i’ve been playing auric for the majority of my time with this game now, and based on just the experience on that difficulty, it’s hardly ever that the game itself is overly difficult because the ai or enemy variety. it‘s that you’ll get some simple jack(s) that don’t understand the basics and will run off on their own, die, only for your remaining 2 teammates to run off one-by-one and do the same. this happens far more often than it should.
i get trying to save your teammates but where tf is the common sense and just the slightest bit of critical thinking? i’d understand if your teammates are a few steps away, or at least in the same room during a save attempt, but some of these people will run so far ahead that you can barely see them with frickin’ MODS that highlight teammates.
obviously not every level 30ish player is terrible but it’s crazy to me that so many players just want to be blatantly carried through auric. if you don’t know you can dodge hounds and mutants, or even just basic attacks for that matter, and/or you can’t do it on a regular basis, you shouldn’t be playing auric at all. you can learn how to do it and practice on lower difficulties and will be better off by doing so.
it’s so frustrating seeing people that don’t even know and understand the very basics of the game trying to play it on the hardest difficulties. even the number of vets that i see that seemingly NEVER switch to melee is ridiculous, too. they’ll be getting absolutely swarmed and overrun by a horde and all i’ll hear is their laspistol. like, ho-ly. lol
also, is there a mod that displays your teammate’s ability cooldowns?
Game isn’t hard enough so these players doesn’t get floored in the first 20 seconds of the map. 2 good players being able to carry the bad players is the issue here.
Totally valid playstyle. I can dodge around trash for hours, and just pew-pew elites and specials.
You want the horde gone? That’s your job. I’m just gonna make sure that bomber, 4 gunners, and 2 snipers doesn’t give you trouble.
it’s not if you can’t actually do it lol i certainly can and you might be able to do it as well but i can literally see these other people can not. it’s them backing up in a straight line and shooting until they run out of ammo only to eventually get overrun and die lol
almost every time i play this game i get at least 1 or 2 sessions when i’m the only one left alive having to carry 3 people. i don’t mind challenge but in a game that revolves around having a squad it’s not always fun to not be able to rely on the 3 other people for the entirety of a mission.
having teammates that occasionally go down because of a brain fart or something is one thing, but watching them constantly go down because they don’t know how to dodge and position half-decently is just ridiculous on auric. i don’t think expecting common sense is too much to ask of your team in any game lol
Yeah, you don’t have to tell me. It’s a toss up between absolutely useless people and veteran players basically playing solo giving 0 sh-- about teamplay.
I value those rare times where I get 1 or even 2 (heavens!) people actually playing it as a co-op game.
This sounds like someone doing a penance though. Lest we forget that players now have to do all manner of silly things in order to get nice shiny things.
I’ve often played in a way that defies all my instincts and intuition in order to complete a penance. One simple example is a pack of hounds… Before I’d wipe them out ASAP. Now I am actively trying to get them all to launch toward me so that I can knock them mid-air for the penance (which is currently broken).
This is why I strongly believe that any new penances that get added should be effectively encouraging team play (E.g. Save a team mate from a melee attack 50 times etc).
Not sure if you can get cd numbers but you do get cd bars.
Regarding the bad players…
In any game where player skill has a huge impact on player performance, you will see similar things.
Unless high difficulty is gatekept and the brainrot is kept out, difficulty will always vary wildly, based on your teammates.
Yesterday i had two teammates walk right past a tagged burster that was currently lying on the floor, on two separate occasions.
They were seemingly unaware of the burster right in front of them, so i tagged it and pushed it over from a distance, using the force sword push attack.
My attempt to make them aware and give them time to get away from it, was rendered pointless by them just walking right over the burster and getting blasted by it, as soon as it got up.
Players with that level of awareness do not belong anywhere above malice at max, yet they infest the auric playlist.
I am still in favor of changing the unlock requirements for the auric playlist to something like „25 damnation missions completed“.
Unlocking auric at lvl 30 indicates to the player, that they are supposed to go there as soon as they are lvl 30.
