This has been on my mind lately, especially since I seem to be wiping more on aurics with bad teammates - but also, this game is just mentally draining to play, and I can only really play one or two missions before having to take a break. Despite this, it’s still some of the most fun I’ve had in gaming - brutal difficulty is my cup of tea. So here’s a poll for the rest of you clowns.
This poll is regarding Auric Damnations/Maelstroms. It is not for lower difficulty levels.
It’s WAY too hard. I can’t have fun at all
It’s more difficult than I’d like it to be, but still manageable
It’s fine as is and doesn’t need major adjusting
It’s easier than I’d like it to be, but still engaging
It’s way too easy, to the point of being boring
0voters
BONUS POLL: If we WERE to change difficulty, who should we tweak - players, or enemies? And how?
So tbh I would have put " It’s fine as is and doesn’t need major adjusting" if it was for me only, but it need more challenging difficulty for the people that only play Maelstorm Auric Damn
with the luxury of a premade 4 man i guess it’d be way to easy, mostly duo or solo randoms are the hidden modifier that to some degree spice things up.
no, not those randos
you know the okay-ish type thats operation better than a bot.
sometimes i get lucky and things flow just right, that right there is just the dopamin spot i’m looking for.
burned out from the game? never!
burned out from a shitty shift full of idiots and bad team composition? you bet.
So the issue here is your asking mostly veterans here, so your going to get a veteran response.
The problem is why are players not sticking around? Just look at the comments about the new games experience after the Ai and buffs to specials.
The lower diffculty experience ramped up and people dont stick around.
Honestly anyone who says some of the current Auric Maelstrums are “too easy” needs to stop playing with friends and go out into the wild for the actual real experience.
Because if they take the advise from the people here the game has even less legs than it currently has.
well op explicitly said it isnt meant for lower diffs so what would be the downside to improve auric maelstrom and leave anything below damnation HISTG as it is?
plus the highest difficulty should be made for the top % and not based on how inabt the average joe is.
I’m at the point now where i hope i’m going to be matched up with lower level players. Once you get like 2 good players in a run it becomes a bit of a snooze fest for me.
I think Auric Damnation wipes are almost always due to some ridiculously challenging snowball-type scenarios, where you enter a room with 50 shooters and get sandwiched between a horde and 5 mutants when a Crusher patrol starts pouring out of somewhere.
So with that in mind, i don’t think making enemies deal more damage or increasing their hp pool is gonna do much. Maybe instead of spawning one monster, spawn two, or decrease time between their spawns, same with the amount of elites.
So it’s not about buffing enemies, it’s about MOAR ENEMIES.
There are 3 things that make T5 Auric/Maelstrom harder than it should be:
Ridicilously bad teammates (unfixable, I know, but I am so tired of people not sparing 40 seconds of their sad lives to back off during an ambush and deal with the elite wave/horde before running into 10 gunners and aggoing them on top. This is number one cause of failed runs);
Silent enemies, especially trappers and crushers.
Enemies spawning out of the thin air or director wanting to screw this run in particular and spawning multiple ambushes in a row with a monster on top. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if randos weren’t so bad.
Overall, with a premade team it would probably be “too easy”, but I haven’t played in a full stack for more than a year. Sound bug is what ruinining the game for sure tho.
With respect to player retention and lower difficulty levels, I think the biggest issues is that malice ends up being too easy (ie boring) for a lot of players once they hit level 30, and heresy is too big of a jump up.
Specifically, the game does an awful job explaining the nuances of combat that matter most to being successful at heresy and damnation. These nuances are also where the depth and skill of play lies - it’s a large part of what make the game fun and addictive.
So when players hit the first big difficulty wall (eg Heresy) they’re totally unequipped to handle it. Very few players will push through that wall. Even fewer will bother to look up guides or do “home work” to practice and read up on how to play better.
In short, DT has an onboarding problem to get players engaged at higher difficulties. Which is really too bad. The game could use some more in-game training tools, an in-game lexicon of terms and concepts (few will look at a 3rd party website). Heck, even a “build recommendation” tool in the game or something.
This is actually a very good point/observation about this game. My friend loves high-action PvE games (Risk of Rain 2, Binding of Isaac, Helldivers 2, etc) and after I showed her my gameplay on T5 Auric, the response was pretty much “I need to take a break just from watching this”. There is so much audio and visual clutter in Darktide, both game engine and player’s brain struggle to deal with it
huh, and here for the longest time since quake 3 and unreal tournament, i feel right at home and actually with the flow of the game.
granted best performance comes with 12 hours empty stomach and 2 cans of energy, but hey i aint 20 anymore.
anything “less” would definately take the appeal from darktide.
the game fills that strange void where i can’t deliver a decent stable k/d in arena shooters,
(mainly timewise, used to have 10+ training hours a day, now i sell this time to pay the bills)
but need to scratch that itch and prove myself i still got what it takes in a “relaxed” environment.
always felt right at home with things coming at me and a nice rock paper scissor dynamic between disablers, hordes, specials and boss monsters.
