New sharpshooter weaker then wet tissue paper

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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the higher-ish damage of headshots is nice, but its completely meaningless if you spend 40% of the round downed or dead.
Its practically impossible to play sharpshooter viably with how squishy that build has become.
Unless you’re going with voice of command you are going to get killed, no matter how good you are (on damnation auric).

Every other class in the game can pull off a solo clutch when the entire other team is downed, except the veteran sharpshooter.
Give us back the toughness damage reduction/regen on kills to the way it was before.

Before this major nerf update i was able to stay alive the entire round on maelstrom auric as the sharpshooter.
now i get downed every 5-ish minutes.

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Seeing claysthetics fail maelstroms with a vet over and over last night was painful. :persevere:

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This is a common complaint with a few threads out already:

Hopefully FS reads and addresses the complaints sooner rather than later. Having no interest in playing Ogryn personally, losing the entire veteran class to a suspicious rework really affects replayability.

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I am really, genuinely impressed that it took them several months with a “high-brow academic approach” to make a tree that seems to be worse in every possible way. Incense and gregorian chants for my vet mains :frowning:

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FS ain’t going to do diddly squat to address it directly, they’ll ignore the problem and then a few months later go “Oh we have this new class rework.”, everyone will forget magically and praise FS for putting out said rework and if said rework sucks, the cycle will repeat itself.

They want Veteran to be a ranged glass cannon in a game in which being a ranged glass cannon isn’t comfortable nor fun to play.

Remember pre-rework Psykers? Remember all their complaints? Remember how they disliked how clunky and squishy they really were, without a proper compromise in their kits? Today’s Vets are now the Psykers of Yesterday.

The fact they put in nerfs on Veteran’s major nodes without slapping them in the initial release notes, only to put them into the hotfix notes should be telling. FS just don’t care, lmao.

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I agree with this 100%. Veteran gaming right now involves serious risk to going down. Veteran is currently extremely squishy and that’s not just because of Exhilarating Takedown being unusable. He just doesn’t have any way to get toughness back when things start going sour. Everything depends on getting kills or being far away from enemies, but Darktide is always SHTF specifically when everything is close. If there isn’t an elite or special with low HP around there’s no quick way to regen toughness, which means each melee attack he suffers in close range will eat large volumes of his health. Toughness is the main means of damage reduction to incoming melee attacks. As a consequence VoC is a top pick and Executioner’s only really feels sustainable while someone else is near by running it. I say this as someone who just put out a guide on an Executioner’s build that does feel good to play. But the only sustain it has is hitting things with a shovel so they can’t hit you. The moment anything goes wrong we have a VETERAN GAMING moment and go down.

I am not alone in this. Extremely high skill players I know who play vet will go down on average 1-2 times per game and the odds of death are very high. Meanwhile i can play the other 3 classes consistently with the average downs being 0-1. All of this is on top of the general feeling of being about 2 points shy on the vet tree for any build. There’s always something that’s just a little out of reach that would make my build feel a LOT cooler to me. Sometimes its 3 nodes away but I’d be willing to sacrifice something I’m only taking because nothing else is really in reach. Sometimes its 4 nodes away and I’d be willing to lose out in one domain to grab something 4 nodes away. This distance is causing vet to feel very pidgeonholed into doing one thing and only that thing. Unfortunately survivng is not on the list unless you go mostly middle tree. I’m very much a fan of the new keystones and (marksman’s focus I’m a bit tepid on) I am in strong disagreement with people who say the tree itself is bad and garbage and vet is unsuable and the keystones are trash. The keystones are good. They’re usable and strong. Vet is just too darn squishy and he needs the tree to be squished for the sum of 2 points.

@Crayvun this is my full take by the way. I’m still trying to draft it better but I think its a good summary. I hope to hear from you on if you disagree or agree.

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Totally agree. This is why i dont get the “confirmed kill was op” talk. Yeah it was strong but its the only good regen vet had and you had to Kill something for it. Other three classes get toughness by just hitting critting being near enemies. Unwavering focus was bit much i agree but atm like you mentioned without VoC vet is wet paper. And i wouldnt call vet “glass canon” anymore due to other classes also being able to dish out quite some damage while being able to sustain themselves.

