Honestly, combat knife and krak grenades are way overtuned. The mobility on the combat knife is just insane—you can straight up ignore half the melee combat in a game where melee and ranged are supposed to be equally important. They seriously need to nerf or rework it.
And krak grenades? They’re basically a cheat code. They give even complete noobs the ability to instantly delete the most threatening enemies in the game with zero counterplay, and they can even melt bosses with ease. That’s just unhealthy design. That kind of quick delete potential should be reserved for elite players with 1000+ hours under their belt—people who actually have the insane reaction time and coordination to pull it off. But Fatshark just hands it out for free, so any random scrub can cheese their way through. Honestly, they need to gut the damage on krak grenades.
Disagreed. They seem to function as intended, krak grenades were underpicked before the buff that simply added +1 to their reserve.
If you are implying a common enemy such as a crusher or a boss should be so hard that it should require a mmo raid event to happen and be impossible to solo unless you’re some “god player” then I also disagree, i think that would be extremely unfun and unbalanced if basic enemies in normal missions worked like that.
Knife without mobility hasn’t much going for it with its very limited and bugged reach, try to use it without speedrunning on a vet build mostly specced on the left side, it feels fair and maybe even underpowered a little, it doesn’t carry a bad player on its own.
Even if the speedrun potential is a little op, it still requires great skill and game knowledge to complete a speedrun on h40 even on an easier seed on sycorax, it’s not something every darktide johnson with 100 hours can do.
Those Enemies aren’t intended to be this common, that’s the thing. Krak Grenades having excessive Charges is part of the greater reason why those Enemies are excessively common. It’s a matter of downward adjustment being needed.
Edit: I forgot to address this originally…
There are more factors to this than this Post mentions. Kraks also had a longer fuse beforehand and were thus significantly less reliable as an anti-Carapace panic button, and Crushers had less HP back then also, meaning they were relatively easy to kill with the vast majority of Weapons (which was a good thing, as generalist Weapons SHOULD be capable of dealing with Carapace decently well) rather than with a select few OP outliers and dedicated anti-Carapace Weapons, and Kraks were therefore not as relevant as Frags back then. Why take Kraks when you were killing a pack of Crushers with a Duelling Sword in the same frame of time that it took for two Krak Grenades to detonate?
These are anti-tank grenades that can penetrate the frontal armor of just about any vehicle in the 40k universe that isn’t a battle tank, and have the potential to one-shot a Terminator or Custodian in tabletop. They perform about as expected.
If there’s an issue (I’m not sure there is, Kraks don’t feel like must-take auto-options), it’s not with their capability, it’s with their availability and enemy density. There are builds that allow a lot of grenades to be used, and the game likes to spike difficulty by spawning packs of heavily armored enemies on top of each other in big clumps where explosives and cleave weapons can overperform in ways that wouldn’t be possible if enemies were more dispersed.
Crusher density should be lowered, and the community could rally around asking to “reduce crusher density for kark’s sake” instead of defaulting to blanket nerf calls.
let’s frame it as putting carapace spam on a diet.
But to do that without outright trivialising them, there are a few things that need to be nerfed to actually ACCOUNT for such a change, in order to bring about a kind of balancing… normalisation.
Krak Grenades, for example, would need to have their Charges lowered back down to 2-3 from 3-4, but in turn, other options would have their viability boosted due to lessened Carapace spawns. You absolutely won’t be needing this many Krak Grenades if Carapace is no longer being spammed like it is now.
Nerfs are, unfortunately, a core component of such a direction being taken. There’s push and pull to this, I hope you can understand. You can’t just buff and buff and buff Players like that.
Vet ability to spam nades is OP overall. If anyone wants to play as a grenadier/demolitionist it should be a dedicated build with pros, cons and more interesting talents, potentialy grenade laucnher gun.
Does it hit like a power sword, outside of Uncanny ignore all armor?
Sure it can put in eyebrow raising work on a dedicated Scrier Crit build or Zealot Crit build but without either of those and/or Uncanny, it’s really not that egregious - especially when considering the very short attack reach.
I think we should just assume no one is running the knife without uncanny.
And maybe this should be a topic for its own thread, but the entire system of critical hits is its own crazy problem. You see all of the boons critical attacks get and then how most of the classes maintain between 40% - 100% crit chance the entire game…
True. Kraks can melt bosses n elites in an insane way, which is far more overpowered than the other blitzes. u can even have 4 of em in total, which makes ogryns grenade a joke
Food for thought: They were competing with uncanny shredder nades
Food for thought 2: People are now picking kraks despite having uncanny shredder nades available to them
Absurd balance. This would be like buffing chem grenade to make people pick it over boom bringer. Pickrate is a bad metric to go by when opportunity cost exists
Chem nades are fine, blackouts could use some help tho, not sure if a simple +1 would do it, I feel like they need some sort of passive regen and the active regen should be changed to something like, every 10 enemies or so. Or keep the 20 number but raise the number of blackouts regen to 2-3 every 20. It should make the player feel as if he doesn’t need to care about nade pickups, like Ogryn’s rock or zealot nives, as it is rn, they run out too fast, regen too slow and don’t justify grenade pickup priority over other blitzes, except maybe zealot ones.
Reduce carapace spam first before reworking/removing our methods to deal with it. That makes more sense to me, and I hope you can understand. I just don’t want the game to become unplayable due to Fatshark’s inconsistent balance decisions, you know.
I think a game state where every weapon feels like infantry lasgun and heavy sword power levels directly clashes with the 40K spectacle/fantasy, but that’s mostly unrelated to this discussion, balance is important.
I think a large part of the issue is many talents require elite or special kills, and fatsharks way of balance is increasing the spawn, thus increasing the amounts these talents trigger, thus increasing how effective these talents are. ( they scale with difficulty )
It is hard to tell what would be a proper way to balance, you could say lower the % or change the skill but Fatshark isnt clear about how they want to balance the game. ( will they further increase spawns, will they increase health, will they change weapons or talents etc )
As for knife (and others), let’s start with uncanny not interacting with other blitzes etc. and look from there. A large part of the balance problems stemm from those interactions.
A certain amount of scaling with difficulty (whether that’s elite density or weapon stats) can be a good thing. Look at psyker assail. Doesn’t scale with anything. Absolutely dominates in low difficulties in a way that can sometimes ruin the experience of other players* and then struggles for relevance at high difficulties. Tuning is essential though.
It’s good to see another person recognising that uncanny strike is the common factor in so many balance discussions. My personal preference is that it is capped at 40% (like shivs, like literally all other rending/brittle effects) and then we see where that puts the balance for all the weapons/abilities that use or interact with it rather than play balance whackamole.
(*this is what happened when I played with a couple of beginner friends and I cleared the level on autopilot without realising that they were just walking along behind me with nothing to do)