Penances Are Just Ruining the Game for me

I’ve been trying to do this final Vet penance after getting all the others done relatively easily. But the make every shot count 100% accuracy 0 ammo penance is incredibly frustrating and feels like I’m both ruining the game for my team and myself.

I’m a pretty decent veteran player, I kill elites very efficiently and make sure my teammates are almost never threatened by anything ranged less than a reaper which also will die in 1-3 shots once I’ve got an angle. I can do Heresy difficulty pretty easily when I have the freedom to play how I like, with a huge ammo capacity lasgun and breathing room to take down elites and manage hordes in melee. I’ve completed every other penance for Veteran and the game was very fun for awhile.

But as I continue to try and force this playstyle, of revolver ammo dumping into bulwarks/bosses because of this penance, doing this cheese because its impossible to do it any other way, not because of an problem with skill but a problem with latency and gameplay. Some shots just don’t register, enemies die as you pull the trigger because there is always a ton happening. These things are never an issue, they never make the game more challenging or difficult to play, unless you’re doing this challenge which leaves you with ammo dumping, and forcing you into a melee only playstyle for most of the match as well as stressing you about landing shots you might not land cause a shotgunner hits you and causes your cursor to fly downwards for some reason.

Its gotten to a point where:

A) I feel stressed about logging on because I know my obsessive brain is gonna wanna complete it. I’ve been looking forward to this game for 2 years and after 6 days I feel tense playing it thinking about these penances.

B) I’m scared for release because if these are the penances for cosmetics I don’t even want! What’s it going to look like for the cosmetics I do?!

C) Its put off friends from playing, because they want cool armor but they aren’t as crazy with their free time or as good at the game so they just can’t.

D) I feel like this is all inevitably intentional, and for pushing MTX cosmetics onto players. That’s what it feels like anyway. Make challenges obtuse and obnoxious so players are discouraged from spending time doing them and just spending money instead.

I really hope the penances get reworked in some capacity because even if I can do them, and I have done almost all of them, and will probably do this one too with a bit of luck. But the stress and exhaustion its causing just feels like an unbalanced trade-off.

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Overall i feel the same about it, like half of them are specific condition which is hard to get unless you are lucky, have team of friends or you ruin the game for other players to get them. And as you said its frustrating that at least for now some cosmetics are tied with this penances with no way to get them other way.

I hope most of them like the one you mentioned “Make every shot count” or one of my “favourite” - “Going out with a bang” will be reworked or at least there is like second condition to them, more grindy but in some kind easier and with visible progression. Like do this rng/luck based stuff or idk “kill 4000 elite enemies with weakspot hit” for “Make every shot count”. For “Going out with a bang” it could be similiar stuff like “Kill 3000 specials with Brain Burst”. Yes it will be tedious and grindy to acomplish but would not be based on things I mentioned earlier. And this 2 are just examples of ones i feel might not be super fun to get.

Still i think rework of the conditions would be better than just adding second optional one, but its just an idea. Even putting them in shop for some crazy amount of in game currency seems like “ok” idea to me, however i suppose it could not be seen as good change.

Anyway I just hope there will be any positive change, because I crave for those cosmetics. :stuck_out_tongue:
Its like only major negative thing for me about the game, rest is great.

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Hmm, today I will become a toxic guardsman because of horribly designed penances. From now on, I will go into quickplay with a revolver on heresy and try to get 100% accuracy while using all my ammo- and if I miss, I will immediately abandon my team for a new match. Completing the penances the way the devs intended.

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i thought as well that the final veteran penance was a little absurd especially because how inaccurate the hip fire is and i already get hit registration issues on headshots like all the time and i would only assume that those would count as a missed shot so no more 100%. and i will say personally this has made me not want to play veteran at all with the issues mentioned here and how lame their feat tree is make the class really hard to want to play over zealot and psyker (ogryn isn’t a real class yet i swear to god lol).

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Well said. As a veteran main, I too hope this changes to something that synergizes with the veteran role. I know I will never be proud of achieving this as it currently is.

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For me it is also a bit from “A)” and “D)”. While we do not really know it yet, D would still go in the same direction were premium currency is (which is a dark pattern), the challenges should not, in like ever, work against the strike team AND the gameplay.
It just makes no sense!

They took the term Penance literally when they made their challenges

At least your final penance isn’t malleus monstronum and you can rely on your own skill to complete it.

