Talent trees are an overcomplicated mess that results in cookie cutter builds anyway. It will always happen, it’s just like convergent design.
You may as well return us to the original system without the 800 tax nodes.
Why? What would this accomplish? It would reduce the unnecessary noise when it comes to inspecting other players and rebuilding your character to compliment the team.
Imagine joining a game where the 3 other players have smite. Well if you have a build ready to swap to, you’re good. But make it easier, imagine if you simply had to choose another ability and everything was golden. That would be much quicker and easier.
It would also make the burden of inspecting other players to alter your build easier as well.
I don’t think tax nodes really accomplished anything. What changed the game were the new defining abilities, like krak, smoke and shredder grenades. Smite, brain burst or assail. Those changed how you played. The rest is just unnecessary noise, with noob trap tax nodes.
I like the talent trees tbh. I think you lose something if you simplify the build system too much, like if it was just select a grenade, select an ult, select a keystone.
Talent trees are good and I highly enjoyed the update, but I sort of don’t accept them as a substitute for careers. Careers are more unique and add more to gameplay still. Unfortunately they definitely designed them as a substitute for careers, so we’ll never get e.g. a whole Gunlugger class that has all gunlugger talents and 3 gunlugger keystones etc. Or the same for an assassin zealot, or the same for a commissar style vet.
Instead we just got all those archetypes crammed into the base class. I don’t hate it, but I think they kneecapped the class archetypes/careers potential by doing that.
They also take away a bit from interesting balance. In VT2, you could give a career very unique, impactful passives, that come at the downside of not having the passives another class has. For example, WHC gets headshot crit kills, but doesn’t get to use blessed bullet. Slayer gets leap, but doesn’t get to have gromril armor. In Darktide you can just pick freely and take the best stuff you want. I think it constrains balance, because now you can’t give the right zealot tree something very powerful that would counteract how limited stealth is, because zealots with charge are gonna pick it. This part is kind of what causes what we’re seeing in Havoc. Everyone just swaps over to the meta picks and it doesn’t actually have any additional depth in building talent trees. If you had to pick between VoC and survivalist, or crit CDR and chorus, Havoc choices would be far less cookie cutter.
If we’re to assume they want to put in that much effort for more classes/careers in the future, they could still take gunlugger out of the Ogryn tree and give him a third, fully original melee focused tree instead, followed by making Gunlugger its own class. Just an example again, do the same for a crusader zealot, or a commissar veteran, or what have you. Alternatively, they could take each ult/keystone and build a full tree out of it. Both of these approaches would be very high effort, so unfortunately I think they’ll add a new class with 3 keystones and 3 ults, if they ever do it. Which will be beholden to the same issues of cookiecutter specs.
For what it’s worth I agree that they’re needlessly complicated too. You could take probably 70% of nodes out of each tree and just make certain things baseline and you’d be effectively making the same choices. I just think the flaws are more fundamental than that
talent tree is without doubt far from perfect but i’d refuse going back to the old days.
as simple as ogryn tree might be, i carved out a spec that caters 100% to my playstyle and makes my impact in and experience with the game so much more engaging.
the problem lies with havoc having such out of proportion/counterplay damage sources that only a handful of talents negate them efficiently.
its up to fatshark, after giving these options, making them equally suitable for havoc 40
The trees give an of illusion of choice, but I suspect ultimately (pun intended) they boil down to the key “big nodes” you choose.
Hitting a pug mission, and with only 5 non-mod builds available, you can’t swap your builds out easily. If you look back at the old system, flipping out (eg) zealot chant for zealot charge would be seconds work. You can technically do that now, but not with weapons etc moving over.
I guess some of this is DT self imposed 60 seconds impatience. VT2 meant a few minutes in the keep balancing builds etc
Exactly my point. In the most people are running cookie cutter builds and the fluff/tax nodes don’t matter.
The old system was for all intents and purposes better. We just associate the talents with a point in time where the gameplay greatly improved with the tree being good. If you took the keystones and boiled them down to their basic 3 choices flavor you’d end up with what we started with, but it would be simpler to reconfigure on the fly.