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Probably the Community Testing Team thought it was fine! Oh no… Maybe even a bit too powerful.

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Its also plausible that the community testing team gave fatshark all the feedback they needed to make the right decision and they were ignored anyway. I mean its not like fatshark couldn’t have seen our pre-existing complaints in Patch 13 and Patch 14 about how squishy vet already was and how inflexible his tree was.

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Or it was rushed. or Community testing team really hate vet! :stuck_out_tongue: (Joking ofc) We will never know.

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I mean… After all streamers/YouTubers that are part of the Testing team saying at and after patch 13 that Vet is fine and balanced I’m not trusting their input on Veteran in the slightest. Although my vitriolic comment was (in part) in jest.

I think the funniest was Milkandcookies posting a video that Bolter is still great using a custom sight hitting all the headshots and still having close to 0 ammo to work with in all segments of his cut-up gameplay video.

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hahahahah. Oh no.
I have been running the bolter lately and its incredibly ammo hungry. Its not bad fundamentally but its just…it needs better ammo economy I think. I ran it on almost pure middle tree with Survivalist aura and it was a vaccuum. Also a bit more damage/breakpoints. I keep missing breakpoints that feel like they should be there. One-shotting shooters seems a low bar for a weapon that does like supposedly 500 damage yet I often fail to kill them. Why should the bolter be a headshot focused weapon in the first place? Mass reactive explosive rounds do not need headshot. Everything is headshot when your organs are paste.

We cleared an extremely fun and lengthy and nutty auric maelstrom monstrous specials with all the nasty modifiers. plenty of VETERAN GAMING moments where things are ok and then they just become very not super fast with no option for recovery except the presence of zealots. All of us played out of our minds. The thunder hammer soaked up most of the boss damage but with the Focus Target the bolter actually annihilates bosses. With good aim I can do it in a single mag for the weakened monstrosities.

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EDIT BOLTER ALSO NEEDS ITS ADS FIXED

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Oh no no no… It was a video posted with the patch 13 balance, lmao.

I agree with all points of critique to the weapon and how it performs on Vet, I’m just surprised it is even useable at all. I think Zealot still gets better use out of it, yes it’s an ammo vacuum, and yes it’s super weird to make it headshot-focused, and ADS IS BROKEN FS PLS FIX, but at least it eats bosses super fast, and that… That is very satisfying. I ran a lot of Monsterous Specialist maps with it in the past 2 days and while the build is just passable, I’m actually enjoying it.

On topic, I’m actually a supporter of the squish the tree by 2 points. I think it would alleviate both the balance and the inflexibility problem. The tree has enough useless nodes to merge or cut out, numerical changes can come after that if needed.

I’m still hating on the side keystones (Marksmen focus is better with infantry autoguns than Sniper rifles which is absolutely hilarious), but that’s a secondary issue.

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Abusing quickscope with each shot helps a bit (annoying tho)

Wish there was glowing ironsight.

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Extremely accurate. Its just passable. But fun. Its not too far from viable either. A dash more ammo and a bit more base damage to hit revolver tier bodyshot breakpoints on shooters and we’re good to go IMO. Strong things can be ammo thirsty, that’s fine.

Lemuel was using Weapon Specialist and the Rashad and was saying it was incredibly good and, from his scoreboard, I have to agree. He also used Executioner’s Stance in that cross build so its clearly viable. One of the reasons we even were able to persevere at times was aggressive use of both Chorus and Voice. Otherwise the vet squish factor would have been too much for sure. Bolter is good bail out for bad situations too, just mag dump in front of you and you can make pretty good space in most cases.

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I think you’re very fair. And I was one of the first people to scream “its trash!” on here. I’ve spent time with it, listened to you fine fellows discussing things and I’ve definitely come more around to it maybe just needs some work.

I’m not sure how you feel about Weapons Specialist, but in particular for me that side feels awful, mainly because a lot of very nice things being on the left side of the tree. I haven’t really felt inclined to make anything with that keystone at all, because of that.

And to be honest, even though you’re tepid on it? I want Marksmans Focus reworked into a more general skill for shooting. Its way to niche right now. Not even sure it’d be that good on a Long-las, which you’d assume its designed for.

