Is it just me or did all the elites and specials feel way too tanky? After the Darktide beta I reinstalled V2 to get some practice going before launch day and boy was it good to be able to kill specials before they reach you without dumping your entire magazine into them. I think that in Darktide I struggled the most with the poxhound. You had to either mag dump him or shell him 5 times with a shotgun. Most of the hits he shrugged off too as if he was knockback/flinch resistant. I also think that the armor renders most cleave weapons useless. I remember fighting a crusher ogryn with 3 other teammates for a good while before he finally gave in because we had no armor penetration. I think that armor should be less forgiving for players in solo quickplay. How would a decrease in damage reduction of armor sound? I think that it would easy up the rock/paper/scissors gameplay that we have seen in the beta, even the maulers seemed really tough when fighting them with swords.
I also kind of felt that the clutches in the game became much more scarce. This is partly because of the incredible ranged potential that enemies have now, also partialy because you donât get coherency to counteract the ranged combat when youâre clutching so all you have is melee and finally because the specials and elites have 3/4x the time to kill now. It can get really crazy when youâre the last man standing and youâre against 2 maulers, 2 ogryns, a wave of tanky specials and also the horde. Thatâs a solid 7 minutes of clearing the enemies before things ease up.
Maybe itâs just me but things felt REALLY different here. In V2 you could instantly swap to your crossbow/pistol, headshot the elite and swap back to clearing the horde. Here in Darktide itâs a lot more complicated. Thoughts?
We wonât know where itâs going to land as the beta wasnât the final build with all the power score or damage modifiers. It may not be much different from VT2.
In the beta we were really low level with few to no class talents, really weak weapons with few to no modifiers or talents, and we completely lacked trinket slots (if there will be trinket slots anyway). So yeah, everything is going to feel a lot harder because we werenât kitted out like we otherwise would be.
For what itâs worth, once I got into difficulty 2 games where everyone had 2 or 3 class talents with blue weapons, specials and elites started dropping a lot easier.
Yeah, I got my Vet some +20%/+20% and 20%/15% damage gear with good damage numbers and it made a huge difference. Especially with lasrifle headshots and shotgun blasts even at medium range.
The poxhound felt a little too resistant to ranged weapons when itâs kinda supposed to be the equivalent to the assassin rat in VT2, who can be staggered by literally everything and gets 2-bodyshot by most ranged weapons in Legend. It felt super bad to get a good close-range meatshot with the shotgun and not even kill it in difficulty 2âŚ
If youâre expected to deal with it by dodging its pounce (with your melee weapon out, or else it might not work thanks for the useless ranged dodge) and then quickly push or attack, the same way you can do to assassin rats, then new players arenât going to like it and I would bet that weâre going to see a lot of complaining when the game comes out.
Think this is what Iâd have said. BUT I AM worried about the bad guy who canât be killed difficulty slider,
âŚIE, In Cyberpunk I tried to do a second play. I went to a higher level zone with a belt fed machine gun. Snuck up on a street punk. Put 100 rounds into his headâŚfrom a light machine gun. He turned around and kicked my ass.
That is not a âdifficulty increaseâ that I much care for. But also the beta was short, didnât get past level 15 since I was changing toons a fair amount.
Should have given us faster leveling for the beta to test better.
Enemies becoming bullet sponges as the difficult goes up is always a concern, but itâs usually a little more pronounced of a problem in RPGâs like Cyberpunk. Although Vermintide 2âs current running holiday event is also an example of that problem where the âchallengeâ was to give enemies massive HP boosts which just turns the runs into slogs.
Although I like the inititive, raising the difficulty a bit, I agree. Before I realized that I should treat the enemies as if they imported from one or two diffculties higher, I seriously wondered what was off about my game. The game didnât become too much harder per se, but the pacing disappeared entirely and killing a horde became a real slog.
The lack of feedback when shooting/hitting them feels kinda bad, they didnât seem to react much to being hit until they died. Some specials you can push, but damage seems to not generate much reaction.
Lets just see the maximum strength of weapons with proper properties and traits first. Lvl 26 Veteran with powerlvl 350 sniper variant lasgun was able to kill specials on difficulty 4 relatively fast, so i highly suspect that stronger weapons and actual sniper weapons will do a better job.
I hope so. Maybe Difficulty 4 is supposed to be like Legend, where itâs a breeze 90% of the time when the whole team is fully kitted out. I doubt theyâre going to make the same mistake as VT2 and put their Cataclysm difficulty behind a paywall, so I gotta assume thatâs Difficulty 5.
I would definitely prefer if they kept the health on enemies lower even on high difficulties because scaling health is the number one thing that breaks weapon balance.
The issue with increasing enemy health is that weapons have break points, like a sniper rifle killing enemies in one headshot and two body shots. The second you give an enemy so much health that it doesnât do that anymore the sniper rifle goes from a great weapon to a completely useless weapon.
At least they need to make sure that a top end weapon does enough damage that the break points on the enemies arenât shifted away from what they were on low end weapons in easy difficulty.
Make enemies deadlier and more numerous, donât make them into bullet sponges.
