I agree they need to bring reload on ult back. Mag dumping two bolter mags in 4 seconds was insane
I can see your point, well spoken.
I would take it a step further and remove the stagger for monstrosities, ogryns and mutants.
It’s not for several reasons. VoC is a top 2 ability and chorus is just simply not.
So is the other top 2 ability, scriers gaze, but there the damage modifiers are so high and so synergistic with psyker that it becomes as good as it is. If exe.stance gave you a 1000% damage buff, it’d be the most crazy ability we’ve ever seen. Clearly it’s not that damage isn’t useful, it’s the amount of damage that’s relevant. And if the amount of damage isn’t high enough, it needs to do other things on top of adding damage.
That’d exactly why exe.stance used to be good but isn’t anymore. It used to give you toughness, reload your gun, effectively doubling your mag size from time to time, and gave you crazy damage. Now it just gives you a worthwhile amount of damage but nothing else.
The modifier nodes don’t even do anything worth considering except for one. Highlighting enemies to the rest of your team sounds neat until you realize that teammates can steal your refresh timers and you get nothing for it, actively making the ability perform and feel worse to use. Highlighting ogryns but locking out the relevant targets is another node that just makes the ability worse. The only modifier you should take, is the one adding shooters to your targets, something the ability should do by default and something that is not worth 2 skillpoints.
The other damage modifiers don’t synergise with exe.stance at all. Why have an ability with the purpose to do more damage and refreshable timer if the ability modifiers have once per activation clauses and different, non-refreshable timers? That’s part of the reason why gaze is crazy and exe.stance is just fine.
The other problem is that “just fine” doesn’t cut it when you put it up against the strongest shout in the series. VoC has better talents above it and simply provides stronger utility. There’s nothing that can be reasonably done to exe.stance that would make it be on par with VoC, the same way that survivalist can’t be nerfed to conformaty, it will always be better than the other two “do nothing” auras for vet.
That’s exactly what I mean, that won’t work. The utility is un-nerfable. You can shuffle numbers around as much as you want, how much worse an ablity does broken things does not change the fact it still does broken things. It’s the exact same dynamic as with survivalist. Nobody want’s a sequal to that masterpiece of game design.
I’d personally not change VoC in a drastic way. I’d change CDR nodes across the board and bring exe.stance and infiltrate up.
I just want exe.stance to be more useful in more situations, have better synergy with the rest of the tree and to be more of a choice compared to VoC. Hence why I made the suggestions further up the thread.
Bring back old Camo Expert for ES: reduced threat from ranged enemies while active
About synergy. It drives me mad they exe stance does not synergize with focus target in any way. May it be a reduced value or just the additional nodes of focus target it would be really satisfying
It does make you vulnerable. You do not have the safeguard of VoC, or Infiltrate. What did you gain? Hipfire accuracy with the Laz Pistol.
We are back at “staying back and spraying”.
I do not imagine anything. There is not a single gun in the game that needs Exes support do shine so bright that it would be worth picking. All you do is gain a slight edge, a sliver really, and you lose a stupid amount of survivability, clutch, and offensive potential.
Everything is “viable”. Playing with a Blindfold is viable too. Being viable does not change that Exe is probably the worst ability in the game for no real reason, but people and devs still being shellshocked from the pre talent tree version.
I beg to differ here. Bubble, Chorus, and VoC are the top dogs. VoC is extremely comfortable to run, since you do not need to coordinate anything. Just press a button and make the play happen. The second you put communication into the equation, Chorus steals the cake. With enough Chorus you can endlessly push in Havoc, set up camp in the nearest convenient spot, and burn the massive stack of heretics while the chanting Zealots still scream “For Him on Terra!”. With VoC it does not really work as well. Been there. Done that.
Having recently switched to VoC vet from a Exec, it is that which needs a kick in the balls. Cooldown on VoC is way too short. Exec is fine. 25% of the nothing you do per shot you do with your recon lasgun is still nothing.
