Ever since the vet ammo aura nerf

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
161

Melee is far safer then ranged - and far easier. My wife started with a vet mostly shooting as she played mainly FPS before DT. She struggled - when she started to adapt to melee she created a zealot and is confidently playing higher difficulties since then. Difficulties on which she still struggles with her vet.

I have vastly more time on ranged focused vets then any other class - and I still perform much better with my zealot, usually ignoring ranged combat most of the matches - got the no ranged penance by accident.

Ranged focused gameplay as I enjoy it means: Getting a proper position, start blasting until the enemy forces you out of the position by concentrated fire or melee assault - then change position and repeat. The vet does even have a decent cover mechanic for this which I find awesome. This playstyle however means that you will actually be focused on targets at range which needs you to aim. Yes obviously a dedicated ranged playstyle will lead to less situational awareness then a melee oriented playstyle. This used to be viable and fun mind you.
With melee trash enemies constantly spawning right behind you this playstyle has become much more dangerous and less fun.

Melee on the other hand has you constantly on the move no need for proper aim in 90% of situations, the ability to block and push instantly and far more reliable toughness regen.

So when you melee constantly and only flip your revolver to execute some ragers 2m infront of you then you are far safer and the game is much easier then when you try to roleplay a guardsman lasgun blazing.

162

Right now survivalist would be the only aura in the game that scales backwards with difficulty…

163

You’ll forgive me, but I’ve seen this opinion repeated several times now and I just don’t understand the logic.

Pre-nerf survivalist was the only aura whose effectiveness scaled with difficulty, because it scaled with the number of targets that spawn. Post-nerf it… still does that. Just much, much less so.

For survivalist to really ‘scale backwards’ it would need to somehow give less ammo per kill in higher difficulties. Which isn’t the case.

164

My god how many posts about 1 talent tree node.

165

I’m really just saying it’s entirely possible my audio is working properly and others isn’t and that’s where the discrepancy is from, didn’t mean to imply user error because for the most part audio drivers and sound cards are the wild west anyway.

As for why other games struggle less, this is one of the few cases where imo fatshark has an excuse. Coop horde shooters tend to layer a thousand times more sounds than other genres

166

DMG reduction is also less valuable

less enemies and less dmg per hit means that you get less value from it

167

Nah as I said that’s literally almost every talent with a few exceptions that are all OP as a result. Talents, weapons and skills “scaling negatively” is effectively fundamentally why a higher difficulty is more difficult.

Example: Brainburst does a set amount of damage. It doesn’t increase with difficulty. When you look at how killing power one hit has in an average encounter, you’re looking at a higher percentage on sedition than on auric. So it “scales negatively” and is weaker on auric. Generally considered balanced if a bit outshined by the less balanced options it’s pitted against.

Example 2: Shooting once with a single shot headhunter (forgot the mark). It doesn’t increase damage with difficulty nor fire rate. When you look at how much killing power one hit has in an average encounter, you’re looking at a higher percentage on sedition on auric. So it “scales negatively” and is weaker on auric. Generally considered a decent balanced weapon.

Example 3: Weapon specialist. It provides you with one ranged crit. I won’t keep typing it out, but one crit has more killing power proportionally on lower difficulties since it’ll let you oneshot a crusher more easily and there’s only one crusher in an encounter. So inherently scales negatively too. Generally considered an extremely strong talent regardless, but partially because of an interaction with weapons with penetration which I’ll get to next.

Then there are things that DO scale positively with a difficulty increase and are as a rule considered busted op:

Example 1: Plasma gun. It hits an infinite amount of targets for full damage. That means on auric where there are 5-20 elites in a line often it actually has vastly increased killing power per shot in an encounter compared to sedition. This scales positively with the difficutly. This is an extremely OP weapon and everyone who plays this game a bunch agrees. Revolver scales positively for similar reasons, ever kill 5 shotgunners with one shot? Only on aurics.

