Please BALANCE weapons

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
41

It was the same with Vermintide 2, I don’t know what you are talking about. Chaos Warriors was Crushers, Shield Vermins were Bulwarks, ragers zerkers etc.

And same as in Darktide in Vermintide 2 you took on Cata weapons/combos that can deal with them. Sienna could burn whole patrol with Ult and Famished Flames, Grail Knight can one-shot almost whole storm vermin Patrol with his ult, Long Bow/Handgun was one-shotting every single special on Cata. Handgun or Bolts Staff ignores shields. Masterwork Pistol was deleting bosses, Troll hammers was obliterating Chaos Warrior Patrols. Executioner Sword was one-two-shotting Chaos Warriors, Shade Could one-shot multiple Chaos Warriors/whole patrols. Bounty Hunter was one-shotting every elite/special and so on. All on Cataclysm.

And yet despite that power nobody ever said Cata was easy and majory of playerbase with access to all this power was never able to finish Cata run or Cata achievements.

The Difficulty of Damnation/Cata is NOT that 4 people need to co-op to kill one stupid Crusher/Chaos Warrior. That would be chore to go through map like that. It’s to be able to handle THE AMOUNT of enemies on that difficulties. When you have on Damntaion (how many of you really played it, seriously) 4 Crushers, 3 Bulwarks, 5 Ragers and 3 Reapers + 4 Scag Gunners shooting at you you need weapons that make fast work of all of them because it’s the amount of them that is danger, not them alone as unit anymore. 1 Crusher might be a threat on Diff 1-2 while leveling. But on Diff 4-5? One? That’s just a guy to kill. In Vermintide 2 on Cata anyone ever took single or 2 Chaos Warrior seriously? No. But when are 4 of them on top of 6 Maulers with 3 zerkers among horde and you hear 2 hooks rats running somewhere: that’s where the stuff gets real and you need to start spamming that Troll hammer, ults, flames, handguns etc. to kill them.

The difficulty on Cata was never in how fast you can kill stuff (you can pretty much one-shot most) but the amount of things at once that game throws at you. Same as in Darktide. When you have 3 Ralintgs (Reapers/Scag gunners), 3 Globadiers, 2 Assassins (dogs) you need people to co-op to kill them but they need to be able to do that FAST.

And the amount of damage stuff can do to you. One clan-rat on Cata from back can take half you HP almost. 3 mobs on Damnation hitting you in melee with 100% toughness can take 1/4 of you HP from chip damage. Damage and amount of stuff. The difficulty is to kill fast, control space/positioning and not get hit often.

I honestly see no difference playing with Bolter and Power Sword than I had when playing with Handgun and Executioner sword for example. It’s just what you take on Cata/Damnation.

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42

And yet I mostly take the Bolter on lower difficulty missions so far because I’ve found the flamer’s ability to lock-up hordes / ranged guys / specials and elites to be a great utility playing the Zealot, so it’s not always true that “everyone takes them.”

And people are more likely to leave if weapons will like they have no impact and are not satisfying and effective to use, especially after grinding to obtain them.

Plus, should the game be tailored around difficulty level 5? The majority of players do not touch the highest difficulty. Why should weapons be tuned around it?

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43

A lot of people in Tide games have this weird misconception that moving forward is the only direction. Sometimes retreating to a better location to hold, out of view of firing lines, ratlings and into areas where their contribution directly help thin the horde (gunners and snipers kill entire lines of their own if you can bait them into chokes).

In V2, everyone had a win button to some extent. The career skills in DT feel more kitted towards

“”“enhancing”“”

the main flow of the gameplay instead of affording you avenues to delete enemies. Grailing, sniping and critting in succession of your regular attacks was what really helped quell the challenge in Chaos Knights. Here, the most we have in amount to that is Ogryn’s box of hurt.

44

I agree that bolters and power swords are not the problem here. Those are the weapons that are fun and functional. It’s every weapon that chokes on enemy armor, doesn’t have the DPS to help in boss fights, or completely destroys the teams ammo economy that are the issue.

The game shouldn’t be a menagerie of disappointing weapons. It should be full of awesome weapons that feel good to use.

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45

Honestly i think several of the currently mediocre weapons would be great/amazing with just…More max ammo. My two main examples would probably be the Ogryn’s Ripper Gun and the Plasma Gun. It feels like the current ammo pools were just sort of balanced for difficulty 2, cause on Heresy+ there’s so much stuff that needs shooting that many guns just cant keep up.

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46

I thought the biggest problem of the plasma gun was that it overheats and then does damage to you when you try to vent it, which severely limits its overall damage potential.

But yea, there needs to be a lot more ammo on most weapons.

Pistols and such need to take some inspiration from the Combat Knife, which feels amazingly fun to use despite being a tiny blade with relatively low damage. It has a number of unique very powerful blessings, and just makes you feel like an absolute ninja while you’re using it.

