Pickpocket should be changed to a branch talent of Vulture Mark or Desperado, to prevent it from being too easily to get
Melee scum is already the strongest scum build, especially with the Needle Pistol. Since melee scum is barely affected by the Pickpocket nerf, they can still easily get ammo for the Needle Pistol. Combined with other buffs, melee scum with needle is still too overpowered now
Change pickpocket to a branch of talents which are both a poor match for the needle. This will effectively limit it
The problem is melee Scum trigger Pickpocket way too easily (the Pickpocket nerf barely affects this build), so they use the talent better than ranged Scum. The better your melee, the better your ranged. Needle makes this worse
if you want to maximize toxin effectiveness, melee cability matters more than ranged ability.
The class identity of Scum has also shifted from its original close‑range ranged class into a melee class, which is very strange.
Just throw a 60 second cooldown on pickpocket and lower needle adm to be on par with the other sources of dot damage in the game. Neither of these things should even be in the game let alone this broken.
Whoever suggested that the solution to sources of dot damage mixing with uncanny strike creating extremely lethal dps was to just make uncanny strike unnecessary is incredibly dumb. You’ve removed the only legit fun part of that combination and replaced it with the incredibly broken bit.
They should revert the melee requirement, strict PP to ranged builds somehow by either shoving it under desperado or vulture’s mark, then remove stripped down from needle pistol.
This sounds like what Fatshark would do, if only because it’s a really bad idea. Would still leave Melee scum the single most powerful damage-dealer in the game and even more wreck the class fantasy of ranged Scum.
Ranged is by far the easiest playstyle with very little to no risk for very large rewards. Pickpocket turns that to no risk, all reward.
Maybe we should stop thinking “gee, my stupidly godlike melee class that can solo everything in the game without taking damage is just too boring. It should also have infinite ammo and kill everything from a mile away with a cursory glance and a needle pistol”.
My actual opinion on this stupid debate of “why can’t classes have infinite ammo? Why can’t zealot kill everything with the holy wrath of god when he presses F, etc.” It’s that this game’s only way to make ranged weapons any fun whatsoever to use in any situation is to turn off interaction and mechanics that ranged weapons heavily rely upon in order to be balanced. So sure. Why not just turn on infinite ammo for everyone? Why even bother with armor penetration, let them deal full damage. Why do we even have a critical and weakspot system? Remove that, and make it a default damage multiplier on everything. Everytime a vet gets a specialist kill, fill the ogryn to the brim with grenades that explode and deal bleed damage to everything and stunlock bosses.
All of this just because in havoc 40, you can’t stand still and shoot because there’s a horde right on top of you, the thirty gunners and reapers are instantly deleting your toughness while you do so, even if you do shoot, it’s horribly juxtaposed by a series of calculations that the game is fumbling every second, completely disconnected from what’s happening on your side of the game where every other shot is going straight through the body of enemies with visible blood splats yet no indication of actual damage even tracked by a health bar mod. The enemies closing the distance are high health flak and carapace armored cretins that you have to dodge every second because they have a funny oneshot attack that deletes you from the map for 30 seconds straight, but you’re not doing much damage to them anyway outside of the 2 year long meta garbage. The suppression mechanic alone makes it impossible to trade shots against enemies when they have 4 times the clip size and shoot at 3 times the rate and might as well not even have reload times due to the sheer amounts of them.
In my opinion, the reason ranged weapons feel garbage and have always felt garbage is because ranged combat in this game has never been good. It’s a straight up lie we all convinced ourselves into believing back when the op garbage was hard carrying everything. Ogryn ranged good? That was just infinite ammo kickback/grenade launcher deleting everything in oneshot, or stubbers and ripper guns applying infinite burn stacks to infinite enemies with a ton of brittleness and other damage buffs being applied at the same time. Vet was a fun shooter class? You had infinite health and 36 rounds in a boltgun with nearly 250% power bonus, of course it was more fun. Zealot had more ranged options? Everytime you charged you were given a tactical nuclear device in your hands for like 6 seconds straight, yes it killed everything. Ranged psyker? You mean infinite ammo infinite cleave weapons that can handle literally every single situation the game throws at you? Hecc yeah, brother!
Fix guns so they can actually interact and play in the game and maybe we circle back to this conversation about how “ranged class fantasy” is being tampered with or whatever. Ranged class fantasy translates currently in my brain to “I want the game to let me win” right now.
I guess, yeah, if you go into a ramble of “what-ifs” you can prove any point.
Gun Scum was far less of a problem that people made it out to be, because it was hard-walled by Bulwarks and Crushers. In the game, as it actually exists (not some what-if fantasy) its only problem was its DPS was too high. As I’ve said before, repeatedly, all they need to do is make Pickpocket a node tied directly into Desperado and give a debuff to either damage or cleave.
