More random ramblings from yours truly. This time I figured I’d create a topic discussing Golden Toughness, as it seems to be a contentious topic, and I felt ‘detailing it out’ was worth doing (with my token bullet point ‘solution’ at the end). Can probably skip to that if you understand how golden toughness works, but I recently realized truly how the systems of the game interact within my head more recently, so I figured, ehh, I’ll just put it all here and people can read it if they want to.
But, basically, Golden Toughness functions exactly like it says on the tin. It’s ‘over toughness’, or toughness that is placed on top of your current health bar. One can consider it like an overshield (a mechanic that’s one of my favorite in video games, can’t describe why but ever since halo I’ve always loved any game that gives me ‘more than my maximum health’ in some way), but with one key difference.
See, in darktide, while you are at 100% toughness, all damage is mitigated. Both range and melee damage is entirely mitigated, with only melee bleeding through once your toughness drops below 100%, based on the percentage of toughness still remaining. One can look up examples if they want, but the main point is how Golden toughness interacts with this system.
For it does not simply ‘increase your max toughness’, it gives you MORE than 100% toughness. For an easy example, if you have 100 toughness, and a veteran shouts at you, your now 150 toughness is not 100%. It is 150%. Why does this matter? Well, it means now, as per the system above, you can not take any HP damage until you hit 100 toughness again. Because the golden toughness always considers you ‘at/above 100% toughness’, no hit is able to bleed through, thusly making the one heavily punishing system in this game (getting hit with multiple melee attacks in rapid succession) a complete moot point, as you can now live above your maximum toughness value, and mitigate all damage that you would ever receive.
The main kicker to implementing Golden Toughness like this, is the fact that you are allowed to ALSO regen it. This makes a character practically impervious to damage while golden toughness is on them, as it also acts like an added layer on top of your toughness when interacting with ‘non-standard’ attacks like pox burster explosions. This means the attack first nukes your golden toughness, then does it’s damage to your main toughness, instead of nuking your toughness and doing that damage to health. This increases your survivability by a drastic margin, as even if it is nuked off of you, through working through all of one’s classes ability to get toughness back, they can get back ‘over that threshhold’, and become unkillable monsters once again.
This is what makes Golden Toughness so contentious, as it effectively functions right now as a ‘low skill enabler’, while breaking the high skill bracket wide open. If you know what you are doing, you are immortal with golden toughness, if you don’t? it still lets you function alright with the big boys, as all our mistakes are made up for and then some. It’s what has resulted in the current balance patches as of recent, making gunners so heavy of a threat in normal game and havoc alike as to shred that golden HP off you more often, and the general Havoc difficulty modifiers nuking the players stats to require 100% golden HP up time to feel playable. It’s trying to fix the problem without nerfing the problem, and to that end resulting in the problem becoming a required staple, or requiring a lot of player investment to thusly mitigate (my 1 gunner resist had to become 2 to play malestrom at the same level on all my none Golden Toughness having builds, for instance).
I feel this is the wrong way to go about doing it, but ‘fixing’ Golden Toughness isn’t so clear cut either. Many have expressed their pain in it’s uptime, calling for nerfs in player CDR nodes or outright removal of them to compensate for it’s constant in game abuse. Some have asked for the outright removal of it all together. Others ask for the values of it to be brought down to barely noticable values. And I’m sure other solutions have been proposed as well (including the one that I will focus on below all this), that can echo their sentiments in the possible conversation to come.
One thought that came to my head (that might have also been said before) is the idea of making golden toughness truly toughness. Adding it to the max of your toughness instead of adding it on top, thusly the 150 toughness from the example way above is now your 100% for the duration of the effect. I feel this is a possible solution, but I don’t like it personally as it doesn’t feel ‘overshield’ like. It makes golden toughness into effectively super toughness nodes, removing the point of it in my eyes as you’ll still want 100% of your toughness at all times to keep from taking incidental damage, having more of it is nice and makes that a bit easier, but not nearly as much as having toughness over your max does.
But, I do think that it’s uptime is the main issue. And to that end, I think this solution would be ‘the best’, and would allow for the devs to not have to make shooters so punishing, while still allowing Golden Toughness to feel ‘strong’, but not oppressive:
- Make it so Golden Toughness can not be regenerated.
That’s my main point, with some added bit of ‘fluff’. Make it so When a Veteran shouts, you get the buff you do now. A character can regenerate up into that golden toughness buff, but as soon as that golden toughness gets knocked off of them (via gunman or melee or what have you), the buff falls off immediately. This effect mainly in the game as to allow those that shout outside of their max toughness range to still get the +50 bump and be able to get the buff, but those that are maxed out just get the golden toughness that will then fall off if hit. Chorus is allowed to regenerate golden toughness the way it does now, but it’s the ONLY effect that does so, and has the same effect where in once the golden toughness gets knocked off of you, that part of the buff fades, leaving only the optional buffs of damage or DR.
Every other Toughness regen effect in the game caps at 100% toughness, and is unable to regenerate toughness beyond that 100% threshold. This allows golden toughness to keep it’s main strength (mitigating damage, and allowing a Iron Will Vet to be a bit more reckless), but not allowing one to be strictly immortal for it’s duration. If you get hit a bunch, you will still lose it, and you will still go down. But it gives you breathing room, as it is meant to.
Further nerfs can come is a well, possible value nerfs (like hitting Shout to like 30-40 and hitting Chorus to 60-80 or something), but I feel this change will create a noticeable effect to golden toughness. And if more needs to be done, it can be, but I think this is a good start. Lets it stay strong, but keeps it from being truly broken, and opens the way for the other two none golden toughness having classes to possibly gain small ways for them to have it as well (25 golden toughness on shield cast perhaps, Taunt gaining Golden toughness as it’s asking everything in range to hit the ogryn, so mitigating damage would be of great help). But that’s a topic for if this actually does get done/feels not op still.
But yeah, thank you for reading my Tedtalk, I hope it was informative and if nothing else, the idea’s within brought clarity to one’s own thoughts and idea about it! Cause I do adore this mechanic a lot, but there’s a reason most if not all other implementation of Overshields in games don’t allow you to regenerate them like a normal shield. It gets, rather busted pretty much immediately. As now it’s not Overshields, it’s just more better shields.