@Fatshark: Toughness has balance problems and LIES to players. Why, and recommended ways to fix this!

[LVSpooky]

So I’ve made some posts before about toughness and how it could use some work along with suggestions, but only just recently realized something obvious that I never even noticed until now. Toughness is worth roughly less than half of what the game tells you you have. Why do players have so much toughness in the first place if there are mechanics and hidden multipliers in the game that make toughness less effective than it actually is?!

Having 100+ toughness feels like a LIE, since melee damage partially bypasses it and ranged damage does like quadruple damage to it. Players look down and they see this blue bar that is over half of their HP and think they have a large buffer against taking health damage, when in reality it isn’t big. I don’t think toughness should be nearly on par with players’ health before feats, curios and blessings are being taken into account, but players are being told that since the number is so big.

Enemy damage output is all over the place due to the way toughness damage is balanced. Basic shooter enemies are the scariest foes on Terra. Melee damage is insanely inconsistent due to the way toughness bleedthrough is designed. Elite enemies have inconsistent threat levels and are often less threatening than they should be in melee range, especially compared to shooters.

Why even make ranged enemies deal so much bonus damage to toughness? Why even bother with melee bleedthrough? Why don’t players just have less toughness and get rid of some of the obscure balancing effects. By trying to make the damage/toughness system in depth it actually ended up becoming misinformative, misleading, bloated and arguably weaker as a design.

What I would recommend changing, given the current game state:

• Lower players’ total toughness by 50% and keep in mind this would also lower all % sources of toughness replenishment.

• Get rid of overkill resistance. This mechanic grants 82.5% ranged resistance for 1 second after toughness is broken with a 5 second cooldown on damnation. The duration and cooldown are also different between difficulties, which is very sketchy for a lifeline mechanic. It makes damage feel inconsistent and should be removed to complement my below listed enemy changes. Balancing a (half) FPS game around fluctuating tankyness just gets messy and the game already has an evasion system that is very engaging and well designed for avoiding damage anyways.
  Edit: I originally thought this mechanic granted overkill immunity and am extremely sorry for the previously incorrect misinformation that may have spread because of my stupidity.

• Get rid of the hidden toughness multipliers on all normal/Elite ranged enemies and halve them for Specialists. Follow this up by adjusting base damages. Extremely similar functioning ranged enemies have a wide variation of toughness multipliers that make them do very inconsistent damage between health and toughness. This inconsistency is only proliferated by them having largely different base damage values alongside the previously mentioned overkill resistance.
  I will be listing some balance adjustments in order to right this problem, that are also in line with the loss of overkill resistance and 50% maximum toughness.
  All listed numbers are for damnation. Difficulty damages scale at 25%/37.5%/50%/75%/100% effect, for context. My source is from a very helpful datamined post created by a fellow numbers nerd. Reddit - Dive into anything

• The ranged enemy number changes I recommend are as follows:
  Scab Shooter bullet damage 35.84 → 12, toughness multiplier 1x → 1x
  Dreg Shooter bullet damage 10.8 → 12, toughness multiplier 4x → 1x
  Scab Assaulter bullet damage 9 → 12, toughness multiplier 4x → 1x
  Scab/Dreg Gunner bullet damage 12 → 9, toughness multiplier 1x → 1x
  Scab/Dreg Shotgunner pellet damage 12 → 12, toughness multiplier 3x → 1x
  Reaper bullet damage 32 → 16, toughness multiplier 0.5x → 1x
  Sniper bullet damage 122.5 → 122.5, toughness multiplier 10x → 5x

• Scrap melee bleedthrough completely. This mechanic makes 1% of melee damage bypass toughness per 1% missing toughness. Just like the max toughness values, it feels misleading and has issues with hybrid(ranged+melee) combat and class design along with many other misc. issues. Specials that grab the player should always deal 50% bleedthrough though.

• Make all classes get the same raw amount of toughness from melee kills to offset removing bleedthrough as to not create a survivability imbalance due to some classes having more overall toughness. Sharpshooter would get 2.5% instead of the 5% of other classes because it has 2x their toughness, as an example.

• Increase the amount of toughness from melee kills on Elite/Special/Boss enemies from a base 5% up to 15% in order to create a risk vs. reward scenario for confronting them in melee, rather than mag-dumping them on sight. This would also increase the value of zealot’s currently garbage “1.75x toughness on melee kill” feat.