Or, maybe, force the Scum to actually play legit close to enemies. Pickpocket drops an ammo satchel on the ground (though from any source).
I was gonna go into a long screed making up what-ifs to prove a random joke point, but honestly you’ve done a good enough job just saying random stuff.
Hive Scum has builds that basically center it entirely around shooting; there’s that one node that helps it in melee, but basically only allows it to keep up with the health scaling on basic enemies, it still sucks in melee overall. And it was clearly balanced around being able to have infinite ammo. As it is, you can’t really play the build as intended because people have a strawman in their head of what they think “should be”, based on their subjective opinion of what they find fun. It seriously reeks of “stop having fun guys” syndrome.
I’ve yet to see an honest discussion from anyone about it.
On discord some guy was defending the nerf by saying something along the lines of “we need to nerf pickpocket if we want to buff HS weaker aspects” when the nerf did exactly the opposite lol.
And yet people here will keep saying nerfs bring more variance to the game. (They never did).
That same hard wall exists for flame staff psyker too. At least Psyker doesn’t have the screen wipe button of the rocket launcher. The other 2k+ enemies that spawn in a match get killed with an infinite resource. Scum can flank behind a bulwark far easier than Psyker anyway. It’s a top two build in the game.
It’s fine as it is.
My only gripe with it, is that when you kill the target with the Melee Toxins Crit talent, you don’t get the Pick Pocket to proc. PLEASE FIX
My casual player friend bought Hive Scum only because it had ranged power fantasy, now that they made the pickpocket change it leaves a bad taste in the mouth for players who are not crazy into Darktide gameplay loop of constantly switching between weapons.
You have to understand that you can’t make people play the game the way YOU want, people WANT to play ranged builds, and they DID since the day 1 of the game’s existence, but both the hardcore playerbase and devs influenced balance so that it doesn’t feel great to play this way.
That’s like coming to a kid playing with a toy in a sandbox and telling him, “You’re playing wrong”, when he just wants to play it his way, right or wrong or whatever.
While this change is not a big deal for experienced players (even me, I don’t care for this change, Pickpocket is still arguably “must take” node for every build), it just sours the experience.
Lots of great games have a freedom of how you want to play them.
If all these “broken things” enabled ranged gameplay than the devs should have found other ways to implement it and make it enjoyable, rather than changing them so drastically that everyone feels the absolute need to play melee hybrid builds on most classes.
Like I said, sure just give the class infinite ammo. Who cares. The game’s balance team is nonexistent at this point and we might as well just make the game a power fantasy entirely. A large problem with the game is that they refuse to go all-in on the power fantasy while refusing to actually make any meaningful nerfs whatsoever to the game, so fine. Make it drop 20% ammo bag all over the floor with no cooldown or whatever, everyone can have it. Will I be happy? No. Is there very clearly an audience in darktide for this? Yes, absolutely.
In actual balance tho, it doesn’t matter if you debuff damage or cleave. Damage won’t effect needle pistol, because needle pistol applies a dot that has like no buffs whatsoever and it’s still one of the most powerful things in hive scum’s kit. Cleave doesn’t matter either, it’s technically an aoe. Needle pistol is degenerate. It is entirely the only reason why fatshark wanted to nerf pickpocket.
I don’t care about “honesty” or whatever. This is a made up concept, man. I don’t think you’re entirely being “honest” about the situation from my perspective. For instance, the majority of enemies in this game are in melee. Dodging puts you in an invincibility state against melee. Dodging is faster than most enemy attacks. There are only so many slots an enemy can attack a player from. This effectively means, that at certain ranges, you can have very few enemies that are even capable of attacking you, and you’re immune to all damage from them. With ranged weaponry, you’re essentially reaping all the benefits with the downside being ammo consumption. Hive scum before the nerf had no ammo consumption. Do you see the problem?
But yeah, it was fun to run infinite ammo auto weapons that gave you back all of your toughness 3 times per volley or whatever. Really fun to be completely immune to ranged enemies, the only enemies in the game that are even capable of dealing damage to you on these builds. It was genuinely awesome to have to dual auto machine guns taking down rooms all by myself, nuking them with back-to-back missile launchers when crusher clown cars came in, and continuing to push forward by myself all the time in every single lobby and it’s really fun to solo every difficulty with this stuff. Does this make ranged weapons very fun? absolutely. Does this make them balanced or feel well designed? No, not really. Ranged weapons have a ton of issues because fatshark doesn’t know how to make an actual first person shooter, which is fine when the combat is focused on hybridization. I don’t think ranged weapons in this game are fun to shoot unless you have things that turn off recoil, suppression, hit response from enemies, knockback, stun, have increased stagger and suppression, deals a ton more damage on headshot, infinite ammo, etc.