The Class Overhaul led to MANY of the egregious enemy/player and weapon balancing problems that we face today. I do find myself in agreement that it hasn’t exactly been a net positive.
Havoc definitely exposed some major problems with this game that were present since the talent tree update. Instead of fixing the issue of each class pretty much having 1-2 builds that were the best, they doubled down on it, and tried their best to make sure you would not be able to beat havoc without relying on skills like Chorus, Shout, or Psyker bubble, and meta weapons like dueling sword and plasma gun.
Emperor bless you if you’re playing Veteran in high Havoc levels without the plasma gun, a million carapace armored enemies are thrown at you along with a billion gunners that are pus hardened, so they take like half a magazine to kill unless you shoot them with a plasma gun.
All of these builds are insanely overpowered for even auric maelstrom if your team is competent, but it’s necessary for havoc unless you want to waste time losing a bunch of games
This is another one of those things that the trees have the issue with, where they dug themselves a hole with initially saying they’d consistently release classes/archetypes, didn’t do so, then tried to toe the line and please both the people wanting new archetypes and new builds and we ended up with the talent tree… which then limits the initial archetype, unless they make the talent tree an abomination of a chart when adding 4+ ‘types’ of builds within it.
Or it just gets weird when you have Ogryn A and Ogryn B and they’re different for reasons because both Ogryn A and Ogryn B can be melee or ranged. (Or whatever)
It’s just a really weird precedent they’ve set themselves up for.
you’re forced into plasma gun for a myriad of reasons.
#1 elimination of ranged through cover #2 ammo economy #3 carapace damage #4 multiple enemy penetration #5 enemy knockdown #6 enemy suppression
the biggest reason to run plasma I found to be was #1, other guns need to be brought up to its level. I’m an absolute surgeon with the agripinaa combat shotgun, but I think it was at havoc 33 that I just came to the same inevitable conclusion that every veteran did - if you want to progress, for the good of the team, you need to run plasma.
I refused to run dueling sword, i made 40 with chainsword and it didn’t feel too bad, other than when cleave just fell off the map due to the pus hardened skin modifier.
PG does terribly on hardened elites. You need four shots to kill a hardened gunner. Two for a hardened sniper. Missing one blast, which happens since they tend to topple when hit in the head, means one extra shot. You gain nine energy, three blasts, on one small ammo pickup.
Any Laz gun with Infernus does a way better job at killing hardened elites and specials, since DoT effect ignore the extra DR.
Even the Boltpistol with Puncture does a better job than the PG in those cases.
PG does great when there is no hardened modifier, but there are still plenty of reasons to run other guns on havoc and in general.
Some Laz Pistol MkX scoreboards. All Havoc. All high 30s.
I thought on it more, the fact you only use hipfire with plasma gun means that you’re essentially immune to suppression. I’ll give some las guns a try and see how i feel. The fact you can get shock trooper, then combine that with surgical blessing to have infinite ammo on helbore is pretty amazing as well.
This is a bad thought regarding any balancing based on havoc.
Havoc is not comparable to the rest of the game.
Any weapon that effectively deals aoe damage and somehow scales in effect with the number of enemies present, will gain value in havoc.
Any ability that staggers enemies and provides toughness, will gain value in havoc.
It is very obvious that this is how those things work.
Meanwhile, on auric difficulty, the plasma gun is outperformed by many other guns, because it can never actually make proper use of the cleave potential. Other guns simply kill more things there.
Zealot books are not worth all that much in auric, because there is no need for that amount of control and defense. They become insane in havoc, because that mode provides the situations where it shines. When you can not just quickly kill all enemies, and you actually get overwhelmed, the book provides great value.
Just like the flamer staff is great in havoc, whereas it can quite easily be outdamaged in the auric playlist, because strong players can kill most enemies there, before you get a chance to burn them properly.
“Bring other things up to that level” is a suggestion that shows a lack of thought in that regard, because those “weaker” things simply work differently and they are in fact superior options in other situations.