Outdated enemy design is the main fundamental problem, but there are some more. Gigapost

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

Said it already in several threads. But will make it as a separated topic as a summary of my thoughts. Haven’t played DT for ~4 monthes, tried new update. CDR nerf made game bit healthier, but balance still sucks cause of fundamental design problems.

Enemies.

The game can’t kill a player without spawning 40 000 crushers with 40 000 HP/armor pool. And the same ammount of specials.

Enemy design doesn’t match player’s gameplay. We are playing a modern action FPS with slides, vaulting, cracked movespeed, long ass dodges. Enemies are playig V2 still. Devastating range weapons play their role aswell.

You end up increasing elites armor/HP, 90% of the arsenal become worthless. Then you slap rend on everything, homogenizing weapons and killing any identity.

  • Regular enemies need to become a treat. Dying from swarms should be a thing. Hordeclearer should be a dedicated specialization you want to invest your build in, not just “i’ll take flamer/purgatus with infinite cleave and will spam it”. Increase their attack speed and movespeed, damage, corruption, etc, anything but HP.

  • Non-armored enemies should be a bit mor of another type of treat, instead of just a low level treat.

  • The most important thing enemies need is a proper mechanics. For example, instead of crusher glows red it should perform enrage animation, roar, helmet lenses glow red and the charge/gain increased movespeed, etc. Things should be meaningfull, telegraphed and countered by player’s mechanics. Like if enemy can regenerate, burning should counter and stop it.

  • New enemies. Plaguebearers elites that puke and regenerate like the Bile Troll from V2. Enemy psyker/witch can cast heals, protection bubbles, cursed areas, etc.

Fighting blob of 10 damagespounge maulers isn’t fun. Fighting 6 human sized elites with each pair having different pool of moves and abilities wich can synergise and create dynamic situations is much better expirience.

Mobility.

It’s too strong. Enemeis can’t counter it. It asks no investements and it’s devaluating roles and abilities.

Specialized frontliner or stealth infiltrator, be it zealot/ogryn with charge or vet/zealot with invis. They are loosing their value, cause even if i run a heavy weapon like bolter or plasma i can just spam slide towards a gunners blob and lock them in melee.

My build doesn’t matter in this regards cause it’s about spaming slide wich can be performed with range focused build just as with run and gun and so it makes so many things meaningless.

Why would i run lasgun, autogun or shotgun in this case? Considering that already has been said about armored elites is the main treat (aside from trapper). You will end up slaping rend on every weapon, buffing armor pen and weakspot damage. Because you don’t have dedicated roles and can’t kill players but with armored elites only.

Ranged enemies can’t zone you out even if you have no any specialized ability.

And like, why shotgunners swap on melee even, if they don’t need to reload?

  • Slide spam should be gone. Slide either need to have limit counter, like dodges. Or use stamina, wich will make stamina curios and +stamina perks more valuable. Plus there should be more sources to increase stamina/buff existing ones.

  • Locking range enemies in melee should be prerogative for a dedicated frontliner/infiltrator builds. It should be much much harder to perform if you haven’t invested in mobility and melee but in range.

Dodge is way too forgiving. Block and shove barely have any place. Melee gameplay is heavily on offensive side wich leades to spam mouse button to win. Generaly high attack speed probably plays its role here aswell.

So swarming enemeis barely can touch you, if it’s not a backstab. Dodge needs some nerfs (except weapons that already have crappy dodge distance). And as already was said regular enemies need attack or/and movespeed buffs. Maybe their ability to track you aswell.

Attrition element

Doesn’t exist. Mainly cause of how toughness works. But i didn’t think about it a lot. It’s just the thing i’ve noticed. In L4D, or V2, you are loosing your effective HP pool slowly. Pills, THP. Those mechanics force you to be fast/aggressive but cautious at the same time. Your effective health is ticking out the more you make mistakes. So you either need to move faster through the map, or farm THP, but at the same time there is less room for mistakes. It’s a snowball system.

