Many players just want to win by mindlessly clicking their mouse, without even bothering to understand how a weapon works by combining light and heavy attacks. They just keep complaining, saying a weapon is too hard to use because spamming light attacks can’t cut through enemies—even though the weapon can actually do exactly that if you mix light and heavy attacks in a specific sequence. Whenever Fatshark releases a new class, they start whining, saying it’s too weak and that they want every class to be like the Arbites, charging through Havoc 40 like a bull with unstoppable power. When a new weapon is introduced, they only say, “Oh, this weapon’s attack animation is terrible, the damage is so low.” To them, any melee weapon that isn’t as strong as the Power Sword is worthless, and the same goes for ranged weapons—if it’s not as good as the Plasma Gun, it’s garbage. Maybe Fatshark should just keep nerfing the Power Sword and the Plasma Gun until they’re as weak as the entrenching shovel and the infantry lasgun. If Fatshark keeps catering to these complainers, they’ll end up adding a Warrior Priest of Sigmar to Darktide, with an incredibly short skill cooldown that restores 130% of the damage taken in the last 3 seconds as health. They’ll give every class a flail and shield that automatically blocks enemy attacks during charged heavy attacks and cleaves through everything like the Power Sword. Or they’ll massively buff the Recon Lasgun so it has the fire rate and stability of a 6D, the damage of a Plasma Gun, and the area-of-effect of a Bolter.
The skitarii power sword has plenty of issues besides its weird attack patterns.
agree on principle but stuff like this is subjective
it’s perfectly valid to dislike a weapon because of its attack pattern. i doubt you like all attack patterns on all weapons. there is an element of preference that you cannot boil down to player skill, merely subjective preference on what feels good. a huge part of darktide is how satisfying the melee combat feels, and weapon moveset is directly related to that.
and when a dlc class releases with 3 new weapons and one of them has a pattern they don’t like, well, it kinda hurts and cuts down melee variety by 33%.
and for what it’s worth, while it’s preference, i felt like vt2 did this way better. warrior priest weapon movesets were, for the most part, very unorthodox, but felt incredibly good to me. it just actually feels weighty and good to swing the hammer or 2h hammer. the arc maul in comparison just feels like my weapon teleports across the screen in a desperate attempt to create complexity. it feels bad to me.
so you want all feed back to be good feed back?
i’ve seen an analogy on this recently that was very good.
let’s say you rent a house. you rent it from a big building company that builds houses to rent them out.
when you rent this house, you notice the roof isn’t waterproof. water drips into your living room.
obviously, this is a problem. you will obviously voice this problem to the company. they will obviously need your feedback, or they’ll never know the roof isn’t waterproof. they need to listen to you, because this is a real problem.
now, what do they do next? do they ask YOU what to do? no, they’re experienced in this. they know how to fix a leaky roof. they have their own tradesmen in their company who know how to fix it. they don’t ask YOU to fix it, because you’re not an architect or professional. you’re the consumer. your feedback matters, coming up with the solution isn’t your role. maybe the issue is not even the roof, maybe the leak is not actually a leak but condensation in a lamp fitting.
the same is true for game development. they should listen to player feedback yes. but fixing these issues? do not listen to players. they’re not devs, their ideas on how to fix it will be bad and purely speculative. YOU are the professionals, not the players.
in the analogy i presented, letting players decide what should change is akin to letting the guy who rented the house decide how to fix it when he notices water on the ceiling. only a madman would let this happen, and it’s highly unprofessional.
and btw, this needs to shape how fatshark sees feedback. “power sword is trash, buff it” might not actually fix anyones issue with it, which could be the moveset. so when fatshark sees “power sword is underpowered” then the solution to this sentiment may not actually be buffing it, but maybe it’s adding more variants with different movesets. the complaint is the leak, the fix to the leak is what professional experience and many iterations of testing will lead fatshark to. so when people for example say
vanguards are WAY TOO TANKY NERF THEM PLEASE!!!
then maybe their perception that vanguards are too tanky isn’t wrong. it could be contextually caused by how the rest of the game is a room clearing warframe experience to these players, where killing elites will spawn aoe dots that will kill more elites that then spread the dots further. that’s a real issue, and it’s jarring, but the solution to it might not be making vanguards into that, hint hint.
The problem with Vanguards is not exactly that they are tanky - so are Bulwkars, or Crushers, and I never had issues with them and defended them from those who said “they are too hard to kill” (they are not). It’s just that Vanguards are too many and they are too often mixed with the regular chaff ruining the experience we love DT for - crunching waves of heretic cannon fodder in one uninterrupted treadmill of carnage.
Different types of foes serve different purposes. The purpose of chaff is to inconvenience you a bit by swamping and distracting you - and die quickly. They are not supposed to drag as much your attention as elites. And elites are here to provide a bit of hardcore challenges, amidst the sea of chaff. That’s what combined into a typical experience of a hoard shooter.
And now you have a lot of highly-durable turds among chaff which interrupt your fun and slow down your chaff massacre drastically, for no reason at all. They are not fun to fight at all (unlike Crushers who are thrilling as you can fold in a moment when fighting them), they don’t have clear opening and weakspots like Bulwakrs (which are relatively easy to exploit and it’s actually fun to fool them around); no, you just need to poke them for a few seconds until they die. It’s irritating and boring.
The only reasonable option I see is to make them really fragile when hit from the back, and when their defense stance is already broken. And ofc let their heads be clear weakspots too (right now I can’t kill them by shooting to the head with dbarrel at pointblack, what kind of nonsense is that)?
Sadly dmg is alleady done and isnt that obvious if its get better anytime soon, espacially if consider fact moast DT devs are moved to unannounced project.