Statement aside, nice gameplay tho. Never seen anyone combine stimm crate + ranged playstyle.
On the topic of balancing Pickpocket, if the real problem all this time was only Needlepistol, they could do a buffed version of the talent only for Vulture keystone with a note that it only grants bonus to conventional bullet/slug weapons. That would remove infinite ammo for Needlepistol while still letting people play ranged builds with other weapons without ruined playstyle. The “normal” Pickpocket would grant less ammo and not stack with the node.
Which shooters do you play anyway you have such a rough opinion about Darktide’s guns?
It feels like you’re comparing them to games like PUBG, CS and Tarkov only (which is a poor comparision since it’s PVP games), meanwhile plenty of shooter games have less recoil and no randomized spray patterns… I’ve been playing shooters all my life, I’m a massive fan of original 3 Halos, all Dooms, Quake, newer amazing retro-shooter games like Dusk, Amid Evil. I played Killing Floor since 2009 and have high hours in all 3 games, I’ve played all three Payday games.
I think your opinion on Darktide guns is wrong and I think they do require skill, just maybe not as much as you want them to.
I completely agree. I just don’t think “infinite ammo with no risk” is exactly the ranged power fantasy that I WANT. How do you fix it? Remove dodge linger from ranged weapons like from launch or beta? This would probably result in a lot of players complaining about getting deleted trying to snipe specialists in the middle of kites or horde, but I’d play that. Lower their damage/cleave? I don’t think that fixes the problem whatsoever, just delays the inevitable while making the experience worse.
My personal solution would be designing very low damage enemy attacks that ignore dodge linger entirely just to be used in order to temporarily stun a player that’s dodge kiting, like maybe charging bashes from bulwarks or crushers, a lunging poke from maulers and rager etc. that way you’re forced to engage with some other way of stopping these attacks in particular.
There is nothing that’s going to stop pickpocket from being a “must take” or whatever. It’s a free source of ammunition for one point and directly next to talents that people want to take anyway. It becomes something you ignore when you either restructure the talent tree to move it into some garbage spot that people will hate or you significantly buff other talents that are really far away and require you to ditch it.
And I’ll be clear, the largest issue is that the only risk with ranged weapons for an experienced player is wasted ammo, and pickpocket pre-nerf removed this entirely with no downsides. I am totally fine if your build can kill a crusher from a mile away with an autopistol by chipping it to death, but come on. You don’t even lose ammo? We’re really going to be that free in the hybrid horde shooter genre?
I’m a big fan of resident evil and left 4 dead, if I want to shoot zombies from a distance while mixing in pushes and dodges and parries or whatever, I’d prefer to play those games for that style of combat. If I want the new doom-style of combat of running circles around a room taking out threats as they chase me or I blow past them, I’d probably want to play doom 2016 or doom eternal. The shooting in this game doesn’t feel remarkable to me, and a large portion of that is that these servers are garbage and make ads while moving feel horrible, and hipfiring a billion rounds is boring compared to many other games, and another large portion is that there is no interaction happening with enemies other than other ranged enemies, everything else is just dropping dead without touching you.
Darktide is most fun for me when I am going through all of my options like I’m steamrolling a quake lobby. I still remember a solo civi I did as exe vet where I would throw a krak nade to get my first few kills, and then kill an elite with a revolver then kill until I had enough for another guaranteed revolver headshot then repeat that loop back to back, using a nade whenever I wasn’t killing enough.
Also, I’m very surprised that, at its height of gameplay, very few people tried stim crate and double barrel shotgun. Nearly every shot is a crit proccing manstopper and bleed, which benefits from your bonus rending from your stim, effectively giving you a high damaging dot against carapace enemies on an infinite cleave high base damage weapon. It would outdamage purgatus users. It was very dumb.
It also has the interaction that, since you’re deleting so much horde in a single shot, you’re getting upwards of 3 stim crates active at the same time, which, if you’re a huge bug abuser, you can use to stack your crate benefits even further, boosting your team’s damage and rending and cdr or attack speed 3 or 4 times over where it should be. 30% rending, 60% power, 60% attack speed (or 150% cdr) on all damage sources for the entire team is pretty wild.
You could also do the power bonus blessing on double barrel, which would also outdamage purga, but bleed felt better for more reliable pickpocket procs since you could just tap any special in the game twice and probably kill it.
We agree on this, Needle Pistol is the worst problem of Hive Scum.
Honestly, the Scum just got made much worse with this last update. I still can’t believe the +50% dodge distance node, makes the class untouchable unless they are hard stuck in a corner. They broke the shooting class fantasy and yet buffed the class overall to stupid levels.
