Idle musing on this while my short attention span browses through long posts on this forum. About 10% of comments I see are talking about how “this isn’t going to affect havoc at all” or “havoc 40 players continue to dominate with the same strategy”.
Isn’t the point of Havoc to be separate from the base game? A difficulty not to be balanced around? So ridiculously hard only a fraction of the playerbase is going to enjoy it?
I’m getting really sick of seeing Havoc mentioned in every balance post like it’s a silver bullet on how everything must work. It’s not and I refuse to see it as fun. Overall, I see the inclusion of the game mode as a mistake.
The game isnt balanced around havoc, havoc is balanced around itself.
The most havoc does for game balance is show everyone just how much of an outlier things are across the entire game and that they may need to be reigned in. But the actual balance itself for these things and others still is done on the damnation level.
If people are talking about the fact that xyz should be buffed becaus it cant do abc in havoc, they can talk into a void
To be completely honest, and this is not meant as a jab at Fatshark, but I don’t believe Fatshark knows what the game is balanced around because I have seen no evidence of any Fatshark staff playing at a difficulty level high enough to indicate that they are 1. above average skill level and 2. understand their game and thus can adjust it accordingly.
I’d love to be wrong and have someone shut me down, and I’ve talked about previously Asian game developers like Yoshi-P and how they work differently than Western developers, but it seems that all of the feedback and changes are happening because playtesters are pestering Fatshark about stuff that doesn’t work properly, and not because the staff themselves play the game and tweak when things don’t feel right.
Spreadsheet balancing is a sin, a-ye, and I don’t follow FS streams, but I do recall that @Exanimia played on-stream on Damnation difficulty, and did well at it. She also played with the Spidey Sense mod (accessibility reasons; she’s deaf), though whether this means Fatshark takes mods into consideration when balancing or developing the game, I’m not sure.
havoc is just reinforcing the meta.
doesn’t mean one can’t try anything else in havoc, but that’s something one can do with friends, and not with the assumptions many people in that party finder have, and you can’t even start a game without them.
Calling Havoc is a endgame is the stupidiest thing I have ever read. Its barely alive right now lmao.
Havoc is artificial difficulty, slide simulator in ammo scarcity and someones calling it as the core of the balance and like “doesnt change the state of Ogryns in Havoc”, bro, even veteran whos pointed to shoot cant shoot in havoc. Nearly all modifiers are just lame. Same ol’ only melee malestorm can offer more in terms of interest and challenge. 99% weapons, skills, builds are straight dead in havoc above lvl27. Its weaves 2.0 in slightly better cover but it will never be the core of the balance, you see the talkin about havoc so often just because nearly all youtube content full of havoc because there is simply nothing to show new and people getting strong desillusion like havoc is something fun (it is for someone who dont mind playing 1 weapon 1 build over and over again)
After managing to sift through the word salad (paragraphs, people, paragraphs) I agree with you. I would also like to add that Havoc is a damn slog. Takes like an hour to beat a mission on Havoc compared to the 30 minutes on Auric Damns. You’re not having any fun for that hour.
Its a shooter game, with me melee as options. Fact that mostly people bad at shooting doesnt wrap the thing. Main threat - ranged mobs, half of the treee in every class about ranged weapons and cherry on the top - even Fatsharks call it as a looter-shooter. So all that “havoc idea” is primarly made for min-max nerds still living in VT2
The reason why the game is not and should not be balanced around Havoc is unnecessary artificial difficulty modifiers that don’t exist outside of this game mode. The prime example is reduced ammo gain from most sources. What is the point of this? I will just get around it by stopping using most of my builds and play as melee Zealot/Staff Psyker/Plasma Vet/Shield Ogryn, etc. Congrats, I have beaten the “hardest” content in the game by using a min-maxed cookie cutter build that ignores 90% of the available gear in the game.
without that “option” every trigger happy vet would waste a teams worth of ammo into every little horde thinking “boy am i a god of headshots”
no, darktide’s meat thats thrown at you is 70+% melee as the cleaner/sweeper option and the rest ranged for softening them before getting to the grinder range or taking care of snipers/tappers etc before the get a mate.
if i was to play mainly ranged i’d be out of ammo at 20% of the map IF we got that far on the process getting swarmed at elbows length.
and enemies having ranged capacity isnt saying you play civil war stalemate shootouts. you slide like a worm infected dog on crack and close the gap >3 seconds without getting hit
When we have havoc absence week (in late december if im correct) i play auric damnation with another havoc players. We just roll through level like it was malice.
So i can tell u that havoc (35+) is more difficult then auric damnation.
Yes havoc is more meta depending, but we always have meta builds in games.
It is a part of the balance consideration, but definitely not the “silver bullet” for it, as you so eloquently put. But you tend to see the same issue in every game, like say MMO endgame raid & PvP balance talks and how people obviously favor those endgame activities over everything else. But we needn’t even go that far.
Most of us in DT - myself included - often argue for balance issues purely from T5+ perspective. That all weapons, talents, blessings etc. should be relevant there. Even tho levels 1-30, Malice & below difficulties do matter too. Quite a few of the blessings, talents and weapons are obviously designed for casual play & ease-of-use, not just us experts and tryhards.
Personally I don’t care at all about Havoc, not the way it works now. And I definitely agree that it shouldn’t be any kind of a benchmark for overall balance. But Havoc definitely exposed the meta for what it is, what with the Duelling Swords, plasma etc everywhere bc with that much performance pressure those options that used to be “good enough” just aren’t. At least including Havoc in the balance discussions does have meaning and value for the game as a whole.
