Hi, lets talk toughness… in a moment. First I’d like to address: Darktide is fresh out of the oven right now and smells great, although it still needs more time to cook. It’s common knowledge at this point that due to delays in development the Beta should have lasted longer, but the Big Bosses felt pressured to hit the full release button. Regardless the Devs are currently hard at work patching holes and trying to keep the ship moving forwards. There is only so much they can do though, I imagine. Fatshark is not a massive team and has limited resources and people working on different things. Player feedback is extremely important for helping them find and resolve issues with the game; whether it be performance problems, balancing weapon damage, fixing bugs, or balancing mechanics/talents/perks. Lucky for them they are getting that feedback here and elsewhere. A LOT of feedback. Unfortunately, most of the feedback, especially for game balance, is in small bits and pieces from people with drastically different takes. Having a wide variety of feedback is a double-edged sword as, while the Devs have tons of information to work with, much of it is simply not constructive. Many suggestions also don’t take practicality into consideration. A massive change can be good, but if it takes too much time only to turn out mediocre or worse then it’s a disaster in the office. I’m making this post because even with its many issues, I love this game and I know the Devs love it too, despite the many frustrations and setbacks. I want to give detailed and useful suggestions that the Devs can actually work with that not only help, but also are easy and clean to incorporate and build off of. Why am I focusing on toughness of all things considering how big this post is? Well that’s actually quite simple. I play a lot of games and enjoy making loadouts/builds that can push the game to its limits through a combination of well thought out stats mixed with learned skill and teamplay. Having and trying to replenish toughness on top of your scarce to refill healthbar is a simple (which I think is important in a game with a big learning curve like Darktide) and good way to combine attrition with aggression. The problem right now though is that the toughness system has a lot of wrinkles that need ironing out. I don’t think the wrinkles are hard to remove with the right amount of pragmatic finesse. While not all of my proceeding recommendations are PERFECT fixes; I’m focusing on practical balance changes that players won’t find annoying/unfun or too casual to play with, while being easy to code/implement for the Devs and in the future will be cozy to work around as more classes are added. All numerical values are purely recommendations and can always be easily changed, which is the nice part about them really. Let’s talk coherency and toughness regeneration. People feel very… aggressive about this one if the “Coherency is anti-teamwork and toxic” post with nearly 200 comments is anything to go by. The two most practical things I’ve taken out of it are whether the current coherency range is fine or needs to be bigger and if players should have toughness regen while alone. I’ve personally come to the conclusion that the current coherency range is fine, but could maybe be bigger by default for melee classes. As for toughness regen; I think having a very small amount while alone makes sense. The coherency indicator says 1-4 already, so maybe being alone gives 1/4th of the optimal regen. It’s not enough to encourage lone wolf gameplay that can leave teammates feeling worried/abandoned, but it’s enough that being the last man standing doesn’t feel completely hopeless. I also want to add here as a footnote that I’ve noticed many people who played Vermintide seem to have what I think is a misconception that the toughness system is way more forgiving than the temphealth system that game had and somehow forces a more passive playstyle. I would like to point out that the rats were not carrying firearms (rattling gunner doesn’t count he’s special and a special, heh). Coherency regen doesn’t really play a big role on most fights since it’s paused by damaging enemies, blocking melee attacks and taking damage. Most sources of in combat toughness replenishment are from talents and weapon blessings. Any downtime a team spends regenerating toughness is also spent simply walking to the next fight while grabbing loot along the way. Why ranged enemies absolutely melt your toughness bar and feel oppressive right now and how to address the issue. I don’t think ranged enemies do too much damage actually, and from other peoples feedback I’ve read, I think I’ve identified the real big issue that is causing the most woe. Enemy aim-tracking is too fast against sprinting/dodging players. Not to be confused with enemies overall accuracy which I think is fine as is and dangerous to nerf. I don’t think enemy tracking speed even needs more than a slight reduction. Just enough for well positioned player movement to avoid more, but not casually all, enemy fire. This change would also allow the melee classes charge abilities to get them into the fray less painfully. Mobility/stamina