I don’t really agree with this. I feel that melee clearly has a higher skill floor and a much much higher skill ceiling over ranged gameplay but ranged work still requires a lot of skill at high level play, mostly around priority and positioning and awareness. But more to your point it is possible to play just melee or just ranged in a 4 stack, i think. But its far more realistic to be using some of each in any given game and that is what i see most games. So i think it succeeds at being hybrid.
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Hm - why do you think so?
I played alot of first person shooters - so did my wife.
We both started DT without any Vermintide experience and played a veteran as first class because it felt like the natural choice coming from shooters.
I personally have played veteran more then the other three classes combined because I love the Astra Militarum lore roleplay the former Guardsman in my head.
Both of us have a far easier time playing Zealot with the clear melee focus and I feel best contributing as vet when I play him melee centric.
I can’t tell you why - but melee feels a lot easier and safer then ranged to both of us despite having a lot of pew-pew experience beforehand and no first person melee experience (unless you count skyrim and kingdom come deliverence ^^)
So I would say that pure shooting would be harder than pure melee in the current darktide balance, assuming you’re comparing melee and shooting classes doing their thing. But that has a lot to do with good class design on fatshark’s part. But also I think that given the ability to leverage hybrid combat, on the whole, ranged gameplay is easier for new players to learn. I feel I am struggling to explain but i’ll try to elaborate as best as I can.
Shooting has the following requirements for success:
- Good positioning
- Good situational awareness
- Good aim
Most players coming to Darktide will have lots of gameplay experience shooting and point and click is not complicated mechanically. That doesn’t mean its inherently easy but its simple enough.
Melee has the following requirements for success:
- Good positioning
- Good situational awareness
- Good aim
- Good combo management
- Good enemy animation tell awareness
- Good defensive management
I know this list is very broad but I’m relying on the reader to fill in the gaps here. Things like blocking, pushing, light vs heavy vs pushattack on which targets…etc. All these things not only provide a higher skill floor to achieve effectiveness but a higher skill ceiling.
If you go play melee only with a left tree veteran build you’re going to have a pretty rough time. Chip damage will build up, you’ll get overwhelemed, etc. Which is where Zealot and Ogryn fair very well naturally. For Zealot and Ogryn hordes are a resource not a drawback. Getting in close actually benefits the player, making it actually very easy to survive in darktide as long as you can hit that minimum melee skill threshold. Whereas the ranged classes suffer from toughness and health issues more in these circumstances since they can get overwhelmed. In this sense it is easier to play zealot or ogryn in melee when things are messy than it is Veteran or Psyker. But mechanically there is a lot more going on for the zealot or ogryn that adds layers of complexity to the game that gives a much higher skill floor and cieling.
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I would not say ranged surpasses melee that much… to me it’s 50/50
Anyway I’m super ok with this direction, we already have Vermintide wich is melee focused
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Not all weapons are created equal, some will have easier times to deal with specific threats then others. Melee weapons with crowd control, damage and easy use will have a easier time in melee then weapons that lacks at least a combination of the few things mentioned before, and ranged weapons can just magdump into an incoming threat to either kill it outright or knocking down its health low enough to make it easier to take it out in melee combat.
Best way to handle any given threat, or at least what I’ve found to be the best way is to use what is strong against them and set up a situation that is favourable to you. If I encounter a ranged threat, I’m going to close the gap and engage in melee so that they can’t shoot at me and for big melee elite blobs, a quick magdump to knock them down and taking a good chunk of the health of all of them makes it easier to clean them up afterwards.
If you on the other hand run into an oncoming horde with a bad melee weapon for that specific match up or try to use a Lasgun to take out a bunch of spread out shooters and gunners while they’re all shooting back, I wouldn’t be surprised if anyone called those situations hard or at least harder then what it should’ve been.
I always felt that melee was the starting point for people to not die in the higher levels hectic engagements, but at a point it would become second nature. Both ranged and melee has specfic playstyles/weapon loadouts that has a low skill floor, this would be just activating power weapons over and over again, or just magdumping into an oncoming horde in a corridor.
Personally, I feel that getting good shots of the more precision based or projectile ranged weaponry is harder then the melee weapons dodge dances and cleaving stagger.
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It’s more like you have a hybrid team composition.
I don’t know for sure, but somehow i feel if Fatshark will post overall DT statistics the total range damage vs total melee dmg there will be at such ratio that you can say DT is a shooter with melee aspect (big part of wich is survivability), rather than a hybrid combat.
Oh man we are so past that in our understanding of medieval combat… grrr argh old pet peeve. Samurai armor has the same overall weight for much less overall coverage due to iron economy in Japan…
Armor was light weight, dodging is replaced with ‘void the blow’ or ‘proper place at proper time to not be hit’ and blocking is replaced with ‘single time counter attack with opposition.’
I agree completely. Or at least that this is their design’s result.
The game heavily favors fast action ranged weapons over careful aim due to it’s spawn methods and our inability to effect the map in most areas. If we could say, jam a door so we couldn’t be attacked from behind, the game would radically shift focus.
Currently when you take into account the constant attacks from behind, the slowness of the ranged classes (espeically compared to the zealot) the slowness of a fair number of the ranged weapons, the volume and clutter of the enemies… it favors melee.
It’s very easy to end up like this: Your team comes around a corner. There’s enemies. The melee guy on your quick play charging in, blocking your shot. Ranged guy wants some kills too, so he goes melee and joins the melee fight. He really can’t get to a better spot in the time allowed, so instead of repositioning he just joins in the melee.