In DT corruption is suppose to take the role of attrition element i suppose. But it doesn’t work rly. We have planty of tools to remove it easely. In DT you die only with sudden spikes. Your team can run the whole map flawless and then one mistake and half of the team are knocked. Wich is fun, and hardcore cause git gut and do no mistakes. But it’s the only way the game kills you, wich feels like a weird rollercoaster.

That’s my couch game designer TED talk, see ya in 4 monthes again, when FS will drop something worth to check.

2

I kinda disagree but agree.

List of things you are wrong about in my opinion:

Not all enemies are need to be a threat. Chaff mobs exist to be meatshield for others, more dangerous ones and nothing more. If you ignore them - you’re screwed up already. But if you are busy with them - you can’t really deal with more dangerous ones.

They already are. Maniac ragers. Leave others as low level threat because it makes sense.

True but not true. You can’t outrun hordes without investment and proper weapon(Or i’d like to see you take power sword on vet and try). Even in Vermintide you are(Or, at least, were) able to ignore everyone and rush to the end of a mission. Even some speedrun challenges required this. I don’t think this is really a problem.

They kinda can. Rarely but it happends when games spawns a firing squad of gunners over open place during horde, locking people to the cover sicen they can’t shoor gunners back because… The horde. But yeah, enemy AI needs some tinkering to become ‘smarter’. Even though i realize how silly it may sound.

Nope. just nope. That’s a mechanic that came from the very TTRPG rulebooks. I don’t see anything wrong with it. I’d suggest to make it harder to players to shoot in melee but it will only kill ranged weapons which already are barely alive as whole weapon class.

Kinda true, but not really a problem, i think. I’d say that issues ios that block aren’t worth tobe used. They are too risky. Add more talents for block cost reduction or something else - than it might be a good ides.

Except we have kerillian who can literally regenerate HP and you gain temporary Hp for every kill, which is essentially same thing but stronger than current DT toughness. I don’t really see a problem with toguhness. It allows you to take singe strike with no health damage while all following ones will ship your HP wearing you out. So it kinda present.

3

This reflects my own thoughts regarding this post very well. I appreciate you for responding to everything because I didn’t really have the mental energy to do so myself. There’s a lot in the main post that I only kinda agree with. A lot of it feels contingently true if true at all.

  • I don’t think swarms need to be more dangerous, but I do think they should be more common. I miss when sleeping hoards would spawn on more than Lights Out modified missions. And I do think the name needs more in depth enemy mechanics and new enemy types who can bring their own modifications to the hoard instead of just constantly boosting enemy health/armor.

  • In a game where so many enemies can shoot at you, movement should be powerful at base. This isnt Vermintide 2. But I do want enemies to be more capable of dealing w/ players who stay out in the open for too long. And instead of gunner keeping you down in cover, they should move around to try and to get a better shot on you.

  • Dodging being strong isn’t the problem but as you pointed out, it’s that blocking has a far less comparable value. Weapons w/ Shields are great for it, but to your point, there should be more blessings and talents that give value to it. We’re starting to see some of that, but the power you gain from it is far less consistent and convenient, on top of inherently being reactive instead of proactive. Unless that reactive power is considerably strong, the proactive power of not being where the attack is will always be far more appealing. Especially considering that dodging doesn’t take stamina (and prob shouldn’t ever start needing it). I’d much rather get dedicated blocking bars, similar to the dodge bar, and have both of them eat away at your stamina when they’re depleted. Maybe they only recharging when your stamina fully recharges.

These are my own little addendums to much of what you already stated. This pose was an interesting read and I think your response was well thought out and concise.

4

Or, now hear me out, let the enemies slide spam too so we can see how silly it really is.

5

Sure, but what’s the real difference between poxwalkers and groaners? You can remove one of them from the game and noone will notice. Is there big difference between scab and dreg bruiser? They are both just a bit tougher groaners.

You need some enemies you can farm for toughness with some reliability. But remove all specials and elites, and the rest of the enemies pool can barely do a thing even if you run offmeta mediocre stuff.