perks, blessings and talents may also see more use over raw unga-bunga stats as more skilled players pick up on evasive maneuvers. An important note on how toughness is supposed to work differently between ranged and melee classes and enemies. Melee classes are meant to be better at avoiding/mitigating enemy melee attacks through superior mobility, close range crowd control and damage reduction passives/talents that are active in melee combat. Ranged classes are meant to be better in weathering ranged combat through a combination of anti ranged weapon perks/talents, having strong long ranged AoE damage and/or crowd control in the case of the Psyker and having a larger toughness capacity for gunfights in the case of the Sharpshooter. Both sides of the group also feature toughness sustain talents that match their respective locations in the fight. A Sharpshooter has no toughness talents that help with melee fights, while a Skullbreaker has no talents that restore toughness in ranged combat as examples. How to balance toughness sustain between ranged and melee classes. An issue right now is that the veteran having a bigger toughness bar means they can also sustain far better than they should be able to in melee combat. The main cause of this is that the in-combat sources of toughness replenishment that all classes have access to give percentage values rather than static amounts. I can see 2 ways to fix this; change Sharpshooters toughness to 100 like the other classes and add a -50% ranged toughness damage reduction passive, or change global sources of toughness gain to give static values. While both ideas would achieve very similar results, I personally think the 2nd one is more practical for a few reasons: Firstly, when new classes are inevitably added with different nuances and roles, having separate damage type resistance passives attached to every single class will start to feel bloated and be far more troublesome to code/bug-fix/rebalance than simply having different toughness amounts. The individual class options would also just feel less unique and curio stat choices would probably have no diversity as a result because people won’t get to see big numbers (heheh big number funny). Secondly, having static values for toughness on kill and toughness replenishing blessings on weapons will makes sources of maximum toughness like curios or possible future talents options easier to balanced as increasing toughness won’t cause some classes to over sustain in situations they shouldn’t, while still increasing how much damage you can buffer at once. As for actual number changes I recommend changing the toughness weapon blessings to give 40%(ish) more toughness than they currently do, but remove the % part. So gaining 10% toughness on multiple melee hit would instead give a static 14 instead, as an example. Toughness on melee kill should be changed to give 5 on normal enemy kills and 15 on elite/specialist kills. The issues of melee damage not being scary enough to ranged classes, the toughness melee bleedthrough mechanic meant to fix this being very controversially received (for fair reasons on both sides) and how to smoothly resolve both sides with surprisingly very little effort. I’d like to clarify that the controversy I am currently taking about is that a large amount of the players do not like melee bleedthrough at all as a mechanic and think it should be removed. I completely agree with this. The other side of the argument is that melee combat would be far too easy and unpunishing, especially so for the ranged classes; mainly the Sharpshooter with it’s large toughness bar. As a fellow Vermintide2 enjoyer I would actually agree with this side of the argument too… IF no other changes were brought in to replace bleedthrough. Spoilers, I am recommending an alternative. Who woulda guessed? In fact the above stated changes to toughness sustain would already greatly fix the problem of the Sharpshooter, along with other future high toughness classes from overperforming in melee range. That of course isn’t enough though as it doesn’t actually make enemies feel less forgiving in general. Here is where things get ironically very simple. Replace bleedthrough with melee enemies deal 50%(ish) increased damage to toughness. Here’s the why: With the current bleedthrough system it is actually harder to run out of toughness in a pure melee fight since a lot of the damage… bleeds through your toughness. Most people don’t fully realize how scary getting your toughness bar broken in a large melee fight can be since it doesn’t happen that often without ranged enemies breaking the scenario or the player simply dying to bleedthrough first. When your toughness bar gets broken you get staggered… so you lose mobility… when someone is swinging a chainsword at your head… yeah. Simply taking more toughness damage from melee attacks would not only reduce how many mistakes in a row you can make before you start to hurt which is already similar to bleedthrough without the annoying issues, yet also adds that looming danger that the more skilled players want from the melee experience. Edit: I was reminded that the Zealot’s 75% toughness resistance