Hive Scum Feedback

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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After levelling to 30 and letting the honeymoon phase feelings fade a little, here are my thoughts on them for improvement in no particular order. I had lot of fun with the class, and hopefully these thoughts help improve it somehow.

  1. Synergy between nodes and weapons

Some of these nodes that you would expect to work well together, do not. For example, not having a stack of Dependancy when you put down Stim Supplies. This is outright hostile to the use of the Stimm Supply, especially since stim effects do not apply to allies if you use it before putting it down. It discourage using stimm supply or stim dependancy at the same time, as these do not synergize and is hostile to the presence of each other.

Skills that require kills to proc not counting kills made with dot damage seems like a massive oversight, as there is an entire skill line dedicated to chems, as well as ganger exclusive weapons that can deal dot.

  1. Weapon line suggestions

Weapon choices are very fun, but dual revolvers seems like a gimme and is missing as well as more dual weapons. Also a baseball bat type weapon would be nice for that gang look.

  1. Bonesaw does not feel great to use

I would have really liked to use the bonesaw more, but it has a strange delay to the attacks whenever it hits something. This noticeably slows down the actual hits, and combined with the strange attack patterns, leads to it being strangely hard to deal with hordes or anything tanky.

  1. Audio indication of cartel stim readiness.

This one is a QOL I think the ganger could benefit from. An audible cue that the stimm is ready would be great. Not a voiceline, but like a zip or a broop that tells you its ready.

  1. Odd choices of Blessings on the Needlegun

The needlegun rarely kills with its direct damage, so the choices of blessings are… weird and strange for this gun.

  1. Speed up the spin animation for the pistols

More of an aesthetic choice, because the spin doesn’t look confident. Speedy spins and variation on the spins would immensely improve the weapon’s feel.

Its ok if the window for shooting the gun decreases a little, because no one who uses the pistols and spins it is actually interested in thing like ease of use.

  1. Rockets strangeness.

For some reason if you take the extra rocket ammo node, you will never spawn with 3 rockets and only 2 if you join a game in progress.

  1. Vulture mark

For a class thats meant to be squishy in and out kinda deal, Vulture Mark keystones neither lasts long, feels consistent across a mission, or at all that strong since it kicks in late in large encounters usually. Stimm dependancy is a far superior option, as it is easier to get, longer lasting, and consistent.

Vulture Dodge and Push are good, but Patient Hunter feels like it doesn’t affect much. As the entire stack decays when duration ends, it does not feel like a very good investment in points to get Vulture Mark at all.

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It does, in fact using middle keystone is better for this ultimate ability. While other two ults can both work together with their dedicated keystone and stimm dependency.

It’s I think, to the point that there’s non zero chance, that even if dependency will work with stimm supply, the meta choice still will be middle keystone.

I really dislike dual pistols I tried several times already, it’s very bleak. They lose to uzis in almost everything.

Bone saw weird, it’s usable, but In dire need of more attack speed and cleave, getting wrath on it helps only slightly.

Agreed with all else.

I actually starting to like this class overall, it’s squishy, but it’s such adrenaline, so fast, high dps, reminds me of melee psyker, the only psyker variant I love to play, because I hate overheat.

Ultimates are fun or have not bad utility in case of stimm crate.

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I agree with your points here, especially the bonesaw one! I feel like if it got some more innate cleave and faster heavies it would feel better.

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I’d like to add one thing (with the caveat that it seems like the talent also isn’t working as it’s supposed to):

Return Battering Momentum’s effect to apply to ranged attacks as well. The original description was “Hitting 3 or more Enemies with a single attack grants +50% Cleave for your next attack.” Now it says the conditional attack and the effect with extra cleave only applies to melee attacks.

This talent provided great synergy with Desperado builds that use shotguns, and especially the double barrel shotgun. If the extra cleave modifier needs to be toned down for ranged weapons, I would accept that, but getting rid of it feels bad. You still need to expend a good amount of points outside of the “ranged damage” side of the tree to pick it up, so it felt like a fair tradeoff and made for interesting builds.

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For me, the dodging seems really off, enough so that I wonder if the talents I took to increase it…. are doing the opposite.

I play a LOT of psyker. And it seems like I can barely dodge anything as Hive Scum. I’m fighting for every single dodge because if I miss one, even if it’s just a mook, there’s a good chance I’m dead.

Something is really off.

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Added in a bit more thoughts to the post.

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Played HS for about 15+ hours now. Completed Auric Maelstrom multiple times, and am about to take them into Havoc.

