I have had quite a few games where me and my teammates (usually randoms) did well, only to face a patrol of six Crushers mixed with horde or other adds who would grind us down. Crushers are not too difficult on their own; yes, they have a lot of durability and hit hard, but their attacks are easy to dodge. Problems begin when you have a gang of Crushers mixed with other enemies. Facing a horde with Crushers within it means that I have to try to kill the horde as fast as I can while also avoiding Crushersâ attacks; sadly, me and seemingly many other people are incapable of doing both of these things well enough and we end up overwhelmed, pushed against a wall and crushed. Ahaha, get it? Crushed.
So, you might say, whatâs the problem? Grab a ripper, axe, boltgun or other anti-armour weapons. Ah, but you see, I donât want to always use these weapons. I want to sometimes bring out my cleaver or heavy stubber* or shovel or infantry autogun, because itâs fun to mix stuff. Right now though I feel like Damnation is trying to force me into using anti-armour weapon or otherwise risk failing a game in the middle because of a patrol of Crushers; an uninteresting and annoying way to make my team lose a game.
My suggestion for the solution: decrease the number of Crushers that can exist on the map simultaneously. I donât think I ever want to face more than four. Or decrease their armour/hp values. Or make more melee and ranged weapons deal decently well with Carapace armour.
Iâve only started noticing such large and regular Crusher patrols recently, perhaps since the last big update. Not sure if Iâve just been lucky before or if Fatshark only recently turned on the Crusher tap. I am also not particularly good at Darktide; played it for nearly 800 hours but I was never skilled at Tide games so I believe Iâm âmerelyâ an average Damnation player. If you think my Crusher problem is a âgit gudâ thing, well, Iâll agree if you have sufficient arguments.
*Gorgonum model deals okay-ish with Crushers. Killing one takes a while but you can do it if youâre in a pinch.
I think we have a slight bit of VT2 syndrome. At launch in VT2 there were some melees that could not even touch super armor at all (flamesword). Obviously this is very bad to play and those weapons went totally unused until they were rebalanced to do little damage instead.
Crusher has the same situation, outright forcing your ranged choices because certain melees have no way of dealing with them. Like shovel on Veteran, you now absolutely need an AP weapon or youâll need around 25 hits to kill one, if you had stamina for push attacks. Bad balance for sure.
I donât think everything needs to shred Crushers but hitting them for less than 100 damage heavy melee headshots should just not be a thing. And it goes a lot lower than 100 currently. Really stifles the meta like you say.
If you donât want to bring anti-armor weapons then pack some anti-horde. Crushers really are not too dangerous on their own, so CCing them and quickly dealing with their escort is a viable option. Kiting works too, the key is separating crushers from the squishier foes. Falling back to cleared areas helps.
That is correct. But I am of the exact opposite view of you on this. I am extremely happy that there are big patrols of crushers and maulers showing up now. Melee was trivial and these enemies added into the mix make it way more fun in damnation.
This is a design norm for darktide you have two weapons, theyâre designed to cover the weakneses of one another. If you bring horde clear on a melee weapon then you should bring something (or a friend!) that can bring armor peircing. If you donât have any armor pen on the team in a game with heavily armored enemies then yes, you should whipe to the armored enemies. Sorry. This doesnât harm build variety necessarily. In my view it enhances it by creating restrictions the players can optimize against and creates tensions in gameplay by ensuring you maybe donât always have the right tools for the job when you need them. If your tools are always good enough for the job that just trivilaizes the combat in my view.
WITH THAT SAID: the mission ready screen should always be present, even when QPing into a mission. You should be able to see BOTH weapons all 4 team mates are using. Its actually so annoying that I am unable to automatically and naturally do this so you can gap fill for your team. This feature is the solution to the problem.
Thing is, in V2 the head of Chaos Warriors is not super armor.
It is regular armor. So even with weapons that do not do well against super armor, headshots still deal pretty good damage.
This is missing in case of the Crusher in Darktide. Carapace everywhere.
I do not have a problem with the way Crushers are right now. All of my loadouts include something that can deal with them. All classes have tools to deal with them.
I do not think that crushers are overtuned at all, but it might be a good thing if their head was a bit more of a weakspot.
Maybe skilled players should be able to deal with Crushers by simply hitting them in the head.
Maybe all players should be punished for bringing a badly balanced loadout.
I find it hard to decide.
âJust play meta weaponsâ is not the solution. The game balance should always be accommodating the widest variety of killing enemies because there is no other gameplay. For people with tons of hours already we know you can kill crushers. There are just minimal options for carapace damage which is stifling kit choices. No sense running a Stubber with a knife. Shovel veteran has almost no ranged choices vs the ability to use anything with an AP weapon. Even a non crit tac axe build takes an age to deal with them. Its plainly uninteresting gameplay to have to play with less options and flexibility.
