Feedback about 'Chemist' Hive Scum tree

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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Heya, first post here! First of all, I’d like to say that overall, the Hive Scum is very high octane and fun to play. It offers enough challenge in higher difficulties, and a focus on staying agile as your defenses is always a joy. In all games that I play, I tend to gravitate towards Consumable focused playstyles (throwing pots in Elden Ring, anyone?), so the Chemist tree really drew me in. I do have a couple of points of feedback though in regards to the Chemist side of the tree, a few “clunky” areas. I’m attaching a screenshot of what my current talent tree looks like in case readers need reference in regards to the feedback:

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a) Stimm Supply cannot be placed while sprinting.
If I am sprinting and press ‘F’ to place my pack, it halts my characters momentum entirely and does the weapon equip animation with whatever weapon I am currently using. This is probably a bug, but if its intentional, it makes the class feel really jarring.

b) Stimm Supply consuming your equipped Stimm feels weird currently.
I understand why it does this, but the fact that it does not function with the ‘Chemical Dependency’ keystone by not giving you a stack of it makes it awkward. This means that if I want to keep my buff uptime, I have to consume my stim first, THEN place the pack down. During high intensity moments, I often time can’t afford the ~2.5 seconds it takes to do both sets of these animations.

EDIT: Just found out consuming your stimm then placing the pack does not provide your stimms benefits to your teammates. So the Chemical Dependency keystone is even worse off if you want to support your team.

c) Specific weapons don’t seem to count towards the ‘Blackout’ Blitz kill refund.
I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something? but I’m running around with the bonesaw and using the ‘Pocket Toxin’ node with Blackout grenades to spread tox. I don’t seem to ever really get refunds on these grenades. I’ll get lucky once in a blue moon and get one seemingly at random, and I usually only end up getting maybe 1 or 2 a mission. This includes very high density missions. Yes, I know chem kills and certain other talents don’t count atm (check my tree, I specifically avoid certain nodes), but even when I’m one-shotting poxwalkers and dreg gunners with weakspot hits to the head, I’m not getting progress for this. “Every 20 kills at Close Range” should ideally include chem tox kills even if they count for like, 50% progress or something. It feels weird or should be specified a bit better.

Thats my main pain points with the class at the moment, the rest of the tree feels fantastic! Rampage is thrilling and dancing around with Desperado are high points. If these rough areas for Chemist are looked at, I think we can reach a fairly coherent support/neutral game focused class.

Cheers! :clinking_beer_mugs:

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Specific weapons don’t seem to count towards the ‘Blackout’ Blitz kill refund

from what i can tell and as you note, they made it so DoT kills dont count as close range kills, prolly didnt want the nade to refund itself with the pocket toxin node, but forgot that it screws over a bunch of other gear and adds major anti-synergy

imo they should make it so only the nade’s pocket toxin itself cant proc the build up for new charges cause otherwise the chem character is punished for using a chem build

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Good post, I specifically second the feedback on Chemical Dependency and Stimm Supply interacting so impractically.

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On top of DoT kills, any Crit insta-kill given by the “Hyper-Critical” Passive also won’t count.

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I guess we didn’t get the fantastic one from the press build, hopefully some buffs are there since it’s definitely trying to cook atm but fighting a lot of anti synergies. Like you want to run potent stims but then building chem dependency becomes tough with the max cooldown (essentially 90s because the stim buff has to expire before cooldown begins). Also toxin builds are the best stim regen sources which is pretty limiting for weapon choice.

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Think the skill tree is broken in general. Stimm Supply’s subnode Practiced Deployment reads as follows: “Once a Stimm becomes available to use (collected or otherwise), Stimm Supply becomes instantly available.”

Except that once you have the custom stimm, then you can no longer pick up stims. The only way to pick them up is if you deallocate all points from the Stimm Lab’s custom stim in which case the Stimm Supply can dispense normal stims tourgh it albeit briefly and only upon deployment. I don’t know if it’s supposed to work in a way where the player should technically be able to pick up stims and it would simply reduce or remove the cooldown of the custom stim or if they would take another slot, but at this moment at this hour it seems to be bugged out either way.

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I agree, it seems like weird design that the stimm-themed combat ability is so anti-synergistic with the stimm-themed keystone. People are saying that Stimm Supply not giving a stack of dependency is a bug. But even if that gets fixed, there is still no reason to take Chemical Dependency with Stimm Supply. Cooldown reduction is useless because you have to wait for your stimm to come up in order to get the most value from the ability. I know Chemical Dependency is good on builds for the other two ‘F’ abilities, but I really hope that both Stimm Supply and Chemical Dependency get buffed/reworked to really work together so that we can make a full on drug addict build.

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Stimm Supply will become available if you pick up a stimm or the Cartel Special stimm finishes it’s CD before Stimm Supply (which is entirely possible, even with max 75s stimm CD, if you take Sample Collector).

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this i am okay with
it’s a second dose of an already potent ability, or it’s a massive team buff, so it makes sense that it doesn’t deploy as easily and quickly as shout or other abilities

you get the dependency buff, OR your team survives an insane fight with ease because everyone has insane attack speed and damage, i don’t see the issue with this one either

If chem toxin worked toward blackout refunds, a single grenade would refund itself if thrown a few feet above a horde. You would have permanent uptime on instantly deployed tox grenades. That would break the entire game and make hive scum the best horde clear class in the game by a wide margin given how good those grenades are for crowd control.

Pick up some more melee damage nodes and the weakspot damage node, and use the heavy attacks on the bonesaw. The reason you’re not getting refunded grenades is because the light attacks rarely are the thing that kills a poxwalker, even on a crit. The toxin is getting the kill because it’s finishing the job for you.

Push attack, heavy, heavy, that way you’re actually killing hordes with the melee attack, getting the toughness for killing chem toxined enemies with melee, and refunding grenades.