It’s not about outrunning hordes. But more about charging into a ranged mobs blob. The effort it takes isn’t that different be you playing knife zealot, or power sword vet. You just spam slide and that’s it. And just picking knife or DS, isn’t rly an investement.

They were able to do it when there was stagger on shots. It was awefull being stunlocked by gunners and gladly FS removed it, but the reason this mechanic was there is exactly because ranged can’t stop you from the mindless slide spam. Now the way game is trying to zone you out is with gazzilions of specials.

All regular guns will either stay trash cause they bring no specialization or end up having rend and everything will be homogenized.

Uh, no? Game balance is pushed to the direction if you are able to deal with anti armor, then you are able to deal with rest of the enemy pool. How many weapons are good against crusher but suddenly bad against maniacs? Don’t you find it funny you bring ONE enemy as an example?

They aren’t. They are useless, cause regular enemies like bruiser isn’t a treat you need to pay attention. You kill all non-elites by spamming dodge and attacks. Or they are dead cause of flamer/purgatus/frags. There is no defensive phase in melee.

Kerillian isn’t even OP. Grail Knight with his full team regeneration is for sure. That crap should have been nuked day 1. And i’m not talking about how things degraded with time, but how toughness as an idea is much worse then THP.

This one, it’s the reason regular enemies struggles to be a treat and the game spawns so many specials.

If you choose to play as melee frontliner, you have abilities, nades and dedicated weapons like shield for that.

Again, if you will be able to perform slide spam with ranged leaning playstyle as affective as with breacher-shotgunner fantasy you will never have a reason to run precise weapons.

Because dodging while aiming heads and swaping back to defend yourself against rager will be always suboptimal to the slide spam giving you almost invulnerability.

Cover phase doesn’t exist, because you don’t need it with how there is always busted toughness refill. The only cover you use in this game is a bubble in high level Havocs.

But Havoc itself is a bandaid they slaped above auric instead of fixing core problems like weapons and playstyled have no dedicated roles and specializations. They are already keep adding rend or just armor penetration on everything for a long time, and they will keep doing that. Dumbification is the way.

6

I’ve been playing since launch, and I remember a good example: an ogryn’s box, which at the time served as a “rock” (exploding only when extra skill equipped and hitting armor), was considered honorably spent on instantly killing mutant. There were ~five of mutants per mission, and they were considered “big threat”, not an just another special, dying by one hit of knife.
However, while players have improved in quality since then, the enemies have only increased in quantity.
I think the game’s identity has simply shifted from a team-oriented “survival”, where the main goal is victory → to an arcade action, where the main goal is simply to have fun during battles (although some abilities and even classes can over-trivialize this). In my experience, the win rate with aurics is 90%, unless that sudden event occurs where the entire team falls at the same time, most often by being blown off the edge by barrels.
To the question about the difference between groaners and zombies, the latter deal “purple damage” and have a bit of durability. But the difference is actually almost imperceptible. Overall, I think there are too few units with infested-type armor in the game, and they could serve as a perfect “sponges” with immunity to DoT damage. yes, they can still be burned, but not instantly - forcing players to work with their hands

7

Well, because all the enemies that remain are exactly the ones who should be a meatshiled for specials and elites.

Yeah, i remember this. and i unironically want this back, because back then veteran had a purpose. A role. Without vet taking down riflemen - melee classes were having a hard time.

That’s true but not my point. You wanted unarmored enemies to be a threat - i named ones that are\can be a threat. Not that regular ones should become a threat.

Well, they aren’t useless on arbites… But risky. And same with other classes - you can block. I do sometimes. But there’s no point because if you hold it for long - horde will delete your stamina bar. You can’t be an ironbreaker with shirld and -100% block cost as i was in good old days of VT2.

I don’t say she’s OP. I just same that mechanics that VT2 has, like ammo regen, Temporal HP, HP regen, ammo regen are much more powerful that anything we have in DT expect for gold toughness and arby’s dog.

