Please fix the powercreep (RANT)

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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@FatsharkKitefin Please relay this to whomever it may concern! :purple_heart:

We need nerfs and buffs. The cycle of powercreep must be broken. Darktide’s powercreep has reached such a crisis point that the AI Director is just throwing spam tantrums of Elite and Specialist Enemies because the Players are TOO powerful for those Enemies to be sufficiently threatening as individuals.

If we buff everything to the levels of Arbitrator and Ogryn, Havoc 30-40 will just become the new Damnation because of crutches like Arbites Shock Maul, Duelling Sword, Inferno Force Staff and Rumbler carrying everyone. Players who should be playing Malice, Heresy or Damnation are beating Havoc 40 not because they meet the skill criteria, but because they’re relying on Weapons that literally void entire gameplay mechanics like Enemy Armour and Cleave/Dodge Limits. If everyone and their mother can reliably complete Havoc 40, what’s the point of Regular and Auric Difficulties? It’s antithetical to what Havoc’s meant to be, a sweat lodge for exceptional Players to brag about overcoming in a genital measuring contest.

Powercreep is literally rotting the very foundation of Darktide by making Regular and Auric Missions pointless, and Players who’ve come to rely on these crutches are asking for that to get WORSE with all this “all buffs, no nerfs” because their ego won’t let them just drop to the Difficulty that they should be playing in the event that their crutches rightfully get nerfed.

Maybe I should come out of my YouTube hiatus and make a video going more in-depth about my thoughts on the issue. I might use that as my way to upload some Arbitrator gameplay of my own while doing something unique. Thoughts?

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Just add Havoc 50-70 then remove uprising, malice and heresy, duh.

/s btw

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please tell this to the countless teammates i’ve had in just the past week that are dead for 50%+ of the mission on auric+. i play this game solely for the co-op, but instead, i end up playing solo and having to tryhard most matches because apparently most people queuing up for auric sucks major ass lol

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I sympathise and even relate, but that falls more within the bubble of low-skill Players going a few Difficulty levels above their capabilities and not learning anything! :joy:

What I mean to say is that Players who are livid and vocal about it because their crutches might get nerfed are playing Difficulties above and beyond their level of skill. In their arrogance, they claim that blatantly OP Weapons are “balanced” instead of coming to the realisation that they’re exploiting a crutch. They get “Havoc viability” tunnel vision and lose concept of the reality that Havoc 30-40 was originally intended to be for a higher tier of Players. They NEVER stop to think about the disastrous impact that balancing around Havoc 30-40 would have on Regular and Auric Missions or non-Meta Weapons. :pensive_face:

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We’re headed to another situation where all enemies will have to be buffed again, defeating all of the hard earned breakpoints of currently balanced weapons again.

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We definitely need some nerfs and buffs, but in my opinion, the core issue is trying to balance a game without any real limits.

We’ve talked about infinite cleave and AoE weapons without damage caps, but I haven’t seen much discussion around how perks and blessings scale without boundaries. There should be limits on how much their combined effects can impact gameplay.

For example:

A cap on toughness regeneration per second
A limit on bonus damage stacking
A maximum for extra stagger
A ceiling on ability cooldown reduction

Balancing becomes a lot easier when you know a weapon can’t exceed, say, 3x its baseline performance, no matter how many perks or blessings are stacked. Likewise, it’s easier to tune the game when players can’t restore 300% of their toughness every second through stacking.

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yeah this is the primary issue

you totally can do the whole “only buffs, no nerfs” thing if you buff up enemy stats to compensate but then you’ve gotta buff up all the stuff that inevitably gets left behind…FS will never be able to do that in a timely let alone clean manner (in my opinion and experience). Also the end result is more or less the same as doing mixed nerfs and buffs i.e actual balancing but in the most ridiculous roundabout way possible for the sake of optics/perception lmao.

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Best solution is to set a target as a baseline, leave that target untouched to the best of the Devs capabilities and try and hit everything around that level.

This avoids power-creep and sets community expectations as to what to expect.

Only issue is a small nerf is met with so much negative backlash developers are afraid to do it, they would rather buff all enemies than nerf one weapon.

