Tide is in the title for a reason. Although I have to say I dislike how Havoc has been “balanced” around the few over-performing options across all classes and weapon types, INSTEAD of nerfing stuff like DS Mk IV, flame stuff, plasma, cooldown reset talents etc etc.
Havoc kind of killed the variety in builds and weapons choices, even if few of us are stubborn enough to try “off-meta” builds.
What is the point of all those weapons and talents if you cannot combine them into something new and different?
You’re absolutely right—and honestly, the meta issue has only gotten worse with Havoc mode.
Before the recent changes, you could experiment a bit. A skilled player running an off-meta build could push up to Havoc 25 or even 30–35 with the right team and strategy. But now? Anything outside the narrow top-tier pool becomes a liability beyond Havoc 20. The margin for error is so tight that one mistake—or one underperforming weapon—can throw the entire run.
Havoc has effectively shrunk the viable sandbox, and that runs totally counter to what makes a PvE game like this fun: variety, creativity, and expression through different weapons and builds. What’s the point of having dozens of weapons and talents if only a handful are “safe” above Havoc 20?
That’s why I’ve been pushing for a rotating meta approach. Everyone should get a turn. Take an underused weapon, give it a noticeable buff—yes, even over-buff it—and let it breathe. Let people actually use it at high level. Then, once there’s enough data and feedback, dial it back, but not to where it started—bring it back to a usable, balanced state based on how it actually performs in Havoc.
But for that to work, Fatshark has to be nimble. Balance needs to be reactive. If we’re waiting six months between meaningful shifts, the game just stagnates. Meta variety needs momentum. Without quick iterations, even the best ideas get buried under dust.
I see a lot of people bringing up V2, but you all know FS struggled with balance for years and finally just integrated a community weapon balance mod into the game.
It’s a weird situation. On one end abilities like Chorus and Bubble have seen far wider use in Havoc than in Auric, but on other hand golden toughness and bubble ended up almost the default pick in Havoc. Many difficulty modifiers are really punishing the max toughness, regen etc. so we just…cheese it with the broken cooldown reduction talents and golden toughness…
I almost wish we could see a Havoc mode without all those negative toughness modifiers, and enemy damage resistance / CC immunity mods, so other builds and the vast majority of weapons might see some usage again.
It’s a game of Whack-A-Mole for sure. Especially if new difficulty modifiers tweak enemy HP / damage resistance or stagger values. This has broken a lot of weapon breakpoints, and made weapons dependant on stagger obsolete.
I don’t think FS is actually doing this. I don’t even know how one would define perfect balance. As is, we’ve never had perfect balance.
This is…basically what they’ve been doing, just without any rhyme or reason. I don’t think such intentional meta-shifting by just messing with stuff for its own sake is necessarily actually good for games (as opposed to introducing genuinely new content), and we see that play out in actual tabletop 40k with its codex cycle (where armies will disappear competitively for months or entire editions then be hideously overpowered for a time), but I think this is already something DT does in practice.
I think trying to make everything at least viable is important, but I don’t think there’s any sense that FS is trying to make everything equally viable, we’ve got triple digits worth of weapons in this game and they’re certainly not all anywhere near on par with each other.
Honestly, I don’t think we’re going to see any real content cadence here. Whatever we get, we get at a snail’s pace, and that’s likely due to technical limitations—probably tied to their in-house engine. I’m no expert on engine architecture, but it’s hard not to wonder if things would’ve been different had they just used Unreal or another modern, widely-supported engine.
We’ve seen this issue before: Vermintide took two full years to add skeleton minions for the Necromancer. That’s absurd when you stop and think about it. Sure, we’ve normalized it now, but that kind of delay is unacceptable for a studio with nearly 200 staff. This isn’t a 10-person indie shop. If technical hurdles are slowing them down this much, it’s on them for sticking with an engine that clearly isn’t scaling well.
And just to clarify—changing the engine wouldn’t ruin the “feel” of the game. Feel comes from design, not the engine. Unreal, for example, is flexible enough to replicate just about anything with the right input tuning, animation systems, and camera work.
The bottom line is: content is hard for them to deliver, whether for technical, structural, or organizational reasons. That’s why I push for things like meta-shifting via balance cycles. Because if new enemies, new zones, or game-altering systems aren’t coming anytime soon, they need to do something to keep the game fresh.
Let’s be real: Genestealers? Absolute pipe dream. The new class? That’s probably the one big content drop of the year. After that, it’s going to be blessing tweaks and maybe one new modifier until 2026. It’s not acceptable, and it’s certainly not sustainable for a live service title.
Exactly—Havoc has shifted the game away from skill-based mastery toward pure survivability sequencing. Things like golden toughness and bubble stacking have become almost mandatory—not because they’re fun, but because they’re necessary. And when the path to success becomes that narrow, you lose the whole point of build diversity.
Defense should absolutely be a valid playstyle. But when it becomes the only viable way to push high Havoc, it kills creativity. Add in something like flamer, and suddenly your entire build revolves around not dying rather than engaging with enemy types, positioning, or smart skill usage. That’s not rewarding gameplay—it’s just endurance.
This wasn’t nearly as bad in Vermintide. Even at high-end Weaves, there was some room for experimentation. Sure, things eventually centered around meta picks like Handmaiden, but at least THP mechanics (temporary health from action-based triggers) allowed for different playstyles to feel viable and rewarding. You could still make interesting decisions and earn sustainability through aggression, support, or finesse.
Havoc needs variety injected into it. I actually really liked the idea I saw floating around recently—about introducing Mortis Trial-style ability modifiers as optional boons during level transitions. That kind of system would let you buff underused abilities in interesting ways, but also make the game harder in response. It creates gameplay loops that are fresh and unpredictable, while still testing your skill.
If that’s too much? Then fine, let’s go simpler and cheaper:
– Rotating modifiers that put weaker weapons in the spotlight for a patch
– Traits that reward skillful inputs like perfect parries, dodges, or chaining headshots (I loved that Shade trait in Vermintide—perfect parry into invis for 2s was genius)
– Or just cyclical buffs, like we’ve discussed: buff something hard, then tune it back down, not to its original state but somewhere meaningful
Why do I keep pushing these kinds of ideas? Because they’re low-effort content, relatively speaking. This doesn’t need 180 people across departments to ship. It’s small changes with big impact. Way better than sitting around waiting for one class a year and some recolored cosmetics.
Considering a random shooter can down you from an angle you are not looking at, it’s hard to disagree that randomness is a bigger factor, and the easiest way to deal with it is just golden T or bubble hopping. Sub 100 toughness numbers are just silly.
For me Havoc has proven the game can provide the Tide intensity, but I dislike how cheesy some difficulty can be, and how they ruined weapon and build variety.
On the subject of cyclical solutions… What about rotating modifiers that are actually drastic enough to propel different weapons into the meta category? E.g. one week we could have endless hordes but no carapace, another week we could have doubled specials but no hordes… Etc.
Otoh, I favour having deliberately imbalanced weapons and some kind of “Loadout points” system - of which several interesting options have been proposed on various forums.
