I don’t really care to weigh in on the argument above for the most part, but to claim Havoc isn’t harder is wild. It may be an artificial difficulty, but it is still harder.
If I can stand still and get hit by a normal shooter and die in less than 2 seconds in Havoc, but still stay standing in Auric, that is by definition, more difficult.
Artificially sure, not at all what I want in a harder mode, but let’s call a spade a spade.
edit - at most we could call the spade an entrenching tool instead
You have to keep in mind that the original discussion was exactly about the aritificial difficulty and the main point was that you had to counter it with the meta builds. Everything else is not relevant. Higher enemy density = more conditional buffs and cooldown reductions. Hence why it’s infinite shout\bubble\relic\charge\shredder spam whenever you play a high level Havoc.
Yes, you would have if you had done it before the rework.
I haven’t played the new version of Havoc yet, so I can’t comment to how it is currently.
Nothing was keeping you from cruising to Havoc 40 with Dome, VoC, Plasma, and DS before the patch, as so many others did.
I’m no amazing player, but I got to Rank 40 and True Survivor early on with a build on my Zealot alt character (Wahid - Tallarn Veteran is my main) consisting of Relic Blade, Chorus, Purity aura, and a Zarona revolver. Aside from Chorus and the aura, I wouldn’t exsctly call that loadout meta.
Obviously, I didn’t do it alone; I was in strike team first and then a pub group.
It wasn’t particularly difficult, just a matter of countering modifiers, retreating when needed and staying together.
If you went in with a group of meta loadouts, you could just have a Psyker with Dome + Purgatus (Immo) and three Zealots all rotating Chorus and never die.
PS: An Ogryn was in my rank 40 pub group on my first attempt (which went super smooth and we won), and he did great with Kickback, Shield, and Taunt.
Yeah that’s fine, but I was referring to this exchange specifically.
No matter what build you pick, you still have less toughness, ammo, etc.
This still makes it inherently harder than Auric T5.
Tbh if I had my way; wounds, enemy health, enemy damage, etc. would all be normalized between every difficulty. Would make it easier to balance weapons for starters.
And yet somehow, trying to do mid-range Havocs with groups using meta builds was still harder than the A5s and AMs I’m used to. Gee, I wonder why? Could it be in part because of the many many modifiers that affect numerical values in the game, kinda like the numerical changes that make Damnation harder than Heresy and Heresy harder than Malice?
Semantically this is correct, practically it barely has any impact once you’ve countered the modifiers. Less ammo and toughness doesn’t mean anything when you have constant golden toughness and use melee/staves/plasma 90% of time.
I don’t find using cookie cutter builds an adequate solution to beating the “hardest” game mode. This might have made sense if DT was a MMORPG with a clearly defined character and gear progression, but here we must have everything apparently equal, so enjoy knives and rapiers being better than Thunder Hammers and Chain Axes against armour and other dumb crap.
Absolutely, this is the reason why HD2 gameplay is so good, despite still being a mess. But this would never happen because FS needed players to grind for the retention numbers.
What it does (what it did; I’m not sure how it works now) is push you into specific loadouts where you essentially turtle around Dome, Purity and gold toughness.
Obviously, you didn’t have to do that and you could absolutely walk in there without those tools, but most people didn’t because the people that I interacted with or talked to on Discord with didn’t go through rank 40 and True Survivor for the sake of having fun.
Obviously, I didn’t talk to every player in the game, just a small sample, but there were none that I met at least who truly enjoyed playing Havoc, and they weren’t bad players either.
They just wanted to complete all of the penances so that they would never have to play and/or interact with the game mode ever again.
Sums up Havoc perfectly. /thread
The argument you’re making doesn’t take personal skill into account at all. And personal skill lies on a very wide spectrum.
I would argue ammo is still a practical concern not a semantic one, but other than that I would say we and @Jado agree that if it requires a meta simply because the meta ignores the artificial difficulty, it ain’t fun.
Sadly even if they went the HD2 route I am not 100% confident in how it would turn out. Diff 10 missions can vary wildly between a fun challenge and an agonizing slog depending on the front you are fighting on certain patches.
And I’ll admit it: I’m a lousy player, but I did it!
Again, I was in a team with other players, but I performed well and held my own/was valuable on my Zealot.