Its a completely emotional response but that is the world we live in. I find the ‘many weak enemies meets AOE ability’ gameplay loop very boring.

Its why I’ve gone back to Left 4 Dead and Vermintide even though they aren’t the same as Darktide, I feel the gameplay loop is more healthy and more about how you play, not what you play, with more moment to moment decision making and interesting ways to play around things rather than ‘face meets 10 crushers do you have the button?’

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problem with the new dlc is that the “dinner bell” has already rung and a lot of the purchases went into the op-ness i wager.

pulling the turkey leg out of the dinner guests mouth is bound to have some negative reactions for them and so far they seemed VERY hesistant to make such “tough calls”

putting my tinfoil head on i even conspire that ogryn revamp was made with arbited abilities in mind so he wouldn’t blatantly stick out as the only one.

that being said, and its weird for me as a 30 year old quake fan
(32 if you count the way you could “speed-strafe” along certain walls in doom1&2)
the speed of the game feels wrong right now.

i love fast games and wouldnt want to see darktide turned into some sloth-granfather mode snooze fest BUT the way i’m simply materializing (for the lack of better analogy) through 50 or so enemies and see them evaporate into a single pile of goo might please my inner gore hound but leave me empty from a game’s response perspective.

all of a sudden that dopamine i felt when snacking tasty groups of elites is gone cause they are just tiny dots in a sea of meaningless obstacles that not even serve their purpose anymore.

and i cant, for the life of me, fathom why people take pleasure and even gratification from such undemanding and meaningless acts?

it aint skill, it aint performance.
sure, skilled players can clear the map even faster while they display good aim/movement/coordination etc, but THIS right here is the heavyweight bare knuckle main event

Tyson VS Steven Hawkins
(plural, but still in a wheelchair)
oh and tyson is using knuckledusters…

so in order to correct this travesty, there needs to be some major adjustments on the culprits
(which luckily arent that many as to not dump the whole game and rebuild it ground up)
such as

confident strike
dueling sword
plasma gun
arbites
certain ogryn talents (that affect rumbler/light spam)

one is a major point being the new class, but at least it isnt out for that long that people cant remember the time before aka throw tantrums about weapons that been annyoing for 1year+

enemies need to be more meaningful on terms of their threat level (and i cant believe i’m saying that, this stuff really pushed me this far) and reduced in numbers as to finally correct that threshold of disbelief when suddenly 20 gunners pop up in a staircase that has room for 5.

so up with the enemy health, if they last longer under fire they compensate for their “missing peers”
dont matter if 3 gunners shoot at you for 20 seconds or 9 for 7 but the former at least begins to feel like a fight again.

we could add some mixed hordes auxilaries to make up for that missing bulk, for example why do poxwalkers use rudimentary weapons (ok, basically zombies with their last “tools” still in stiff hands, i get it) but dont “loot” the tons of equipment we leave behind in our wake of destruction?

add some walkers+ that fire blindly with some lasguns or space ak’s they picked up, sniffed on it and foud the trigger.

“new” enemy, little threat level, adds moderate “ranged attack” to hordes that will be reduced when the amount of specials/elites go down.

or finally add some proper nurgle enemies that fling goo/ :poop: by less sophisticated means :man_shrugging:

i cant gauge how much work it’ll be on the developers end, but from customers perspective (AFTER the vacation, no worries there)
i’d be fine with a yellow band/sign “work in progress” and have them experiment with certain values for the rest of the year.

everything’s better than THIS :sad_but_relieved_face:

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This is a truly serious issue. The difficulty system has practically collapsed and no longer holds any meaning. right now, players with a wide range of skill levels, from Malice to Auric, are all gathering in Auric and Havoc. I’ve never seen such a ridiculous game before.

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It doesn’t work like that, the game’s design functions between parameters havoc already pushes outside of those, the lethality of gunners the way certain builds start to outshine/become necessary. itr all starts to push the game into narrower and more limited game options.

And the engine has limits to, silent specials become a thing, there is only so many things the engine can throw at the players and each one ups the network load, lot of people already experience ghost bullets failed weapon swaps etc.

nerfing us back down into line with the games design makes way more sense than braking the game to leave op weapons/abilities as they are.

