Going to be a long(ish) one, karking hell.
Personally, I feel like I’m doing Fatsharks job for them right now. But, in short, I have complied a list of people’s thoughts on difficulty in Darktide, specifically discussing anything difficulty 3 and higher, although this is more aimed towards 4-5, where most of the ‘hardcore’ audience and (more than likely) regular ‘tide’ players have aired their gripes and concerns. We’ll go through what has been (to my understanding of being obsessed with the topic on this forum) what have been consensus points, things which a majority of players have agreed on and identify as a significant issue. Subjective points, those which a large proportion of players have identified as issues, however doesn’t (seem) to be shared by the majority and could be misconstrued as personal preferences on gameplay. Followed by personal, which are just my own qualms outside the realms of it being possible to implement and/or few share the same opinion. These will be explained, but in short, as you will find many of these repeated in other posts if you search for them.
Before I start, I would like to disclaim something very important when in an honest and open discussion about video game difficulty:
A game being difficult to complete doesn’t inherently make it a good (or bad) and rewarding experience to complete
Consensus:
Elite Health & Spawns
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Health pools are absurdly high on 4-5, especially on the melee elites. This enforces a hard meta shift towards DPS styled weapons and making burst weapons practically useless, especially those with some form of charge up and/or window of vulnerability (psykers staffs, plasmas, charge lasguns). Massive health pools also make run-to-run incredibly RNG, if you’re unlucky, your squad simply won’t have the damage, and many of the times ammo to deal with them (unless each player is playing to 100% of the classes strength, IE. Pugging is impossible).
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Spawning of enemies is incredibly warped and inconsistent, when clearing an area and moving forward, it’s not uncommon to get pot shotted out of nowhere by 1-3 random grunts or get backstabbed by a lonesome pox walker. Even though you had cleared an area thoroughly (which is 100% a non-negotiable in 4-5 missions I might) and had left the area 10-30 seconds ago, enemies are still spawning there. This isn’t the ‘worse’ thing in the world, although it is incredibly annoying, when it is just a small group of grunts, but when we add in elites, it becomes simply unfun, not ‘punishing’, unfair. It’s not uncommon to have a sniper at one end of a large room, with a mauler charging you, only to have a gunner or poxflamer come up behind you, leaving you suppressed and unable to effectively fight any of the threats.
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Difficulty jump from 2 to 3, its harder for us veteran tide players to really comprehend, but the change in difficulty from 2 to 3 is huge for newer players to the series. Due to the sheer popularity of the game atm, a large portion of the player base are ‘new’ players, the amount of pug hazard 3’s that fail are astounding, if Fatshark would release some statistics in the near future i believe 3’s would have by far the highest fail rate.
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Demonhost, say no more.
Class Balance
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One Class to rule them all,
One Class to find them,
One grenade to kill them all
and in the lasgun fire blind them. -
It’s really no secret that Veteran by far is the most equipped to deal with hazard 4-5 missions, talents which rewards players for standing back and prioritizing ranged combat (which is a problem in itself which we’ll get into later), a class ability which (like we talked about earlier) works incredibly well with the ranged weapons most optimized for killing high HP targets, and a grenade which can be spammed to cull hordes with little mechanical knowledge needed. If we just want to chalk this down to ‘playstyle’ then that’s fine, stay at range (even though it is kinda boring)
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Psyker and Zealot perform woefully, Zealot only becoming useful due to an incredibly specific build to reduce incoming toughness damage by up to (and over) 80%+, which I assume will be hotfixed or changed in the future due to it being cheese and a complete Band-Aid fix to a underpowered class. Ranged combat is incredibly more effective than melee, zealots shooting options are limited, and the weapons you ‘want’ to take due to its fun-ness & thematic simply won’t cut the mustard in 4-5, The flamer doesn’t do enough DPS to high health targets and the autogun(s) and shredders aren’t as reliable at shooting long range targets, not to mention none of its talents or abilities realistically help you in any ranged scenario besides niche situations. Psyker… yeah, sorry mate. Brain Burst does actually childs pee damage to elites, the abilities don’t attach on to those who can be killed by it very easily (like sniper) and resorts in the player having to dodge in and out of cover literally hoping for brain burst to target the right enemy. The staffs aren’t as reliable as its normal gun options, the CC staff is useful in (again) extremely niche situations, but the other staffs lack the damage output of other ranged weapons, but who the hell wants to take a gun as a psyker?