Psykers are completely at the mercy of RNG and our teammates to even ATTEMPT to complete ours.

Psykers have the easiest time, join a discord team or whatever…

Vets have to literally do an ENTIRE 20-30min run without taking ANY melee hits OR missing a single shot, plus, having zero ammo by the end - fyi vet regens ammo.

Honestly its not even comparable.

I agree, that penance is absolutely zero fun. One of many really badly designed ones. And it was a roadblock to progression in getting cosmetics I want, so I did it anyway, but goddamn.

My recommended steps for doing it (this is what I did):

  • Use a revolver, the lower the ammo capacity the better

  • Expend all your ammo first. This means very carefully only shoot things that are preferably not moving or running straight at you, but NOT at the front or too close to your team. Body shots only, forget weakspots or anything like that! I had to hope my team mate did not shoot it just before, because even if you hit the ragdolling corpse, it will not count. No hitmarker = miss. Dumping all your ammo like this first ensures that if you miss, at least you more likely do it early, and don’t waste as much time.

  • Periodically unloading ammo as needed that is given to you by your team killing specials, on safe targets. Again, avoiding shooting anything a team mate might attack at that second.

  • Last problem - very often, the last few things that attack you in a mission will include specials, which will upon death generate ammo, invalidating your penance. This means you have to, in the last few seconds, after ALLLL that work - aggressively hunt them down, kill them, desparately reload your gun, and expend the last few rounds on the last few enemies on the map, before your buddies kill them, and hope there are enough trash mobs to use your bullets on.

There are some maps that are better than others for this mission. It is horrible design regardless. I got it playing randoms (none of my friends play DT yet) and I feel bad for them having to carry.

I can’t remember the name of this map, but you extract from the roof/pad thing after clearing the small compound at the end - that’s where I got it:


Note about this map - at the end of the waves, there are often two berzerkers that come from the left side (left as you enter). Kill them ASAP, so that you can burn off the ammo you get from their deaths on the few remaining trash mobs, or you will be screwed by that ammo.

There are probably better maps to do this on, like water treatment, something where infinite enemies keep coming at the end.

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Penances for outfits and hats should be removed and made like in VT2 where they’re earnable by just playing the class and completing a certain number of missions. The ridiculous, often bugged and poorly worded challenges that unlocked DLC premium cosmetics(which still baffles me that you had to pay separately for them and then ruin people’s/your own games to even try to get them) in VT2 were overwhelmingly criticized as unfun and terrible so it’s extremely weird that challenges in a similar vein were included for the base class cosmetics in Darktide.

If there wasn’t a premium shop that sells cosmetics this would just feel like bad game design where a mechanic promotes toxicity and playing in a way that promotes the opposite of teamwork but here it just looks like they’re giving you a choice between ruining the experience for other players/yourself or buying a cosmetic with real money.
There are multiple penances with god awful extremely RNG based requirements or penances that promote incredibly unfun,toxic and uncooperative gameplay that really shouldn’t be tied to the class cosmetic:

Veteran’s “Make Every Shot Count”: the game often has hit reg issues, veteran passive gives you back ammo and the penance forces you to play melee only until the end of the map where you can unload on boss or plink hordes while holding up your entire team at the extraction point

Psyker’s “Pick and mix”: brainburst doesn’t scale into heresy so unless there’s a perfect combination of elites or they’re softened up(which just doesn’t happen ingame, soft ones are deleted as soon as possible and others need to be hit multiple times by brainburst)
Psyker’s"going out with a bang"- promotes exploding and downing yourself, the explosion is weak, very long and can’t kill untouched ragers so you also need to soften up enemies that are priority targets and will be deleted by your teammates as soon as they see them

Psyker’s " Malleus Monstrorum"- I don’t even need to explain how this is the most toxic, unfun, annoying penance in the game for everyone involved, so the player doing it, his teammates and even Fatshark because they’re getting constant feedback how awful it is

There’s too little cosmetics that can be bought without premium currency and the current way of getting them promotes incredible toxicity, at this point I’ve been in over 30 games where people held up the team, got downed or were unwilling to progress the map because they were trying to do/cheese a penance, often insulting the rest of the team that just wants to play, in almost 2k hours in VT2 I’ve never encountered toxicity that comes even close to something like this which I encounter every other mission I try in Darktide. This needs to change, the fact they made some penances even harder while not touching some of the worst is just a very bad look for Fatshark seeing how much toxicity this injects into the game

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