Remove level 40 as the maximum. Make it so there is no limit. For example, for each rank after 40: multiply enemy health and damage by 1.01, and multiply player toughness, health, and damage by 0.99. Or use some other coefficients, but the idea is that there is no limit and no sudden spike in difficulty. At the very highest level, there would probably only be a few (maybe even just one) team at any given time. Their team compositions and builds would then become the absolute ultra-meta. Furthermore, this meta wouldn’t have to be learned from streams, videos, or Gameslantern; this meta would be displayed on a special terminal. The same terminal would also show detailed statistics of champion missions and allow you to watch missions from the perspective of any player, both in a spectator mode following the player with a camera, and in a free camera mode (similar to CS2).
Why do all this? Precisely because right now, truly strong players don’t really need optimized builds. For instance, I watch NRgaa play with a marty build, see how he survives for ten minutes on 1 HP, and realize he’s capable of playing the game with completely different builds and perhaps even much more effectively. So what is the value of his build? By copying his build, I expect it to be a truly optimized build, one that allows you to succeed where other builds wouldn’t survive. But it seems that’s not the case, and this applies to most builds that are presented as H40 builds – it’s unclear which ones are genuinely optimized.
What does an optimized build mean in my understanding? It’s a build with which the creator can achieve mission success with the highest probability. At the very least, they must sincerely believe that to be the case. And if they discover a more effective build for themselves, then the old build is, effectively, discarded, because it no longer allows them to play at, say, H90, the way the new build does.
How many development resources need to be devoted to catering to the top 0.01% of the playerbase? Your average Darktide player plays on Heresy and Damnation, and in 2025 more than 30% of all games ended in mission failure, telling us the game is still plenty challenging.
It would be its own meta, as Havoc already is, with substantially different balance point from normal gameplay (e.g. Psyker shield is far more heavily used in Havoc than normal games because the need for it just isn’t as pressing from Gunner threats, same thing with the Plasma Gun, if you aren’t starved for ammo and don’t get 12 elites spawning on the same spot the PG doesn’t deliver anything near the same value). I’m not sure what creating new metas for its own sake offers.
So, I’m not concerned about the 0.01% of players, but the 0.01% most effective builds. Not all builds presented as H40 builds will suit those who intend to maximize their Havoc rank (those who are very far from H40)
The best players and best builds are practically synonymous at that point if you’re talking about absolute peak performance under extreme artificially inflated difficulty, that’s who’s going to be playing that content.
Regardless however, what you’re proposing essentially optimizing around damage output and resiliency alone, and creating a very different meta than what otherwise would exist. That’s not teasing out the “best” build, that’s optimizing for a hyper-specialized game mode with relatively limited levers for players to manage (and that’s likely to be “solved” in short order). The enemies aren’t getting smarter or better lead or more competent, enemies aren’t gaining new abilities, the players aren’t being presented with new challenges, we’re just increasing enemy damage soak and output and reducing player resiliency and damage. I suspect what you’d see is the builds that are best at avoiding being hit in the first place being prioritized over builds that can take lots of hits (because once you get high enough H-level where everything just one-shots you regardless, it’s just always better to not be hit), and players that are really good at playing evasively will pop out at the top in such a paradigm. The best build for the theoretical H90 in that circumstance may not have any functional advantage relative to other builds outside of that H90 setting, or may even underperform (especially in the hands of an average player).
What you have done is effectively recreated the Weaves gamemode from Vermintide 2. And if you know anything about Vermintide then you know that it wasnt exactly a popular gamemode. Buffing enemy HP and damage to the point where everything takes forever to kill and one hits the player is not a fun way to make the game harder. It just leads to cheese strats like others in this thread have mentioned. It turns the game into a completely different playstyle that doesnt resemble the usual game at all. You might have a select few achievement/challenge runners that would try to push their rank up, but those people already have plenty of ways to make the game harder on themself without the devs needing to put development time into that. For example, if someone wanted to mimic the gamemode you are proposing then they can simply equip grey weapons and curios and go run a havoc 40, but you dont see people doing that for good reason.
If someone wants to push themselves in the game then running things like duo or trio havoc 40’s is a much more fun way to implement extra challenge than arbitratily buffing enemy stats and nerfing the player. Sure theres no leaderboard for that, but having a leader board didn’t make Weaves any more popular of a gamemode.
Theres enough difficulty in darktide as is for those that want it, theres just simply not an incentive for fatshark to spend the time adding more higher difficulty levels when the players that want it can already find ways to do that themselves. Not to mention simply buffing hp and damage is the lamest and least fun way to increase difficulty possible.