the more you miss you mean? Yes, absolytley.
i see another hypothesis here, based on keystone description and the most primitive and simple logic that doesn’t reflect what is actualy happens in the game.
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When a Focused Target dies, stack timers being replenished from “Redirect Fire!” do not seem to reset the stack size, regardless of what the current stack of the marked target is.
That’s a functionally permanent +12% Damage (+17% with the aura) buff to yourself and all teammates as you constantly mark targets, even if you’re marking targets with 1 Focus Target stack.
That’s a really good incentive to continue marking, even if you do not necessarily reach max stacks all the time. I have no idea if it’s a bug, but it’s worth noting. You do not need to wait for 8 stacks to get efficient use from it.
It’s also worth noting that you do not need 100% uptime* on every single passive, modifier, or ability in this game to beat it, even in HIST or Maelstrom.
*I think maximal uptime on these things is less important than how fun they are.
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Have you TRIED the thing? Stacks don’t disappear immediately, they fall off gradually, with a 3s grace period. It’s easy to stack them back up if you’re decent at headshots. The ‘OMG YOU MUST STAY STILL OR CRABWALK’ is a red herring.
No, genuinely … no. I’ve tried all three keystones with their playstyles. The only one I think needs design review is the left one because it only caters to a portion of the vets arsenal and is the ranged dps keystone, so should have more options. That said, it certainly doesn’t suck, it’s not hard to use, and maintaining stacks over the course of regular play isn’t bad at all (with a subset of vet weapons). I genuinely don’t get it. I also think the vet tree is overly restrictive and requires 4-5 more points to fill out abilities and keystones than other classes which really hurts build flexibility, and that’s not great.
Not even going to address ‘tagging is hard’. The middle keystone is by far the best one in my eyes.
Honestly, that should be a viable option, no? I think the Vet tree is too restrictive as is, to be clear. Now, if you suck at headshots, suck at tagging, or suck at juggling melee/ranged, the keystones may not be for you. If you can perform better without them (well, without the middle one - it’s a team boost and a big one) and ARE good at headshots or juggling range/melee, maybe they need a revision. But that’s not the arguments I keep seeing. I keep seeing red herrings like “YOU CAN’T MOVE WITH THE KEYSTONE” which are just objectively, inherently, demonstrably, flat out wrong.
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I think ranged vet is seriously kneecapped by Exhilarating Takedown still being bugged, as it synergizes amazingly with the new keystone.
I think there is validity in complaining about the amount of upkeep that Vets have to do with their Keystones, but I think I like that Keystones are a lot more involved in altering your playstyle than just making existing ones stronger (or just being a glorified passive).
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I don’t even play with any keystones, I’m using longshot the crit chance/ melee dmg nodes and for the emperor and close quarters kill zone with a very good plasma gun or revolver + power sword and I don’t understand the doom and gloom that vet is suddenly “bad” since the skill tree got reworked. I can 1shot mutants with melee and I can 1shot anything depending on plasma charge or 2 shot crushers iin the head with the revolver. I don’t know if focus target applies for everyone but my guess is , that it does so that’s a pretty good keystone right there. Marksman focus seems to pretty strong on weapons like the revolver aswell. I tried weapons specialist out but didn’t like it.
I’d like to see you placing those headshots on the move because i sure as hell can’t do that. And all vets i see stop in place before taking the shots only moving when they are in danger of taking damage/being disabled. So, if everyone i know and see stops to shoot what is the actual problem?
Besides thinking that they might need a slight tune in spots I don’t have any major qualms with the keystones themselves. If the point economy problem is addressed I feel like vet would be dangerously close to being perfectly balanced if Psyker’s skill floor was brought up to veteran’s or viceversa, or better yet equalized at somewhere in-between.
Let’s be fair here though, yes it’s necessary to set a skill floor in order to avoid trivializing the game’s difficulty. But unless you’re trying to troll people here, you need to actually engage with the elements in question here if you actually want to have a conversation. While I’m inclined to agree that alot of the complaints are likely overblown/hyperbolic, this doesn’t mean the concerns are empty.