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Ogyrn - Shield or Bust, put simply, if you’re in an organised group, you’d be incredibly stupid (or just looking for torture) for not having a shield if you are running an ogryn, due to the ‘issues’ with ranged fire being so oppressive, the greatest use of an ogyrn is completely tied to one weapon and not the rest of his kit, not to mention without it, his size makes the absurd ranged damage (somewhat ironically) the squishest out of any of the classes if caught out in the wrong place.
Subjective:
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Ranged Damage, this has been put in the ‘subjective’ category, however, is only going here to not cause a massive argument in the comment section, from my own experience (and what I’ve seen from the forum) ranged damage is dialled up way to high on 4-5. There’s a huge discussion on whether or not this was a purposeful design feature. arguments range from those believing players who come from VT2 Cata’s “don’t respect” the power of ranged units, and those believing that the sheer volume of ranged fire and it’s damage & suppression make melee a major afterthought and ruins much of the experience of the game. I much fall into the second category, while I’m happy to get one shot by a sniper that i didn’t identify or dodge, I believe it’s absurd to have an entire toughness bar gone by 2-3 grunts firing at you in the open, it promotes an incredibly passive playstyle and creates absurdly long game times (games last from 15-30 minutes compared to VT2 Cata).
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Being ‘mechanically’ better at the game doesn’t have a 1:1 ratio with how well you are able to complete missions. Due to what we’ve previously discussed, the game is promoted a ranged dominant, DPS orientated meta in order to combat 4-5 missions, this leaves out harder to use ranged weapons like sniper(y) guns in order to use the spray and pray weapons which funnel out the most damage possible. Alongside that, the sheer lack of melee focus, which i think we can all agree is the real meat and potatoes of learning any tide game, means a player who is incredibly proficient in melee won’t always see the results you’d expect. All of this chalks down to a meta which promoted the most reserved playstyle possible, (in most cases) don’t push, don’t take risks, stay behind cover, make sure to clear the room pack by pack, don’t test yourself, let the veteran shoot it first (lolpog)
Personal:
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Temporary Health > Toughness, I haven’t particularly seen this discussed much, but i believe temp health is a much better system then what we have currently, I’m not a programmer, but from what I can infer simply just having all of your feat, curios & passive modifiers apply to toughness and health separately, compared to just having ‘health’, seems like a balancing nightmare. not only that, but temp health also allowed for the easy integration of ‘lower health = x bonus’ modifiers. As we spoke about with the zealot, its hazard 4-5 viability relies on a niche toughness modifier build, however its class passive revolves around having less health = more damage, so where is the rational there? If you had something to hit, you could stay in the fight, it was really that simple. If it aint broke, don’t fix it.
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Melee > Ranged, perhaps this is reserved for the diehard VT fans, however tide games are fundamentally melee games, the combat system is rich and rewards player time with getting to grips with it. Ranged is click button, aim, click button, repeat. The game having such a heavy focus on ranged really feels like it’s missing a piece of that X Factor that makes vermin tide what it is today. Playing melee orientated isn’t just harder then playing a ranged one, it’s downright a chore.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading, I’m happy to have my mind changed about any of these, but i believe i lurk this forum way too much for any of these to be completely unfounded. Obviously i have a life outside of the game, i’ve only been able to get the zealot & psyker to 30 (which is still more then most) so any more in-depth discussion about the other two would be appreciated.
and that’s coming from someone who regularly QPs Legend in VT2 with zero issues)
Unlike what you described and stacking toughness, I actually just use high level hp curios to have 316hp. I tend to be able to avoid most damage altogether but with the abundance of range that likes to melt toughness, I prefer having more hp.