As it progresses enemies spawn and join in.
Occasionally ranged guy, if he has a fast action weapon, will go ranged but will often be attacked from behind and be going back to melee often, because he has to.
Now, sometimes it doesn’t go like that, range guy gets into a good spot, enemies appear at longer ranges, spawn director decides not to throw that many at ranged guy, ranged guy finds a wall with no door, but what I describe above is still common enough that it feels like it dominates most of my quickplays.
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It’s because they buffed players and increased ammount of enemies trying to compensate it. Before patch 13 it wasn’t like that, on vet i was mainly playing with mg12.
For carefull aim you need to go ads that decreases you fov and adds extra animations, so it makes you much more vulnerable. Untill there will be no some extra protection for such playstyle, precision weapons will be in the mediocre tier.
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Agree completely. Would really like it to be otherwise.
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On the side note, bringing up that true duo youtube vid can hardly be considered a measuring stick.
I do assume you know who Jsat is.
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I have to say this very thread alone seems to show a pretty even split between opinions on this point so it likely also provides a split. Personally I heavily favor melee in almost every game I play. My vet builds tend to be 50/50 and everything else favors melee like 80/20 or more. My martyrdom zealot chain axe builds are usually around 800K damage give or take and 80-90 melee. I recently put together a MG4 lasgun build that is full left tree and that’s more like 20/80 and pulls around 700K damage. I lose a lot more games with that build because its inflexible and suffers from bad self-bail. But its a fun build.
In any case I, personally, feel I usually engage in a hybrid combat. Even my 80/20 builds just wouldn’t be the same without snap shotting revovler/laspistol/shotgun. That feels very hybrid even if its not what Ido most of the game.
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There is no chance overall stats are at 50-50, just counting up my recorded games, its 40-60 at BEST, but that includes me almost only meleeing, I suspect the overall numbers are closer to 35-65. That is exclusively auric / maelstrom, lower difficulties will have a much higher ranged bias.
For the last time, no one is questioning the viability of melee, it’s quite superior if you ask me, I’m just stating what the numbers are saying. Majority of my pugs will avoid meleeing at all cost, albeit that is undoubtably skewed by what seems to be a heavy vet preference amongst the playerbase.
Yes you have this freedom to change your range-melee ratio. But typical pub game will look so that most enemies are eliminated with columnus, plasma, krak nades, rumbler, surge stuff or stunlocked with smite. Game spawns 8 or how many crushers just so 2 of them could even start overhead animation.
I’d also say the ratio is closer to 40/60 in favor of ranged, and the worse it gets the lower you go in difficulties.
Its also honestly logical, its infinitely easier to just use whatever ranged option you got to deal with multiple elites than it is to learn perfectly manage your melee.
That said, i still agree with reginalds assessment that you can do perfectly fine by just running mostly melee. I also do run close to 80-90% melee in my runs. So in terms of if you can do well with both then i would definitely lean on it still being perfectly hybrid game in that sense.
The question in the OP was “Is Darktide still supposed to be a melee-ranged hybrid game?”
Then provides a hypothesis of a split of weapon uptime, which no one has a clear agreement on. Whatever the real split is we’ve established in this thread that it is fully viable and competitive to go anywhere on the range from 100% ranged to 100% melee usage. There are clearly many adherents to melee only or melee dominant gameplay even if they are a minority compared to ranged dominant gameplay. Since “hybrid” does not mean “50/50” in the first place, an 80/20 split still could meet the criterion of a hybridized play style. In conclusion I argue that since a player can choose to effectively battle anywhere on the scale between melee and ranged dominant play at will, Darktide itself is a hybrid combat game.
The rest is down to player choice. We could incentivize that one way or another but I don’t see a need to. I’m not having much trouble having fun games right now going full melee even with plasma vets standing around blasting.
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In their original intention, hybrid exactly meant that, a 50-50.
But mostly I’m just bored by how easy the game is I guess, seeing everything getting annihilated before my team would be forced to melee.
New difficulty when?
This is the wrong approach. We’ve seen Fatshark try the approach a lot of people wanted where they let player power increase out of control then tried to compensate with more enemy spawns to keep the game challenging. It has largely failed. Enemy spawns are already at comical levels and it’s lead to a slew of sound issues as you can’t even hear special cues over the wave of other enemies. They tried doing more enemy HP with elite resistance and basically everyone hated it.
Dare I suggest what a bunch of us said from the beginning, that keeping a sensible upper limit on player power is a necessary part of achieving a game that is challenging in an enjoyable way has been proven pretty valid at this point. IMO it’s time for nerfs, so they can then scale down enemy spam so conflicts with elites feel more meaningful, rather than them feeling like trash mobs that last 0.5 seconds longer than the other trash.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying the game isn’t fun as it is. I just think we’re not left with many realistic ways to give more hardcore players higher difficulty content at this point.
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It’s not only about ratio, but how distinct every phase feels and how complex it is. Either way you can say V2 is a hybrid game, but it’s not rly cause range is quite simplistic there.
Part of what i mean is on encounter and enemies side. I would like to see something like this:
- game has such range enemies in a very specific spawn composition, so it will be very stressfull for melee specialized builds
- reversed - melee enemies in a specific composition, so it will be very stressfull if you are heavily range invested
- mix (kinda like what we have now) spawn composition when during the encounter your team should use everything
- all these phases should be in one run
Cause when you look at hybrid, you can say what is there in the mix, there is some clear distinction of its parts. And if i can’t, then it’s something more like chaos spawn. So current combat for me is more like chaos spawn.
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