There’s more to the skill floor issue than just weakspots, but this post is already going to be waay too long. So to start us off let’s look at hitting weakspots in melee v. ranged with something like Brutal Momentum v. Deadly Accurate. When you actually look at how stuff is functionally working ingame during a run it becomes pretty obvious that getting BM to Proc is incredibly easy vs something like Deadly Accurate. Both have the same proc condition (weakspot hit), and a their effects are immediate, but because of the fact that one is melee based while the other is ranged they have disproportionate skill floors tied to them. Here BM is favored, and therefore has a lower base skill requirement, because the game makes smacking heads easier than shooting them.
If you don’t understand the dymanics of shooting (both IRL, and in vidya games) you could be forgiven if you assume that headshots are easy to achieve, it’s why groan inducing conversations about “shooting to disable” happen irl with laymen. This is not the case, irl or in games. Ingame, consider that hitboxes and melee animation patterns seem to be designed to make them easier to achieve here. This is fine, head strikes can be nearly as hard as shooting in non-grappling hand-to-hand combat. Meanwhile, ranged weapons seem to have the inverse relationship. Especially when you take into account enemy stagger animations, and that headshots, especially from low power weapons, can still induce erratic flinches even though they often don’t actually stop or slow the advance of melee threats making follow ups harder. Therefore stuff that requires multiple weakspot hits for optimal results like Marksman’s Focus can feel exponentially harder to use relative to stuff with more immediate effects even when only comparing ranged stuff.
IRL, there’s a reason why even operators, snipers, competitive shooters, and other such cool gun-totting high speed types train to hit center of mass. Even in a world where body armor is becoming increasingly common. Professional marksmanship can be just as hard to train as most martial arts and sports (though the basics can be learned faster). It is also just as perishable a skill that requires constant training just to maintain even basic proficiencies. Hitting far off things, even within the 8-30m engagement range paradigm that is common here is HARD. YES, even in videogames. In range conditions too for that matter (like the meatgrinder), never mind in actual combat (especially considering we have to worry about noreg too). More so considering that the devs seem to feel like they need to make landing headshots for ranged weapons even harder than doing so in melee. Without commensurate pay off too might I add. This is why in other games where they make it this hard you can usually 1 tap most things or have other measures to make up for it. Meanwhile easier games simply give generous recoil patterns and larger hitboxes, or make it so throat and upper chest hits count as headshots in DMG calculations. I’m not necessarily suggesting changes like these need to be implemented, but if you want to be charitable you gotta consider them. If you run the scoreboard mod, open the log and check out the weakspot hit rate breakdown for both yourself and teammates, and you will notice the disparity.
I feel this is where people are coming from when they complain about being forced into “unnatural play” or that vet the “feels bad”. This is what I keep harping about in these discussions about the vet changes. The skill floor on the class was upped without necessarily providing people with the payoff that usually should come with something being made harder to use. Just because the skill ceiling is in an ok place, doesn’t mean the floor is. Ranged combat is indeed more powerful relative to melee combat, for obvious reasons. Look at how psyker performs without a lot of the factors that seem to up the skill floor for play with the veteran. IMO, the current skillfloor for vet is unreasonable, what makes the situation even funnier is that the devs clearly aren’t afraid of having disproportionately powerful ranged play given where Psyker’s damage potential is at currently. Theoretically both Psyker, and vet’s DMG potential is close to equal too, especially with the new keystones. The problem is that it’s way harder for people playing vet to realize the potential versus someone of the same skill level playing psyker. But it’s just “clicking on heads”, so people, probably even the devs themselves from the feel of things, disregard the issue and just assume that vet players are just doing the usual bitching that comes from the affected people whenever something is changed. Do note this is also true to an extent, but this doesn’t mean that this and the issue I highlighted are mutually exclusive.
TL/DR Some people hate how vet plays now because, along with his tree being inflexible, is also harder to perform well with. Especially when stacked up against other classes. So it makes the class feel like it got kneecapped if you don’t get sweaty playing it.
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I feel like you took my comment a bit out of context since I was talking specifically about just the Weapon Specialist keystone which essentially charges a DPS burst for your other weapon while youre using the one the situation calls for. You mainly focused on headshots which is very much a marksman focus specific thing.
The ‘forced action’ people complain about with WS is needing to be constantly swapping weapons and maxing out stacks for 100% uptime and effectiveness which is an entirely self imposed ‘skill ceiling’ that misses the point of the skill entirely.
