What I dislike the most about Havoc is that, despite being advertised as a “challenging gameplay experience”, what actually matters is not player skill but using specific builds and weapons.
whenever a horde appears or a boss shows up, the Psyker immediately deploys a Dome Shield, followed by the Zealot using Chorus. the remaining two players take care of the enemies. once the Chorus ends, the Zealot rapidly triggers critical hits and spams Chorus again. if the Psyker has Smite, they spam it as well, and as soon as the cooldown ends, they deploy the Shield again. while there are alternative strategies, such as having an Ogryn with a shield use Taunt instead of relying on the Shield, the viable builds and weapon choices are essentially fixed.
to me, a truly challenging gameplay experience means that any build or weapon should be viable, and success should ultimately depend on player skill. in other words, player skill should be the most important factor, while builds and weapons should come second.
Very well written and I agree with every point and especially the demotion system and boss trigger mechanics are utter bs.
Currently it feels like totally random if you make regardless of level. Having four boss triggers across all levels doesn’t make sense in terms of “rising difficulty”.
Why not adjust according the level brackets:
[1-10] one trigger
[11-20] two trigger
[21-30] three trigger
[31-40] four trigger
I’m a returning player who stopped for about two years and I see a lot of improvements and really like the idea of Havoc. But in its current state it make me wanna uninstall again.
“I disagree because I like the spawns”… is your reasoning?
You seem to misunderstand the reason for this post, yet you go out of your way to disrespect the critique with your “zzz”, so I’ll answer in a similar manner. There’s a difference between challenge and cheap challenge.
The problem is not that Havoc was made harder than before. The reason for my post is that there’s no balance in how the difficulty is handled. You can have absolutely insane spawns and unfair situations like the ones I described, or you can fly through the mission without much effort which happened to me already several times.
If you play with premades, well, lucky you are. Not everyone has a deadicated group of players. Especially good players. Actually, you’re in the very small minority. Most people play in quickplay, Havoc or not. And since this is a game for everyone, and not a private project, it should be balanced for everyone.
And let’s not be delusional here, playing in premades has always been the easier mode of Darktide. In quickplay you have to adapt to each team, since one can have aggressive playstyle, the others might turtle a lot. People might speak English and listen to callouts, or they might be silent for the entirety of the mission, so you never know what they’ll do. And some people will refuse to play certain builds, so you don’t always have the tools you want, even though I personally always fill the roles we need.
So spawning Daemonhost Ritual on the other side of the door in mid event of Dark Communion, where the bar automatically fills up without a chance to stop it, is a good design and a fair challenge?
Don’t be ridicilous.
Waiting for a favorable RNG in the missions is not a challenge.
And it’s especially stupid when you have demotions in place.
i like the spawns =/= i disagree
that was just a personal opinion
yes havoc it way harder than before, devs said so too in the blog, where they explicitly said they upped the difficulty in havoc, which was a very good change.
that is the beauty of darktide, and the AI director. if it was everytime a cakewalk it would be just disappointing and monotonous, it is good that sometimes, insane spawns can happen to have variety. you can also very easily still win despite bad rng/“insane spawns”.
you can still do that, as i said you can join any party and play, it is a bonus. it is just expected that it will be harder with randoms, so there shouldn’t be any complaints if the game mode is perceived hard, mostly due to the teammates mistakes rather than the mode itself.
i have seen and talked with playtesters, and when they lose, it is uniquely because they did mistakes, if they didn’t mistakes, they wouldn’t have lost in the majority of cases.
not really
you don’t really need vc, i could play with a premade without using vc and doing better than with pubs. also again, you can play with whenever you want, but it is just bad complaining if you lose because people do mistakes. this 100% a game mode oriented for parties, and no most of people actually use discord to find a party for havoc, meeting up and play together.
ridiculous*
you don’t have to, can still win even with unthinkable situations, you can see it in any havoc video, people easily clutching even in the new havoc
if this really happened,
it is a bug, not really bad balance as you says. it’s different.
solution would be adjusting the position of spawns where are within a certain range of the strike team.
that’s the only part i don’t like either, because it doesn’t make sense, either back where only the host lose attempts and other can host once you start to lose or increasing the attempts needed to derank. or remove completely and decide which Havoc number play once unlocked them by winning at least once
Why would I lie about Dark Communion, if I posted the screenshot of mid event?
Also, Hab Dreyko on Havoc 28 and Havoc 34: one has spawn on Twins during the escape where they block the bridge and two people get instantly downed with nowhere to go, and on Havoc 34 there was no Twins spawn at all during the mission. How is this a good difficulty progression from 28 to 34?
you don’t have to, can still win even with unthinkable situations, you can see it in any havoc video, people easily clutching even in the new havoc
You mean videos where people generally post only their wins, and not failed attempts?
I don’t think just because some people do Havoc in true duos or solo Maelstorms they can consistently clear them with every class, every type of build and on every map.
i don’t think i called you a liar or doubt about it.
if this really happened, then it is a bug. it can’t be bad balance if it’s not intended by the devs.
it is something that could be easily fixed, and i think some bug reports have been already sent.
honestly i like this cause different, could try to wait until they stop bodyblock the bridge and just escape to the valkyrie together with the team. sometimes not focusing and escape better, especially when it is close to finish
just to show that, they can run the same havoc/map and have no problem despite the insane spawns. returning to your example in hab dreyko, there could been people that probably did not have any problems in that part.
maybe not bad balance, but bad design, and they could move them ahead once dropping after the mini bridges, or above near to valkyrie, even if at that point people would just escape. i still think though having those there is cool, once you drop you can just sprint to the valkyrie, so i guess they put in that spot to counter that a bit.