perk may trivialize the game without chip damage, but wouldn’t it make more sense to nerf the INSANE perk that quadruples how many hits you can take? Tone it back down to 50% like it was in early beta before they buffed it due to the addition of melee bleedthrough. I want to also make a quick reminder here that we also want to think about how practical implementing something like this will be for the Devs to work with compared to the current system. Melee bleedthrough was already bugged when the mechanic was forced into the beta and also has to read different values depending on your current toughness percentage. People are also very unhappy with it right now and I imagine the Devs are working on ways to adjust it which will only be more work now and in the future and most of the people that just want it gone won’t even be happy with a “better” bleedthrough system, even if it actually is better. On the other hand, making players take more/less damage to specifically health/toughness from ranged/melee sources is already something they have diversified in the code and would be very easy for them to edit with little issue and wouldn’t be nearly as likely to break or need rebalancing in the future with new classes and talents added. So why do I think that melee bleedthrough is an unsalvagable mechanic that needs to be replaced even though I don’t completely disagree with its purpose anyways? So as mentioned in vaguer detail above I think it has far to many issues and would take to much investment by the Devs to really make most people satisfied with, but let me also get into some of what those big issues are, besides most people just saying it isn’t fun is already a red flag. Melee bleedthrough compounds painfully bad with other sources of chip/bleedthrough damage such as explosives like poxwalkers, corruption buildup from enemies and wounds(downs), and worst of all grimoire missions. Taking bleedthrough damage from basic enemies feels like ass combined with these very common conditions. It also makes it very hard for the Devs to add other forms of challenges that affect the players healthbar since melee bleedthrough is already so oppressive. INCONSISTENCY! The design of melee bleedthrough leads to some very different results from very similar combat situations. Taking 1% bleedthrough per 1% missing toughness from melee enemies can cause seriously confusing situations when combined with ranged damage. Let me make two examples here: You have 100 toughness and both the gunman and melee enemies do 50 damage each. You get shot and are on 50 toughness after the first hit. You now get hit by a melee attack and have 25 toughness and are missing 25 health and then you get melee’d again so you have 12.5 toughness and are down 62.5 health. Now you get shot again and have 0 toughness and are missing 100 health and will get stunned after 4 hits because your toughness broke. Now another situation is that you get hit by the melee enemy first and take no bleedthrough so you have 50 toughness. The ranged enemy proceeds to shoot you and your toughness breaks, but you lose 0 health and get stunned after 2 hits. Freaking what? That’s so confusing! How are people supposed to understand, much less appreciate, a system like that? I genuinely think this melee bleedthrough system or something similar could have worked in a different and far more melee focused game, but that just isn’t Darktide. Enemies have tons of stinky guns and players get the fun guns. The game is fun and we love our guns, but this bleedthrough system just doesn’t fit with ranged attacks breaking it’s rhythm. A basic rundown on how this would hopefully add diversity and personal choice to selecting which curios you want to run, instead of there just being a boring “best” one. +Wounds is probably the only curio that won’t get affected by any of these changes as it’s simply the “Do or die and boii do I not want to lie to myself about the die part” option. +Stamina may see more use if evading ranged attacks becomes more doable along with perhaps more blocking/shoving due to the potential threat of getting stunned if enemies break your toughness easier in melee range. +Toughness will start being used again since it would actually prevent full melee damage now, however it would no longer affect how much toughness you gain from static sources of toughness sustain and therefor by used mostly if you have toughness talents you want to combo with it. +Health will still be relevant as the toughness sustain/melee damage changes keep maximum toughness from overshadowing it along with simply having a buffer against things that can bypass/remove toughness like specialist enemies. It also increased your bleedout health which isn’t a commonly known thing and surprisingly useful. Ending Note This has been a fairly massive post all things considered and I am grateful for anyone who has taken the time to read it all the way through along with those who comment and bring in their own feedback and opinions on the topics discussed! I am also grateful for all the work a certain exhausted Dev team has been putting into one of my new favorite games! Sincerely, an Obese Megalodon appreciator.