When you swap you weapons naturally its usually when a new threat emerges that forces your hand, WS is a keystone that gives you a sizable DPS spike in that moment and the next 5-10 seconds to, if not clear the threat entirely, then at least blunt it enough to now be manageable with your regular DPS.
Its not the kind of ability you need to think about because it kicks in automatically and is so easy to prime you really shouldnt be worrying about ‘wasting it’, yet people trip themselves up trying to min-max it and then blame the keystone.
This is the real issue with the keystones imo, the abilities themselves aren’t bad but the tree is so bloated and hard to get around that going for one leaves you precious few points to play with, and then it demands more points to try any modifiers for them. I really cant blame people for demanding so much of them when you have so little to spend and they cost so much, but at least in Weapon Specialists case I really do think this overthinking actively hurts peoples experience with it for diminishing returns.
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I used headshots as an example of how some of the issues I wanted to highlight manifest, post would’ve been 3 times longer if I went into the other two keystones. I simply meant to address this to folks that seemed to be dismissive of people taking issue with vet’s changes, which is the sense I got from your posts. Although I didn’t intend the post as an attack as I’m in agreement when it comes to evaluating the keystones in a vacuum, they indeed are mostly fine IMO, and I do apologize if I misunderstood your posts.
While I agree that there’s nothing inherently wrong with the keystone, the issue I see with it is that the way it’s set up (it revolving around stacks and seemingly complex proc conditioning) basically invite and incentivize people to play the minmax minigame with it, which then results in what you describe.
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I mean I probably do sound somewhat dismissive because I do think the the whole dialogue about forced actions is self imposed and misdirects frustrations with the bad state of the tree itself into demands for super simple and strong keystones to compensate, which imo would just make for poor internal class balance in the long run.
That said, I only really mean to speak about Weapon Specialist since I don’t have enough experience with the other two keystones to comment on them, so if I sounded dismissive about keystone criticisms in general then I apologise.
And yes WS is worded horribly (on par with MMO skill descriptions) but at its core its just:
- Getting a ranged kill primes a 10s DPS boost for your melee
- Getting melee kills charges a 5s DPS boost for your ranged
Its essentially just a more highly tuned ‘Agile Engagement’ passive skill which actually waits to apply its buff when you actually need it and when you actually have the weapon that can use it, so unlike AE its actually useful and really shouldnt be hard to take advantage of without trying to force things imo.
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That’s exactly what I meant when I said it’s niche. It’s the quick swap build.
Do you want to run through the levels and quick swap every 5 seconds? I know I don’t.
Weapon Specialist also happens to be the most effective of the three, but again. It’s niche.
What I mean is this: Compare the three Veteran keystones to those of the Zealot. Momentum for instance is infinitely better. Just with normal play you usually get all your 20 stacks until the next refresh. And that’s a lot of added damage and attack speed.
There is only one keystone I currently find to be more tedious than the Veteran keystones. And that is Disrupt Destiny. The most counter-intuitive piece of a gameplay element I ever witnessed in an action game. It’s right up there with QTEs, unskippable cutscenes and forced motion blur.
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After a lot of testing tonight, I’d hard disagree. Focus Target is super good when it’s fully modded, and probably the highest consistency you can get out of a Keystone with amazing teamplay.
I just posted in another thread (and posted a bit earlier about this, unwittingly not realizing that the stacks do this) but Redirect Fire stacks are additive and have zero upkeep involved, so you can functionally upkeep +12% damage permanently for you and your whole team. You don’t need to mark something with all 8 stacks to get 8 stacks of Redirect Fire. They just add up between kills.
Likewise, +5% Toughness per stack adds up insanely quickly. Focus Target is great when being spammed as targets die, because you can generate insane amounts of Toughness for the whole team in a very short amount of time. Between each target you can have 2-4 stacks generated, which is +10-20% Toughness per kill for everyone.
Of course this requires a fully modded Keystone which is a heavy investment, but it works perfectly for my support Vet build without losing out on anything I had for it before.
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I don’t mean this as a dig, or to invalidate your experiences. . . but unless you’re only playing T4 and below, or play with a top tier premade group, what you discribe here is literally how anything T5 and above plays at them moment for vets, and a to a lesser extent, Psykers. Especially considering the director is even more egregious about dropping melee chaff, and sometimes even ragers on top of them. It especially loves doing so right when you go into ADS as a vet too.
