The buffs in patch 14 weren’t enough, they were a joke compared to the level where players were at after patch 13. And FS then went with “spam elites like horde mobs, that’s difficult, right?”
Havoc’s main issue is the hidden modifiers, and said modifiers do stuff like add extra hit mass to enemies, which just f*cks many weapon because they no longer can cleave anything. Same goes for damage because Havoc also buffs enemy health, even for hordes, so it makes many weapons just feel like you hitting a poxwalker with a pool noodle in havoc.
But these hidden modifiers are NOT an issue outside of havoc, only thing that I ask is to give enemies more base health on regular difficulties and aurics. But don’t touch hit mass.
Also here’s the unsavory truth, havoc is a terrible and badly designed gamemode that should NEVER be the thing that Darktide is balanced around. Havoc IS and should just be left as a CBT-gamemode for tryhardest tryhards and masochists who want to slam their head into a brick wall. It is a challenge mode and should be treated as such.
For God’s sake FS already had a solution to this in VT, Weaves had completely different progression and it was separate from the main game, meaning they could change the balance around as much as they wanted without it effecting rest of the game.
Also big reason why many weapons underperform now is because FS buffed elite spawns to high heaven, which is the main reason why people are running DS, etc. When the AI decides to spawn 20 crushers at once, your only solution in that moment is either stab them with the toothpick or pullout bolter/plasmagun. Autoguns are USELESS against most elites.
No one is bringing any of the autoguns or IF lasguns, is because only niche they have left is killing trash mobs like groaners and poxwalkers, ie. objectively the least threathening enemies in the game. And even then they are outperformed in that niche by many things.
Helbore exists, but lets be honest, currently it is arguably just a sh*ttier plasmagun but without the heat mechanic. So there is no reason to use it besides for roleplay/fun.
I believe that they should rework veteran keystones into something fun and bring back their idea of weapon specialization, but only for ballistic talents. So you could choose between laser and ballistic. Yes, PG would not have any specific talent… but I think the weapon can survive that
Autoguns are fun to play… the infantry can be good. The MKV has its utility. The other two marks have no identity and are just weak. One of them is a little more precise at long range, but that’s all.
Something has to be done to make them different and, at the same time, balanced against the MKV.
Headhunters (vigilant), the bot weapon… terrible, and that’s not a compliment. I tested them, they are good at what they are supposed to be good at. Really. The VII can one-shot close to everything… if you can manage to land a critical. But compared to the Helbore… it is not a good weapon.
The burst versions are just bad.
Braced auto, all are good.
The problem is more the monstrous Boltgun. I would say that, yes, all autoguns should be buffed if they don’t feel the need to nerf anything. And to be precise, I’m not asking for a nerf to the Boltgun’s damage… but for some kind of drawback. But it won’t happen… so let’s buff everything and introduce a 6th difficulty… (no Havoc is not this difficulty, but they could go to 50 havoc levels)
Like @dannylew8299 I’m not a huge fan of this approach. A lot of weapons, especially the slower ones, live and die off breakpoints.
You called the patch 14 elite changes a joke, but they took T Hammer from pretty damn good in patch 13 to pretty awful in patch 14 by ruining most of its one shot breakpoints.
Then we waited a very long time for that weapon to be adjusted upwards to catch up. If you increase health pools you now need to look at breakpoints for basically every mid to low tier weapon (and probably some above average weapons too, like Chaxe that would become massively worse if it lost a bunch of one shot breakpoints) and adjust as needed. I think it creates a lot more work than targeted nerfs to talent trees and the upper third or so of weapons.
Agreed that I would like to get to a point with less elite spam and more hordes though. I’m just not convinced enemy health adjustments are the way to get there.
I agree with this and try myself to be cognizant of not falling into the “F it, we ball” mentality to class balance.
On the other hand I do think it’s pretty legitimate for class loyalists to be peaved about their character being held to a high standard of honesty while surrounded by cheaters.
I hear what you’re saying that there may be different balance teams for different classes, and that could make a holistic balance approach difficulty. But also maybe those groups just need to, like, talk to each other more? Set out some agreed standards for how different mechanics should be implemented? Like mutually agree CDR needs to avoid flat or % reductions with no cooldown between procs.
Or have a group coordinating these teams that get final say on balance adjustments to make sure things stay within certain parameters. I dunno I’m not the game dev, but if you can’t manage some semblance of class parity something is clearly going seriously wrong.
