Currently I find the DH is just an annoyance. I don’t run any builds that can take it down and I think that highlights a problem right away: it’s just too difficult to kill for a majority of builds. Yes, I’m the guy that if the DH is triggered, I MIGHT try to kill it if I see others actually damaging it, but 99% of the DH fights I see go 2 ways:
1: TH user deletes it fairly quick
2: no TH user and 1 or 2 people at most are fighting it (usually the one who triggered it and the person immediately close to them AKA its next victim. Person who aggros it attempts to dodge/block, takes a ton of damage and dies repeat with the next victim. It’s almost always a waste of ammo/corruption to try and help in my experience.
I think it needs to have way less health or way less speed. One of the two. Make it slowly seek out it’s victim and give the team a chance to coordinate and kill it before it can get there OR leave it how it currently is; teleporting around, super fast, quick attacks, but make it MUCH easier to kill.
I like the idea of slowing it down and giving the team a chance to take it on. Feels more like a boss fight then an over-tuned special that deletes 2 players.
A third random idea is giving a good reward for killing it like 200 plasteel or a power cell for the med station. An incentive for killing it would still be needed I think even with a redesign.
Personally, not a huge fan of adding rewards to the Daemonhost (at least, based on the current design where it is a danger best avoided) - if there’s shiniest on the line, people are going to jump on it, oftentimes with no regard for the current situation, and force the team into an extremely difficult spot.
Is the wasted ammo/corruption worth more than the players who die to the Daemonhost?
no they aren’t worth more than the ammo/ corruption unless we need the weeklies or penance stuff because we can res them shortly after. Good chance they’ll die anyway which is the point
I think we have to remember the design intent in the first place of a Daemonhost, they weren’t meant to be something you farmed or go out of your way to kill. They were based on the concept of L4D2’s Witch, a scary, intimidating creature that the team is meant to avoid. So keeping with that theme, I’d be a little hesitant to overly incentivize actively hunting them or neutering them, like making them a target to be farmed.
What might be cool would be is (probably a pipe dream at this point of course) if maps had multiple paths, the easier one being blocked by a Daemonhost, while the one without being more difficult and treacherous (think LotR, when the Fellowship had to make the decision of whether they should go through the Mines of Moria, and possibly facing the Balrog or taking a more difficult path elsewhere). But that doesn’t affect how punishing a Daemonhost can be to the team when accidently aggro’d.
If I were to tweak the encounter itself, I like the idea of, upon killing the Daemonhost, giving the team a buff that lasts for a minute or so. Let’s call it Morale Boost/Rush of Victory/whatever, or something like that, where with your spirits high after defeating such a formidable foe, you regenerate and cleanse Corruption over time. I’d also prolly like to have the the passive corruption aura weakened or removed all together, things just go so difficult once one has aggro’d it makes little sense to penalize the team for just trying to rescue their teammates and fighting back. Personally, I’m of the mindset that unavoidable damage/corruption is just bad game design, that’s the thing I like about Vermintide over Darktide (or take the Darksouls series or Eldenring for example), the fact that although the game can be more brutal and punishing than Darktide things feel fair; you don’t get damage that you just cannot avoid, and if you play extremely well enough you can even get away from crazy battles unscathed. I like a foe to be punishing, deadly and brutal but IMHO think unavoidable damage is just poor/lazy game design.
Also what I’d like to see is for the enemies to be a little unnerved by the Daemonhost as well, perhaps it unsettles them or something and for them to actively avoid crowding around it. What I find aggravating is when a bunch of shooters or a Bomber/Sniper treats the damn thing like a meatshield and just hide behind it while peppering us with impunity, lol.
Not gonna lie, when someone triggers the DH, i very much run a cost benefit analysis of the situation as it presents to me. Like how likely are we going to survive, with just two of us, till the next pick up and the like.
I very much agree that fighting the DH is always a waste of time and ammo. Even if successful. Unless you are standing next to a Medstation, there really is scantly a reason to do it.
The irony is that the groups that could take the DH, are usually the groups that don’t accidentially pull the DH. And the groups that can’t take the DH are the ones usually triggering it.
That’s why I try to reposition (while simultaneously shouting “YOU DAMN FOOL” internally at the guy missing the DH by inches )
That’s pretty much what I expected to hear, lol.
Another thought popped into my head… instead of killing 2 targets, what if the DH can get a single kill but if they succeed, the remaining team members take an amount of corruption damage (not bound by the 50% max corruption that comes with the passive corruption effect), possibly scaling inversely with remaining DH health. Say a baseline of 25% corruption damage when the primary target is killed by the DH, with that amount reducing by 5% for every 20% health lost by the DH
The remaining 3 team members may suffer less corruption by abandoning their teammate over suffering the passive corruption while fighting the DH (at most 25% vs up to 50% if they were to fight and succeed)
A team in a weakened state would need to do as much as possible to prevent their teammate’s death in order to avoid being pushed to dangerously high corruption levels. The passive corruption during the fight would potentially push them to 50% corruption, but the consequences of failure could be mitigated to an extent.