Example 2: Psykinetics Aura/Tactical awareness/etc (the “CDR on elite/special kill” talents). These directly provide more CDR the more elites/specials are on screen, so obviously they scale positively with aurics. In effect these are completely busted and they let you spam vet yell 3 times in an encounter in auric, or let you venting shriek each time you hit 100% peril in one single encounter so long as elites are dying nearby. Completely OP in aurics as a result of scaling positively.

Example 3: old survivalist. Same as 2 really.

Incase you were comparing it to only auras, stuff like psykers 5% CDR inherently scale negatively too because having 5% more scriers gaze uptime isn’t proportional to how many more enemies need killing with scriers gaze on in aurics. Another example would be zealots 10% toughness DR or hwatever it is. A crusher or mauler will oneshot your toughness on damnation regardless of that and there’s a lot more crushers and maulers on auric. Meanwhile this can actually protect your HP bar more, proportionally, on sedition because it’s mostly just poxwalkers hitting you.

In other words it’s a very fundamental balance issue if something is STRONGER on aurics than on sedition. That’s what “scaling negatively” really means. It’s a biased way to say “this weapon kills more on sedition than on aurics” or “this skill has more benefits to player power on sedition than on aurics” which as I said: Yeah, and that’s how it should be. That’s where the difficulty comes from. If everything “scales positively with difficulty” then aurics would be easier than sedition.
This is why I said we’re fundamentally starting to lose track of things here.

TL;DR Survivalist counteracts the teams ammo consumption less on aurics than on malice proportionally, and it’s good that way because increased ammo consumption and the resulting ammo econ is an inherent part of auric difficulty design. Pre nerf it was inversing the intended ammo econ on aurics and gave you more ammo to waste in an auric total than you would get on malice.
It’s still 200% ammo restoration for the whole team per match on average btw. That’s the same amount of theoretical ammo restoration that you get from looking through boxes and finding the levels 2 ammo kits, and most people don’t look for those to begin with. Imagine if zealot provided 2 med kits worth of healing to the team.

168

Resource starving main component of build due to higher difficulty is super bad design IMO.

If it is to be balanced correctly for higher dif, guns will automatical reign supreme in lower dif, if it is to be balanced for lower dif, melee/hybrid will be better.

Getting ammo to target ratio to stay consistent is important. VT2 managed to work it out for ranged classes. DT struggles for some reason.

I’m not against balancing certain weapons with ammo availability, but balancing whole playstyle around this is ridiculous.

Ammo eco fully revolving around one aura was bad, but instead of properly fixing the issue FS just dumbstered Vet’s ranged focused build that were already subpar in general, and made gun centric play feel worse in general.

I’d really like to know how would the community receive changes that would make you scavenge for grinding stones so you can hit enemies with melee otherwise it would be too dull, or warp dust so you can use your psyker powers.

169

I think it’s fine because ranged combat is literally inherently built to be “melee but better”, that’s why you can’t block and push with a ranged wep as it would make melee completely outclassed.

As for

I feel like the comparison is very unfair. The only weapon comparable to power to a plasma gun in VT2 is the trollhammer torpedo. It comes with I think 4 single shots, a long reload, and has a massive friendly fire aoe. It’s also class locked to the tank class and an engineer class both of which have no ammo econ talents iirc and are mutually exclusive with getting the survivalist vet equivalent on the team.
Stuff like huntsman was allowed to have free shots because it 1. required good aim 2. ranged weapons generally werent as good (you can’t kill a horde with a handgun, but in DT you can absolutely kill a horde or atleast kill 80% of it with a plasma gun or a vraks headhunter or a mk12 kantrael)
And again, friendly fire acts as a natural limiter to how much ammo you can pump into hordes mindlessly. If you were doing that nobody else could stand there. If someone was standing there you couldnt do it.