If you bring horde clear on a melee weapon then you should bring something (or a friend!) that can bring armor peircing
Eew, friends. That aside, yeah, I do that. I always have melee and ranged weapons that fulfill more or less different roles. But that doesnât matter when Iâm being pushed to the wall by six Crushers and a horde. Today I play a veteran, and only a bolter would help in that situation; yes, my Antax Mk V axe is good against armour but not good enough to make a difference in a situation like that.
The key is not trying to engage with Crushers in melee when literally any sizable amount of other melee threats are present, because trying to dodge their overheads in those circumstances is suicide.
Also it depends on what you mean by kiting. Close-up? no recommendation on my part. Playing in and out to linearise the fight more? More likely.
If youâre in that situation and completely solo as a vet, yes. Youâre going to die. But a lot of stuff had to go wrong first for that to happen including your positioning and aggro. If you and 3 other people cannot handle a horde and six crushers then the team was blatantly incompetent or blatanly underequipped (which is the same). No offense intended to anyone. The word incompetent in this case is meant purely as an accurate descriptor and not as an insult. Competence can be learned.
Also let me ask a question that would help improve your odds of victory in the future, fellow damnation enjoyer: Why were you against a wall?
Nah its another bad non talking point, like all the people who say certain overperforming weapons canât be nerfed because âits a PVE gameâ or âits 40k manâ or what have you.
What do the armor penetrating weapons even give up? They all can ruin horde efficiently some without blessings. Basically just the thunderhammer plays around an actual weakness. The rest are high over performing weapons on top of killing crushers.
And I want there to be more variety because the game is more fun with variety, obviously. I can play VT2 and run Ranger Bardin with a 1H axe or Pyromancer Sienna with a mace because the balance is good and Iâm not actually unable to deal with any situation. There are still huge degrees of seperation in efficiency in the weapons themselves but thereâs no giant roadblocks in the form of âno, you canât kill this enemy typeâ. Its bad design.
The thing is they donât. Itâs the fact that you can dodge attacks only very late into their animations that makes it so that you can dodge one enemyâs attack, but completely miss the timing for anotherâs as they start attacking at different times.
Because the horde mixed with Crushers pushed me there. Last time that happened most of the party wasnât even dead yet but weâve all dispersed around, everyone in a different direction. That isnât Crushersâ fault, of course, thatâs playing with randoms and little communication.
Not insulting you at all, but that is incorrect. You let them push you against a wall. Instead of doing that you should have been fighting while retreating, keeping in mind the terrain you passed earlier, so you always had an escape route and preferably some terrain to use to split up their formation.
It doesnât always work out that the team can stay together, fair enough, but I try to pick out one guy I feel I can trust and move his direction unless Iâm confident heâs going to pin himself in a bad position. Just a hot tip.
Oh, and as a vet you can always huck a grenade to stun/stagger an AOE around you, including crushers. Not saying thatâs easy depending on space, but its a tool in the kit.
I just realized I might be being tedious so if so, my appologies.
Had a few matches with teams light on the anti carapace (or incompetent players), the recently buffed ogryn groups that started spawning with 4-6 crushers and 2-4 bulwarks were pretty brutal.
i like that ogryns and crushers exist and that they are strong. its super easy to optimize for 2 out of 3 enemy types (hordes, ranged, heavy armoured).
having no single player able to tackle all 3 with good efficiency means that either we have builds having optimization for 2 leaving 3rd totally vulnerable, or good efficency in 1 and focus split between 2nd and 3rd type
that makes game interesting, the same map, the same conditions, yet different combinations of builds adds variety.
i think it would be better to have lobby screen with info about weapons, so that you dont get strike time with big vulnerabilities
Vermintide 2 had a similar issue at launch with some weapons simply being unviable against chaos warriors or trolls. Mace and shield was a good example of this, it just didnât have enough armour damage or effective combos that could deal with them in a reasonable amount of time. Maceshield also had poor single target DPS which made it literally impossible to kill trolls with it because back in those days trolls regen could not be interrupted.
Some darktide melee weapons fall short in the same way. The veteran shovel is a good example of this, even in the most ideal circumstances of 100% heavy charged strikes to the head it will still take you over 2 whole minutes to kill ONE crusher on damnation. If youâre in a carry situation where part of your team is downed and you have to solo kill multiple crushers before you can rescue them, youâre basically hosed at that point because youâll be fighting for so long that the next horde will spawn. A zealot could make the shovel work because they have attack speed bonuses, guaranteed crits, bleeds etc. But in the hands of the veteran itâs simply a moderately effective antihorde weapon that can kill the entire run if you get stuck fighting a crusher without your team to help you. For that reason itâs not really worth using on damnation.
To be clear, Iâm not suggesting you make every weapon an anti armour. But there is definitely a âminimumâ amount every weapon needs to be viable and a >2 minute crusher TTK is not up to snuff.