• Sharpshooters and psykers SHOULD NOT take bonus toughness damage while sprinting as it discourages evasive actions and fun sprint builds, or at the the very least make it only apply to melee damage.

• Coherency regeneration should probably be lowered to match the reduced maximum toughness, because it is the only non % source of toughness recovery. It should also work at 25% effect when alone, aka at 1/4 coherency.

• Lower the sharpshooter class’s “75% ranged resistance during ability” feat down to 50% as it is already debatably overpowered even without the above listed changes.

• Zealots should not take 100% reduced toughness damage while sliding. Just make it 50% instead (seriously, they are out here playing dark souls with a gun, with those immunity frames). This one apparently doesn’t really matter that much, but it’s still silly and might become too strong if melee bleedthrough is removed.

Summarized Results:
(You have to take the above changes into account together or they don’t work to proper effect.)

Toughness will actually be worth as much as the number says it is. People will be able to properly gauge how much damage they can endure. This naturally extends to making the selection of defensive perks, blessings, and feats more straightforward for the players. The game’s numerical mechanics will also be streamlined, therefore resulting in easier balancing and coding, especially down the line should more classes and difficulty modes be added.

Playing ranged fights should be somewhat different. Basic shooters will not be as oppressive and overkill resistance would no longer be present to incentivize the slower and more grueling “peek-a-boo” tactics that are stalling missions and leaving the more melee oriented players bored. Proper usage of cover is still a very useful skill, but evasive maneuvers will let you survive and advance farther then before. This will notably even the playing field for differently designed maps too.

Taking melee damage will mesh better with ranged damage and be far more consistent overall. Players can actually survive a few papercuts while on low health, while eating an overhead slam from a CRUSHER properly does more health damage than getting hit twice by wimpy groaners. Missing a sliver of toughness no longer make the smallest of hits lethal, at the cost of not being able to casually shrug off massive hits while on high/full toughness (bleedthrough was dumb like that). The 50% reduced toughness would make melee combat overall more lethal. Elite melee enemies would be more dangerous and while basic enemies would be harder to sustain against, they wouldn’t apply chip damage while you still have toughness.

If after reading this you have any thoughts on this post, or have something to add yourself, please feel free to add a comment. More discussion, data, and feedback is always better. I have also been periodically editing/polishing this post for better reading and coherency… Heh.

Sincerely, an obese megalodon enjoyer who thinks a basic and core mechanic should be just that.

[LVSpooky]

I actually have another older post talking about adjusting damage from ranged enemies. It also goes into greater reasoning for the specific changes, but the recommended numbers were different from this post mainly due to being isolated from other balance changes such as lowering maximum toughness. If you are interested regardless, here is the link.

@Fatshark: You tried TOO hard with ranged damage. Simplifying it would actually improve the game. Here's why!

EDIT: Some of my information on this post in incorrect, even if it is similar to the actual mechanics. For in depth information on all of the ranged damage mechanics please check out this very detailed post I found: https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkTide/comments/10f40uz/all_enemy_attacks_damage_values_healthtoughness/ So for those that don’t know, there are these 2 mechanics based around ranged enemies damaging the player: Ranged enemies basically all deal a bonus +300% (aka x4) damage to toughne…

[Darth_Angeal]

@LVSpooky

zealots should NOT take 100% reduced toughness damage while sliding, so just make it 50% instead (seriously, they are out here playing dark souls with a gun, with those immunity
frames)

@LVSpooky

lower the sharpshooter class’s “75% ranged resistance during ability” trait down to 50% as it is already debatably OP even without the above listed changes.

While i agree sliding shouldn´t be that strong and sharpshooter is somewhat exeggerated with base-stats, i think all the other suggestions shouldn´t become a thing. It´s just some huge buffs which will make the game way too easy in general.

@LVSpooky

as there should be a small reward to taking the risk of melee combat

Also dunno why you need a reward to go into melee mode. It´s part of the game and even if some poeple still believe this is a shooter, no… it´s the tide-series and they belong to melee- / close-range combat. FS should actually decrease the amount of ammunition or atleast bring a modifier doing so, so poeple will stop sitting in the back for 5 minutes and stall the game unneccessarily.

Anyway… killing enemies in melee will give you toughness back so. Even if you get a hit you´ll get your toughness back pretty fast. There is no risk to take. It´s even easier to do the most times and overall compared to V2 especially thx to toughness and multiple wounds. Just start to get used to the basics.