In other words and I’ve said this exact thing in a similar topic, if DT ranged weapons want to remain as strong as they are, then they need to be ammo limited. It is literally the only way to balance that out. If you want ammo econ to not be the major balancing mechanic, then you would also have to nerf their power significantly. Otherwise whatever has great killing power and “infinite” ammo reigns supreme. I don’t think players want that for Darktide though. See: Pre-hp buffs the mk12 kantrael lasgun was considered the best vet gun. Post-hp buffs everyone calls it trash and no fun to use. Ammo econ is functionally infinite before and after.

The other oddball mechanic that could be introduced is friendly fire which I would welcome too. VT2 had shotguns and aoe ranged weps too. It wasn’t an issue. The dwarf wasn’t shooting everyone else in the back just because they’re tall for him. Ranged classes existed and were shooting 80/20 and FF wasn’t game ruining, it was simply the limiter. Ogryns wouldn’t get shot to pieces after people learn to deal with it. Kickback would be balanced because you can’t just spam it down a hallway with 3 people infront of you holding the line. A lot of people are scared of this though which I personally don’t emphatize with. It takes 1 game to adjust to the positioning differences and issues and you instantly have a better game. The only reason Fatshark is scared to implement this is because of toxicity issues, meanwhile griefing is possible in a plethora of ways and the only solution is votekicking, so I don’t see how this is different.

170

It’s the second time you come with this disingenuous comparison.

You can compare any VT2 weaponry with DT counterpart and DT will come out on top. Combat Axe with 1H axe, Voidstrike with Fireball staff, Trauma with conflag and it can go on.

Best melee comparison would be to look at how dual dagger on Shade or Handmaiden compares to Zealot running Knife. VT2 pales in comparison on both offense and defense front, and by a lot, a whole lot.

Other could be any VT2 shield combo compared to Ogryn’s Shield. It’s night and day.

171

I think this would be a terrible thing.
It does not really benefit anyone, but it would enable griefing.

Never liked it in V2 either.
With one exception: it could be used to trigger barkskin. So if you had a hagstalker on your party, everyone could have near 100% uptime on their barkskin.

If you want friendly fire in darktide, i suggest that it could be added as a modifier, to test it.
I am pretty sure that most people would not like it.

172

It’s not disingenuous because it’s literally true though. I don’t understand how the melee wep comparison matters. Name one melee wep in VT2 with similar performance as the ogryn folding shovel. Doesn’t exist. Now look at a ranged wep in VT2 with similiar performance as a plasma gun. It’s a literal torpedo with 4 shots total. How is the comparison not fair? Can you actually articulate instead of just repeating that over and over? The plasma gun IS on the level of the trollhammer torpedo and there is nothing else in VT2 thats remotely close. The trollhammer torpedo coincidentally is HEAVILY ammo limited via multiple seperate mechanics. How melee weapons compare doesn’t matter much, since the point is to explain why in VT2 you have more lenient ammo regen mechanics. You get less killing power per ammo in VT2.

The psyker weps are SUPPOSED to be balanced by peril but they also kind of shorthanded that mechanic into “peril buffs you” with no other drawbacks and by result psykers are OP, proving my point exactly.

173

You can play VT2 without friendly fire on lower difficulties and it’s exactly as braindead as you’d expect: Elves with infinite ammo spamming into every single enemy that shows up at all times with their aoe poison bow. Huntsman just magdumping non stop to get the scrounger procs no matter whats in the way. Non stop griffins foot blasting into everything without a care killing 100% of the enemies on the map unless you rush in to kill them first.

That is how DT plays with weapons powerful enough to screenclear + functionally infinite ammo too. I’m glad they’re reducing the amount of those thigns in the game.

174

You argue that we can’t have VT2 ammo eco because Ranged Weapons are more powerful in DT, meanwhile everything is more powerful.

You want grindstone pickups to make melee work, because it’s more powerful than in VT2? Stamina as a non-regenerating resource, so you have to pickup rations?

It’s all bollocks.