One of the really big issues is the way the game treats armor, where some weapons are simply not effective against it at all, and just choke on armored enemies. In theory the idea of having characters who specialize in taking down armored enemies is solid enough, but in practice, most weapons are not so stunningly effective at any other thing that the inability to seriously damage some of the most dangerous enemies in the game is a reasonable tradeoff.

Lasguns and weapons like that need to have some kind of saturation fire mechanic that gives them a chance to pierce armor with repeated shots. Their whole schtick in the 40k universe is that they get fired in such massive volleys that eventually they simply overwhelm even the toughest armor. Since you only get one Lasgun at a time in Darktide that effect needs to be simulated by allowing Lasguns to snowball their power the longer you keep firing on an enemy.

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47

Was wondering when this was going to show up, and it didn’t take long.

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49

Yea, that would be a great way to make weapons that rely on volley fire in the lore kind of play that role in Darktide even though you can’t actually deploy a hundred lasguns for every bolter.

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50

No, the boltgun is almost exactly where it needs to be. The only thing I would think of is maybe lower max ammo by like 20%

All the other weapons are just bad and need buffing. Stop suggesting they nerf things that are usable because everything else feels like trash.

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51

I agree. Bolgun is good as it is. Other weapons should be buffed. Laspistols and revolvers for increased weak point damage. Ammo tweaks, for autoguns. Cant really talk about power sword as i dont have SS yet, but thunder hammer for example is underperforming on higher difficulties compared to axe/knife crit/bleeding meta on zealot. Eviscerator is my fav weapon on him, but because of the fact that incomming damage transfers through toughness to hp, its absolutely useless to use speed increasing talent to make the two handers work imo. Talking about 4-5diff, as they should be balancing point of this game.

6 Likes
52

reducing max ammo by 20% is a nerf tho?

53

I have to admit its really funny seeing people in here still defending the Bolter and power sword as if its not Over powered when infact it is absolutely the most broken weapon in the game.

Bolter has everything going for it, the only down side is the slow ready speed which truth be told once you get used to it, is completely manageable at worst, and completely ignorable at best. The ammo economy of the weapon is insane, i can go almost entire games using the bolter for just about anything and everything, save for if you are just laying on the trigger and hip fire mag dumping every time.

Just speaking from damage alone, there is nothing in this game the Bolter cant go toe to toe with and kill in a single made outside of bosses. Every ogryn on any difficulty can be downed by less then a single mag, even less then half if you are being conservative and single shot head shoting it. Specials stand no chance against it, because of the bolters second most overpowered aspect.

Bolter staggers EVERYTHING, its not only an insane damage dealer but one of the best CC weapons in the game because it will stop any enemy dead in its tracks, its also one of the only weapons i can consistently see suppression working on.

All of this is just on the base bolter, its power is only amplified when you give it to the vet, who is generating ammo on each special kill which normally only takes 1 maybe 2 shots so already there you have a net positive in your ammo economy able to constantly get ammo for it.

With the vets ability of line them up, killing a single specials renders one of the bolters big draw backs, slow reloads, completely ignorable as it reloads as fast as a laz gun at that point. On top of that taking the best level 30 perk the one that instantly reloads you gun, basically gives you a 30 round magazine, that you can just dump into a boss and take easy a third of his health if not more.

Then when you start adding in blessings into the mix it gets even more gross, able to stagger more, crits on consecutive shots, toughness on kills, its insane.

I love the bolt gun, but the boltgun is far and away a massively over powered weapon, because its does everything and it does it good. Saying otherwise at best is being willfully ignorant, or or telling a lie at worst.

Then we get to the power sword, which is much of the same thing, but not as bad. The one thing the powers word does do that is blatently OP, is its amount of cleve it has or rather its arc. You can actually have something just off to the side of you, off your screen, and with your fast attacks you can hit them. The only thing that needs to really be brought into line with the power sword is its reach, and its arch, outside of that, i think its pretty fine. Becuase once you start getting belssings on your weapons, the appeal of a power sword starts to fall off. For example i have a chainsword that has Ignore body mass on crit, and +175% cleave on hitting multiple targets at once. So, you can see already how even the chain sword can go toe to toe with it with out issues.

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54

We joke about ammo tins only holding 6 revolvers rounds or how a massive bag of ammo only carries 18 bullets.

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55

You would think people would talk about Lacerate, the Atrox, or Infernus Rapid fire Laz.
Maybe the XII which single handly destroys every weapon in the game in every aspect.

No. Its the Bolter that gets talked about. A weapon that has actual drawbacks. (Low clip size, extreme reload time, long swap animation, low stability, low mobility)

Its gonna be terrible to talk about any weapon balance from this beta anyway. Most of the properties are bugged and give hugely inflated numbers. A 6% modifier towards an enemy suddenly equals 60%. And ontop of that you can roll vastly different weapons that have the exact same name, because the point allocation of the weapon is random as hell.

