Just a thought that crossed my mind today, Darktide’s elites are not scary at all anymore, I went back to play Vermintide 2 since last week and played a bunch of matches, and noticed that the gameplay is way slower and you really feel the danger of enemies more, elites actually feel dangerous and are much harder to dodge, unlike Darktide, where with the correct build, nothing below havok 30+ feels like anything really, too much armor pen, too much stagger, too much attack speed, easy to dodge attacks, facing 5 crushers doesn’t feel that dangerous, compared to 5 chaos warriors in Vermintide, you can dodge most enemies in Darktide with your eyes closed, literally.
I realize the gameplay in Darktide has been getting faster and faster, but I believe things got way out of hand, and the power levels need to be looked into, I have no idea what kind of change will not upset most people, but can we at least stop the powercreep where it’s at?
Well said, theyre really trying to turn it into some sort of ‘arena fps’ versio of a classbased horde shooter where everyone has the ability to be a railgun.
Anyone that disagrees with you will just troll you, but youre totally correct. The Beta helmet is from a different game.
I’d say Auric, Maelstrom and Havoc below 20-25 feels easy, but it is because Darktide is more forgiving than VT2:
AOE damage - Grenades, Psyker and Rumbler etc
More ranged gameplay - More safety at range
Lots of med stims and med stations along the way
Team mate revive is quick and rescue is only a short trip or respawn in same room
Toughness layer on your health
Short cooldowns for strong abilities
Most importantly mobility is so fast you can bypass enemies to door.
In VT2 you are more wary of getting hit even once. Darktide you can take many hits and lots of ways to recover toughness/health.
I think that’s probably one of the least threatening encounters, since any mass or infintie aoe can just crap all over that encounter. Flamerthrower, Trauma or blue dueling sword (puragtus) is built for this sort of thing. It’s probably why FS had that bandaid fix of their torsos being carapace so they last a bit longer.
this has been the case since the game came out for play station, they removed roaming hordes and added more armor, rebalancing everything around this change
I agree VT2 is a much more difficult game than Darktide, but I think a large part of the explanation for this is that Darktide is a much more ranged-focused game and as such all the classes have much better ability to control and destroy melee enemies with ranged weapons and special abilities.
However, facing large numbers of spread-out ranged elites and enemies totally changes the dynamics of the game around and increase game difficulty. But it requires a diffierent skillset and playstyle than VT2. At higher difficulties, when there are lots of spread out ranged enemies Darktide turns into a boring cornershooter where you have to peek out and take shots and whittle them down one by one. It’s not that this is particularly difficult skills-wize, it just becomes slow and laborious.
In the end I agree player powercreep and too much ranged focus has made the game easier, and one consequence is FS had to increase enemy numbers and add annoying modifiers (like pox-gas, the blight spreads, and so on) on top to increase difficulty.
But in the end I don’t think much can really be done about it without fundamentally moving Darktide towards a more melee focused game. The many strong ranged options unavoidably (and realistically) trivializes melee enemies. The gun replaced the sword for a reason.
The thing is it could have been fixed with specials that support melee enemeis, or just elite abilities.
I keep repeating those things in every thread about enemies, and probably mentioned them before they appeared in havoc.
The same way elites enrage in havoc and become red colored, it could have been crusher’s ability with proper animation and sound que. Like, he’s starting to roar and stomp, eye lenses glows red, all that stuff.
And instead of purple haze - enemy psyker/witch, that cast either heal, or protective bubbles of rot flies that decrease ranged damage taken.
Another one is to counter VoC and Chorus - another caster that place totems or curse area that stops any toughnes regeneration.
DT has almost all elites and specials being V2 copypaste without signifficant changes, but player’s mobility and range power is on another level. They put outdated enemy design in a game with modern movement.
DT was never hard with a good team, and aside from high Havoc it’s pretty casual friendly.
Ironically if you drop to the lower difficulty you’ll see how unprepared folks can be, dropping like flies to trash because they just want to shoot stuff but refuse to switch to melee or dodge.