175

Yes, and as a result ammo econ as a whole is more limited in DT. The one weapon that’s as powerful as Darktide weapons in VT2 has extremely limited ammo and isn’t usable on any ranged class with ammo generation.

I’m really not sure how this is so hard to understand. Does this not make perfect sense? At that powerlevel there has to be something in the way of just spamming the wep 24/7 and clearing the level for you. That’s true in VT2 (where the ammo econ solution affects literally just that wep) and in DT (where many weapons are that powerful so they need the ammo econ limiter)

For the record I am not comparing damage numbers, I’m comparing the actual utilization. You can remove a chaos warrior patrol with a trollhammer torpedo, you can do similar things with a plasma gun.

If you’re asking me if I want melee power to be nerfed then yes, the power peaks are too hard. Many melee weapons are OP at this point. There is literally no excuse game design wise to have something as ridiculously OP and game trivializing as the ogryn folding shovel, to give one example of it.
At this point if they were to introduce the equivalent of the dual hammers of VT2, a highly esteemed weapon for its ability to shred hordes and stagger decently at the drawback of poor armor killing power, nobody would use it because the current standard for DT weapons is “does everything with no drawbacks” (talents factor into this, like giving every class free rending to completely bypass armor pen as a weapon balance factor)

176

Good, let’s ask for grinding stones! Resources are the balancing factors!

177

I know you’re just lashing out at this point instead of engaging wit hthe point (you can’t have unlimited player power and either the power has to sink or it needs to be limited) but have you ever considered that it might even be a pretty good idea to have power swords be normal swords but you expend battery packs to charge them up and kill stuff better with them? And that it’s actually total trash game design to have a power sword that you just have to manually power up every 3 swings or so for it to just kill everything?

And again, if you’re genuinely arguing the ogryn folding shovels are acceptable balance wise then you’re just arguing in bad faith. I’m not saying these need to be resource limited in the first place, that’s just you strawmanning. I’m saying resource limiting is one balance approach that Fatshark chose. The other balance approach is nerfing them. Would you accept having a weaker, non omnipotent revolver in exchange for having more ammo on it?

What I am furthermore saying is that having both unlimited ammo and the absolute killing power isn’t conductive to actually having difficulty in the game. You can go queue sedition and experience what I mean. Yet this is in essence what players ask for when they want survivalist to function like it did while keeping the weapons as powerful as they are. Balance dictates it must be either or, or some other limiting factor is introduced.

178

Look, Shooter focused Vet was subpar compared to Hybrid Vet, and every other build on every other class. Now you are either ammo starved too or have to scavenge the whole map.

This is a hybrid game, and I’d like to shoot freely, without need for team’s good will, or running around for pickups everywhere the whole game on a build that is… Focused on shooting.

Meanwhile you defend this change because for some weird reason you think that ranged specializations are easier to play than hybrid melee ones. Which is just isn’t true and wasn’t true even before the change.

Again, Resource starving the main component of a build is just dumb. It’s bad design, doesn’t feel good, and even the balance didn’t need it.

I want to play a shooter spec from time to time and this change just made an already subpar experience worse.

I actually like the activation gameplay loop, probably should have 2 at base and 5 with Cycler, it felt way better that way (you can balance it with that). It would also open up build diversity a bit.

Having to look around for power packs sounds terrible, especially if I think about the “Power” Knife player running ahead and picking up all just for himself.

179

Genuinely pick one. If you don’t have to do that then it’s not a hybrid game, then it’s a ranged game. Again, try queueing a sedition match. You can infact do that there. See how you enjoy the difficulty. You don’t know what you’re asking for.

It’s not that ranged is easier, ti’s that ranged inherently bypasses many gameplay mechanics that are complex enough to add difficulty. If you allow people to shoot all game at no drawback then it’s sedition gameplay no matter how much HP the enemies have.

180

Dude, I’m asking for getting the same damn ammo sustain on Vet than before the most recent change, probably even a bit more would be welcome.

What are you talking about “not knowing what I’m asking for”.