I think you probably hit the nail right on the head about those weird spawns. I haven’t had hardly any of those since the beta though so idk about other peoples experience with it. Also this comment chain got quite off topic.

Daily reminder that this post exists. Have another new Darktide player in my friend group now. He plays zealot and didn’t know why his passive was inconsistent. Melee bleedthrough doing its diligent duty to muddle the new player experience.

Daily reminder that this post exists.

Sound cues exist you are right on that. Gotta say though the game still likes to spawn enemies right behind you. Had that happen today. Was standing with the back to a wall, no drop down in sight, no doors no nothing. I kill a trapper and bam get hit by a poxwalker from behind - not fun. Then again in terms of spawns - my biggest gripe are still the pox bursters that spawn from the door you are standing next to and therefore have little to no time to react to. Would rather they can only spawn from doors a certain distance away from you.

I think the problem with the poxwalker doors is that sometimes they don’t make noise when they’re behind them for some reason.

Just found this datamined info on another post Darktide stats.xlsx Sheet2 Stat Category,Stat... Wtf is even the point of this sh*t? Why the hell don’t characters have stat sheets to tell us this? I also don’t agree with most of these numbers. Why can zealot dark souls roll(slide) through damage when this is not that kind of game? Why does the veteran have such wonky numbers like getting more % melee kill toughness, making melee combat easier, while taking more damage while sprinting causing ranged combat to be harder? Isn’t that the opposite of what veteran should be? A lot of these weird hidden modifiers only seem to make the game more convoluted and confusing.

I just wish there was no damage to health while you have toughness… Ranged won’t chip at health, but melee mobs hit health through toughness for some reason.

I wish they made a better solution. But it’s to combat toughness regen abilities which you could easily gain some toughness between swings and thus be essentially invincible just by gaining any amount between swings. Which should’ve been noticed as an issue. It’s a problem with how feats, toughness regen and toughness mechanics not meshing well with each other. Toughness feels like they are trying to make it work and band-aid after band-aid is applied when it probably needs a rework. EDIT: I think a better solution rather than bleedthrough on every hit is that any damage you take beyond your toughness also does health damage. Got 20 toughness and take 40dmg in a hit? you take 20 toughness damage and 20 hp damage. That way toughness regen abilities will still be worth it, but you will still be worn down. Ofc this can be tweaked by toughness taking more melee damage (which I think it already does) etc etc.

The game would be way too easy without melee chip damage.

You do realize that you spend 300 words to talk about how not all the feedback is functionally helpful only to then proceed and lay out 3000 words that no one on the planet has time for.

@Fatshark: Dear Devs! A thesis on how to polish toughness into a straightforward and adaptive system for current and future classes

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback

LVSpooky March 6, 2023, 3:37pm 55

Linking another post I made taking about ranged enemies and toughness damage.

Topic		Replies	Views
@Fatshark: Toughness has balance problems and LIES to players. Why, and recommended ways to fix this! Gameplay Feedback	40	2043	April 5, 2023
Toughness bleedthrough crisis has an easy fix Gameplay Feedback	44	1893	December 7, 2022
Toughness negating dmg General Discussion	28	715	January 4, 2025
Toughness Bleedtrough - Worst gameplay decision in a long time Gameplay Feedback	45	1373	December 1, 2022
Toughness Bleed-through feels AWFUL Gameplay Feedback	34	2166	November 28, 2022

@Fatshark: Dear Devs! A thesis on how to polish toughness into a straightforward and adaptive system for current and future classes

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