I’m not even in the top 100 players, but I gained rank 40 and True Survivor with a self-made build ik the first week, so was Havoc genuinely difficult, or was it just a matter of countering modifiers and you win?
Anyway, Havoc was a waste of development time, and Mortis Trials, with minor changes and difficulty increases, is a billion times better than the slog that Havoc was.
True, especially considering how bad an average Darktide player is, but still, Havoc has much stricter builds checks rather personal skills checks. The power gaps between meta and off-meta builds on Havoc are so large, the requierments for personal skill grow unproportionally the more you stray from the meta.
@Murderer made a great graph showcasing effort/gear requierments for Havoc, I’d ask him to share it here too.
I would say while it is always good to err on the side of humility, I think this is more of an example of you being on the opposite side of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Through your time invested and knowledge of the game you presume yourself to be lousy, but you are probably above average at the game and are underestimating your own ability. Most experts or people with more than a passing knowledge on a subject do this.
You know, “The only thing I know is that I know nothing.”
Some players are genuinely really really bad. Which is fine, but they will not make it through Havoc unless 3 giga sweats drag them to the finish line.
There are people who will never get the True Survivor penance because no amount of babysitting will protect them from going down at least 1 time during the level.
That is extremely nice of you to say, but I am actually quite bad.
I understand the fundamentals, but I usually play very lackluster builds because I’m more of a roleplayer than a giga-sweat.
I also lack some fine mechanical skill, which I blame on my age (just an excuse), but I got through 40 and True Survivor without being carried, but the difficulty in that mode (as we all know) used to come mainly from [Blight] and especially [Emperor’s Fading Light] + [Pus-Hardened].
Havoc wasn’t actually difficult in my opinion.
It wasn’t about twitch reactions or mechanical or skill or strategy, but rather, Havoc became a boring crawl where you turtled around the Psyker Dome and Chorus/VoC’d when the shield was down so you wouldn’t get insta-deleted by Gunners.
That’s why Auric Maelstrom was/is more fun; people go in with whatever they want and either your team wipes in the first engagment or you are a full team with giga sweats where noone ever loses a wound.
Other random players will always be the most fun modifier to me, and I love Mortis Trials’ first draft and am confident it will be a success with tweaks.
To be fair we definitely needed some difficulty increase given fatsharks reluctance to balance. They obviously chose the ‘only buffs in a pve game, we don’t want get bullied like arrowhead’ route and interpreted in the worst way possible.
A lot of dev time could have been saved if the stubborn s.o.b. that is the lead designer simply gave us the option to pick map, modifiers and AI director rules in custom games.
Would have required minimal UI effort, slight tweaking to the backend and boom done.
That time could have been spent on weapons, maps and other actual content.
But alas here we are with a party finder that is terrible to use, a mode that only achieves difficulty through massive density at the cost of visual clarity and a strike system that is actively encouraging people not to play and be as toxic as possible when pubbing/picking team mates.
Bravo mr. Lead Designer. Bravo.
I think any player capable of self reflection or analyzing why a strategy does or doesn’t work is above the average.
Even the knife zealots that run ahead, die, and leave might not be lousy, just embarrassed they messed up. It’s the ones that start b*tching and moaning about how it’s their teams fault they died that are lousy. Those people will never make True Survivor.
Just beat havoc 40 with the new update and I 100% agree that havoc is wasted. New changes solidified the meta of using voc, chorus and bubble spam. You are literally reducing your odds of winning from like 60% to 1% if you deviate from the meta. Sure given time some true solo guy will just stealth speedrun a map but lets be honest, no one thinks that having 2 captains, 1 beast of nurgle and 1 impending deamonhost is fun to beat without using the meta.
Auric has never been actually hard though, not since patch 13 overscaled player power or the removal of timed hordes.
IIRC Auric came out in September and the overscaled class overhaul in October. So there was a time it was difficult.
Auric Damnation Hi- STG was definitely hard, and do you guys remember the horror of the Scab Stalkers prior to their nerf and when Fatshark finally caved to our pleas and changed EXEC Stance to light them up?
This was before Dome shielding, VoC, Chorus, numerous toughness regen nodes, Sonic the Hedgehog mobility speed, and Crusher clown cars were introduced.