Thanks for the tag by the way!

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Weapon specialist in particular just needs to go. There’s no flow to the gameplay. VT2 had weapon swapping builds where on a kill, you’d get a special effect for ~20 seconds with your next attack with the other weapon. Melee kills gave your next ranged hit a double projectile, etc. That is a combat cycle that makes sense, dash in, kill, dash out, use the effect to trigger melee. Interesting effect, consistent to trigger. WS is so clunky. Swapping weapons after combat to reload wastes your stacks. All you get is some crit chance/attack speed. Generic passive buffs. You’re forced to dump your melee stacks anytime you need to kill a special after combat, and forced to dump your ranged stacks for those one-off dregs in between hordes.

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Paraphrasing some internet wisdom I’ve heard: well, the new vet isn’t really tough, but at least he ain’t dealing a lot of damage either.

I held back with feedback on this on purpose, as it is way to easy to jump the bandwagon. After several games on Damnation +, I am sure that vet is the worst class currently.

My hottakes: the tree is too long. The perks giving much needed survivability are too little. We have to many useless talents (extra grenade, 20 % chance for double grenade, smoke grenades, stacking tagging debuff keystone, marksman focus keystone that loses stacks when you move and so on). The squishiness and lack of mobility are not compensated by overwhelming damage either. Offence is a pretty good defence, but here we have neither.

Fact is, that for me, the best I could do with new vet, was a build that was just OK, while I have awesome builds for every other class. To add insult to injury, the build I came up with, combined the second and middle tree for a vet centered around team support and melee combat. Guns, the core element of the class, were just an addon to deal with some pesky specials or trigger the third keystone.

It’s quite sad. I liked the gunplay a lot and invested a lot of time and in-game resources in the vet, only to end with a class that is straight out not fun to play. On a side note, my sentiment to break the goddamn locks just got twice as strong due to that. The frequent meta changes mean just more grind to salvage the golden bricks.

The Marksman Focus keystone is just a meme material. The mechanic is overcomplicated, usable only somehow with infantry autoguns, where it suffers from poor ammo sustain and is just overdone (what for do I need +1000% HS damage, majority of the trash or unaromored elites dies from a burst of fire anyway and I cannot stack it on boss, unless I crouch in front of a charging Chaos Spawn). Not to mention the wonderful playstyle it forces one into, I always ended up lagging behind my team, trying to manage the stacks but losing the much needed coherency.

I’ve no solutions for this, but I can imagine, that to fully develop Veteran into the ranged weapon specialist so many players love he needs:

  • Option for more survivability, be it through toughness, DR or mobility.
  • Better Keystones No 1 and No 2 which currently scale very, very poorly with higher difficulites
  • Possibility to get better ammo economy, not just with laser pointers.
  • Shorter tree with useless talents combined into one to create at least some niche use (f.e. 20% chance for double nades + 1 extra nade) and less tax nodes.

Currently, the gunlugger ogryn feels more like veteran, than a veteran. I will not even talk about sniping snipers from 200m with kickback. Talk about sarcasm here.

I would also love to get the old sustained fire back (reload on ult), every class has some nice panic button; that was the panic button from the vet and it synergized wonderfully with almost every gun in game.

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thats how it supposed to be lol, vet and psyker were OP before the patch, zealot and ogryn were weak as f, now they nerfed them, now we all are equal, huzzah

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Zealot and Ogryn have literally never been bad, just they just have a high skill ceiling and a low skill floor.

I agree with that. But I don’t think the gap is very large. Mostly I think its toughness gen and about 2 of tax nodes too many. I see most people agreeing broadly on this point so hopefully fatshark hears that.

Yes

wooaahh there. This one is stupendous.

I’m still jury out on this keystone but the movement stacks thing is seriously not a real issue if you do your job and click heads. Its just a different way of expiring it between fights just like a bunch of other tools do. People are probably going to whine about this until they just change it to stacks fall off over time (which will be the exact same rate as it does when moving) then they’ll give you a modifier that lets headshots prevent stacks from decaying on headshot. Its going to be literally the same thing but more worse yet I know people will celebrate this change. I can sense it in the winds using my fifth eye and cryptic metaphysical dream space ancestral blood memory.

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