i say kinda because the enemies that do it are normally fine, until you’re the only person that’s standing up. when your entire team is either down or dead, it ends the game when you get netted or pounced. a good fix is making the trappers use pistols on the last person standing and making the dogs just try to bit the player instead of pouncing and mauling them. for the record, i don’t mean change it so that these are the only things that happen, i mean change it so that if only one player is able to fight, the trapper and dogs will not incapacitate and instead just focus on shooting or biting the player without nets or pounces.
No, don’t do that.
11 Likes
I disagree because it would break a core concept of the game: stick together or die alone. You may have heard that used as the tagline for GTFO, and that’s because GTFO is that concept in distilled essence - but it applies to ALL team-based horde shooters, all descendants of Left 4 Dead, who introduced this concept to modern gaming, especially on Expert difficulty.
If three players are down or dead, the solo player SHOULD have a hard time clutching, because three-quarters of your team’s power is just entirely gone! An individual player in Darktide is very powerful, yes, but you have to be actually godlike to go an entire mission on your own and not get disabled.
Disablers are stressful because they can instantly remove a player from the equation, even for a second, which can snowball into a wipe. I’ve seen it happen firsthand. As soon as you make it so the last man standing can’t get disabled, much of this stress is gone, because you can just leave the guy who got trappered or hounded for a while. Why bother risking yourself saving someone when you can just let the other two clowns die and let you become fully invulnerable to being instantly shut down?
This segues into my final argument: 
C H E E S E and difficulty. Not part of a balanced breakfast… or game.
Even a moderately skilled player can pretty reliably kite a horde of melee enemies full of tarpit mobs and heavy armor and whittle it down over the course of a few minutes. Melee combat on its own isn’t hard. It gets a lot more difficult when you factor in ranged combat, because now you have to deal with a bunch of guys shooting at you, but player defenses in this game are powerful enough that a solo player can still handle that reliably: dodges recharge fast enough to not let toughness break, and stamina management is easy enough to do that you can sprint and block forever.
Specialists make this kind of situation exponentially harder, because now you have to deal with a new high-priority target that will either make a section of the arena uninhabitable, throw you out of position, or outright incapacitate you entirely. Now you have to juggle this active defense of melee and ranged while looking out for and killing that trapper you just heard spawn. Sometimes that trapper happens to run into the middle of the horde, and you get caught on a stray poxwalker, and you get netted - most of the time you don’t. But that tension of knowing that a single slip could end everything keeps the game fun, and makes solo clutching all the more impressive when it happens.
Once you remove trapper and hound instant-downs from the equation, it gets a lot less stressful, and a lot less fun for everyone watching the surviving player too. The rest of the specialists don’t punish a single slip-up: while Sniper shots and Poxburster explosions hurt, they don’t outright incapacitate you, while the other specialists only exist to make your life annoying.
TL;DR - the knowledge that your whole run could end with a single mistake makes solo situations both more difficult (as solo situations should be) and more fun (for me, at least, and my opinion is clearly the only one that matters : P). Removing the sources of these one-mistake-ends-all scenarios would make the game far too easy and a lot less fun.
6 Likes
I thought about it a lot^^
Actually I think it’d be a net benefit it DT moved away from VT.
Right now you usually die to damage and nets or dogs and stuff are more of a disappointment.
But the direction in which I’d like FS to go… I don’t really know. Maybe nets should just disable you for some time as your character cuts through it. Dogs should be susceptible to friendly fire, after all they are knocked off you by mutants and some other stuff…
I’m a strong believer in enabling ff for enemies (maybe with some ai tweaks), cause the game would be much, much more fun after it.
they did patch friendly fire in for the AI and it is pretty funny. poxburster explosions do 100 damage, but have a crazy high multiplier against infested to where they vaporize crowds of poxwalkers/dogs. snipers do around 1200 damage +/- depending on armors and seem to cleave everything up to ogryns. enemies burn in both kinds of fire (when is green fire going to be different from regular fire again?). machine gunners can stun enemies, they all take damage from getting shot (regular gunhands included). sometimes I see 2 trash shooter standing on each other or one in front of the other and one ends up stunning the other when they start shooting. the crusher’s overhead throws all enemies on the ground except other crushers in an AoE. leaping dogs knock over enemies in their path, along with the mutie dashing in or a spawn flailing in your face. I think the shotgunner is the only one who doesn’t friendly fire.
2 Likes
I just think a trapper net should slowly and consistently damage you and all other enemies ignore you whilst netted… Just like what happens with hounds.
On higher difficulties a trapper is no longer a “disabler”, it’s a sniper, due to the incredible amount of damage caused by a huge wave of enemies instantly attacking you whilst netted (along with the 2-3 flamers who conveniently show up the millisecond you hit the ground and start bbq you).
If a trap behaved like a hound then at least it would give the other players a chance to un-net you instead of revive you, which is how I imagine it was always meant to be like.
If netters will always be able to shoot you in the middle of a 200 enemy mosh pit then something needs to change.
Save your teammate, drop the med kit, drop the ammo crate, stab a player with a stim. Too many times players hold items to the detriment of teammates, just bad play overall.
2 Likes
entering the cling to the ledge animation every time you touch the wrong fence might be overpowered
but i wouldn’t touch disablers in a left 4 dead game
having to be mindful and have something in your build to deal with disablers add positive complexity to the game
2 Likes
Nah you’re just new to these games aren’t ya? Disablers are that: disablers, and they won’t get changed because you want so
2 Likes
Disablers is just lazy and dated game design in my opinion especially the way darktide uses them. BUT due to the way the toughness works the trapper and hound is a necessary evil because a skilled ogyn or zealot can be unstoppable no matter how many shooters and elites the director throws at them. The one hit kill nets are there to be the game ender for those who just won’t die. That is probably why the trappers has no cleave limit.
I’m glad this was not a space marine game because it would look real dumb seeing them sit helplessly and die with 98% health just because something paralyzed them and it could only be removed by another person.
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