But again, should they be a threat? I doubt it. They are needed to limit your mobility and focus, making you more vulnerable to specialists.

If i haven’t mentioned something it is because i either agree or don’t have anything to say.

8

I’m gonna be a hypocrite here because while I agree in my lizard brain, the little bonobo at the control panel loves to slide around like a maniac.

I would certainly be in favour of more deliberate slides that cost resources if it also came with a gunner re-work that made it so the peashooters weren’t the biggest consistent threat and cover was kind of a thing.

That is precisely their threat…. Unless you are strong like Ogryn and make punies fly (please don’t ever take this away from me)

+1 for more chaff enemies since imo they’re always fun to kill. If it’s true that we had to tone down hordes to support Xbox then my heart is yet again broken :sob:

This is such an interesting point which imo can be traced through since beta. And it’s a shame because as a co-op lover this is has been a letdown. You’re no longer expected to work together as a team to bring down a common threat so much as to pull your weight as a player to keep up with everything the game throws at you.

It’s a game for generalists that excel at every situation, enemy type, and spawn point. Rather than a co-op target-priority cover-your-squad-and-they-cover-you focus game. When I found out about coherency in beta I was thrilled — it seemed like such a unique and interesting way to keep a squad together.

But then it never really went anywhere, and people seemed to mainly want to solo everything with any weapon, and now we are hesitant to even bring back carapace as a threat because of the bizarre state of balance.

I also maintain that altering the quickplay dynamic into a loadout screen would do wonders for cooperation (oh that guys got a bolter I’ll go flamer). A lobby browser, even!!

9

Based. It also gave TWBS Zealot a unique enabling tool for diving gunner lines, which was clearly a pretty core part of their original intended role in a party. Now everyone does it pretty freely (not talking about Havoc gunners).

I do miss when a good backline Vet and/or competent aggressive Zealot were huge boons to have for a team.

As rough as early Darktide was it’s hard not to feel like we’ve gone backwards on many aspects. Classes felt more like they had actual roles on the team, I miss clenching my cheeks when a group of shotgunners came round a corner just far enough away to be a genuine threat to dive, I miss seeing the team throw everything at small Ogryn elite groups and still spend a while putting them down.

10

Well if stagger on shots was the only thing that kept sharpshooter playstyle role viable then it was a crutch.

But in reality it’s that you can run big gun like plasma and bolter, have a dcent toughness/hp pool, refill it with VoC, and also be extremely mobile after #13 patch and all reworks.

Any mechanics that removes control from a player without being properly telegraphed and not having sound cue is awefull trash and a crutch. That’s the difference between trapper and regular shots. It’s impossible for all barrages incoming from 360 to be seen and heard.

The healthy way to bring purpose and specialization back is to decrease potency of builds against treats they are not investing talents, curios, etc. to deal with.

It will be fun till they have low HP and limbs and bodies fly around. They are also toughness farm source. But their offensive possibility needs some buff. It’s the matter of how much.

But the game needs that posibility to punish you if you fked up your positioning or melee swing rotation, block, ammo managing, etc.

We have 2 types of swarm enemies with different types of armor - infested and unarmored for no real meaning. Same with dreg or scab bruisier. The diffrence in their moveset and AI is whatever.

Perhaps this is so cause in DT we don’t have horde enemies with shields and so there is barely any pressure.

Well cause fun can be unhealthy, you just need a proper dose.

11

This is what bothers me the most. Everything is just uber-fast. Cover is pointless and you’re incentivized to run n’ gun.

12

6 second cooldown on slide.

13

Yeah it’s a good point, although there is always the mighty stack of poxwalkers that are able to chunk you to nothing with consecutive hits if you’re not careful.

I wonder if stagger needs a cleave value (something tells me it does? So…. Adjusted) so that coordinated/dedicated CC plays a more substantial role. I’m pro-scoreboard because my ego is pea-sized (but what a beautiful pea) but maybe the intent was to incentivise enabling others to kill rather than doing it all yourself. I’ll give an example:

If there’s a pox hound modifier bearing down on my mates, I love to hole up in an advantageous choke and just push as needed. I get no hound kills but so much satisfaction. That’s a lot of what I want out of this game.

