when you pray for dog arbites because they at least lower the difficulty in a non annoying way where you still have to interact with the game. also a lot of the times you have people running ‘challenge’ loadouts their screen is an illuminated field of glowing circles, prompts, highlighted enemies, radars (sometimes actual radars) and other totally not cheating mods to evaporate the challenge anyway, so its kind of zero sum at this point without pre made. the solo experience for the mode is pretty garbanzo, even if you can win most rounds.
Anyway to tie it back, all I’m saying is that if you look at the overall % of players who are using a certain weapon or build and it’s as disproportionately in favor of a certain choice (90% inferno staff users out of all psyker players, and >=50% h40 party finder players are psykers out of SIX possible classes to choose from) it’s very clearly a problem from Fatshark’s end.
People WILL optimize the crap out of the game especially at the highest difficulty level, I think everyone can agree on that. It’s up to Fatshark to decide if they want to do anything about it.
tfw even ai generated kriegslop mogs the stuff in darktide
Flamethrower in vt2 is overpowered, the tourney balance people have talked about it before, I think firewatch specifically mentioned that they placed cleave caps on the flamestaff and it ultimately does nothing because they ignore common cleave restrictions i.e fire goes through armor and super armor. It’s still the highest damage weapon in the game, and if you’ve been watching dutch clears, Uvess and friends have cleared multiple maps as a trio a couple months ago as footknight, shade, and bright wizard. With obvious choices to their obvious reasons.
But that’s 3 of the best players who have ever vermin their tides. Normally the real cost in value and why flamethrower staff is kinda okay to people in modded is that you end up losing a special/elite killer for a dps boost against hordes, and the order of what ends your runs are specials, bosses, elites, and all the way at the end, the actual horde itself. If you’re so good that you can play dutch spice without a 4th, you’re probably good enough to play without a dedicated special killer.
The thp thing isn’t a common problem in modded, more like a starting issue that gets solved by just a tiny bit more experience. Everyone who starts out as BW thinks they have to dps everything, and eventually they hit their effective limit via all the health they’ve drained, and now they’re stuck bashing like 8 stormvermin for temp health and any slight mistake means they’re dead or have to restart the health chain, and no dps is happening. You end up learning to balance between damage spiking and health farming, sometimes without thinking about it.
I miss vt2 sometimes.
If the Inferno Staff really is a weapon that can be used ‘without effort or skill expression,’ then why have I never seen a team of four Psykers all using the Inferno Staff easily clear Havoc mode? How long would it take for a Psyker using only the Inferno Staff to kill a single Crusher or a boss? In Havoc mode, the hit mass of hordes has increased by 170% compared to Auric difficulty, and the enemy count has also multiplied several times. This is the main reason the Inferno Staff appears to be OP. In my opinion, balancing the Inferno Staff requires adjustments to the Havoc environment: reducing horde counts, lowering the number of elite enemies while increasing their health and adding dot resistance. The primary goal should be finding ways to make the other three Force Staves viable in Havoc, rather than nerfing the Inferno Staff.
Because they don’t stack?
if the game needs to literally warp its mechanics and systems around a weapon to not be trivialized, maybe its the weapon thats the problem
you are literally saying change the entire mode to avoid tweaking one weapon
insanity
Attached are the scoreboards from two Havoc 40 runs after the update. It can be seen that the Inferno Staff’s high total damage has a considerable amount of melee lesser enemies damage, while its damage against elites can easily be caught up to or even surpassed by other teammates. Combined with my previous comments, it can be concluded that even in Havoc mode, the Inferno Staff is not an extremely OP weapon. Balance adjustments targeting the Inferno Staff should focus on these melee lesser enemies. Perhaps replacing a portion of them proportionally with elites that have damage-over-time resistance and having them approach in small groups could be a viable balance direction. An existing example is the dreg rager from previous Havoc versions that used blue stims (it became Carapace armour, it had crowd control immunity, and an extremely high speed!). As long as the Ogryn’s taunt is not timely, the Psyker will often go down very quickly.
This is more work than just adjusting Inferno.
This would also involve more work than just adjusting Inferno.
Because generally the more Psykers you stack the more issues you will run into regarding particular combinations of enemies (especially if Captains or Lieutenants, or bosses are involved). Other classes have better tools for dealing with these particular enemies, especially under pressure/can regain certain resources more easily.
Also Soulblaze doesn’t stack beyond a certain amount with more Inferno staves, unless Venting shriek/Perilous combustion is involved, and even then that does not alleviate the issues Psyker has handling things under pressure. If they don’t have frontline against some enemies that ignore the effects of Inferno/any other staff for extended periods of time, then they can get shut down easily.
Maybe we could start small and adjust Inferno first then, to not have to adjust twenty other things to supplement it staying as is?
So, we have a class whose main feature is dealing massive AoE damage, or any form of area denial and crowd interaction. It has weapons specialized for that same AoE damage. And now, we have a difficulty level where one of the major problems is the sheer number of enemies spawning at once. And here’s the question will a Psyker with an Inferno be effective or not?