[Padds]

hmm im not quite seeing what the lie is, what the problem your perceiving is nor how these changes would address it . lot of buffs and nerfs and changes to class identity i would simply not want,

@LVSpooky

• remove the +300% (x4) bonus damage ranged basic enemies do to toughness
• lower the +300% (x4) bonus damage ranged Elite/Special/Boss enemies do to toughness down to +100% (x2)

I fully agree the ranged gunners and particulaly the shotgunners are far too dangerous. but i dont think id go down the route of making them behave more like melee i do like they are different in approach.
think i would go the other way , increasing the immunity on slides to extend beyond them , and giving the player buffs to make the ranged miss based on distance traveled recently or number of enemies in combat, if you could use the enemy to block shots etc some way to negate the lethality through gameplay. and maybe tone them down a little , particulaly that stun/snare affect which is just pure frustration

[LVSpooky]

@Darth_Angeal

i think all the other suggestions shouldn´t become a thing. It´s just some huge buffs which will make the game way too easy in general.

But it’s not all buffs… How is halfing toughness and getting rid of the toughness gating, buffs?
Like a said in the OP.

@LVSpooky

The overall results of these combined changes (you have to take all of them into account together or they don’t work to proper affect) would not actually have a large shakeup to the current balance of the game, but the listed changes would make much of the current toughness system far more honest and straightforward to the players.

Also:

@Darth_Angeal

Also dunno why you need a reward to go into melee mode. It´s part of the game and even if some poeple still believe this is a shooter, no… it´s the tide-series and they belong to melee- / close-range combat. FS should actually decrease the amount of ammunition or atleast bring a modifier doing so, so poeple will stop sitting in the back for 5 minutes and stall the game unneccessarily.

I mean… It doesn’t really play like that though. When I see a rager I never even bother killing it with melee. Why would i risk taking a hit when I can casually gun it down? Also this game can be played as a pure shooter if you have a mobility gun. I’ve played damnations with under 10% melee kills on my sharpshooter. I do agree that there is too much ammo, but if ammo pickups were reduced and nothing else was changed alongside it, then gun builds would simply struggle and the meta would shift to a purely melee game. At that point we would just have a very shitty vermintide3.

[LVSpooky]

@Padds

I fully agree the ranged gunners and particulaly the shotgunners are far too dangerous. but i dont think id go down the route of making them behave more like melee i do like they are different in approach.

I’m not quite sure how this would change the approach to ranged enemies? It would just make the player less reliant on immunity gating and more reliant on just naturally avoiding damage.

@Padds

hmm im not quite seeing what the lie is, what the problem your perceiving is nor how these changes would address it . lot of buffs and nerfs and changes to class identity i would simply not want,

The lie is that due to hidden multipliers, mechanics and melee bleedthrough, toughness functions at wonkily about half of what it’s shown value actually is, with the current system. If someone gives you $100, but you go to spend it and everywhere you go it is only worth $50, you have been bamboozled.
Also what listed changes affect class IDENTITY?

[Darth_Angeal]

@LVSpooky

But it’s not all buffs… How is halfing toughness and getting rid of the toughness gating buffs?
Like a said in the OP

Because just less toughness wouldn´t outweigh that we don´t have chip-damage anymore, or that gunners have a harder time breaking your shield on higher difficulties.

I mean away from the class-specified suggestions, the only real con is that you want to lower also the regeneration while being in coherency. But this will become pretty much irrelevant since you´ll get less damage in general and also want to buff the melee-toughness on kill.
Not to mention that such a change will only assist solo-play instead of staying with the team.

Tbh i actually see a Zealot / Ogryn sitting on 50 toughness, using the ult as gapcloser, maybe losing like 30-40 toughness, but they get all back with just one slice. And since we lost chip-damage, horde-enemies will become pretty pointless and even rager to some point.

EDIT: It might shift more players into melee, but melee will become pretty much braindead at some point.

[Licious-D]

The toughness concept as a substitute for VT2’s temp health was a good idea. The execution is needlessly convoluted and complex, when it should just be straight forward “shield”. Like almost anything in this game, it feels like five different people were tasked to design the mechanic, and then they just threw everything they had together.

[LVSpooky]

@Darth_Angeal

Because just less toughness wouldn´t outweigh that we don´t have chip-damage anymore, or that gunners have a harder time breaking your shield on higher difficulties.

@Darth_Angeal

And since we lost chip-damage, horde-enemies will become pretty pointless and even rager to some point.

