Players are still too strong, can we get some more nerfs please?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

Can we get some more overall player power nerfs please? Powercreep has been ruining the game slowly over time.

Last balance pass was pretty good, like to see more of that, but this time can psyker also get some of the meaningful nerfs too WITHOUT another buff snuck in there? Psyker has probably gotten a buff in at least 75% of all the updates that this game has ever received, can we pretty please tune that down just a little bit?

Can Rampage please gets its exhaustion mechanic added back. Shortly after the class was added to the game it literally felt like to me the class was designed at the core to be able to solo the entire game with little to no help from teammates… and then it got buffs, and then more buffs, and a whole brand new tree layout. Pickpocket got the deserved nerf it should have, literally how did that talent get added into the game in the state it was in at launch? Regen 20% ammo for shooting any elite/special? really? its just that easy to have infinite ammo all of a sudden? sold to you as a $12 DLC class lmao, so happy thats been changed.

Can the stacking stimm effect bug with the Stimm Supply ability also be fixed? The lingering effect node on the ability allows the dropped crate to give the Hive Scum and all teammates the scums stimm effect, even if their stim is on cooldown. So with that you can stack your stimm effect onto yourself 2-3 times(stim, drop crate, stim) 20% attack speed, 20% strength, 35% finesse, now stack that 2-3 times :laughing:

Chem toxin/the needle gun could also use some tweaks, toxin is too strong and the needle pistol applies too much too fast. Not sure what the right way to fix that would be, could remove the primary fire from needle pistol so they only use their ‘special’ mode, or could put stack limits on how much toxin it can apply to enemies(similar to inferno staff) or maybe a magazine size change, reload speed change, something like that i dunno, just needs tuned down somehow.

Also the shivs, even after the nerfs they have gotten, they still feel like the dominate weapon for scum, the mobility and damage is just too good, but thats also partly because of how strong certain talents are and just how much damage bonuses you can stack up on hive scum etc, so if everything else gets tuned down a little(talents, abilities, and such), the shivs themselves also would be tuned down.

Theres more balancing that needs done on all the classes, theres been some good forum posts recently, like Project Ogryn Weapons , but this is just a few things off the top of my head i wanted to put out there.

Balance changes are good, nerfs are good, buffs can also be good, but repeated buffs again and again and not nerfing the outliers again and again over the course of a couple years has led us to where we are now. Patch 13 was a huge spike in player power, giving the classes their current talent tree ‘structure’, before then it was a Feat System? with very few options, and back then the game was HARD. I want some of that HARD back, not all, just a little. I want the later difficulties to actually mean something, Auric should be challenging, and Damnation should be ‘kinda hard’ ish, if that makes sense. Currently, Auric doesn’t even really feel like a challenge most of the time, the only hard part about it is memorizing what maps/spawn doors have audio dead zones that block ALL audio, trying to react to the audio queue of a hound jumping at you with no other audio queues leading up to that point, trying to dodge a trapper net thats been shot at you through unrealistic holes in map geometry/certain railings/etc.

Theres no counter-play to a silent hound jumping at you, and only in THAT instant does it finally make an audio queue while leaping at you, you turn and try your best to push, but guess what? the push didnt register

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so now you sit there with a hound biting you, hoping for any of the ways it can be knocked off to happen.

Now imagine a world where the audio engine isnt tearing itself apart in order to keep up with all the special enemies spawning, attack sound queues, gunshots, etc. Imagine if there wasnt a burster right after a burster right after 2 flamers and a hound and a mutant and 2 trappers all spawning and charging at you in such a short time frame. Imagine if that was just… less

just a tiny bit, im not asking to heavily nerf or remove specials/disablers. just the spawn spam of them causing fundamental issues with the game pretty much is all i want tuned down/fixed/whatever you wanna call it. I just want to ACTUALLY hear and be able to react when the hound spawns and is coming for me, i wanna hear that trapper around the corner, i wanna hear the crusher charging an overhead behind me etc etc etc

2

Of course we can nerf players, but we have to buff Inferno Staff again to compensate.

-Fatshark probably

3

Just FYI, the problem isn’t shared across the board and there are in fact people that do not experience this issue. We have this debate in our premades quite often and it seems that Mid-end systems are actually far less affected up to a point of nonexistence!

I’m one of the chief complainers about Darktide performance and if this was happening to me i wouldn’t shut up about it and the salt would be of myth and legends, and yet i genuinely have to watch clips of it happening othewise i wouldn’t have a clue what is being talked about and took it for people just making excuses for bad plays.