The only other way I could see other vets having a different experience right now is if you’re just running an Infiltrate + Low Profile + Overwatch ambush sniper build, and open every fight by cloaking. Or do you just get lucky enough with specialist spawns and kills to have good enough uptime on VoC to just reflexively spam it when trying to take shots to clear stuff around you?
Before the latest pattern changes it was pretty easy to keep stuff away from you and the team with good enough situational awareness with competent premades or even pugs. Now though? At least in my experience, even in fights that start at 15m+ distances it quickly goes, and stays CQ, especially if you’re in some of the more claustrophobic maps. Regardless of whether you play aggressively or passively as vet.
Point is you don’t need to use an aggressive melee or hybrid vet build to make good buck out of WS. Niche it is not, closest to a pure generalist keystone out of the three IMO. Seen a lot of folks just going all in on the bottom of the vet commando tree even if they’re trying to run an executioner’s centric builds, especially after the latest change to spawn patterns. Right now if your melee isn’t otherwise immaculate in T5+ as a vet, Desperado at a minimum is a must have for crowd clear even with shovels or swords.
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I’ll reiterate again that trying to achieve 100% uptime on everything is not possible and not a fun way to play the game. Weapon Specialist just makes you better at CQC in general and you don’t have to feel forced to constantly upkeep something to feel like it’s worth taking.
There’s almost nothing in this game that requires you to have 100% optimal uptime on every single talent you take to actually play the game. There are some weapons you can run grey in Damnation and do more than fine. But there are choices to make that just make sense, like not taking Serrated Blade if you use a Power Sword—not that it’s bad, just that it doesn’t really help that particular weapon much.
It certainly does make you a lot more conscious of swapping your weapons, especially since you lose the stacks when you do, but I really enjoy using it with my Infiltrate backstab build. It’s there to make a build that was already good even stronger. A lot of people seem to forget that Vet got objectively stronger in many ways. People just seem to be screaming in the void the more I actually test things out and find the nuances that are there, like with Focus Target.
Once they fix the point deficit that Vets have to deal with to actually use Keystones (among other bugs they have yet to resolve after a month and a half, like Exhilarating Takedown), I think they might end up being perfectly in line with everyone else.
I also don’t like connector nodes. They feel like you’re forced to invest in something that doesn’t really do a whole lot for you. It’s fine if it’s handled well, but we’re seeing it being poorly done with Vet right now. Zealot also has a few that’s kind of annoying, but I digress there.
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Of course you switch weapons a lot. But there is a difference between doing so when it makes sense and aggressively switching weapons every 5 seconds to guarantee uptime on your buffs.
When I play, I want to play according to the circumstance. Not compulsory. That’s what grinds me.
Same with Disrupt Destiny, where you’d have killed all enemies eventually. But now you got a marked target somewhere else in that crowd or far away shooting at you, inconveniencing you to shoot that target whether it suits the situation or not.
Same principle here. It’s the compulsion to do something at a moment’s notice, whether it’s useful to the situation or not, is what uglifies many of the talents.
I’m an RPG guy. I’m used to “press X to get an outcome with calculated risk” not a Fighting game guy “combo this and that off each other to get this effect”. I don’t know what the latter has to do with Warhammer and why we’re so intent on making it a thing here.
If you’re trying to play optimally though. I mean it really ruins the fun for me, knowing there’s a stack (haha) of inactive abilities at any given time, that I have to get active in order to achieve peak.
And it makes me spiral out of control. Disrupt Destiny as an example again - I stop having fun with the game and get laser focussed on chasing that one glowy boi. I cannot not attack the glowy boi. I MUST KILL THE GLOWY BOI.
It drives me insane, seeing glowy bois killed by someone else or just being de-tagged. And I start to make plays that are fully out of play, like ignoring people next to me that are downed just to make sure I don’t lose my 15 stack.
Now back to the Vet. If I have an inactive buff, that gives me +25% freaking damage, but only on quickswap and for 5 seconds, I could eat a shovel it makes me so angry.
SWAP. Kill a few horde enemies, oh the stupid buff ran out again. SWAP. Kill one Mauler. Oh the buff ran out again. SWAP. SWAP. SWAP. FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU-
I know I’m the guy who memes the Design Intend thing, but here this really is design I don’t get. Why make it so fiddly, so exhausting, so tedious? Don’t make me swap my weapon every 5 or 10 seconds as a compulsion. Don’t make me chase one glowy boi at a time, just so I don’t have pitiful damage. I will hate you. I will fu-- you up. I will steal your lunch box.
