You know what’s even worse than the multitude Gunners? It’s when 10 armored Ragers spawn and rush you at the same time in Hi-STG.
It does not always happen, but when it does, it’s is game ending unless you have a specific loadout to deal with them.
On the map with the “poop tree”, before the final run to extraction, if you scan in the small room to the left, you will sometimes get Poxwalkers, Crushers and 5-10 Ragers, spawn and charge into the room at the same time, trapping you there, killing you and anyone who tries to help.
Ragers are a really big problem when they are “allowed” to spawn like this.
I can deal with them on my Ogryn, but on my lil’uns, that situation is a death sentence.
I agree with that.
Gunners are pretty easy to deal with.
They are easy to kill and you can pretty easily outmaneuver them, or just hide behind cover for a while.
But large packs of ragers will just come after you until either you or they are dead.
Generally, i do not mind those either, but those large rager groups make clutches pretty difficult with many loadouts, and they can often overrun an unexperienced party (especially when people are lacking the situational awareness to use their grenades).
I see rager spawns as a positive, or I would, if they couldn’t overlap one another in attack chains. I like that we finally have a truely dangerous melee enemy but MAN its a pain when two of them are inside one another and I cannot consistently hit either of them but they can hit me from fifty fathoms away.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Gunners are still spawning in fewer numbers than other elite blobs no?
What the OP described getting hit in the back by a full gunner team sounds to me like the regular patrols that (quite rarely) happen to be full stand-alone gunner groups of 8-12 similar to the Rager+Bulwark patrols or the 12+ Maulers you can run into sometimes.
I would say they have a high ambient spawn rate and a high prevelance in ludicrous patrols. But I don’t usually get big dumps out of horde spawn doors or anything. Usually just 1-2 or so. But its common for a mob of them to get drawn to you when a horde spawns so you can be in a situation where 6 gunners that were ahead of your position get drafted and start raining fire on you while you’re fighting.
One of the things most players don’t know is that a given map is seeded, with semi-randomized spawns built on that seed. So if you get a map with lots of gunners littered around the game is just going to have high concentrations of gunners for the whole run. I discovered this because of my melee solo runs. So if you see like 20 gunners at the start of the map, all game long there’s just going to be big blobs of them. If its scabs it’ll be shooters, if its dreg gunners it’ll be dreg stalkers for lots of the game. Reapers mixed in both cases. An alternative elite density spawn is ragers/bruisers and maulers/bruisers. Both spawn waves of crushers. Then there’s my personal favorite for solo-melee which is shotgunner waves. This spawns a lot of scab stalkers, shotgunners, with occasional nests of bulwarks, maulers and crushers. Its a very close-combat oriented division of ambient elites so its easier to handle solo.
All this is to say there is some kind of mechanic that just literally says “OOOPS ALL GUNNERS” for your ambients and literally just stacks them a mile high that run.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. Maps are generally broken into at least 2 parts (3-4 more likely). The first part can be gunners second might be something else. That said if you see a whole bunch of gunners at the start it’ll most likely go on for a while. Same with shotgunners or a certain type of elite. Even something like Patrol position is based on seed in my experience (just the existence, not the type).
On a side note, I don’t remember seeing “Ogryn map” since patch 13. Those are the most fun IMO although mostly for the novelty.
Maelstrom with scab focus tends to generate a ton. I think the opening room have like 4 separate groups on one of those and we probably killed a good 50 or more that mission alone. I remember deploying a ton of Krak grenades to compensate.
What I was talking about are “normal” maps with very minimal ambient enemies and tons of Crushers and Bulwarks, like a ridiculous amount. I started seeing that after they introduced Comps-Plex and it was tons of fun.
That’s a point I haven’t really thought about. I know on my preacher I have a full set of gunner and sniper resist and my vet has at-least 2 plus toughness bonuses.
The perfect accuracy with no recoil/spread whatsoever has been a long-standing issue with ranged enemies in Darktide since release. It’s… kinda weird how the common enemies armed with stolen weaponry are all super commandos.
Well, to be fair, you could make this argument for the Dreg Units.
The Scabs on the other hand are supposedly trained soldiers of the Moebian 6th, who were turned away from / betrayed Atoma Prime.
But I get what you mean. There is definitely a lot of “cover crates” where you can’t really take cover behind, because the enemies will shoot that one pixel of your head sticking out.
Kinda invalidates the duck and cover / shoot over cover mechanic that is in the game. If you have a too big humanoid character, it’s worthless.
Two days ago i encountered a patrol of 8-10 reapers on a normal heresy mission, so no Hi or anything. At the same time some crushers and maulers came from another direction and some specials were active.
I have never seen that before. Fortunately i could kill most of them with grenades before they started to fire and spread around.
But for a normal heresy mission that was quite unfair imho.
I just finished a run in the map with the sand and hangars full of containers where enemies could shoot at us through the small gaps between the crates.
We could not even see them, they surely could see us.
It is a thing. It’s not an always thing. There being too many gunners overall I would suggest is not up for debate, this seems to be objectively true.
But yes, gunners can silently spawn, seemingly from nowhere, in a large group in nearly a full circle or half circle, and instantly delete toughness before there was any sound.
I think some of the disconnect in this thread might simply be because people haven’t experienced the exact issue.
Spawns out of thin air is a thing since #13 (arguably before, but 100% for sure after), the game not giving a frigg about sound has always been a thing, and seems worse since #13 as well.
This can happen, and it’s not really related to, or about, there being lots of gunners in general.
Pretty much this sums it up.
Lets say in 95% of the situations where omega gunner spawn they are just gunned/meleed down.
But in those 5% other situations the position in which they spawn in creates a instant end of the run without ANY possible player input to change it.
That is by definition not fun, and its not difficult to address this.
Not only gunners should be specials - and give them back 70% stagger its not a problem when there is one or two of them, not 19.
AND/OR
Someone here mentioned they should start very inaccurate and then get more precise as they shoot + once they get out of LoS they stop shooting and reposition.
So you guys mean Gunner Patrols? So this is a Patrol Spawn problem then and not a gunner problem?
Personally never had an issue with any number of gunners including those rare full patrols. The closest was on one of the desert maps there were 20 normal shooters standing in the same exact spot (like it was just one guy) and instantly deleted me, but even that was pre-13.
Nope.
Try that same map with gunners laser focus on you from every side of the hangar with a horde spawning behind you.
Gunners you can’t even see, but they all see you and shoot you with laser precision from the other side of the hangar.
Oh, and there’s no reason to move, because their torrent of bullets follow you around as if it was attached to you.
Not to be rude, but that sounds like a skill issue. There are only a handful of encounters where rushing gunners is hard and it doesn’t make the encounter much harder, it just takes a bit longer, otherwise, you can just slide around, suppress, and mop them up with melee, grenades, or ranged weapons.
Hanger on desert maps is one of the “take it slow” encounters. Rushing in and letting yourself get surrounded by gunners, or being unable to reposition when the horde spawns is just bad positioning/tactics.
Far-away gunners deal minimal damage anyway, but you can always use gunner resistance on curio if you want.