Another common complaint is shooter classes having poxwalkers on their tail all the time. If it wasn’t so effective to slide on up to gunners then maybe it would be more worthwhile to be on melee overwatch so they can ranged overwatch.

I know these concepts are extremely difficult to nail in a multiplayer game, but even playing with groups you just aren’t that incentivised to provide that level of co-op when you can just fly around and blender everything.

14

This is also why they did stopgap things like ragers being undodgeable and the like. Player move speed simply needs to go down. The reason the enemies in VT2 are more threatening in melee is because you have to melee them. You’re not going to turn around from a bunch of berserkers in that game.

Or make the enemies tail you faster, either way the feeling of them being on your heels should always be present for them to actually matter. Otherwise they’re glorified bollards on an obstacle course.

15

Funnily enough I kinda view plasma gunners as an evolution of balance intended at hard-stopping hyper-mobile players because they’re moderately tanky, headshot-resistant, and at release would obliterate you with essentially no warning, potentially ensuring a death if your team wasn’t there to back you up.

Aka the perfect tool to punish Sonic The Hedgehog cosplayers.

Then again I really prefer the ‘tactical’ feel/cosplay where you move carefully and eliminate targets as a group so my perspective may be a lil biased.

Please no, them magically speeding up once you weren’t looking at them was annoying as all get out.

Pretty much how I feel. There was a brief shining moment where they buffed shooters and it basically forced melee classes to buddy up with shooting guys who could quickly and efficiently eliminate said shooters and I did enjoy it (though I noted it was un-recorded in patch notes and was unhappy about that). Then they basically reverted it.

16

yep, i noted somewhere else (although before the rework) that exec stance was rarely useful, because seconds after activating it you have enemies in your face and forced to melee.

17

The problem with hordes is lack of moving attacks and attack speed to keep up with the player. Darktide has a lot more spammable options to manage hordes in much faster succession, from dodge spam to push spam to insanely high cleave weapons with no stagger drop off. This isn’t even including that almost all abilities in the game restore toughness now, making small hits not matter at all, and numerous abilities and blitz options are high stagger aoe.

Groaners and poxwalkers also lack a lot of range to their melee attacks, and often whiff to players just standing still or walking backwards ever so slightly. There’s also very little difference between horde chaff other than armor values and hp, which often don’t matter since their health pools aren’t high enough to make this distinction worth thinking about.

Then you have the problem of cleave mass being insanely high for players now. All classes but vet can take nodes that increase cleave, a lot of weapons have cleave blessings, and there are a ton of available aoe options.

There’s a few ways to fix all of this. Firstly, add new and improved attack animations for enemies across the board, largely focusing on making them animate faster and perform more reliable attack animations such as pokes or thrusts instead of swings. Poxwalkers and dregs should leap carelessly towards you while groaners and scabs should be dashing.

Secondly, to differentiate between horde enemies you give them different weapons. Dregs are vicious cultists losing most of their minds to the rot god, so a mace fits them, but why not have ritual daggers or swords with faster animations as well? Scabs are supposed to be sturdy and regimented soldiers, why not give them spears/two-handed weaponry that move a little slow but have greater reach? Both of these types of enemies should be able to catch players more often during kites with either their pokes or superior speed, and allowing the rest of the horde to catch up and actually kill them.

Finally, add thicker enemies to both sides. Dreg could have maniac armor horde that’s able to take more ranged damage and have higher hit mass and appear in great numbers among the horde. Scab should get a shielded horde that absorbs hits and requires opening them up to deal damage, but have appear in medium numbers in horde.

The problem with elites in darktide is one faction is 80% finished and the other faction is 40% finished but it’s all filled with copies of the other faction’s work with little to no variation. Dreg has been sore on variation for a very long time, with only 1 melee elite variant, and 2 ranged variants compared to scab’s 2 melee and 3 ranged variants (why did scabs get another shotgunner type enemy when they already have one? Who knows…), and only 2 faction specific specialists compared to scab’s 4. If you’re wondering why every modifier in the game is designed around scabs, this is probably it.

