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.
3 Likes
The game would be way too easy without melee chip damage.
3 Likes
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.
Alright fair. Let me shorten it for you.
Current system bad. Need new stuff. Numbers.
I actually like the way toughness works but there are 2 things that bother me.
- It’s not fully explained how it works ingame
- Some ranged enemies like Scab Stalkers and Shotgunners deal way too much toughness damage on the last 2 difficulties. They need to either nerf the damage or increase the “swap to melee”-range by a few meters.
2 Likes
The problem with toughness in this game is that on the higher difficulties your toughness really only buys you a single second to get into cover. That’s similar to games like Halo or Call of Duty where you die really quickly if you’re caught out in the open. However, in those games your health/shield come back almost instantly once you’ve taken cover, here it takes a decently long time and has a list of conditions attached to it.
The health mechanic in those games is not so much about managing health as a resource as it is about just making you “act like a soldier”. They are extremely forgiving if you immediately get into cover when you get shot at, but extremely unforgiving if you don’t. In Darktide you kind of get a system like that over your health, but it’s much harder to get that “disposable health” back, so once your toughness is stripped you tend to be screwed pretty quickly.
2 Likes
Yeah recovering from ranged attacks is kinda sketchy right now. The current toughness/movement system is supposed to support a mixture of damage buffering mixed with evasion, but isn’t quite hitting the mark. Suppression is supposed to also play into the mix and make Darktide a bit different from other shooting games, although it needs some tweaking too.
Great points, particularly about the pitfalls of the bleedthrough system (While intended to nerf Veteran’s toughness protecting them from melee, it actually nerfs classes like Ogryn with a lot less base toughness a lot more, because they much more easily get to low toughness%), and possibly having fixed values instead of percentages for toughness on hit blessings to reduce the insane synergy for classes that can stack base +toughness. Also, they should really take a long hard look at their toughness regen code as it’s absolutely rife with bugs and design issues, for instance the weapon toughness regen profiles for moving vs still are completely inverted on some weapons, and some feats are overwriting others due to clashing identifiers, etc.
Another important point is about how these very fundamental game mechanics are communicated in a very contradictory fashion to the player: take the Ogryn for example, ostensibly a “tank” designed to absorb small-arms fire with their tough skin, they in fact have the lowest toughness out of all classes. On the other hand, they have a passive that reduces all damage (health and toughness) taken by 10% for some reason… why not just increase their base by 10%? Again contradicting this, if you look at the actual game code you will see that this tiny modifier is overshadowed by Ogryn taking much more toughness damage whilst sliding, dodging, and running (which is about 95% of gameplay) than the Veteran or Zealot. It’s like FS can’t really make up their mind about whether they want Ogryn to be tanky or not. At the moment, the only viable playstyle as an Ogryn on Heresy/Damnation is to essentially play peek-a-boo (very difficult since most if not all cover cannot cover your massive frame), only engaging with your ult if you are absolutely sure you can reach the backline and engage all the shooters. Otherwise, you’ll get absolutely pin-cushioned, because you cannot withstand any amount of fire, and your evasive abilities are very poor compared to other classes. I would understand the latter, if the former were not the case. All of this would also be much less of a problem if suppression worked on all enemies, but as of writing the dreg shooters are essentially immune, making effective counterplay against them impossible.
Since it’s relevant to this post I would like to point out something that I’m not sure is a bug or intended mechanic. When it comes to toughness coherency regeneration, dodging enemy attacks treats the player the same way as it would for them taking a hit, which in turn interrupts your regeneration despite never actually getting hit.
I noticed this while trying out a super regen build with Skullbreaker’s double regen perk combined with regen curios, since regen curios work after the new bugfixes. When this issue wasn’t happening (like when I was just stun-locking things without dodging) the loadout felt ok, but doesn’t seem viable without a toughness replenishing weapon blessing to go along with it.
1 Like
Each class should have a different gimmick. Frankly toughness as it is now feels lazy. The ogryn should have toughness, but the vet should have a defensive shield while the zealot should have natural regen and the psycher should have a psychic barrier. All 4 should work differently in how they lose and gain points.
On the topic of toughness, I’ve noticed/remembered while playing again recently a weird mechanic that is a bit awkward that could use some tweaking. If the player has any toughness remaining when they get hit by a ranged attack, no excess/overkill damage is applied to health (same with melee, but bleedthrough exists so it’s weird).
I think it’s kind of weird that ranged attacks do so much bonus damage to players’ toughness and yet this weird buffer mechanic exists to contrast it so heavily. I don’t think it’s a directly bad thing, but wouldn’t it make more sense that players still take a (reduced) portion of the remaining damage when their toughness breaks, but ranged attacks don’t do quite as much bonus damage to toughness in the first place?
It’s kind of strange just how powerful toughness regen talents and fast (but small) gains of toughness are against ranged enemies and yet large (but slow) bursts of toughness gains feel bad in ranged fights because enemies tend to instantly shatter your recovered toughness in 1 hit anyways.
When your toughness breaks, you have a little bit of grace time (1-2 sec, depending on difficulty) where you don’t take any health damage from ranged attacks. Except shotgunners. Shotgunners can break your toughness and chunk your health in the same shot. Add that to the pile of special cases.
1 Like
Linking another post I made taking about ranged enemies and toughness damage.