Aye, it’s a very directly attritional environment where difficulty is managed largely by damage output and damage soak on the part of both players and enemies, the game just throws more of everything at players, and that kinda of difficulty simply incentivizes and rewards a handful of specific metabuilds while leaving most of the arsenal and talent choices in the dust.
I don’t really care much about Havoc being hard but it would be nice if they also make content for normal quickplay too rather than spending most their time working on super niche game mode.
Sure, this patch also come with Mortis Trial but it’s literally the exact opposite of Havoc where you get so powerful from buffs everything become laughably easy instead.
literally just do the generic update with a new map, more weapons, balance change and it would already please 90% of player, Idk why they have to do some weird gymnastic stuff with all these different game mode.
The game shines the best on the main mission board.
Play one map with one build or class. Then get a new build, play a different map with a new modifier. Maybe finish with ranged only or melee only maelstorm, because they feel unique.
When I entered the game with great joy, you threw five bosses at me and told me how to play. Of course, that’s a letdown. When we’ve done our best and reached the middle of the game, you tell us there are endless waves of zombies mixed with another three or four bosses. Honestly, if you don’t want us to pass, just say so. If you do, then give us a boost in character performance or weapon performance. Also, can you improve our preacher right away? In Havoc, I felt like a big shield-brushing super soldier.
while i understand the frustration, the last thing darktide needs right now is another arms race.
if anything certain talents need to be toned down and havoc re-balanced accordingly.
the moment a skilled player, solely by his physical performance (aim/movement/reflexes) beats havoc no matter the character or build, THEN havoc AND the game is in a good place.
My point still stands. The 2nd season is unbalanced mess. The only well-working modifier is orange enemies. It’s actually fun and makes you want to bring good horde clear. You actually take horde enemies seriously. If Daemonhost rituals worked correctly and always gave you a chance to stop them, I’d enjoy it too, since it allows me to bring Thunder Hammer, which is one of my favorite weapons.
If you don’t get BS spawns like Twins + bosses + elites all at the same time while everyone’s back is against the wall, it’s not much harder than previous season. The only “difficult part” is when map design collides with spawn system. Or stuff like healing captain, healing Bulwarks. For the current version of Havoc to work, they need to set a prevention system where bosses cannot spawn at certain points. Getting bodied by RNG is not challenge.
It’s funny when the game spawns Bulwarks, supposedly to “punish” you, while you couldn’t even progress further, because the area was still crawling with enemies. I once had Bulwark Squads spawning, because we were riding the elevator, and the game thought we were turtling.
hence we spend an obscene amount of time here, yelling at the swedish clouds in hope some fragments of our ideas be heard.
i’m not saying everything put into the idea-pot is gold or even “right” but at least they could set up a couple test servers and see how they play out.
heck i got another rig standing around for 2 years i used as conan exiles server…
im seeing a lot of “havoc is too hard” without addressing the true issue with havoc, because it’s really not too hard. it is designed at higher levels to only be completed by the best players in the game. end of story
no the actual issue with this is the deranking system, rework that mf. it’s current state is akin to stubbing my toe 37 times in 15 seconds before swan diving into an active volcano
yep, can’t expect anyone to hit higher havoc levels if you throw some bs modifiers together and only allow 3 attempts from ALL players total instead of 12 between all 4 players like it used to be
like i wrote in earlier posts, the 3 strike concept is utter crap for many reasons.
one being “gear-fear” of darktide, leading to group disbanding that might have needed 5 triesy or 7 or who gives a how many, if i want to spend my day bashing my head against with that particular combo of players, fatshark should be happy people spending time in their game.
weird concept, i know.
so, in other words, those that only got access to randoms as a filler in their group, need an infinite number of tries to even find the right composition, let alone skilled people.
i mean sure, i can turn this into “falling down” and keep another 2 hostage in my basement so i can play havoc whenever i got a “gaming-time”-slot
but i’d rather not fight it out with a water pistol at the end
Add to this that a bot can move towards a daemonhost ritual and fail it very quickly even when the players are far away or backtrack because they got a boss and a horde.
Twins should be removed from the mode entirely. In my opinion that cheapens and ruins them, like spamming beatstmen in every map.
They are supposed to be a unique and memorable thing.
You want to challenge your players? Make them fight differently than Rinda and Rodin.
Also what’s the point of removing the blight spreads if you use the gas mines?
It doesn’t make sense to have a mode that’s that hard if you don’t change the base content and add a mode that’s easier than the base game.
I want to be able to fight havoc spawns somewhere without havoc mutators and hidden modifiers. Why can’t you add a second auric maelstrom that has just that?
Purple and orange are godawful mutators: crap design with crappier interactions.
DT is a visceral, tactical fast paced melee combat/shooter hybrid. I don’t want MMO design (healers and dps checks) ruining it for me. Whenever you add something that players have to look up and artificially play around you are going against your core gameplay.
Moebian hordes, cranial corruption, the blight spreads are all cool, intuitive additions.
Pus hardened skin, daemonhost rituals, orange and purple aren’t.
I’m undecided about red.
how many, if i want to spend my day bashing my head against with that particular combo of players, fatshark should be happy people spending time in their game.