Here’s some important takeaways I’ve noticed:

  1. Their weapons have very stingy cancelling frames. The needle gun, dual pistols and dual autos all require a full animation cycle before they’re cancellable, meaning that reloads are longer than several other classes not accounting for perks and abilities which expedite reload speed. It’s very common to attempt a sprint-cancel on the last frames of these weapons animation cancels only to come out of your sprint and still have to finish the final part of the reload.

While I understand that FS wants us to value the hard work they’ve put into these reload animations, it’s an annoying disparity between their class-specific weapons and generic ranged weapons. Auto guns, flamethrower, bolt pistol, boltgun, and plasma rifle all have animation cancels which, when learned, dramatically increase the rate at which a player can return to attacking enemies. This is a skill which isn’t necessary at lower difficulties, but rewards the player for more active engagement with the micro-mechanics of the game with faster recovery times.

I’d like to see the Hive Scum’s unique weapons given more generous reload-cancel frames.

  1. Bone Saw hit animations can desync, even on extremely low ping (sub 30 ms) lobbies. There are a few ways to proc this reliably, such as sliding away during the Heavy-1 “latch” animation. The desync is far more noticeable in laggy lobbies. Push-attacks seem to be desync’d, and I’ve found myself pushing enemies multiple times because of the delay between the weapon’s “push” animation and having the enemy stagger.

Please review the synchronization between the Bone Saw’s attack animations, push animations, and animations when cancelled by sliding. Something’s not quite right.

  1. Bone Saw needs to apply it’s special toxin faster. It’s a really cool idea to have the ability to apply different status effects passively with a single weapon, but on higher difficulties, mob density is so intense that it’s basically impossible to swap from one toxin to the other without getting obliterated. Blocking is disabled during the application animation, and (like with the ranged weapons) it’s almost impossible to cancel the animation early. Q-cancelling can work, but again, the frames are stingy – at most you’re cutting of a quarter of a second, and any mistakes means that your weapon isn’t applied in the desired toxin. Most of the time, people keep a single toxin on the weapon for the entire game, typically neurotoxin. I hardly ever see a person swap toxin mid-combat.

Even a 15% speed increase would be invaluable for mid-combat toxin application. Please consider speeding up the toxin application animation slightly.

  1. Shivs have a watered down version of Uncanny Strike (Uncanny Strike IV, 8% Rending, 5 Stacks as opposed to Uncanny Strike IV, 24%(!!) Rending, 5 Stacks).

I’m not sure if this is intentional – one the one hand, I get that many members of the community think Uncanny Strike is OP, and I certainly understand why they would assume this. At the same time, the Combat Blade, a generic weapon available to Hive Scum, also has access to Uncanny Strike. An un-nerf’d Uncanny Strike. This is confusing to me – first, why would the new weapon have a the same blessing with one-third of the effect of the standard blessing? Second, if the class is assumed to have sufficient rending to not need Uncanny Strike, why offer another weapon with the full-power version of the same blessing?

Please make a choice on the matter. Either give Shivs full access to Uncanny Strike, or give all weapons on the class (or classes) the “new” version of Uncanny Strike.

  1. Dual autos have an animation glitch. If the player uses the special-action “bash” and then attempts to brace the weapon, they will sometimes repeat the bashing animation. This might be mod dependent, but I don’t think it is. In any case, this obviously isn’t intended behavior.

Please review the Dual Autos special action interaction with bracing the weapon. Something seems broken.

  1. The Cartel Special stimm has different cancelling frames than generic stimms, and they’re much stingier. Considering that we’re expected to use the custom stimm whenever it’s available to us in the thick of combat, it’s really important to be able to inject that stimm FAST and get back into combat. Even with generic stimms, poorly executed or planned use of the stimm can lead to a down, but generic stimms permit sprint-cancelling about have a second faster than the Cartel Special stimm. The Cartel Special stimm also has some unusual behavior when used while sliding, but it isn’t reliable – I’ve had it break me out of a slide during use several times, often to catastrophic effect.

Please consider mapping the Cartel Special stimm’s animations to those of the generic stimm. There’s a difference between the two and it makes using the unique stimm much more cumbersome and dangerous than a normal stimm.

  1. When deploying the Stimm Supply, if the player goes down while throwing out the supply, it will sometimes cancel the deployment, expend their ability charge, and set their cooldown timer to negative numbers. Obviously this is a problem. I’ve only had this happen to me once, and a friend had it happen once as well. Hopefully players begin reporting this issue more.

**Please review the Stimm Supply deployment and try to ensure that it’s as jank-free as possible.
**
Thank you for reading my novel. The class is fun, but these things really need to be looked into.

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Hive Scum’s “Nimble” talent REDUCES dodge time

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