My more lenient suggestion for balancing VoC:
- Increase Cooldown from 30s to 45s.
- Reduce Gold Toughness from +50 to +25.
- Remove VoC’s ability to stack additional Gold Toughness via multiple Veterans using it concurrently.
That would make VoC weaker, but not change that every Vet and his brother will pick VoC over anything else.
Baby steps.
If that’s not sufficient, my next course of action would be to propose:
- The CC AoE only has an effect in the general direction that the Veteran is facing, similar to the Psyker’s Venting Shriek AoE.
I can’t stress enough just how surgically nerfs need to be handled in Darktide, though.
Wait, wait, wait! I forgot to mention something in my initial post, forgive me. I haven’t had my coffee.
Editing in the third dot point now.
I feel this is also the main ‘crux’ of the issue. This along with everything else you said. The left and right side trees just tend to have this massive issue where going for what’s on them drastically diminishes the power output of the veteran, as you have to take a lot of talents that absolutely blow just to have the ‘privilege’ at also taking an ability that isn’t all that great.
I feel Infiltrate is finnne in this regard, because you can at least take shredder or flake, grab the upgraded grenade, and get an extra grenade on top of that and feel pretty good with it, but even in that case you are STILL taking Demolition Stockpile every single day of the week and that will still always make VoC the preferred option over the other two as that node is basically required.
And that in general just makes a feedback loop where in every build will be better off taking VoC because you are ALWAYS taking Demolition Stockpile, and to that end unless you really want that extra nad (in which case infiltrate can be taken because of that) on top of the crit node, you aren’t really ever going to WANT to use the other abilities, as they will require tax nodes to get to.
And Executioner Stance gets the worst of it, as you have two dead talents leading to it that are always better spent somewhere else. Why get 10% crit for just the first bit of the mag when I can get 5% always? Why take Kill Zone ever as it will literally never be proced because there will always be at least 1 spawning poxwalker directly behind you?
Both of these talents do nothing, which make ES fight THAT much harder to be relevant, and need it to be that much more effective to not just be crap in comparison. And I love using ES, I got a few different builds with it cause I like the fantasy of it, but they are NEVER as effective as VoC or even infiltrate just by nature of having to waste a point on something that literally does nothing for me, just to take an ability that is also just flat out worse in every way (objectively).
If you traded Demo Stockpile for Killzone on the skill tree alone, I feel Executioners viability would shoot up drastically, just by nature of no longer being ‘taxed’ to run it. Kill Zone would actually synergize a bit with VoC too since you can throw everyone down in a 9m radius then run off to get the bonus.
But yeah, at the end of the day while I would like the buffs/reinstatement stated in this thread for ES, the nodes leading to it are also a massive issue. As while the nodes leading to Survivalist are ‘hard to stomach’ but at least something that you’ll get effect out of, the nodes leading to ES are actively nothing, and make an already bad Active Ability feel that much worse.
And you’d be wrong.
Bubble and chorus are meta in havoc and nowhere else. That does not make them the strongest abilities or meta in general.
This is also the least relevant part of what I wrote or to the topic at hand.
Sounds good, though I feel like without reworking the overtoughness itself you could get much less and it still wouldn’t matter much since the core problem of acting as a separate layer would persist.
IMO 45s cooldown is the most basic reasonable thing to do, but instead of simply increasing the base cooldown of the ability Fatshark could move cooldown increase from Only in Death Does Duty End (revive on shout) to Duty and Honour (overtoughness). The base ability itself isn’t that good without the upgrade nodes and absolutely warrants mere 30s cooldown base.
I’m not sure what should be done about the cooldown reduction on special kill though, it’s another major part of this entire puzzle that has to be tweaked somehow.
In any case, as long as overtoughness and the CDR node work the way they do right now it’s hard to nerf VoC in moderate manner that would be impactful without going overboard. You either make a slight nerf that will be insubstantial cause of those two nodes, or account for them and make the ability absolutely terrible on its own.