This. This is the core problem with MF. I dont love the way it builds or dispenses stacks but the issue is not standing still (which, despite what people say, is entirely doable) or even building stacks. Its that 90% of the weapons that feel like they should benefit from this talent: don’t and the weapons that do are thematically unaligned but derive huge benefits.
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And yet people miss. All the time. Things happen. Mechanical failures happen.
Your aim either gets jostled from a silent backstab (thanks fatshark), or you dodge and don’t compensate your aim enough. Hell you can just straight up miss. We aren’t perfect, or at least I’m not.
You are aware that 30% is not a 30% at the end of the damage calc right? It’s like a 10% more on average. Notable to be sure, but not really keystone level power.
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Who asked?
You did when you made the implicit comparison of a random node to a keystone on a forum. The thing specifically meant for discussion.
Your little outdated tik tokism used as a blanket gotcha to shut down conversation really doesn’t belong here especially since it was far more applicable to your thinly veiled “skill issue” comments yet you got a proper response.
Least you can do is keep your mouth shut if you can’t or won’t think of a proper one.
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Yeah it does need a pretty hard looking it. MF is clearly intended to be the “keystone” for that lasgun marksman role that the entire left path of the skill tree is built around, and it fails super hard at that for a whole bunch of reasons even outside of the mechanics of the keystone itself.
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Yes, the point was that random nodes offer unconditional buffs at a much lower rate very often. That’s what you’re asking for. They wont just randomly make 1 talent point do the same thing as a small passive node but 10x better. Nobody asked you to explain why 30% weakspot damage isn’t that significant, my point was infact that this is what straight 100% uptime passives are tuned to be
Don’t be so upset that someone is giving you counterpoints to stupid arguments. I won’t stop posting just because you impotently rage about it.
I’m really not. Losing your stacks on a miss which is a number that could be tuned is not something people would keep up with 100%.
Try keeping that up with an autogun. Not possible without using it as a semi auto in which case whats the point?
You can defend MF all you want. It’s a bad keystone that makes no real notable difference in TTK on the weapons that can maintain stacks easily even without a replacement keystone like Focus Fire, and the ones that require effort to maintain the stacks don’t really benefit from it because they don’t gain any real breakpoints other than maybe crits.
Asking for a change regardless of what change is not unreasonable when looking at opportunity cost, or by looking at other classes keystone design which do have 100% uptime for literally zero effort.
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So I’ve just ran some tests again:
My non-keystone crit build for a Kantael Lasgun kills T5 Rager in two headshots, provided one of the shot crits. With 15 stacks of MF it oneshots a T5 Rager with a crit. That’s the only notable diffirence, most of the other elites/specials die to one crit heatshot regardless of MF stacks (not counting Ogryns, but it barely matters). But the key diffirence here is that non-keystone build is active all the time and actually is better against big targets and monstrocities (because of the passive rending and Bring it Down), while with MF I have to constantly divert fire to trash mobs to maintain the stacks.
Seriously, pretending that MF is fine and requiers “skill” to use is such a dumb hill to die on, especially considering that the only weapon category that actually benefits from MF (Autoguns) require you to waste ammo on overkilling trash mobs with headshots. BTW I am 100% sure that the people who defend MF and tell you to score headshots on hordes (it takes “skill” lol) also tell other people not to shoot at trash enemies when they complain about grossly inconsistent ammo balance for weapons.
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Try using it with weapons that don’t already oneshot most things. That’s usually where a huge damage bonus ends up being beneficial.
The biggest problem with Marksman’s Focus I have is that it is a “Win More” Keystone. Those conditionals to both gain and keep my stacks? They are simple to accomplish when I am already in a comfortable position during the match; they are devilish to activate, let alone fully activate, when I am not. Darktide is a very chaotic game and sometimes I may even choose to ditch my stacks entirely for the sake of staying alive or helping the team. This is a completely unnecessary choice to make! But why?
Very simple answer, dear reader. There are two alternative Keystones for the Veteran that always do something beneficial no matter the situation. For example, Focus Target puts a concert-poster-sized ping on a dangerous and high priority target (The alternate ping is available even at minimal or zero stacks!) while the Weapon Specialist keystone rewards me for the mere act of playing the game, starting with a single heretic kill. Another astounding thing about these alternative keystones is I am never punished nor disincentivized from moving my character, which is very easily one of the strongest defensive and offensive maneuvers in the game across every character.