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it turns out you can, in fact, indicate sarcasm and have it completely go over someone’s head anyways

Anyway, yeah. DT needs to be scaled back as a whole. The game is ridiculous, unbalanced, and exhausting.

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What do people think that simply suggest havoc 50+ for this levels to be like?

312513455235 crushers and 1221312 chaos spawns in every room? Octuplets instead of twins?

Havoc spawns and enemy density is already fine as is (this is true for normal game modes too). The problem lies within the fact, that certain builds / classes / weapons fart all over it regardless.

Reasonable nerfs are needed in some cases as stated ALOT of times. (Arbites weapons and shock mine with lone wolf, Ogryn is too much of a powerhouse, infinite cleave weapons dont have real drawback AND SO ON)
Buffs to certain weapons also - look at the sad state of infantry autoguns and infantry lasguns for example. Vet and Zealot talent trees need a bit of an overhaul. Vet has to many tax nodes and meme talents, zealot is just boring.
Enemies in Auric difficulty need to be a tad bit tankier (especially CRUSHERS and MAULERS are a complete joke. They feel like clan rat pushovers). That mode is a serious same game on medium diff atm. Auric Difficulty should actually MEAN something. I mean look at that evil lookin demon skull thingy next to the difficulty description.

We all know that. If Fatshark is not in complete denial, they all know that too.

/Thread

JUST KIDDING

TELL THEM AGAIN 10000 TIMES IF NECESSARY

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I can see it now.

“Fatshark, Infantry Lasguns need buffs!”
“Understood, doubling Bulwark spawns and buffing Scrier’s Gaze.”

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Hey folks, we tweaked infantery lazergun!

Now deals +5% more damage and makes a fun peep peep sound when drawn!

We listen to feedback!

xD

(Sorry Ima goin to leave that thead now, back to trolling steam forums)

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Don’t leave me! :sob:

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Enemy design should also be looked at, for example, crushers being one of the biggest (no pun intended) problems.

Crushers are, sound bugs aside, the enemy that has little to no actual counterplay outside of anti-armour brute force (even CC is just setup for that brute force) because of how they were designed to have no non or less-armoured weakpoints and a move set that has no mix-ups whatsoever (as much as people complain about the chaos warrior’s mach punch). They also scale horribly in that when density gets to a certain point, you can’t move but there are 5 of them stacked together giving the binary state of either killing them all together or getting 5-stacked overheaded because they’re out of sync enough to catch you on the dodge cooldown.

Pretty much compare them with chaos warriors in VT2 and every difference makes crushers worse.

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You know the kicker? I actually do think some enemies should be buffed… just not all of them, and not all the same way. Something should be done about infinite cleave AOE weapons, but not to the point they can’t hurt pox hordes or minor elites.

Don’t you put that evil on me

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Just so you know, 99.9% of high-level players play exclusively on Auric or Havoc difficulty, so there are no skilled players in Damnation or lower difficulties. Right now, a team of four beginners has a much lower success rate than a team of three beginners and one experienced player. That’s because this game offers various tools, such as classes and weapons, that grant godlike power. As long as there’s one skilled player who has access to that power, the team almost never fails.

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I personally only play Auric as Havoc isn’t fun for me, and your experience is actually exactly the reason why I think everything needs to be scaled back. Players moreso than enemies, but the game needs to be saner overall.

Right now we exist in a state where you can be literally invincible in the direct middle of the densest horde you’ve ever seen, but also one mistake and you explode instantly. It’s a very all-or-nothing kind of deal that demands constant vigilance, and while it’s intense and fun, it’s tiring. Even VT2 Cataclysm gives you breaks and a modest amount of difficult elites and specialists.

EDIT: Another big part of it is that players on their own get so powerful that they don’t need their team anymore. Even though there are a lot more team-oriented buffs and effects, the fact that a player can solo an entire Auric on their own and not have it be that big of an accomplishment anymore really says something. VT2 has more teamplay by comparison, even if most of your talents and bonuses are selfish, because each player is individually weaker, and not expected to solo the whole thing on their own. Weakness forces natural teamwork to happen.

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