The Audio engine tearing itself apart is a cope term for an unrelated (nonetheless a very real) issue and shouldn’t be used in balance discussion in any shape or form whatsoever, because right now its a straight manipulation of unrelated facts and a bad practice!

How come the engine is falling apart for you and not for me? Because the engine isn’t actually falling apart and the issue lies elsewhere, its that simple…

4

Today I was playing with friends and the theme of the day was to bring the most dogshit build we could come up with. In a 3rd game I just brought gray mundane ds4 + purgatus straight from commisary and 0 talents spent on psyker and we went to game auric maelstrom.

Man, I got reminded how fun it was to have a strategic approach to encounters in darktide. Today we can solo everything only if we perform all manual actions correctly. Dodge all overheads and kill all disablers. There is very little strategic approach with gunners and kiting as we have so much mobility.

Today for the first time in 1000 hours I was peeking corners and hiding behind benches, I got the same strategical positional gameplay I loved in early darktide and space hulk deathwing.

It is completely non-present and optional even in h40. As meta there is focused on disabling ranged combat and overpowering everything instantly or being overwhelmed. There is no high strategy, pathfinding, positioning. Only gold toughness, bubbles, infinite cleave, stagger for days and boss nuking.

5

Yeah the game was designed around coherency toughness regeneration and the 5% toughness gen on melee kill with one additional flavour of getting toughness in another way. Nowadays the former are completely overshadowed by multiple much stronger ways to generate toughness which f***s balancing over.

All toughness generating passive nodes should be halved while the spam gets reduced.

6

Nit pick: base toughness gen on melee kill varied by class at release. Vet had 10% (with a whopping 200 base toughness) IIRC.

7

I don’t know, i can’t explain why silent hounds jump at me and ignore pushes, i cant explain why trappers are completely silent until they are shooting their net, i cant explain why i get hit by collateral sniper shots aimed at teammates with no audio or visual queues.

i have a 6900 XT and 5800X3D, is my computer good enough to run the game and not have audio issues? apparently not

the game is spawning so many things that it cant keep up and handle it all at once, is that really hard to understand?

8

I’m not sure about this, I did a Heresy solo run not that long ago, and there were fewer than ten enemies on the map at the same time, but there was no sound from the Poxburster and no sound from the hound (there was a cue that a hound was on the map and a “bark” far, far away, and then it pounced on me without a preliminary growl):

Timestamps: 29:26 and 29:55

9

Its not hard to understand, its simply not true that’s the reason for the sound issue and it was never established as such :grin:

You wanna go that way? Establish it for a fact first!

And good luck with that, because as i said the issue isn’t shared across the board and there are indeed people who never experience the issue, so that kinda rules out the engine dying or whatnot, doesn’t it?

I mean you don’t avoid engine on its way out by growing a mustache or wiping with a left hand, do you? Its either universal or a nonsense…and the issue is far from universal so that kinda narrows it down :+1:

You are boiling water and calling it a soup and expect people to partake in the overreach with you, so either do better or abandon it and leave it to people who can go further than empty proclamations. Leave it out of the balance discussion until you do the legwork, thanks

Totally meaningless information btw, both of my systems are weaker than yours and i don’t have the issue!

My older 10700 with 2070 and a crappy external SSD inside it is entirely immune to it, yet by your ‘logic’ it should suffer heavily and in a far more pronounced fashion than stronger setups.

How come?

10

that is a ‘known’ audio deadzone on the map, while standing there it fails to properly play the audio thats coming from the next zone right in front of/around you, theres a few places like this on various maps

like the spawn door just to the left right after completing the first event on chasm station, bursters can spawn there and are completely silent until they are jumping out of the door exploding

11

ok so then what causes it? I would really really love to know please. It has caused enough runs to fail and has caused me to take unavoidable damage so many times, can you please diagnose the issue and tell me how to fix it then? or please tell fatshark how to fix it.

I legitimately want to know why there are audio issues, just because you don’t experience it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. I want to get the audio queues and i want to properly react and play the game, but that just doesn’t happen sometimes, why? Why do i not get the audio queue that a hound is nearby and targeting me? Why do i only get the audio queue of the hound pouncing RIGHT NOW! and theres just no real way to react to that, i try to push and it will even visually show me start to push… but sorry didnt register and now a hound is eating me. Why didnt the push register? and why didnt i get an audio queue as a heads up that the hound was about to get me?