None of the other Keystones in the game require so much effort and micromanagement to gain a meaningful benefit from as Marksman’s Focus currently does. I presume that it was designed the way that it was (Finesse, Reload Speed) because Executioner’s Stance bestows so many gunplay oriented benefits upon Veterans already and to double dip with a similarly designed or similarly strong Keystone would have been too much. In any case I would prefer it if there were less stacks of higher individual value that are simpler to gain and to lose than the current setup.
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You can easily tell the players who only play the single class they are advocating for on the forums.
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Zealot Marytdom requires you to intentionally die 4 times in a row before it does basically anything, lol. It’s easily the worst Keystone in the game and it’s not even close. Even at max Marytdom stacks it factually gives less damage than Marksman’s Focus even at 1/3 max stacks, assuming you have the skill to hit heads.
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Psyker Disrupt Destiny is literally a more difficult and harder to manage version of Marksman’s Focus. You can only kill specific enemies to proc it, unlike Marksman’s Focus which you can stack to max instantly on a random horde. All the stacks fall off instantly, unlike Marksman’s Focus which rolls them one a time off. You have to waste a second talent point to get them to stack twice on headshot kill, unlike MF which stacks 3 automatically.
I straight up don’t understand how people complain about Marksman’s Focus. You literally headshot 3 trash mobs with your first half of a clip and you now have +25%~ damage for the next 10 seconds, even if you get 0 headshot kills and run around the whole time.
If you want extra damage for ammo efficiency on rapid fire guns that works 75%~ of the time you are doing damage, you take Markman’s Focus. If you want always-on damage on big targets you need breakpoints on, you take Focus Target. If you don’t care about ranged breakpoints and need melee survival, you take Weapons Specialist. There is really no issue tbh.
Veteran absolutely does not deserve always-on +112.5% Finesse damage when they already have +30% weakpoint damage, +20% general damage, +15% elite damage, +20% boss and ogryn damage, and up to 50% rending for all weapons. This is completely ignoring Execution’s Stance and its potential amping nodes.
Martyrdom…doesn’t require you to die at all, those wounds don’t have to be Corrupted, it just needs you to lose a lot of health while equipped with lots of Wound trinkets and not heal back up, the skill is in using the Zealot’s toughness generation to stay up and killing with a huge DPS boost that doesn’t care where you hit just as long as you don’t die. The problem with that build is how you need specific gear to properly play it, not that it requires you to die.
Disrupt Destiny was specifically called out earlier in the thread for being in the same level of sillyness as MF, it’s a broken concept that doesn’t fit the gameplay paradigm.
Meanwhile, the overwhelmingly vast majority of Keystones in the game, as already detailed, are substantially less fiddly to deal with than MF.
I straight up don’t understand how people complain about Marksman’s Focus. You literally headshot 3 trash mobs with your first half of a clip and you now have +25%~ damage for the next 10 seconds, even if you get 0 headshot kills and run around the whole time
That’s great in a vacuum. However that finesse damage bonus means squat all against those trash mobs, racking up headshot damage bonuses against poxwalkers just gets you high Overkill scoreboard numbers, you want it for a more meaningful target.
When presented with a more meaningful target, what’s the better option, using MF trying to kill 3 mooks (who hopefully are conveniently at hand) with headshots and then shift to the big target with a huge weakspot damage buff and try for weakspots, or using FT to Tag the target (making it more visible to all, and causing them to take globally 20-32% more damage regardless of source/hit spot/movement) and immediately engage it? In my experience, you’re better off going the FT route every time. Even with the MF damage boost, often you’re doing just as much damage with FT because the enemies only have so much HP, your 100%+ finesse power bonus doesn’t practically mean much if a 20% FT damage-buff gets you over the threshold to one-shot headshot an enemy for instance.
On paper, or for a TTRPG, MF seems fantastic, would be a great skill in a turn based game. In actual play with a horde survival-shooter, that’s really awkward to get consistent use out of. The Keystone works best running into a horde of enemies while spraying automatic fire at head level in confined spaces (where they’re already easy to kill), while ostensibly being about taking careful measured headshots in a tree emphasizing precision and range, and that’s the big problem.
Veteran absolutely does not deserve always-on +112.5% Finesse damage when they already have +30% weakpoint damage, +20% general damage, +15% elite damage, +20% boss and ogryn damage, and up to 50% rending for all weapons. This is completely ignoring Execution’s Stance and its potential amping nodes.