I’ve read so many of these threads, and I still don’t get it. We’re supposedly playing the same game, but somehow we see it completely differently. “The Psyker is blocking my Ogryn from fighting the horde.” “The Psyker deals too much damage.” “Smite-bot”. “The Psyker spams too many bubbles.” “Psyker with the Inferno Staff.” “The Psyker’s number on the scoreboard is too high.” «Using the Inferno staff is too easy» THEN DON’T TAKE A PSYKER ON YOUR TEAM. DON’T PLAY PSYKER YOURSELF. AND TURN OFF YOUR MODS. God. By that logic, Psykers should start complaining about Ogryns because Ogryns have a taunt, right? Makes perfect sense.
So fixated on something that works exactly as it should under certain conditions. Should I remind you what you did to Staff №4 after Patch 13? How often do you play with it now, or see anyone else using it? It’s a psychic staff, alright because it gives me psychic pain to remember how good it used to be and what it’s become. Keep going. Do the same to the remaining staves. Then go after the Psyker’s talents. Oh, and don’t forget Smite I’m sure that gets in your way too.
I suggest we just let the Psyker keep only the ability to regenerate toughness based on peril. That would be perfect balance. He won’t get in the way of you drooling over the numbers on the scoreboard, and won’t be too strong. And when you’re done with the Psyker who’s next? I think Veteran is still very strong with his Krak grenades. That needs to be addressed too.
P.S
and
First, simply nerfing the Inferno Staff will not increase the usage rate of the other three Force Staves in Havoc mode. I don’t see much point in such balancing. More importantly, in Auric difficulty and below, the performance ceiling of the Inferno Staff is likely worse than that of the Voidblast Staff, let alone the Electrokinetic Staff and the Trauma Staff. When paired with a Venting Shriek build, the Electrokinetic Staff can often eliminate all enemies before the Inferno Staff even gets within attack range. To put it bluntly, in Auric difficulty, I consider the Inferno Staff to be a below-average weapon that only noob or slacker Psykers would use. Therefore, nerfing it solely because of its high adaptability in Havoc mode is even more unreasonable.
In my reply above, I also mentioned a simpler solution: high-speed enemies that are immune to crowd control and have Carapace armour. Such enemies hard-counter the Inferno Staff.
Such enemies are a “hard-counter” to anything that isn’t an Ogryn with any of the taunt interactions hodling them at bay and letting somebody else bring them down, so I don’t see how that applies to Inferno exclusively. What it changes is that Inferno will melt them eventually still - slower, yes, but eventually. Carapace being the main basis for the DoT profile also doesn’t change much since Inferno/Soulblaze can still reach close to 0.65 ADM against it with minimal investment - and without accounting for the most generic source of rending/Brittleness from majority of weapon blessings - which is still like… 160 DPS? That’s plenty. You just need space to kite, and not backpedal too far to trigger other events.
And how can you tell? Adjusting one element negatively (i.e., nerfing it) in the state of balance would also influence other elements positively (i.e., buffing them) if indirectly - can you really tell at present that it would not change anything? Because Inferno does have a contender in form of Voidblast staff, and I could see more people playing that if Inferno wasn’t the answer to most challenges posed by Havoc mods that also happened to require the least amount of input from the user.
Yeah, but that’s also a problem with Auric not posing much of a challenge to certain builds, or the general pace of Auric being ruined by character builds that rely on speed play and clearing enemies before they amass (which is also easier to do in Auric than in Havoc; things strong in Havoc aggressively will be strong in Auric in the same sense).
And aggressive builds can outdamage Inferno even in Havoc, but the issue is that most people don’t play that way; and if they do, say in premade groups, they don’t really play with people playing Inferno, be it their agenda or some other factors that contribute to that.
I think one of the problems with Inferno is that it reinforces a “safe” playstyle of spank and tank that has been present in MMO games since the dawn of time, and that it leverages putting more responsibility on one person to clear anything the game throws at them, rather than all people trying to build better/build with less turtle-y playstyle in general. The intention is not to kill that playstyle, but limit its output so that games are faster, because people wouldn’t be over-relying on Psykers for dealing damage to vast majority of enemy types, and in sterile positions, aligning with stagnant strategies for terror events and/or map segments.
If the Inferno Staff requires the Ogryn to taunt such enemies before it can deal with them, that means this power does not belong to the Inferno Staff. Moreover, the current uptime of the Ogryn’s taunt skill is not particularly high (the left branch can achieve about 1.3 times per minute; the right branch generally around 2.0 times per minute), and not all Ogryns like using the Slab Shield. This means there are often significant gaps in taunt coverage, and these gaps are enough to threaten the Psyker. Also, you should know what the blue eyes and purple visual effects represent, right? Units with blue eyes have 60% damage reduction, their armour becomes Carapace, and they are immune to most forms of crowd control. Dreg units that inhale the toxin gas have their damage reduction stacked to 100% (becoming invincible). As for the purple visual effects, they indicate the unit continuously heals surrounding allies (around 1000 HP per second). Let’s wait and see whether the Inferno Staff, which can no longer take advantage of the old version of Uncanny Strike, can handle these units.
Brother, i play games to get AWAY from mental taxation and to have fun, not to fry my nervous system while treating my hobby like its a high stakes endeavor.
So GTFO outta havoc?
Anyone who doesn’t regularly do havocs can safely disregard anything said about balance most of the time. ANYTHING works more than fine on aurics.
What is even your point?
Chill and relaxing gameplay is not what balance discussions about higher difficulties, such as this one, is about. There are plenty ways to make your game easier, achieving the preferred stress level.
Thought I might point it out, as it has seemingly eluded your attention.