So what? The outcome is all the same regardless of details. Darktide’s bosses don’t have anything that makes them a threat worthy of actually calling them bosses, unlike in Vermintide 2.
Horizontal monster attacks don’t hit through block except for troll that does negligible damage.
Plague Ogryn overhead should defenitely be made to count as a crusher overhead hehehehehe
Right now just stop to nerf Arbites finally this is the most nerfed class. The 90 sec count for mine is too much 80 is fine. And no Arbites aren’t the most OP class right now. And the biggest problem we have is that the hit that finishes off a mob validates the kill. It’s reminiscent of the 1990s games.
And the captains/champions with the big stick of useless, the wind up is forever and the overhead is just as weak as plogryn. But the suckiest boss is still the slug, so easy to just quickly beat it to death even without shield cheese. I pretty much just see bots get eaten nowadays.
All bosses (Rat Ogre, Chaos Spawn, Minotaur and Bile Troll) have a horizontal sweep attack that does what I already described. If you don’t believe me, go play Vermintide 2 on Legendary difficulty and see for yourself. I know that I’m right here because I recently played, and experienced all these attacks from all the bosses.
Finally this just a detailed aspects. From 18.04.2026 you will have a major drop in players.
Knockback attacks break your block, it doesn’t damage you through block. Only troll does for 10hp. Bödvarr and Gatekeeper can damage you through block if they have shield-shatter but that’s only on modded realm.
And I also play Vermintide 2 a lot, recently too.
You can block these attacks without breaking block with a lot of BCR and a shield like handmaiden, foot knight or ironboi.
In that case I was wrong. But that alters little to nothing regarding what I said. Darktide’s bosses should have these mechanics because that’s what made bosses in Vermintide 2 so dangerous. I don’t think anyone here disagrees when I say that Darktide’s bosses are so badly designed that they do not even fill the role of the damage sponge well, due to how quickly they die in normal games.
Monsters are in a weird spot in Darktide since you can steamroll them easily with a solid build or teamcomp but they are legitimately a damage sponge at low levels where players deal far less damage. Monsters were already designed to be fairly threatening damage sponges but player capabilities in damage output and toughness sustain skyrocketed so hard compared to Darktide at launch that monsters now just don’t pose a threat even to a player that’s half-asleep.
Maybe if players weren’t capable of things like dodge-sliding, all bosses would become much more threatening, but as it stands the current design of the bosses is just bad. They need new mechanics on higher difficulties. That applies to all enemies we currently have in Darktide, actually. Difficulties above Heresy should see enemies use new attack animations with more attacks and impact to their blows.
Increasing just their health and damage just isn’t working if players can spam things like dodge-sliding and then whip out Kraks or Boom Bringers.
Yea we can see Fatshark trying this with the Ogryn pack master that gives you pretty dangerous debuffs when you get hit by its aggressive moveset and it also summons a couple dogs but it still dies just as fast as any other monster. Effective HP for monsters at least would have to be increased through some means if we want them to not instantly die, whether that’s increasing their HP, tweaking hitzones or reducing player damage.
Hard agreed, and I feel like FatShark can easily do that without people taking issue with it since bosses are not Crushers. They are not to be spammed like Elites and are not covered in Carapace.
So if there are any enemies who should be buffed to be more individually powerful, it’s Darktide’s bosses.
Might be nice to give them temporary conditional buffs. Like if you deal x ammount of damage in y seconds he does an angy yell and gets DR for n seconds.
Slight correction, she’ll die to a one-shot headshot on normal expert if most pellets connect. It’s only on realism expert where she can’t be one-shotted due to dmg resistance.
It wasn’t a serious suggestion. I was just trying to show that the other guy was trolling. Notice how he never responded to me? That’s because his only choices were:
- Double down on his absurd claim that Demolition Team is in fact not generating very many grenades and that its ok if Demo Team gets deleted.
- Agree that some nerfs are reasonable to Kraks
I like your idea though. Maybe just tackle the total output rather than the regeneration? I dunno.
ERM AKSHUALLY IT WAS SIX 
I ran a bunch of kinda bad weapons into carapace H40 crushers to just demonstrate how slow it was to kill them for some things. Started with Deimos and Endcapped with DS4 on a non-melee build to show how fast that was. Its not rigorous testing - just a ‘sense of scale’ for players.
Do you think my clear speed and safety would be better or worse in a real game fighting 6 crushers, snipers, trappers, mutants and other elites and hordes?
I play with pubs often and I think its brutally hard compared to playing with my premades. We lose most of our games unless I slap on the hard-carry builds.
ON THE OTHER HAND - its definitely the case that H40 was intended to offer a challenge to premades. Look at its design -
- Premade lobbies only, party finder. no quick play.
- Described as a challenge mode, intended to have a low win rate.
we’re off target for sure.
For non-havoc difficulties I agree. Which is where the game balance should be anchored. Something like damnation/auric. But the concerns which has been expressed by numerous players and ignored by you numerous times in this thread is not just "premades are having it too easy” but rather that:
- Premades have no where to play, we were actually promised havoc 40
- Some equipment, like kraks, is so strong that it actually is depriving other players from a fair chance to play against the intended challenges of the game.
Agreed, but just wanted to add that a big problem that I see with a lot of streamers (not saying that it’s you), is that besides having premades they also play with every single benefit they can like; [SpiderSense], [Health bars] and etc, while also metaslaving and that too adds issues with balancing because the game was not intended to be played with those mods.
Regarding the idea that Havoc should have been the “home of better players”.
That idea has never appealed to me.
Fatshark has already changed how Darktide is played DRASTICALLY to suit exactly those players, and in my opinion, the result is a game that plays significantly worse than it once did during the old Damnation times (getting deleted by three Scab Stalker’s was awesome) and prior to the inclusion of the skill trees.
Now we are stuck with a game that vomits hundreds o Elites, Carapace, and specials from all directions, constantly with no pause, from start to finish while “enjoying” unkillable Arbites, on-crack Scum, perma gold toughness Veteran (even after the nerf yes), Psyker who never melees (infinite ammo) and clear whole rooms.
Next class will probably be even more broken.
We switched from a somewhat tactical-lite game with a awesome and slower game flow to whatever this abomination is supposed to be.
I don’t agree with that analysis. Almost all the ‘high skill’ players I vibe with regard patch 12 as a better game than patch 15. At least in the circles I run in there’s a desire to claw back some of what the game once was. Hence the conversation of anchoring difficulty around Auric rather than Havoc.
Personally I do like the more chaotic high energy games, but I still argue for reduced spawns and spam density because i think its obviously bad for the game and is a major cause for the audio issues we have (silent curshers etc).
Me and players like me do deserve a home in the game. That can exist without harming the rest of the game.
Why would that happen?