I dont know, maybe you and everyone else can react fast enough to no audio queue disablers but i just cant, not with the ~62-70ish ping i play at. And like you said not everyone experiences it, dont know why, wish i did, and im not even saying it happens that often. Most hounds are fine, i can dodge most snipers just fine, i can handle most trappers just fine, but its just the 1 out of every like 20? 30? 50? i dont know, just every so often theres something with no proper audio queues until they are already performing their disable attack, and i just cant react fast enough to that, ive gotten lucky very very rarely and managed to but very few times.

i dont know, why do you not experience it and why do i? can you please tell me

12

Yeah I don’t really experience the audio issues people talk about. Most times I get downed are my own fault. Sometimes I am surprised but I think that’s my brain not able to keep up vs the computer.

13

But yes more balancing. Probably means more nerfs overall. Although I am not sure which difficulty the largest amount of players struggle at. Not sure if most players still stay around malice or not.

14

see and i completely agree with that, I understand when i make a mistake and suffer the consequences of it, im not complaining about when im deep in a mixed horde and i get my block broken and then a hound pounces me and a flamer runs over and kills me, that i completely get, i messed up and ate it. I am upset when im in the middle of kiting a mixed horde, i can hear a hound spawn, theres a mutant charging at me, i just heard a trapper spawn off in the distance too, im killing horde enemies and like a rager and stuff, just dodged the mutant, turn to kill it and i can hear the trapper coming at me from the left, kill the mutant, and then all of a sudden HOUND POUNCING FROM BEHIND, and then i just cant react fast enough, i didnt get any queue of the hound being nearby, i heard it spawn, and i heard it pouncing me, i just want to be able to hear the inbetween so i can properly react when im supposed to.

And again im not saying this happens like every game, i eat hounds, trappers, and sniper shots all the time, i make mistakes and take the damage for it and im not upset about that, im just upset about when im not properly given the chance to interact with what is trying to kill me

15

Nobody is saying that, what is being disputed is the engine and amount of enemies being the cause!

The issue is real, the cause isn’t!

One of the theories is direct storage saturation and buffer saturation in general!

Back when the Hive scum released and this issue became more widespread, i actually asked Xbox devs on our company VPN about it and the first thing that came out of it was about streamed assets and direct storage interaction!

But i can’t reproduce the issue and that was it…

16

I getcha. And I don’t know enough about game engines to know/validate whether it hit some limit with audio outputs.

But perhaps a more philosophical question, how do we know it was an issue with the technology vs our brains? Human brains also aren’t able to hold on to many sources of information and we can be myopic by design. If we’re heavily concentrated and focused on something in front of us our brains naturally deprioritize and tune out sensory input from other sources.

So if I didn’t hear something, as the subject… is that the engine? My speakers? My ears/brain? The conscious experience is the same as in, the subject didn’t hear something, but I wouldn’t be confident in declaring whether it’s the technology or me. I wouldn’t know where to go to find out which one it is either way.

Maybe I am just quick to blame myself :stuck_out_tongue:

17

On top of that, Fatshark should address Gold Toughness as soon as possible. It regularly makes the entire team effectively immortal.

Even after the buffs to Executioner’s Stance and Infiltrate, they should seriously consider why 99% of Veterans still use VoC

18

id need to take a weekend or two and compare samples of recordings from late 2022 / early 23 when infact i cant “remember” a sound issue the like of silent dogs/bursters etc.

that was the era of damnation HISTG as the be all end all, predating auric maelstrom.

then id need to make I II V E G ai director spawn comparisons for again subjective memory has me remembering far less spawns back then.

PLUS, and i guess that gets ignored way more often, today we speed through a I II V E G in sub 18 minutes.

so even if enemies wouldn’t spawn “more” or come to us faster, we get to them way quicker and trigger stuff in our wake we didnt 3 years ago due to the simplicity of the modifier nowadays.

that could indeed be a factor, oddly enough im pondering writing some stuff about/against the current sliding mechanic, for how bland the once hefty combat has become due to it.

and this is coming from an og quake player of yonder

19

Yeah I guess that would be the best way. If you had a good quality audio recorder or app that could record all sounds while playing for you to review after the match to see whether what was recorded matched, or not, what you heard, or didn’t while playing.

20

i think one pressing reason to dial back enemy elite/special spawns is because of all the talents that scale off it. sound engine issues are one thing and may not affect everyone equally, but the fact that almost every single class scales off elite kills and the game just spams way more elites than originally intended at you totally exponentially breaks balance. perilous combustion is one cool example of this. kill 1 elite in that 5m space? does a bit of extra damage. kill 5 elites in that 5m space? that 5m space is cleared and it’ll proliferate to clear a bigger area entirely on its own provided enough fuel (elites) is involved

of course perilous combustion could change too, and all the equivalent talents, but i think pacing wise it was better when there was less elite/special spam