I mean the whole idea was: No chip damage, but you have half the toughness to make due with. Normally chip damage didn’t even hurt until your bar was chunked anyways. And ranged damage being able to do overkill into your health would add chip damage to ranged fights that are played poorly, resulting in evening out the basic(non-elite) enemies being proportionally weaker from the changes. Take in mind too that if you have 50% less toughness then all % toughness replenishing sources would be weaker too. That is why I only specifically mentions coherency regen in the OP, because it’s a flat value.

[Darth_Angeal]

@LVSpooky

I mean the whole idea was: No chip damage, but you have half the toughness to make due with.

I do get your points dw, i just don´t see some big changes and more buffs in general, meanwhile the “issues” will just shift from one place to another.

Yes, longer stupid range-fights will become “harder”, but overall just for Ogryn or Zealot. Psyker and Vet will still be like before. Meanwhile melee will become easier than it is already since no chip damage will allow more trades with enemies.
I would pretty much welcome it if poeple will stop playing this game “pewpew-wise” and start to push when it´s needed, but not on the cost to make melee-combat pretty much braindead.

I´m not saying the current system is perfect. Even the max toughness mitigation was a change because the system before was either too punishing for worse players, or too good for better ones.
But no matter how needlessly complex it looks, the current system offers a lot of possibilities in class-design / balancing. Just look at Vet… yes it´s too much, but they clearly want it to be the range-class in this game.
On top the max toughness allows to hittrade if you want and is somewhat forgiveable if we talk about some randoms hits that will happen here and there. Meanwhile it´s still punishing if you missplay hard.

Nothing against your ideas so far, maybe FS can take some into account for future-tweaks. But overall i don´t see the impact you might see based on your experience. And i clearly don´t want just a normal “shield-mechanic” especially like said above… a more complex system will give FS more possibilities for future classes and even the players more depth gameplay-wise, while rewarding good decision-making and offering a bit of skill-ceiling.

@LVSpooky

edit.

Done.

[LVSpooky]

@Darth_Angeal

Yes, longer stupid range-fights will become “harder”, but overall just for Ogryn or Zealot. Psyker and Vet will still be like before.

If sustained fights are harder, but shorter duration ranged fights are slightly easier, then melee classes would actually be fine, as they would have more room to get into melee range wouldn’t they?

@Darth_Angeal

I would pretty much welcome it if people will stop playing this game “pewpew-wise” and start to push when it´s needed, but not on the cost to make melee-combat pretty much braindead.

When I play sharpshooter I consistently find myself waiting for teammates to catch up. People that use the slow semi-fire guns tend to sit back a lot though. I think the toughness gating mechanic makes a lot of people play more passively TBH. Also even without bleedthrough melee wouldn’t be braindead. If you have half the bar AND are getting half of the toughness from kills/feats/blessings since they are % based, then melee sustain would be cut in half, you have to take in mind. That was one of the reasons I though elite kills should give slightly more.

Edit also: letting people have a bit of regen at coherency 1 would mean that having the team slightly split up wouldn’t hurt as much, so you wouldn’t have to wait for people that sit back as much. They will either catch up while giving cover fire, or get picked off from playing too far back alone like the tortoises they are. They’ll learn to move eventually.

@Darth_Angeal

But no matter how needlessly complex it looks, the current system offers a lot of possibilities in class-design / balancing.

I actually HEAVILY disagree with this. I’ve played some games with complex builds and mechanics. The biggest example is Path of Exile with massively different and whacky builds with tons of different modifiers and perks. Ideally a game shouldn’t have a complex foundation. It should start simple and build up in different ways from there. Most games I play with a complex foundation tend to actually LIMIT build diversity. In fact a lot of feats in Darktide i’ve noticed are way worse/better than others not due to numerical value, but due to the wonky ass way melee bleedthrough and ranged overkill immunity work.

[alsozara]

@LVSpooky

zealots should NOT take 100% reduced toughness damage while sliding, so just make it 50% instead (seriously, they are out here playing dark souls with a gun, with those immunity frames)

Not that I think this change would really matter, but I do want to clarify again how this actually works, because there seems to be an awful lot of misinformation around about how slides generally as well as specifically Zealot slide functions.

Firstly all classes’ slides prevent ranged damage, that is not unique to Zealot, Zealot slide’s dodge duration is just very slightly longer than other classes so they have a slight advantage over other classes sliding against ranged attacks.