Both factions are missing high hitmass horde variants, and elites designed to stop or slow player progressions beyond a wall of shooters. Dreg is missing a melee elite similar to mauler, a trapper and sniper specialist, and dreg captain variation.

To slow down player progression, we probably need some sort of sergeant variation that takes command of squads. A dreg sergeant, for instance, could order nearby enemies to stim up with the modifiers from the current havoc stim modifier. This would make all nearby enemies sturdier or harder hitting, and therefore more punishing to players pushing directly into them. A scab sergeant, instead, could execute a nearby enemy and spread one of the other havoc buffs to everyone, such as max stacks of rampage, or make nearby enemies final toll. Add some behaviors that makes the enemies bunch up around them or they move towards and stay behind big groups, and give them fancy hats and some sort of las pistol, revolver, or bolt pistol weapon to shoot, and you have an interesting enemy type that forces players to take them down.

Another elite type to slow players down would be shielded elites and improving the bulwark. Ogryn enemies are already designed as “x but better in every way” as is, so having a scab/dreg bulwark doesn’t ruin the already amazing enemy design of the ogryn bulwark, especially when spammed in large groups. A scab bulwark would be slower and reliant on his weapon options to get at the player, performing shielded charges to knock them backwards or break their line. A dreg bulwark would be faster and more unconventional, having kick attacks to knock players away and performing charging thrust attacks to hit the player. Both should have some kind of very hard tracking attack that can stagger players even if they dodge. You should be able to break their guard by hitting their shield with enough stagger to enter medium stagger state.

Dregs could just copy-paste from vt2 chaos mauler and be completely fine, as long as the magic sweep attack can still hit and kill multiple players really fast, but I’d like for it to be a different direction of an elite. While scabs focus is, and should be, tough, and hard hitting enemies that will kill you, dregs should be incredibly focused on being fast, tying you down, and swarming you. So I think instead of a dreg mauler, it should be a dreg flagellant holding a flail made of bells. He swings it around in the air, the bells chime, and then he unleashes a fast tracking multi-hit combo that ends with a loud clanging slam to the ground. The goal of the enemy would be to force the player to block the first few swings, then dodge the final slam. This synergizes well with the dreg rager, whose goal is to force the player into a constant dodge state, and thus leads to greater resource exhaustion.

For dreg specialists, I think they could just use a psyker variant. The psyker could function as a highly mobile sniper, breaking out of cover to grab a player with a rapid brainburst that applies a stacking debuff to player mobility. Getting close to the psyker or repeated stunlocks could force them to teleport away from the player. At maximum debuff stacks, the psyker could attempt to disable the player with a dodgeable attack, and if they miss they enter a stun state for a period of time before teleporting and repositioning, repeating until either the stacks wear off or the psyker is killed.

Finally, the problem with captains. The dreg captain iirc only has the crusher/shotgun combo while scab captain has crusher/sword and shotgun/pistol variants. I think they should be more unique from one another in terms of actual combinations and attack patterns, as well as more variation.

Firstly, remove the bubble knockback and replace it with faction-coded attacks instead. It’s ridiculous looking and buggy and this idea would be more thematic. Scab can throw grenades off his bandolier to knock players back and create a firestorm around him looking like a badass while the dreg captain could release pox gas to buff himself and nearby allies like the stank lord he is.

Secondly, adding more unique weapons. Dreg captain should be able to bring double axes instead of a melee and ranged weapon. With this, he chucks the axes out at players then charges melee twin speed towards whoever/whatever he ends up hitting twice to pick his axes up, then goes back to performing melee combos for a bit of time. He should also be able to leap towards players, and get a rager style tracking combo that eventually slows down and leaves him vulnerable. Scab captain should be able to take a chainsword that applies a bleed debuff to whoever he hits, reducing their toughness overtime, toughness replenishment, and mobility. A dreg captain could have a heavy stubber or a bolter while the scab captain gets a hotshot volley gun or bolter, both with some more utility and counterplay to players who rush them in their ranged state such as kicks or dodging/rolling away from the player while still shooting.

