I’m fine with those changes for now. We seem to have far more reliable ranged options with larger “magazines” etc.
I feel like Fatshark in Darktide is fleshing out the “team work is required” aspect. Your “temp HP” is limited to the shield, which recharges when you work closely. Every character has a passive bonus for sticking together - the cohesion mechanics or whatever that is called. Also we face far more ranged enemies which can pin you down with ranged attacks through stagger.
Its too early, builds haven’t been identified, maps are not familiar. Clutching is a great part of V2 and I hope Darktide allows for moments like these to continue. Interestingly enough, no class can go “invisible” that I have seen.
Vermintide had Kruber, Dwarf, Elf, all with the ability to disengage. Hiding in the Dark doesn’t seem like an option in Darktide. I do remember the devs talked about sneaking around, I maybe mis-remembering.
I think we’ll see those abilities return.
There is a good possibility we’ll get a commando class for the Veteran that might get the ability to ambush enemies and plant explosives all over the place, so it would likely have a stealth type skill.
I could also see one of the Zealot classes be an assassin who can sneak in, take out a high value target and disappear.
Ratling as a new Archetype is still a possibility as well.
I feel like…I dunno, like the enemy armor system has been reworked, and that contributes to guys like the Maulers feeling unfun to fight. They hit like Chaos Warriors, are faster, take more abuse, don’t stagger as easily and don’t stand out in a crowd until they’re right in your face. All that contributes already to them feeling harder.
In VT2 if you pop a Chaos Warrior right in the dome with the right attack, they stagger. 4 to 6 of those hits and you’re good to go. If you hit them anywhere else they don’t react to it, and you maybe even get the armor symbol depending on the weapon. You know when you’re being effective against them vs. doing nothing.
Maulers in DT though didn’t seem to stagger as often, leading to mistiming your attack and eating a nasty hit. I didn’t get the same feedback either of “that hit was absorbed by armor” the way VT2 lets you know. So are these charged attacks to the face the best damage I’m doing? It must be, right, because it’s the heaviest hitting attack of my weapon. And yet, the Mauler doesn’t react to the hits that way. So am I or am I not hurting this thing?
That’s why I think Armor has become less of a binary “did damage/did no damage” state, and more a flat damage reduction where some stuff penetrates the damage reduction. So when you wail on a Mauler with any given weapon, you’re doing something but it’s minimal and makes them feel like they take forever to kill.
For reference, I play a lot of Sienna with the Flail in VT2. That thing is armor piercing on all attacks, so I will batter Chaos Warriors about the head and shoulders all the time with light attacks. When I need them to stagger, I give them a heavy to the face. Either way, I know all my attacks are doing damage because I have the armor indicator.
Playing DT and fighting Maulers, it felt like all my weapons behaved like the Flail. I could slap an armored guy around with light attacks seemingly to no effect, or maybe minimal effect. And my attacks to attempt to get them to stagger usually were ignored as well.
The only reliable stagger I got on Maulers as the vet was hitting them with 2 grenades back to back. That would put them on their asses. But there seemed like little stagger effects up until that point.
This is all just speculation, because by the end of Beta I wasn’t very clear on how armor in DT actually works. This is just my attempt to sort through what I saw.
It’s kind of tough to say how this will play out since we didn’t have the full set of weapons in the beta. Like V2, there’s guaranteed to be meta weapons and like V2 those will probably be the ones that are the best at everything.
Yup, I think this is where the frustration stems from, a lack of weapons and also a lack of explanation. We were given horde clearing weapons in beta. Although that pysker sword and one of the ogryn knifes felt very single target focused on their strikes.
The way I see it, the bulletsponging stems from the problem of weapon unlocks being required. For example, as the stats showed, the Maulers were shredding players and I noted this too, as killing them was rather difficult for me since I only had the Lasgun. However, when I unlocked the Revolver, I was three tapping them, in the head. Magically, the problem was solved, and the solution was simple, I got the weapon designed to fight them.
I have 0 problems with locking attachments, feats, traits, etc. behind levels, at least not if the progression is manageable, but I do certainly hope that the weapons are not. Progression in general was my core issue in VT as to why I never levelled any other character beyond Bardin since I knew for the first several dozen games, I was not going to have even a lick of actual fun since I was basically useless compared to my friends who had all their weapons and traits unlocked, and as such, were able to breeze through enemies using the things designed to fight them.
So yeah, the problem is not entirely that enemies are bulletsponges, you need the right tool for the job, and unfortunately, those tools are sometimes locked several levels beyond your current one.
What difficulty, power level and character level were you running? I get it, I ran heresy since level 5, but the TTK difference on specials and elites was noticeably lower when I ran it on 15/20.
It was at 300 ish. Maybe when we get more weapons when the game comes out it will be easier to pick your prefered loadout and deal with these guys. Seeing that people are split about this topic I think that I might need to spend some more time with the game before coming to a solid conclusion.