Auric Damnation varies wildly. I play pubs so…yeah. It can either be a stomp or a slog. For instance, whenever an update drops? Absolute hell, because a bunch of people rush in.
My less dedicated friends average out Heresy or Malice (one hasn’t even gotten to 30 on their first class).
Overall for ‘high levels of play’ I’d recommend a moderate difficulty increase to push out players on Auric and back to lower levels of difficulty, but that may be difficult to do.
It really doesn’t give you any breaks. Perhaps this isn’t a flaw insomuch as an observation, but I think if you want people to keep playing, especially on the higher difficulties when they want to be challenged, you need to give them breaks in the middle of missions to mentally recover from the sh!tstorm that just landed on top of them.
Darktide very frequently throws another batch of enemies onto you 15 seconds after you deal with the last one, and sometimes it really does just feel like it never stops. Normal Damnations tend to be better paced than Aurics in terms of player fatigue, at least in my experiences. Scale this over the 30 minute average mission time, and you can get pretty tired by the end of it.
I chose stay the same, because there was no “other”. I quite enjoy the current max difficulty, but I wouldn’t be opposed to them adding another harder one.
However, this doesn’t really fix the biggest problem around their difficulty design. Which is the fact that enemies aren’t only more numerous in higher difficulties, but also that they have increased health. Which I will always maintain is a crutch in difficulty design for 99% of games.
Regardless, this means I can’t enjoy horde gameplay in my horde game with my less skilled friends because enemy count is tied to difficulty levels.
One of the reasons I like HD2 difficulty is because nothing about the enemies change between levels, just how many of them there are.
This also (in an ideal scenario, not necessarily the one that currently exists) allows them to balance weapons across all difficulties. I know a Quasar is going to 2 tap X enemy type no matter what level I play at.
I guess maybe the biggest change to Darktide I would like is just increasing enemy quantity rather than quality. Malice just feels like walking through an amusement park, but a new difficulty just makes killing health sponge elites boring.
DT really does only give basic information to the player on how mechanics work and interact with each other. I only seriously started to dive deep into stuff people might classify as “elite knowledge” once I started looking at third party websites and youtube videos (Tanner Lindberg, as offensive as I find him, tends to know what he’s talking about most of the time). A lot of this stuff can only be seen and fully understood through lots of experimentation in the meatgrinder using mods that let you freely control it.
I too hit this difficulty roadblock, but for me it was transitioning between standard Damnation and Auric Damnation. Regulars were a snooze, but I found myself useless so frequently in Aurics that I felt disheartened and thought I wasn’t pulling my weight - it wasn’t until putting in a couple dozen more hours into the game that I started to be as competent as my teammates, and eventually exceed them and dominate the game.
I think a lot of folks wouldn’t have had the dedication to put in those couple dozen hours - most folks want to have fun via winning, at a reasonably difficult challenge, and so when they hit that roadblock, the game stops being satisfying to play, and they dip. One’s too easy, the other’s too hard - where’s the fun in that?
On top of this, just “auric damnation” isn’t entirely accurate, because the modifiers it comes with also affect how hard it is. Basic high-intensities tend to be pretty easy for me, while shock troop gauntlets can be a nightmare - lights-out missions are just annoying.
Quickplay makes no distinction between these modifiers, and so one mission can be a lot easier than another for reasons that, to the average player, aren’t apparent at all. This stacks with the bipolar Director to make the game’s difficulty feel all over the place, which is weird (why am I doing this side tangent? Is it relevant to what I was talking about earlier?)
Dude, I was just playing the other day with a friend that still hasn’t even maxed his first character. We had two bosses spawn in no modifier Heresy at the same time. I don’t even remember the last time I had that happen on regular Damnation. Director was cooking.
spawns feel random to me some missions are empty some are slug fests with zero room to dodge anything.
I kinda like that some missions give you nice rewards and some are challenging
well the poll is for people that play top difficulty but global changes like the gunner changes affect everyone.
its why im against nerfing the player or buffing the enemy. i think there needs to be like an advanced mode for the new difficulties
3 players, dogs and nets that cant be dodged, co ordinated special squads spawned and co ordinating attacks, snipers having a refraction field and only becoming visible to the player currently being sighted. that sort of thing.