If your team has the burst damage to blow her up before someone dies, nothing changes
If abandoning a player is the best decision for the team in that moment, I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with that - sometimes, trying to pull off that save before someone dies will end badly. I’d just like to see that the team-oriented decisions are, in general, the more compelling ones.
I’m not sure how you address the situation of griefers activating then suiciding/leaving (would the DH treat that as a successful kill, or find a new target, or…?)
Add extra variant of deamon host, not simply daydreaming version.
Let the deamon host summon something from the warp with some nasty ritual, portal on the pentagram or something. Let it attack those traitors and cultist for more bloody sacrifice in exchange for random boss. Allow it not to leave the area, so even if people decide to charge by, they will have to deal with summoned enemy. So you don’t have to kill, but you can kill to ease consequences. Spawn or Beast is good pick for an example. Idk, bosses are not as dangerous as they should be, but after DH it can be sorta challenging.
Also some sort of counter-corruption event as weekly / monthly with 3 rewards from Melk or something. Kill DHs and you gain X global reward + Y stage 1: money / st2: plastile / st3: diamantin for each killed monster. Idk why we need money or diamantine… Whatever, this will also boost grind aspect of creepled crafting system.
The problem is, usually the one triggering the DH is the one you least would want to trigger it. I have seen people die to the DH before anyone even was fully aware of the DH being active.
You’d grief players either way. Its not just a case of people always deciding that abandoning is the right call, but at least in my experience, as i already said… the players that can deal with the DH are not the players pulling the DH… it is the ones that cannot deal with the DH that generally pull the DH.
And we are not talking about a “hey there is a DH, lets talk about it with the team, if we want to defeat it” situation… but usually the “DH ahead of us, tagged it, walked past it and some random PUG member still manages to shoot past it, or walk into it, despite it being highlighted multiple times and called out” kind of situation. That is generally when you have a DH on you. When the person least aware, walked into it… and consequently dies rapidly.
If someone kites the DH for 5 minutes, then everyone will have decided that they stand a chance, by that point.
The biggest issue, in my opinion is: Fighting the DH is never fun. Its a drag at best and annoying at worst.
I can absolutely agree with you there. Its currently is just not a fun or particularly interesting boss. While I don’t like that its a part of gameplay that players don’t engage with, it is important to remember why they don’t engage with it. That does need to change, definitely. Even if its supposed to be something you don’t want to happen, it should still be something that is fun and engaging when it does happen.
@Serafyna I really want to play your version of Darktide. Love the idea of difficult bosses potentially being in easier paths with there also being a longer and more attrition based difficulty path. The sheer amount of work it would take to change that now though is hard to even imagine. The enemies showing fear by realizing they’re getting near a daemonhost and quickly backing off would be a rather cool, atmospheric touch while also communicating to newer players that its not something you want to bother.
@Dumlefudge You’re right about that, that is why I think any reward you could get from a daemonhost shouldn’t be an additional thing but more to just offset some of the risk. If you add extra incentive a player will make the executive decision that since they need plasteel we are all now fighting the thing we don’t want to fight, and thats something best avoided. It currently doesn’t count as a kill for the Daemonhost if the player leaves before they are actually considered “dead” this has happened to me. The bot that filled the spot remained untargetted and wasn’t much help.
As an aside to address an issue Serafyna brought up: The longer you take to bring it down, the more all players are punished in the event you have decided to acutally fight it, which doesn’t feel great. Maybe the corruption you get from the daemonhost should be capped, as an aoe burst when it awakens rather than a constant AOE effect. Just a flat percentage of corruption to those in range of its awakening, then further corruption only to who it attacks rather than the constant corruption aura it has now?
Ye, these corner cases need to be addressed. I’ve seen Daemonhost attack 3 or 4 players because something killed (or otherwise removed) the DH’s target before the DH could kill it. Death by any source should satisfy the DH kill requirement IMO (if the dying player was the target); if a player leaves, a new target should be selected, otherwise people will cheese the damn thing by Alt-F4ing. Focusing the same player slot (i.e the bot replacement) is fairest on the team as a whole, although the bot is guaranteed to die. Just pray you’re not the player who replaces the bot during a DH attack
demon host already disables part of the map, and with no anti boss build or any anti demon host strategy that part is disabled, you going to throw at me its same the witch from L4D2, yeah but L4D2 didnt have crafting material that is locked by a witch.
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