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 modifiers 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.
First off, I never said “flavor of the month”—you’re misrepresenting what I actually wrote.
I’m not advocating for wild, weekly shakeups or constantly flipping the meta for chaos. What I proposed is:
– Identify underused weapons
– Buff them hard (not just by 3%, I mean really give them a moment to shine)
– Let players experiment with them for 3–4 months
– Then scale them back thoughtfully so they land in a usable, competitive state—not back into obscurity
This isn’t about invalidating current builds or “forcing” change. It’s about creating opportunity to break the monotony, explore new builds, and bring life to underutilized gear—especially in a game where content drops are rare.
If you’ve been running the same loadout for over a year and think that’s ideal… maybe the problem isn’t with the idea of change—it’s with your comfort zone.
How is this bait? I’ve laid out a full argument with reasoning, examples from other games, and even suggested how it could work in a low-effort, high-impact way for a studio that struggles to ship large content updates.
If anything, this is the opposite of bait—it’s a serious discussion about improving gameplay longevity in a system that’s stagnating under static metas and slow balance cycles.
Exactly this. Deliberate imbalance with a loadout point system is one of the cleanest ways to promote diversity without having to flatten everything into mediocrity. There’s a ton of design space in that direction. Thank you - I would love to read those posts. I hope Fatshark does more with the balancing.
I remain skeptical, but it’s hardly a bad idea. And I do think it would be much, much, much, much better than FS’s current balance workflow, which seems something close to bupkis.
They also somehow kinda butchered importing it and just did some whack things that weren’t in the mod, like buffing mace + sword heavies into the stratosphere for no reason.
Then during that beta, they also tried to rework Huntsman, and introduced one of the goofiest mechanics we’ve ever seen, where you could shoot a shotgun into someone’s torso and have it count as 100% of the pellets hitting the head, making it inexplicably good against chaos warriors (VT2 crusher equivalent) while making it terrible against the elite with unarmoured body but carapace head that it could previously slaughter in droves (you couldn’t turn the auto headshot passive off lmao).
Then they gave up on the rework entirely and to my knowledge never came back to Huntsman balance again.
So yeah scepticism is pretty reasonable, though I do think they tend to eventually reach a decent balance state.
No modded realm is still the big difference here that hurts Darktide massively. No ability for modders to create their own balance patches for players to test and use to trial potential balance changes or just generally enjoy a better game state. No modded difficulties to step in and fix the thing that Fatshark can never seem to get right - a satisfying challenge level for hardcore players that isn’t a drag to play or woefully inadequate for coordinated teams.
Good post and reasoning, but I don’t think it’s achievable with how slow Fatshark make even the smallest changes. A good start would be looking at the blessing pool and reworking all the non-meta blessings nobody uses into something that’s not necessarily strong, but just fun and chaotic.
Giving Thunder Hammer a blessing that has a 10% chance to randomly activate special on charged heavy attacks, similar to Psyker’s auto-brainburst, or giving Chainswords a blessing that lets you infinitely saw through an enemy until you stop or get stunned etc etc
There are very few non-meta fun blessings like Haymaker, which is actually very underrated because it’s fun and funny to randomly kill maulers, ragers and mutants in one swing/push attack.
I’m not much interested in FOTM balancing but it would be nice if FS were willing(?)/able(?) to do smaller and somewhat regular (at the very least more regular than current, it’s a low bar) balance updates so we don’t get such boom and bust balancing with huge stagnation periods.
You really would think they could squeeze some number tweaks into the cosmetics fixes hotfixes they do pretty regularly. Like once a fortnight just number tweak a few weapons or talents or blessings.
For all we know tuning down the mobility profile, carapace mod, and uncanny might be all DS really needs to be fine enough. They could have tried it 30x over by now if they didn’t save up all their balance adjustments for a once every 3 month content patch.
About next , i am not sure, because people can use they favorite weapons and abilities very long time and they wouldn’t like removing their favorite candy. like some play only or mostly one class, i’ve seen guy couple days ago with 10 000+ true levels on zealot. i asked ai, it says 10 hours per day since release on one character. Maybe it was cheat btw.
Perhaps it would be better to add more modifiers to the game, which will push people bring more fitting weapons, like right now if i see waves of mutants, i bring heavy sword, i see dogs, i bring flamer or some machine gun, i see scab, i bring Ogryn or something else that fits from other classes.
Trying to make everything equally viable is not only futile
I think everything can be made viable, but people need to understand, that something always be meta and going to cry about nerfs is pointless.