And not just that, but give certain Elites unique traits in Auric, found already in Havoc. Crushers, Ragers and Maulers would be significantly more dangerous if they were immune to stuns, had faster attacks, and did more damage below 50% health.
Shotgunners and Bulwarks becoming slightly tankier and more resistant to stagger upon witnessing allies die would also shake up how players approach engagements.
These are just a few examples of attribute modifiers that could be selectively implemented to make Elites more engaging to fight without just a boring health increase.
They were a joke in the context of the entire game.
The amount of power players got in patch 13 is massive and patch 14 didn’t do enough for most of it.
Yes, Thammers and many weapons like autoguns got f*cked sideways but it doesn’t change the fact that most weapons didn’t feel the change of patch 14.
The easy solution here is to both buff the enemies and then the weapons. Like with Thammers making sure that Thammers can 1 shot a crusher to the head on a heavy power attack. And it needs to be like this EVEN after the enemy health buffs.
In general enemies need to be more dangerous, ie. do more damage or have whatever effects, but that danger doesn’t mean much when you can instantly splatter the enemies onto the wall without trying.
So you acknowledge that enemy health changes you consider too minor to reign in power player still had pretty devastating effects on a lot of weapons, but don’t seem to give any counter to me pointing out how much balancing work would be created by your suggested greater enemy health buffs.
I maintain my stance here, your approach creates an unreasonable amount of balancing work, especially if we consider Fatshark’s pace of updates. Nerf the upper echelon first, address outlier talents, address overtuned blessings (eg uncanny, confident strike etc), then re-evaluate. Buff truly underperforming things, eg vigilante autoguns, infantry Las. Then reevaluate the game state from there. Ideally if upper tier of power is brought down enough, elite spawns can be tuned down, horde density tuned up.
Not pretending that isn’t also a lot of work, but at least it doesn’t require FS to go through and retune damage in view of breakpoints for effectively every single weapon in the game.
From the lowest dungeon to the highest peak, I fought him, the Adoring fan of Valenwood. Until at last, I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin upon the mountainside.
The health changes were minor, yes, because they didn’t buff the enemies enough to where the health changes would effect all weapons. AND it wasn’t enough of a counter balance the power that the skilltrees provided to the players.
Patch 13 boosted player power massively and buffed all of the already strong weapons to be super good, the skilltrees also had a side effect where even bad weapons were buffed to be actually usable.
Patch 14 was meant to address this new player power problem (mainly OP weapons and abilities like VoC), but it obviously did not do that because players are still very strong, because Fatshark didn’t buff the enemy stats enough back then.
OP weapons weren’t effected by stat changes because they are just that powerful, however already bad underperforming weapons were effected.
Remember, the underperforming weapons only became good, because the power from the skilltrees compensated for them. But when patch 14 hit, it then reversed this but only for the previously weak weapons and made them weak again.
That’s what I’m getting at here.
And yeah it is kind of unreasonable, but at the same I don’t really give a damn.
Because expecting them fix something that should have NEVER been broken in the first place is not unreasonable.
Even then all of this only exists because the devs, by their own hands, have dug their own grave with every patch they’ve released, while without actually addressing any of the damn problems (like UP weapons, OP weapons, OP abilities, enemy spawn rates and how that effects the meta, etc. the list is endless)
Which then has snowballed into this sh*tshow we are in now.
I’m at a similar point when I think about it. A lot of the powercreep feels borderline irreversible because of how skittish they are about downward regulating things to stop being busted OP. Ngl it feels very unlikely they’ll address balance in a major way going forward with how much they’re dragging their heels on the very OP very obvious outliers already. The big issue is them powercreeping it so hard to begin with.
I know people always say “just buff it then go from there, can always nerf it a bit after” for e.g. the Ogryn tree. But the missing factor here is that Fatshark just won’t nerf it. They’ll make it busted OP then not nerf it because it’d be bad PR. They should really, REALLY think their balancing over more before making something busted strong
In other words pretty much any potential fix is already in the realm of fantasy anyways, might aswell fantasize away
This is true, but I mean look at Ogryn talent tree. We got most of those changes advertised ahead of time and I saw almost nobody point to anything overpowered before it was actually implemented. Foreseeing power level is easier said than done. I really think being quick to respond and make further adjustments is the best answer but unfortunately that’s a pipe dream with Fatshark.
Rememeber before rework land there was “that” one youtuber shiting on changes saying it changes nothing and moast people catch that and ridiculusy parrot his statments.