Just to clarify. I tested all ranged weapons in Vermintide 2 that Saltzpyre can use in the modding realm. There I could purge all enemies on the map with a press of a button and spawn new ones on command. All the weapons I tested were first power 300 and then power 5 (starting value). The effect? I could no longer oneshot it with most weapons and had to use two shots. From an instakill to about 0.5 s TTK (time to kill).
The health statistics donât lie. The assassin rat has 39.5 health on legend (12 on recruit), so does the ratling gunner and the warpfire thrower. The blightstormer, the leech and the gas rat have 66hp (20 on recruit).
This quickly shows us that even in Legend we can still kill specials in under a second without much problem while carrying power 5 items (all starter gear).
I wanted to see how all of this looks when put into practice so here are my results. I tested all specials using brace pistols and here are my results (legend - gear power 5). All enemies were killed with non-crit bodyshots and from close distance to minimize the damage falloff.
What does this tell us? This tells us that we are in for a hell of a lot more shooting and target tracking in Darktide. I fully understand that there we have more ammunition but increasing time to kill from under a second to the time it takes to magdump your autogun into a charger, reload it and then finish him off? Looks like I was wrong and the time to kill was increased much, much more than 3/4 times. The time to kill is very high and when compared to Vermintide 2 it has skyrocketed. In Darktide with some weapons it was not possible to kill a charger when hitting every of your 24-30 shots (depending on weapon variant) before having to reload and risk a dodge unless most of your shots were headshots.
Why not test this excercise yourself? Watch a DT gameplay online and watch how players try to magdump kill chargers and fail and then go play some Vermintide 2. Even the pox hounds would eat up like 20 autogun bullets or 5 lawbringer shotgun shells on medium range.
Of course it is worth mentioning that we were playing a slightly older build than the devs were working on at that time but still I wonât believe that without feedback special and elite health will be changed. All of this completely alters and slows down the pacing of the game. Like I said, sometimes when everybody is dead you end up clearing the horde for 8 minutes because you have to be super careful about specials that you have to chip down throughout most of the fight instead of eliminating them quickly so that you can clear the poxwalkers and move on and try to rescue them.
I understand that Vermintide and Darktide arenât supposed to be exactly the same games but the ttk in Darktide just seems unhealthy.
Personally I canât agree itâa good design as it leaves most players powerless to clutch a game and rescue others when compared to V2. I understand that they should be resistant to damage but definitely not magdumping. I also mentioned poxhounds that are almost just as tanky while having half the hitbox and being super agile and flinch resistant.
I think one of the big problems here is that Darktide contains a large number of automatic weapons, so in order to balance automatic weapons with semi automatic or single shot ones they had to make the damage range between weapons pretty big, and then give the enemies more health to accommodate that range.
Like, if a revolver that can fire 5 times before a lengthy reload kills an enemy in one hit a weapon that can shoot 30 times before a much shorter reload simply has to have less damage per shot in a system where all weapons compete strictly on occupying the same slot.
Lot of problems with attempting to balance things that are unbalanced outside games.
An example is an M-14 battle rifle, a M21 sniper rifle, an M15 squad automatic weapon and an M-60 beltfed machine gun.
Now, in most games the per-shot damage and rate of fire would change between each, the sniper rifle hitting hardest but slowest, the battle rifle a little under and a little faster, and least damage/most speed to the belt fed machine gun.
Problem is, at point of impact itâs all the exact same weapon! The first three quite literally M-14, tuned M-14 with a big scope, and a light machinegun experimental variant of the M14! (M15 and M14E2 are about the same⌠but I didnât want to be too obvious.)
And each of these rifles is going to have almost the same rate of fire because they use the same action. They will recoil the same, (except the belt fed being heavier) and so on.
But all of these, many bolt action rifles, and the belt fed machine gun are all in 7.62x51mm nato, (which is also called 308 winchester.) So the on target effect/ballistic profile of each weapon is going to be exactly the same.
One 7.62mmX51mm ball round on target is equal to one 7.62mmX51mm ball round regardless of itâs launch.
Same thing with say, a double barrel 12guage shotgun and a semiauto 12gauge with a drum magazine. Most game devs would make the double barrel the hardest hitting to compensate, but in the real world the double barrel is obsolete and outcompeted by other options for anything except hunting birds.
Thatâs why I generally like games where enemy health isnât all that high and the biggest thing that matters about a weapon is how it handles. Itâs just hard for a game like that to be balanced unless it mechanically acknowledges that the biggest advantage of a pistol is that itâs light and easy to carry.
One game that IMO did a really great job of balancing large and small weapons was Mass Effect 3. They had this system where the lighter your weapons loadout was the faster your abilities recharged, so there was a solid reason to play a Biotic or Engineer who only carried a pistol, but they could also make the bigger weapons more powerful without making the smaller ones pointless.
Agree 100%. There have to be better ways to balance a game then making rifles bad and enemies close to immortal.
When I was playing SWTOR I couldnât play jedi for a long time since the light saber did so little. It was hard to accept with blasters as well, but excessively difficult with a lightsaber.
Oh yeah, in KOTOR for a long while after you get your lightsaber your vibroswords would tend to be better because of all the mods youâve slapped on them.
thanks for the useless ranged dodge) and then quickly push or attack, the same way you can do to assassin rats, then new players arenât going to like it and I would bet that weâre going to see a lot of complaining when the game comes out.