If you’re taking all those talents (Precisions Strikes, Longshot, Superiority Complex, Bring It Down, Rending Strikes, and Onslaught) together with MF and ES, including particularly the MF node to get 15 stacks for the max possible +112.5% Finesse damage, then at best you have exactly one (1) points left over for any ES amping nodes or additional MF nodes or anything else, that’s every possible talent point you can spend.
You can fit Exhilarating Takedown in there (as an either/or with Volley Adept), but No Deadshot, no Shocktrooper, No Close Order Drill, no Charismatic, no Confirmed Kill, and leaves pretty much all the resiliency/utility at home except Iron Will.
Most every time you see a build like this, it’s running VoC and FT instead of ES and MF, you can get 98% of the practical killing power with substantially more general utility.
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I play all 4 classes with Psyker as my least played class; I have over 1600 hours in DT since its original public beta.
This is false. Martyrdom can stack without downs and without corruption. It grants quite a lot of Melee Damage with Attack Speed as an optional side benefit. It’s very strong. I don’t feel a need to compare it damage for damage with Marksman’s Focus especially because it has a “meaningful benefit”, unlike MF. Lowish HP? Congratulations, Martyrdom is stacking.
I was clear about what a “meaningful benefit” was for a Keystone and the bar for that is set quite low in my post. Disrupt Destiny provides a “meaningful benefit” when the player kills a DD marked enemy because it grants 10% Toughness and a temporary Movement Speed boost. Furthermore, the Lingering Influence node makes it substantially easier to reap the precision bonus benefit from the stacks. It’s a bit random whether a funny teal enemy pops into the psyker’s field of view and dies to them overall, sure. Precision maxing using DD with 30 stacks is questionable. Overall, however, the Keystone only has a downside when the player fails to refresh their stacks. MF directly punishes the most common thing in the game, moving. Regardless of the difficulty there is still a “meaningful benefit” associated with the DD Keystone when the player completes its prerequisite.
Marksman’s Focus doesn’t have a “meaningful benefit” like that from a headshot kill. The benefit depends on the gun which may or may not have great crit / weak spot damage multipliers to boost with Ranged Finesse and making use of the Ranged Finesse bonus depends on if the player crit or not and then also if the player headshot or not. The benefit depends on whether or not there are any breakpoints for the player to hit and then on whether or not the player can hit those breakpoints with a stack number that isn’t too high because then it’s inconsistent and inconvenient. The benefit depends on how much the player has recently moved. The benefit, strangely enough, depends on whether the player farms plasteel or not as this requires a lot of moving around in general.
I’ve never thought about Marksman’s Focus this way because I’ve never felt like Ammo was a problem with most guns. I’m only interested in hitting breakpoints and the way MF is currently set up makes it awkward and in my opinion a bad investment because all the points I put into MF I can spend somewhere else on Vet’s talent tree which contains amazing nodes.
Never said the class deserves it or not. I want the Keystone to have a simple activation for a simple reward of some kind on top of whatever stacking benefit it should have. If that means tweaking the numbers, so be it, the end result should be a Keystone that isn’t as cumbersome as MF. They made 12 keystones and out of that entire group only MF is tedious and excessively conditional.
I agree with all of the above. I tried hard to make it work as well, my biggest problem was the mobility cost. This isn’t a standstill game. We’re not allowed to turret. I fear we spent a lot of our capital to get the rework to begin with and now we’re stuck with something lackluster until the rest of the classes get the reworks they need as well.
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Its easily the worst keystone he has, and one of the worst keystones in the game. At least FT provides team damage in some niche cases and Weapon Specialist is actually pretty good and most things on the right side are too (its the left side that is starving of good nodes). Compounded by the underwhelming MF keystone.
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Full agreement.
This keystone is one of the reasons I always advise to go flat with the Veteran skilltree. Underwhelming keystone that is way too deep buried even now for what it provides (very little). At current you’re better off using those 4 talent points you’d put into Marksman Focus by grabbing some toughness or something from the right skilltree.
The proposed changes are good, too. I’d sign that as it is.
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By the way, I just noticed that Tunnel Vision doesn’t work unless you have a source of Toughness regen (coherency, Catch a Breath, etc).
This makes it really bad, to be honest, would rather have 2.5% Toughness DR instead.
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