Flame Staff: rework instead of just nerf

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

It’s safe to say the flame staff has been a controverse weapon in terms of balancing for quite some time now. With the devs even admitting that power creep has become a problem in Darktide, the flame staff needs addressing.

My biggest problem with the weapon is how simple it works, because it offers little balancing options other than reducing range, increase peril gain or removing infinite cleave which all would cause the weapon to be just dead useless if reduced to strong.

However, when looking at the Zealot flamer, that weapon is perfectly fine despite being stronger and having even more range once firing. The reason why the Zealot flamethrower is balanced is not only that it is limited by ammo, but more important by long reload time. Basically, you can’t spam that thing all mission long and rather save it for the real thick hordes.

The first thing I’d suggest is to change the primary fire to something different that doesn’t also have infinite cleave. A short ranged shotgun like blast or a single ball of energy that applies souldblaze to the target, there are many possibilities that could be soulblaze based. The removal of the current primary fire would also safe the team from epileptic seizures.

The secondary fire is the thing however that needs changes that don’t allow it to be spammed all mission long. I thought of either a charging bar similar to how the Covenant Greatsword charges it’s special ability, or an overheat meter that rises when using the flames and as higher it gets, the higher the peril increase becomes from using the flames to a point where you can’t properly use it anymore and need to let it cool off. Personally, I’d prefer the second as you don’t have to watch two different things to know how long you can use it and you can get a feeling by just looking at your peril. As for the UI, both versions could be implemented as outer layers to the existing charge meter into one UI that shows both.

Both versions would bring lots of new ways to balance the weapon and the exact numbers need testing on what is a good balance between advantage and disadvantage.

I would also recommend taking a look at it’s blessings, as for instance “Blaze Away” is bugged for a long time now and always stays on maximum stacks when only charging the staff for a short time, making it way stronger than it is supposed to be.

The mistake with the flame staff is that it was a 1 to 1 copy from Sienna’s flame staff with the difference that Sienna had way more cooldown time than Psykers have and she didn’t have a blitz ability to deal with specials, especially no auto-brainburst.

Personally I would be fine if the weapon gets nerfed into the ground but I think it’s smarter to make something good out of it that doesn’t involve spamming fire 99% of the mission long.

2

There are more options

(King of vagueposting) I’ll elaborate later

It’s really not

Sure it’s not AS OP as Inferno, but it’s still an OP weapon

I don’t dislike the idea, but I think the simplest change would be making that once an enemy is staggered by the m1 fire, that same enemy can’t be staggered again by it for 5s

This way you can’t spam it against a group of ragers/maulers, as they’ll eventually get you

I mean there we go you found the solution

The issue is spewing fire 99% of the game with no thought on how to aim it or when to fire it

Your higher peril gen idea is good but I think there’s a more elegant way to do it

Simply add a new bar that starts full and starts draining out as you use it, and to recharge it you need to not use the staff itself for a time (just like Moonbow works in Vermintide 2) and you can even introduce a blessing that makes melee kills against elite/special recover 15-20%~ or so of the bar

This way now we’re encouraging more Sienna like gameplay, where you need to mix melee and staff action

I’d just remove it from the weapon, it’s a little too silly

The issue is that quelling does not take hp away like Sienna does, there’s no downside for using it 24/7

Sienna needs to stop using it (which is why I’d say a charge bar could work for Inferno) or kill enemies in melee to win thp and then quell (which would be translated with this new blessing I suggested)

3

That’s basically what I’ve meant with a charging bar like the Covenant sword. I didn’t explain it that well this time after deleting my whole text. My problem with it would be that players would need to watch two things, their peril and the weapon charge bar. This just feels awkward to have both and you could either die from exploding from too much peril or you miss that the charge bar ran out at the wrong moment. I came up with the overheat mechanic so you only have to watch your peril, which is easier to get used to as player and is more likely to be adapted.

As for the Zealot Flamer, I don’t think at all that it is OP. Sure it has insane damage potential against tight groups of elites, but it’s extremely slow and basically useless in almost all other situations where the enemies aren’t stacked into one hallway. Unlike the Psyker, the Zealot has no talents that snowball it into killing enemies you don’t even hit. The Psyker has it’s auto-brainburst that’s constantly triggered by soulblaze (but that is worth it’s own post) and multiple talents that spread soulblaze stacks, which all together make it that insane. There is a reason you rarely see Zealots using the flamer and making it worth it but about 50% of Psykers run the Inferno staff.

4

Vror’s suggestion is excellent.

I don’t think watching two bars would be too much, personally. Only the peril bar would have a risk of hurting you. The energy bar would only be the equivalent of running out of ammo.

5

@Agayek solved this months ago, even implementing it in modded to field test it.

We’re just waiting for Fatshark to notice and implement it at this point.

6

Oh hey, they actually did a new thread just on inferno recently with more details on the issue and their solution.

7

Hey, I came up with that first!

9

Your work is phenomenal and should not be overlooked!

10

Something needs to change. As things are I just leave the lobby the instant that a flame psyker enters the lobby. Same for smite psykers, but for different reasons. Flame needs to be toned down so that it doesn’t so heavily eclipse other damage options, and Smite needs a regenerating ammunition supply like Assail so that smykers can’t be so darn annoying with how they do NOTHING but smite.

11

Man I sure hope someone at Fatshark sees all these topics about the flame staff and decides to do something about it within the next 2 years…

12

Maybe they won’t make it as strong in Darktide 3.

13

I think the problem is really 3 main things

  1. Soulblaze having 1 or more ADM against everything but a singular enemy (which only spawns like 15 times per mission now)
  2. The ability to regularly apply lethal amounts of soulblaze to the majority of elites spawned in all situations, no regard for horde density or even map geometry
  3. Perilous combustion proccing off soulblaze

The problem of massive havoc 40 elite waves consistently vanishing in blue particles only happens when all 3 of these are present, imo. If you play melee psyker with a gun, you have 1 and 3 but not 2, and you almost never get an eye rolling perilous combustion snowball that kills 90% of the elites.

If you remove inferno staff from the game any shriek build with a competent player still does these 3 things.

14

giving perilous combustion an internal cooldown would go a long way towards checking runaway chain reactions.

15

Why such an indirect approach? Why not just revert the lobotomised change they previously made that lets it proc itself?

16

PC is definitely a problem on it’s own, as is auto-brainburst and together they are just ridiculous. I’ve had a situation in No Man’s Land at the middle section med-station where I killed like 3 gunners and those two talents alone killed the entire section around the corner to the way up to the bridge because of all the elites usually gathering up there.

Imo, PC should have a short cooldown, not be able to proc from soulblaze kills and as compensation I would be fine if it applies one more stack.

Auto-brainburst is also kind of broken imo. The least they could do is that it can’t trigger from soulblaze but I would go further and only make it proc from headshots, which would make sense and less of a braindead free kill. The buff we have seen from a random 10% chance to a guaranteed kill was just ridiculous, especially considering how bad normal brainburst is without the middle keystone.

17

I was thinking about that too, but I was thinking more along the lines of tying auto-brainburst to MELEE damage. Maybe the same for emphatic evasion too. Tie that MELEE CRITS. Make people get their hands dirty if they want the strong effects to kick in.

18

Doesn’t that kind of unnecessarily punish gunkers?

19

Unironically just take half of the inferno staff’s cleave and give it to elektrokinetic staff in the form of additional arcs on crit that can also crit and arc. Boom two fer one