This is just how coop games are. You either carry, get carried, or find people to play with that are on par because random matchmaking won’t make that happen very often.
For what it’s worth though I agree that Auric should be an unlocked gamemode, and not just what new players naturally click at level 30 because it has more rewards.
This is pretty much standard fare for co-op PvE games. They’re balanced to be playable by randoms who don’t communicate, which means they’re faceroll ez-mode even at the highest difficulties with a skilled, coordinated team.
The only answer is to have a higher tier which has some pretty severe gatekeeping, such as being only playable by full teams. That doesn’t happen all that often because the vast majority of playerbases are randos who don’t appreciate being locked out of content.
Make a higher difficulty tier with lower rewards. The problem with players just drifting into Auric games is because the numbers on the prizes are bigger. They want their prize bigger. A lot (if not the majority, maybe?) of better players won’t give two squits about the rewards after not very long, but want to play on the difficulty for the challenge, for the fun of the harder game mode, but their queue is effectively salted because of the lots/few/one/I dunno how many players who are unprepared but want the bigger numbers.
As weird as it sounds (and it sounds weird, and you perhaps need a weird sort of sideways brain to grok it), perhaps lowering (or equalling) the hard mode rewards to the normal rewards might actually help the gameplay flow. Probably not the backend (hello, plasteel grind, I see you there), but the in-mission experience. You might end with a few less players overall, but the standard of the players might improve to make the drop-ins more cooperative and more prepared.
Otherwise, just require a valid penance chain for the class you want to play, I guess?
I always imagined that the lower reward for higher difficulty is not being able to survive it! Maybe some people don’t mind being observers, idk.
I also imagine that some of the people trying and failing Auric are genuinely challenging themselves, and so the material reward remains irrelevant and the carry may still be required
Probably still the minority (especially with penance-chasers in the mix), but stupidity and malice and all that…!
Yup, I almost exclusively play with friends for Darktide, the pubs do stink more often than not. A good hot-mic every once in a while is fun but other than that nah… im good…
@JaynSilver I agree with you, this is what the penance system should of been about, grinding for the late game…a border or cosmetic… the material grind is also in a bad state… The whole system is really unfortunate…
I think this has some merit, but I also think it’ll deter people from taking the plunge and trying out the highest difficulties, which will eventually cause a lack of players at the top end.
There’s a learning curve here, but people who suck badly for a few rounds might become valuable teammates.
I know I was a total boat anchor for the first few Legend rounds I played in VT2 (back when Legend was the top difficulty). If it wasn’t for the lure of stronger weapons, I might never have tried it. I eventually became good enough to get through entire rounds with all the circles and without taking any damage.
It absolutely could, and to be fair sometimes it’s hard to decide if I’m serious about the suggestion or not even to myself. I hear people complain about wanting to be carried, then the counter as you quite rightly put it that players are always new at some point or another. Let’s face it, every single one of us was not prepared to sweep the hardest difficulty the first time we played it, right?
I think it’s inevitable, though, that the better players will naturally gravitate to trying harder modes, eventually. Certainly it will dry up a few newcomers, but from my experience the quickplay queues are hostile (in the extreme) to new/lower skilled players coming up anyway, so I’m unsure if the drop would be materially noticeable. I feel (and there’s zero evidence in my brain to prove this whatsoever, so 100% conjecture) that the majority of players who wiull improve past ‘boat anchors’ will want to be there to /play/ there, for the difficulty, rather than simply get the carries then drop back down again once they have the toys they want.
And counter to the whole question is whether the ‘carries’ problem is really as bad as some people make out? Personally I don’t think so, so I’m sort of talking solutions for something I’m not sure needs one. Although there was this one Damnation round I did where the two random people with us didn’t understand to do the servo skulls (either use or defend the operator), so that event took some time to get through…
The major issue on Auric is that people tend to just run around and refuse to use anything remotely like tactics and leave the others behind. the great thing about the game is if you are not a completely toxic player you can make friends that want to run the game the way you would like to play it. Yes sometimes you have to carry someone or a couple of some ones if everyone else is dying around you it could also be you that is the issue.