Finally, to further differentiate them, make the dreg captain’s shield and health an inverse of the scab captain’s shield and health mechanic. As the dreg captain takes damage, a shield bar slowly builds up, and once it finishes, the captain takes a knee, and pops the shield, building up a percentage of the health he’s lost until the shield is destroyed. It would function just like troll from vt2, with forced phases and no attacks being able to directly oneshot/ fastly kill them as you currently can with stealthlot and other builds. The scab captain should instead enter a light stagger state on shield destruction, allowing them to recover faster and get immediately back to swinging.

The goal of the changes I personally want is to make enemies faster and more active threats and increasing faction variation enough that it actually feels like two different factions. Player mobility definitely needs a nerf, but if it’s going to remain this way, enemies need ways to interrupt or catch up to player mobility to make up for it. Making the dreg faction more designed around this (buffing themselves to be faster/stronger, debuffing players to be slower, and nonstop attacking and chip attacks, etc.) would place them as the proper threats in line with their intended design philosophy as a more numerous swarming threat to scab’s slower, bulkier and damaging threat. To deal with scabs, it requires consistency and being methodical, while dregs will require a faster, more reactive playstyle.

18

this just reminded me of a lan party back in 2002 when we overheard a brief voice com of the counterstrike “retirees” a couple rows apart from us

:” ich will dass ihr ruhig und planvoll vorgeht”

while moving at a snails pace.

and us almost breaking into laughter spilling our energy drinks flying through the quake maps faster than they could even perceive.

:rofl:

does the sliding look weird?yep.

would prefer an upright dash animation over it BUT the moment the speed is out of the game, I’m back to quake live and pop “pervitin” until I drop if necessary to compete :smile:

darktide is that one game that offers flickshot performance and rewards it without self chastising myself if my k/d was 0.001% worse than yesterday.

a nice echo of decades past when pirx and i, by ourselves, demolished and emptied whole lan parties and tournaments.

and while the reflexes degraded to some degree, that hunger for dopamine stays the same.

so making darktide a “tactical” game would be a 100% turnaround from how the game plays since release.

besides, most of random teammates are arse, lets be honest.

forcing to “rely” on “day-shift hans&klaus” instead of being able to solo if necessary isn’t my idea of “fun”.

quite the opposite, if there’s others than myself to blame for a whipe, resentment and anger would be back to early 2000’s gaming, along with the “vocabulary”

as of now auric maelstrom is in a good spot to clutch, carry, solo and basically say “move aside and let daddy do it”

movement and reflexes play a vital role in this and make clutches look awesome instead of a stand off slug fest.

as for “get a premade”, nope thx very few people would be on our wavelength and having to watch every word you cuss and scream when :poop: hits the fan isn’t my idea of relaxed playing.

“wen jeder an sich selber denkt ist an jeden gedacht”

is a pretty fitting german proverb, provided everyone is on the same skill level and able to shape an engagement autonomously.

one can play with one another without being dependant on each other hence not wanting to strangle the life out of someone if he fks up :laughing:

so yeah, movement speed gives autonomy to players to free themselves from inept randoms, which is a good thing.

19

In higher difficulties, there are Moebians and the tentacled Poxwalkers now. Both of them have increased health, with moebians having more armor hit mass, and both of them have a really brutal backstab attack.

The abundance of cleave has unfortunately made them less of a threat but they still are there, and are noticable especially when one dodge catches you.

20

I personally have not noticed either of them. unless they’ve been super buffed from their introduction as an entire modifier, having like one or two of them in a horde doesn’t do much. more health, more hitmass, and being bigger in general would help them in normal hordes, I rather focus for scab and dreg hordes to have more variation than just “normal horde except armor type”.