@Mister_E is right, “As the game gets more and more difficult and tries to make itself more and more challenging, what we end up with is more Carapace armor in the fields, especially considering something like Rotten Armor”
Let Bulwark be the tank, Crusher be the Linebreaker
Crusher
The Linebreaker 100% Carapace - too exclusive to weapon variety
Flak weakspot without attack/movement changes - a joke, Crusher just moves too slow for that
Flak Weakspot with attack/movement changes - more of a melee threat that can be countered by a wider variety of weapons, by using the correct dodge timing.
Bull Charge followed by a 2-3 sec Mutie style self-stun if he hits an object accomplishes part of this.
Crusher gets a faster attack that heavily punishes players who don’t dodge, allows him to close the gap faster - shortens player reaction window; but fairly considering the dodge rewards players with an attack window.
Bonus: Without Uncanny DoT synergy, DoTs become less effective vs Carapace and now precise melee strikes with competent dodging is the counter to Carapace, while DoTs are more horde clear, bosses etc.
Sure, there’s this restrictive usage of certain weapons/ranged/AoE on blessings that really can deal with Carapace that I’m not a fan of, because you just get the same weapons used over & over again. I wish that there was more variety besides just putting uncanny, brittleness on your melee/ranged to deal with it with certain weapons. I also don’t agree with the Armor HP increase which exacerbates the issue for the sheer amount they hural at you. I just think in my mind it’s just a balancing act. Maybe not have a whole clown car army of metal coming at you all at once. Lessen it down a touch depending on the difficulty. I wouldn’t mind the HP increase if it was a bit tamer & more reasonable. Since Rotten Armor is gone for now, I feel that Havoc-40’s just seems like a Maelstrom to me & it’s more manageable, so I don’t see a huge deal in my mind with the armor aspect, just personally for now. This gets slightly complicated depending on how you look at all. I’m totally open to actual changes of course.
Another idea I’ve read is to have breakpoints on Carapace armor. Like, you get to a certain damage registration on the target, the Carapace aspect loses its resilience & each additional hit the damage increases after the initial threshold losing its Carapace effects eventually with each subsequent hit. It’s interesting… I mean there’re blessings that do this already in a sense. But if it was universal, it could work potentially? I don’t see why not. So, it wouldn’t matter the weapon, you would just break the threshold depending on the weapon’s damage potential/weapon type, etc. So, even weaker weapons might have a fighting chance it would just take a bit longer to kill the targets is all. But you would still feel like you have that weapon variety to use anything just instead of the usual suspects, which can get boring. So, either change how Carapace functions or just lessen the amount they throw at you. I’m cool with either one.
Yeah, I like the idea of Carapace breaking under attacks too. Certain weapons like the Shock Maul, Relic, Crusher could be more effective at breaking Carapace with the caveat that they have lower mobility.
Honestly either giving more movesets to Crushers w/ flak rear or that armor breaking with sustained attacks solution works for me. As long as the Carapace mosh pit stops
It will not stop, the game doesn’t provide a reason for players to bring non anti armor weapon, cause if your weapon good against the crusher, it’s also good against the flak gunner, or mutes, and disablers.
In theory it should be balanced that it’s inefficient to use big guns on small targets, but big guns have either aoe dmg/stagger/cleav in this game. On top of that you have defensive layers like voc or invis that removes vulnerability window during long reloading animations.
Why would anyone use laspistol? Only for the roleplay. It all ends up infantry lasguns will have cleave+rend to become vaible. And autoguns, and everythin will be the same.
Then you have OP dodge. Just leveling new character with shitty mobility roll on your weapon shows how dodge distance and dodge limit/CD is crazy broken.
Mr.E was promoting the idea Boom Bringer should be buffed so it can delete a pack of crushers, why would you even want to reinforce the root of the problem just to whine then the problem is growing?
Guys I think I partially solved the Darktide carapace spam crisis.
Make carapace armor breakable (i.e armor pieces have health and once broken it has a different armor type behind it, like unyielding or unarmoured etc) and have all weapons be able to do it based on the weapon and if it makes sense. Like bladed weapons would be sh!t at breaking armor (i’ll come back to a solution in a bit) but blunt and heavy weapons would be great at cracking armor, hammers, maces, clubs etc. Large calibre weapons like the heavy stubbers, plasma guns and bolters would also be great range options for breaking carapace.
The second thing is that bladed weapons should have a passthrough stat, i.e they have a chance to negate armor entirely, like you were shoving your dagger through a crushers vision slit or sword up into his armpits or joints. Mostly bladed and otherwise pointy weapons would get this stat. Having these mechanics would make some of the weaker weapons a lot more viable while also making carapace spam a lot less oppressive.
Probably also apply the armor breaking to bulwark shields as well, since they can be super bullsht when you play havoc and they have the bloody healing mutator and like 40 bulwarks trap your whole team in a corridor, corner, elevator etc.