You hear that Fatshark? I will fly all the way over to Sweden and steal all your lunch boxes from your fridge! No holds barred!
Hyperbole of course. I’m trying to convey the feeling of stress here that this type of gameplay design gives me.
I know you don’t have to get everything optimal in Darktide. You can win the hardest difficulty with substandard gear and build, if you can play.
But when faced with two different options, one being something powerful that only has short up-time and is inconvenient to use and something less powerful that is up 100% of the time and convenient to use, I’ll often choose option 2.
Having a generally stronger character is preferable in my mind to having a guy that has 10 “oh-sh” buttons, but they all require a prerequisite or such. As long as you have 1 or 2 active abilities, it’s enough. You don’t need 6-8 different conditionals, that trigger on a specific thing and then you are super strong, but only for 5-10 seconds at a time.
I’d say this type of thinking is not all too weird, after all the current Vet tree does get lambasted a lot. Especially because this design somehow affects the Vet worse than the other three archetypes.
They all have conditionals, too, don’t get me wrong. But somehow they always trigger anyway because they’re things you’d do naturally. With the Vet, I feel that they chose 3 very distinct playstyles that aren’t really what you’d organically gravitate towards.
As for the team damage going higher with the the Tagging skill fully modded and it refreshing easily. Good catch. I actually did not know this and did not care to check for it. So props @simpliv
Still not my cup of tea when I can use those 1-6 points elsewhere. But maybe I’d feel different if the Vet tree was not as point-tax heavy, as you explained.
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When I played with Lasgun, going heavily into sniper fire support 60-70% of the dogs/mutants were going for me. This also includes bombers throwing nades at me almost exclusively.
It didn’t matter if I was front, back, whatever. I even stayed in coherency most of the game. It has gotten to a point where I was counting mutants and it was 6 in a row targeting me at one point.
It might have been a totally random occurrence, but man it felt so bad.
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Seems to me that there is a you problem, not a keystone problem.
And, i mean. Stuff like bloodletter or shred exists. Does it also makes you mad to not only do special attacks or to not do any blocking/push attacks/missing an attack with those?
I honestly don’t know why they are pushing this “swap around” playstyle in the first place. You swap around anyway on Vet, on Zealot, on everyone. Putting it on a timer with these swap nodes (including agile engagement) takes away more than it gives honestly.
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That’s the point. When you swap is usually the point in the game when you need a bit of a boost because you have to deal with some threat that made you swap the weapons in the first place.
And with this keystone you always have that boost ready for you to pop when you swap. 5-10 seconds is enough to deal with most threats that the game can toss at you.
Y’all looking at WS and thinking that you have to get 100% uptime. You don’t.
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I don’t get being intentionally obtuse on the buff length or how the keystone works. The keystone is easy to use, I ran chainsword and columnus, and when closing distance I’d use ranged to kill at least one mob to activate 10s of 15% attack speed & 10% dodge distance/speed. You then melee away as normal, accumulating a stack per melee kill up to 10 (just swapping every 5s nets you nothing, you need to kill in both modes). IF something like a special or elite happens to rear its head at range, you swap back for a solid +33-330% crit chance for 5s to range (and if traited, your weapon ALWAYS HAS AMMO in the clip even if you just emptied it) to deal with said special. Or just swap to range and pick off a nearby trash mob to refresh your 10s melee buff. Rinse, repeat. It’s not a difficult playstyle to decipher. It may NOT be the playstyle for you, and that’s fine, but calling it niche is absurd. It’s pretty straightforwardly a melee style complimented by swapping to range occasionally for power bursts.
Dude has a point. I get that you want ‘always on’ buffs instead of the keystones. A thing is, I’d say there’s certainly room to argue on all the keystones - but first you need to accept that they are, in fact, pretty darn solid as many people are saying. I’d be the first to say the vet tree still needs work (4-5 more points to get/fill out keystones hurts flexibility) and maybe if they do you can find your passive buffs and ignore these keystones, but they’re objectively pretty darn strong and people that are actually trying them instead of complaining about them agree.
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