The 100% reduced toughness damage while sliding thus only comes into effect against melee attacks. Most even passably mobile weapons do no get hit by melee attacks mid slide with any kind of regularity. I should know, I’ve been playing a heap of Ogryn and Psyker recently. It’s also worth noting that if you are hit mid slide, Zealot will still take HP damage according to their current Toughness. 50% toughness and you’re hit mid slide you’re still taking the 50% HP chip. Not super relevant since again, being hit mid slide by melee attacks is pretty uncommon in my experience.

[LVSpooky]

@alsozara

Firstly all classes’ slides prevent ranged damage

I thought it didn’t prevent damage, but enemy tracking was just designed around being bad at hitting sliding people. I could have sworn sometimes i’ve been hit with bullets while sliding.

[alsozara]

@LVSpooky

I thought it didn’t prevent damage, but enemy tracking was just designed around being bad at hitting sliding people.

You’re kind of right. Slide puts you in dodge state which disable AI ranged from targeting you. You won’t be hit by a ranged attack while sliding on any class.

@LVSpooky

I could have sworn sometimes i’ve been hit with bullets while sliding

A) you can be hit between slides and towards the end of the slide animation I believe, that definitely happens to Zealot too

B) Servers suck and funky stuff can happen. Once again this can and does apply to Zealot as much as anyone else.

[Docman]

I just want to say is that I agree toughness feels like

Many times I’ve been hit once and it’s bypassed my 100%, impossible to know if it was because two enemies synced up their attacks, or some other weirdness. Maybe I had 99.5% toughness? Who knows.

We need consistency. The systems that keep us alive need to be predictable and easy to read and understand at a glance!

[LVSpooky]

Just did a bunch of random edits to the original post.

[LVSpooky]

So I was playing a lot of games today and was trying to get new curios for my ogryn. I replaced 20% toughness with a different stamina curio and after playing multiple games I can say that LOSING max toughness made me tankier. The extra toughness was causing me to take a few extra seconds to regenerate to high/full toughness in between fights and I wasn’t even using “Lynchpin”, but it was very noticeable. Due to this I was taking less melee bleedthrough over the course of my games. I didn’t even feel the difference in ranged fights since 20 toughness wasn’t enough to take an extra ranged hit.

All I can say is, what the hell? Toughness is a complete mess. I can understand it being not as good as health for some builds, but making you LESS tanky?!

[zaygr]

I though coherency toughness gain was % based. If it isn’t then that’s another mistake in the implementation.

[LVSpooky]

Yeah… I’m pretty sure Fatshark made it a flat amount because they didn’t want only 1 stat (maximum toughness) to increase recovery from feats, blessing and coherency, but It’s so jankily balanced with all the strange modifiers that it is ironically detrimental.

[alsozara]

@zaygr

I though coherency toughness gain was % based. If it isn’t then that’s another mistake in the implementation.

Coherency is the only thing that’s flat regen. I think it’s like 5 flat per second from memory.

@LVSpooky

So I was playing a lot of games today and was trying to get new curios for my ogryn. I replaced 20% toughness with a different stamina curio and after playing multiple games I can say that LOSING max toughness made me tankier. The extra toughness was causing me to take a few extra seconds to regenerate to high/full toughness in between fights and I wasn’t even using “Lynchpin”, but it was very noticeable. Due to this I was taking less melee bleedthrough over the course of my games. I didn’t even feel the difference in ranged fights since 20 toughness wasn’t enough to take an extra ranged hit.

You’re either gaslighting yourself or trying to gaslight us. I am calling 100% unambiguous BS on this comment. The only flat regen is coherency which seems to largely disable itself when you’re in melee combat anyway. Pretty much every Ogryn melee weapons runs confident strike or momentum which is, guess what, % based as most things.

Your math also just generally makes no sense. If you took 50 damage it take coherency regen the same amount of time to get you back to full regardless of whatever your max is 100 or 150. The only situation it would realistically take longer to regen is when your Toughness is fully depleted, in which case the extra max toughness saved you a bunch of chip damage from ranged in the first place, but since you’re so irrationally biased against toughness I guess you just didn’t notice it do that.

Generally Ogryn is probably the single best case of HP curios maybe winning, even then it’s a stretch, and only assuming you’re running the standard Lynchpin build. Even then Ogryn has 20% DR against health damage and 36% DR against toughness. Combine that with huge % gains through confident strike/momentum and I have to heavily question HP being unambiguously better for Ogryn.

So yeah no I don’t buy a damn thing you’re selling sir, and both my experience and actual game mechanics back that stance up.