Overall carapace (mostly crushers specifically) needs a balance pass, because no one likes being restricted to using certain weapon classes because of one enemy, that’s just poor game design.
Having new mechanics as I have suggested would help the player deal with these problems in more diverse ways.
Nothing against ‘Mr. E’; he does good stuff on YouTube, but it feels a little disingenuous to give him full credit for a topic that has been discussed ad nauseum on these forums for many years like weapon balance.
There were many discussions held around the news of Fatshark buffing Crusher health and the “nerf” of Crusher amount spawns.
Yes, he is correct, and yes, we have all had extensive talks about this topic on Reddit and the Fatshark forum for years.
He’s undoubtedly had a number of terrible takes throughout the years.
I still think that “MR. E” is a great source of information for beginner players because his videos are well-structured and simple to follow and can be watched/listened to while you’re on the treadmill or rage deadlifting.
It’s amusing, because that’s actually pretty reflective of the current tabletop edition.
When you look at most characters and squad leaders, they may have a plethora of options for weapons, but most are just fluff , and there’s no restrictions/costs on taking whatever you want anymore. Your typical grunt Guard squad commander has the option for a Laspistol, Bolt Pistol, or Plasma Pistol, and your choice doesn’t make the unit cost more or reduce other options in any way. The result is that you’re going to give each one a Plasma Pistol that has 8-12x the damage output against the typical benchmark target (marine infantry) than the other two options every single time, and GW instead just costs the unit as if you’re always going to take that best option, further reducing the incentive to take anything that isn’t the optimal choice
It also doesn’t help that tabletop has let scale creep run away on itself in many ways, the average number of lasgun/laspistol shots needed to kill a Space Marine in 10th edition is 6x that of the 1st edition, while there’s literally no way to field and bring to bear the literal hundreds of lasgun-toting Guardsmen models in an army needed to kill a full squad of slabshield toting carapace armored Bullgryn without support from heavier weapons Often for competitive events where you’re on a clock, players often won’t even bother rolling the Las weapons unless there’s a way to juice the dice (there are some, but usually not enough to make the Lasguns worth a damn) and the Lasgun models just end up being ablative bodies for the plasma weapons hidden in the squad.
TL;DR las-pistols are even more worthless in tabletop 40k, with literally no downsides to not taking the better weapons.
Remove the Inferno Staff from the game and we can talk about more sensible difficulty balancing. I suppose we should add Desperado, Chem nades and Boom Bringer to the mix now too. I really wish designers paid more attention to the game’s identity, because its evaporating.
The easiest thing to do would be to make the Head and Body HP independent of eachother, leave the body HP where it is. Leave the body carapace. Make Dots no Longer ignore Damage Reduction.
And what we would end up with, would be an actually balanced game.
Imagine that, elites that die because you destroyed their head. Maybe asking too much of fatshark.
And probably requires gutting of Dueling Sword, which lets be real. Faq that weapon.
I don’t think we’ll get a Crusher with a flak spot. The Dueling Sword already destroys every Crusher without Uncanny Strike, so imagine how hard it would devour them with a flak weakspot.
I’m much more in support of increasing Carapace penetration on weakspot hit for every weapon struggling with armor.
This.
Also if you think about it, it feels like it was unitended for DoT to stack with blessings like Uncanny Strike but they just left it in. Melee blessings belong on melee weapons and melee weapons only, and nothing more, end of story.
Let the flame staff be a horde-clear, just remove SoulBlaze’s synergy with melee blessings and you get a balanced weapon. The same goes for any DoT weapon in this game.
Eh, I think some cross kit synergies can be fun and fine. Like I don’t mind too much throwing knives being able to benefit from some melee blessings, even the perks, though I admit that’s stretching it a bit. That feels kinda in line with their role. Assail too to some extent. Obviously rending dots goes way too far but I’m inclined to warn against throwing out the baby with the bathwater where possible.
Probs if they just made uncanny only go up to +40% and that blessing in particular only work for direct melee strikes everything regarding cross kit blessing synergies would probably be fine to be left as is.
Regarding crushers generally man I dunno. With rending dots gone and tweaking carapace mods across weapons (some down some up) they could probably just leave them as is and seriously tune down their downs numbers and they’d serve well enough as meaningful enemies.
Rotten Armour seems like it’s own separate issue that probably shouldn’t be conflated with the actual enemy’s design
While I think that FatShark didn’t commit enough to Enemy Design of Ogryns (aka. they shouldn’t be knocked over by shout and explosions; their hits should have more impact in them like take away more stamina on block and launch player into the air and Crushers should have sound cue when targetting certain players), if that’s how they would be reworked, it still be content.
I never explicitly gave Mr. E “full credit for a topic that has been discussed ad nauseum on these forums”. I noticed a video on my feed, I watched the video, I agreed with some points, and I referenced the video as it fits within the discussion.
Disingenuous is a bold word to use in this context.
Yes, I’m quite aware. I’ve been here “a minute” and have been playing Darktide since November 2023
This.