You can have a XII that is stable as a rock onehitting every special to the head, or one that moves half a Volkswagen every time you pull the trigger.

8 Likes
56

The bolter should feel powerful. They got that right. Same with the power sword, it probably needs a bit of a nerf but not in the damage or cleave department. Probably a cooldown on the charge or a capacitor or ammo system. The power of it is perfect.

What needs to happen now is every other weapon gets brought up to the same level of effectiveness. Not power, effectiveness.

The Kantrael lasguns are in the same balance league as the bolter because they do what they are supposed to do well. As are the Recon lasguns.

The autoguns need a look at because they aren’t effective at what they are supposed to do. The braced ones are all good, and the infantry ones are better than they used to be, but the headhunter ones suck.

Same with the krieg lasgun. It’s overshadowed by the bolter in every way because it has no upside over it. It looks cool, but as a precision weapon it’s terrible because of how much sway it has. If this thing had less sway and accurate charged hipfire it would be fun and effective, while still having obvious downsides like slow swap time and worse ammo efficiency then the other lasguns.

Everyone is way too quick to jump on the nerf bandwagon without stopping to think. Consider what the weapons purpose is and if it’s effective at it. All the weapons need to be balanced relative to each other. The bolter is always going to be popular because it’s awesome and unique to the setting. The hard bit is getting everything else to be effective enough at it’s job so that people want to use them too.

6 Likes
57

Honestly even still the Bolter is OP. You can have a good feeling weapon and still have it be OP.

IMO the fix to the bolter should be, increase its magazine to 20, remove the ability to stagger ogryns, remove its ability to penetrate (Because lore wise its in accurate to have it penetrate multiple targets, its designed to embed then explode not punch thorugh multiple people then explode. ) and reduce its damage just to the point where on Heresy, it can weak point one shot specials and elites, 2 tap them on body, and one shot everything else. Possibly just reduce its overall damage but greatly increase its weakpoint multiplier.

I admit i love the bolter, i love how it feels, but in the hands of the vet its massively overpowered. It does every other weapons job that the vet has better. Its better at elite and monster killing then the plasma, its better at special killing, its better at horde clearing. Its just better at everything.

Its not matter of people are not stopping and thinking, its that a lot of people wont see the forest through the trees here. The bolter just outshines every other weapon on the vet, it even massively outshines the vets signature weapon, the plasma rifle by leaps and bounds.

58

What about the Psyker? No one’s mentioned them in this whole thread.

Every Psyker unique weapon needs a considerable buff, IMO. Force Swords are currently just objectively worse in every way than Power Swords, when they are every bit as iconic.

5 Likes
59

Because the psyker does not have a weapon thats able to chunk 1/3rd of the boss in a matter of seconds.

The pysker does not have a weapon that can kill multiple crushers and bulwakrs with easy and do it again 3 seconds later when it reloads.

The pskyer does not have the ability to pop specials from across the map at +50% damage. even his brain burst cant do that on heresy and damantion

The reason why we are talking about the bolter is because we need to address the elephent in the room. I dont think anyone will disagree that psykers staves need work, but we have a much bigger fire on our hands.

Also no, the force sword is not a worse powersword . its a side grade to the power sword, while the power sword is great at CC, the force sword out classes it in single target damage. it does more damage then brain burst can with its alt attack, is the only weapon outside of the ogryn shield that can block ranged attacks, and with Block cost reduction you can get close to 50% reduced block values. On top of taht the force sword has dodge on par with the saber, and has reach on par with the saber.

The draw back of the force sword is it has a very small attack arc + not a fast attack speed for its small attack arc.

The only thing that needs to change on the power sword is that the cleave arc needs to be reduced, you can actually hit stuff that is off your screen to the side of you with the power sword which is insane considering its a 1h weapon.

60

This is why I say the Force Sword is worse. Even if the Force Sword can do more damage with a single attack, it still loses out - even against a single target - in sustained DPS. Why?

The Force Sword takes longer to activate, costs about 30% peril, and gets one attack per charge. The Power Sword activates faster, for free, and gets multiple attacks per charge. The Force Sword is high-risk, high-reward; the Power Sword is no-risk, high-reward. The Force Sword can kill a single Elite? The Power Sword can kill an entire group.

The ability to block ranged attacks is the only real advantage that the Force Sword has, and that’s only if you get the right blessing.

2 Likes
61

Are the shotguns considered overpowered? Because while I do sometimes use the Bolter on Zealot I keep gravitating back to the shotgun. I find the immediacy of shotgun extremely valuable, as well as it feeling like it has better effective range than the Bolter.

I imagine it’s very powerful on Veteran, but I do find the current drawbacks of reload time, and moreso switch time effective enough at keeping it in check.

3 Likes