Out of the gate im gonna say, awesome work on the talent trees, its breathed so much life into the game and that is proven by the big spike in player count. However that isnt the main topic, the topic here is feedback on the proposed patch 14 notes, as well a some things that are a bit bigger scale and thus porbably will have to wait for patch 15.
Balance feedback:
Ironhelm thunder hammer, please dear god emperor stop bullying this poor thing, it was already bad but the proposed changes just take something that you have no reason to to use over its bigger brother to something you dont want to use ever, this thing needs buffs, not nerfs.
Infantry autoguns: the ammo buff was desperately needed and is awesome to see, but there is still one MASSIVE porblem, that being the ADS recoil. The on paper advantage of the infantry autoguns over the braced ones the accurate fire with the ADS for longer range and headshots, but in practice they are useless for that due to the MASSIVE recoil and side to side sway even when fired in short bursts, this needs to be toned WAAAAAAY down for these weapons to see any real use. The ADS recoil of the boltgun could also use to be toned down a bit.
Assail: Remove the stagger/suppression on hit, with how much this ability currently staggers, it totaly screws over your teammates, in particular vets, ability to hit headshots, and with how spammable assail is it makes many physkers just not fun to play alongside.
Smite: the single target fire mode needs to do more damage, as it is right now smite is really only useful for mass crowd control. In addtion, I would buff the talent tree ability modifer that makes enemies stunned by it take more damage, say from 10% to 15 or 20%, that would go a long way to making it more appealing to pick.
Brain Rupture: slightly decrease the base charge up time. The buffs to armor modifers and reduced peril cost will help a lot, but it still really struggles with just being too darn slow, if I want anti armor I will just use the surge or voidstrike staff, or even truama with rending shockwave blessing, they just come out faster and are thus mopre useful.
Power sword: this power swords DO NOT need a buff to thier energzied attack, that is fine, the porblem is that thier unpowered attacks are useless, and on top of that for the powered attacks popwer cycler VI is basicly mandatory for harder difficulties due top the sheer number of enemies. Im not saying power swords should not have any need to make use of their enegrized attack, thats the selling point of the weapon, but say +1 engerized hit at base and more unpowered first target damage so you can better deal with loose pox walkers and bruisers would go a long way to making this weapon more fun to use.
Ogryn lucky bullet: This keystone needs a buff to how often it procs, right nmow while on the face of it looks good on paper, when you math it out it barely does anything over the course of a full mission, this needs a serious buff to its proc chance to be worth taking even on a pure gun lugger build.
Veteran demolition team: Removing the ability for this to restore team grenades was and is a HORRIBLE idea, there is now zero reason to take this over the return one grenade over 60 seconds unless you just want to overkill spam krak grenades, and on top of that it removes one of the best ways vets used to be able to support thier team. Now I can see one reason this was done, and thats to prevent ogryn frag bomb nuke spam, that makes sense, but you should just add an excception where it cant regen frag bombs rather than neutering one of the best buff abilites for vet.
Veteran frag grenades: These despterly need a buff, they dont even do enough damage to really thin out a horde on damnation, so thier only real use is to stagger enemies off of a downed teammate, which with the coming stagger buff to the smoke grenade even that will be somewhat taken away from frags. They need some combination of a reduction of damage falloff from the center of the blast, more base damage, and more bleed stacks. Just do whatever combination of those the dev team makes sense in order to buff these things intop the horde rippers they are meant to be.
Sustained fire blessing: As of now, be it due to a bug or it just being forgotten about, this is just an objectively worse version of punishing salvo, which is already a very low tier blessing for 99% of the weapons its on. Something needs to be done to buff this, be it triggering continiously without stopping on fully automatic weapons or just overhauling it entirely.
Zealot blades of fiath: fiarly simple, these just need much higher headshot magnatism and perhaps a small damage buff, right now they take too long to line up and just dont do enough damage vs just shooting the enemy in the head with your gun, if these are meant to be quick throw one shot weapons for a super fast up close playstyle where you dont have a ton of time to line up a tricky shot with a slow, dropping projectile, they need help.
Server issue: Please fatshark, regularly restart and do proper maintaince on your servers, you not doing this leads to server slowdown and the issues that come with like, mainly around hit detection, slowly getting worse and worse as time goes on untill the next patch. This has been a porblem sense launch, and pratices need to change, the community wont mind weekly server restarts as long as you are clear and consistant about when they will occur.
Future large changes:
Crafting. the fandom continues to complain about this for a reason, its BAD, its by far the worst part of the game, its endless, no fun grind with several layers of horrible RNG. Now I do understand that there needs to be some grind, but RNG always feels bad and the grind is simply WAY to much. I have both short and long term solultions to this which I will now lay out:
Short term: just massivly increase the value of plasteel and diamantine pickups so overall the amount we get from eahc mission is much, much higher, say about double. While this wont fix the system, it will in the short term help with the horrible grind.
Long term: Two Words: Melk Bucks. This currency has such untapped poential to help with grind, and here is how. First, allow use to use melk bucks to buy tier VI versions of any blessing for any weapon, as some larger creators have already suggested. Second, take the garenteed max stats red tier weapons from vermintide 2 and let us buy them from melk with his currency, with 80 in all stats and NO CRAFTING LOCKS, both perks and both blessings are changeable forever on red weapons. This will make the late game much less RNG based as well as give much more use to melk and make players care a lot more about the currently at large inconsequential contract system, and in the process push players to try diffrent classes, as each opertaive gets thier own pool opf contracts each week. And dont be afirad to make these garenteed blessings and red weapons really pricey, they should be as to not invalidate the current brunts armory shop as well as give pl;ayers something to work for long term. In addtion, having it so that once you reach level 30 on an operative, any XP you earn should get converted into addtional crafting materials at the end of a mission so the system doesnt become useless when you reach max level, which is when you want to start grinding for good gear anyways.
Paid cosmetics changes: While it is great that you give us reasonable prices, the ability to buy the exact cost of bundles in aquillas, rotate old bundles back in, and the ability to buy spesicies items from a bundle on thier own, fruther changes are still needed. In particular, going from buying bundles of aquillas that are only in exact amounts for the full lagre bundles to allowing players to buy the exact amount they need for any purchase regardless of size would bring a lot of good will and make players at large more willing to spend real money.
Free cosmetic changes; Plain and simple, we need more of these, especially more for weapons, two simple pallet swaps with minimal model changes isn’t enough. It feels really bad and scummy when these are stagnant, but the paid shop is constantly getting new stuff on a semi fomo rotation.
New weapons: While this isnt a super pressing issue, there are still more iconic weapons from the 40k universe that could do with representation in darktide, in particular a chain weapon for ogryn melee, some sort of melta gun for zealot, and more staffs with diffrent powers for physker.
I know big changes abd internal balance testing take time, and to be frank modern game devs dont get anywhere near enough credit for thier hard work, but they do need good direction on what changes to make, and I deeply hope you seriously consider my proposals.
