Please give an explanation of terms used on weapons and perks ingame

[Demoulius]

Hi there,

Ive recently been getting alot of my friends play Darktide and im trying to keep them motivated to continue playing. But im running into a bit of a problem. Its also something thats been bugging me for a while but while im not to bothered about specifics, I notice my friends are. The unclearness of alot of the terminology used in the game. Specificly in weapons and the skill tree.

Could it be possible to get some explanation of these ingame terms? Preferably ingame? Il explain what I mean… Alot of perks use terminology that (as far as im aware) isent explained… anywhere. I can google the term and alot of times il find people on reddit talking about the terminology. But id like an explanation from the developers. Not hear what people THINK it does.

Im currently logged into my Zealot. So il take a few examples from my Zealot’s selection of weapons:
-Shattering impact. lvl 1 perk on boltgun. Target receives 1 stacks of 5% brittleness on direct projectile hit. Lasts 5 seconds.

What the hell is brittleness? I THINK it lowers armor. But the game doesent tell me. Can you…stack these stacks? The game doesent tell me either.

Fan the flames. Lvl 2 perk on purgation flamer.
Primary attack Ignores 40% stagger resistance on burning enemies, as well as dealing +35% impact.

Does the effect also apply when your weapon is braced? What is stagger resistance? What is impact?

-Terrifying barrage. Level 2 perk on Columbus mark V infantry autogun.
Supress enemies within 6m radius on close range kill.

What is close range? 2 meters? 5 meters? 10 meters? I know you can tell in the psycanium by trial and error. But giving a number sounds like an easier way for players to know what a close range kill is.

Substained fire. Level 4 perk on a Zarona mk IIa Quikdraw stub revolver
+20% damage on Third and fourth shots in a salvo.

It is a semi-automatic weapon. What counts as a salvo? Continues fire? Just the 3rd and 4th shot? Does there need to be a set time between the shots?? Holding the trigger only fires a single shot so kinda makes it hard to tell how this perk works. Ive tried firing as fast in a row as I possibly can but the perk doesent show up in your list of perks (do any weapon perks) so its very hard to tell if the perk is even working… All the shots (outside of crits) do the same damge. i used the carapce armoured ogryn as a dummy as most other targets dont survive for an entire clip…

Savage sweep. Level 3 perk on Turtoisky Mk VI heavy sword
Hitting at least 3 enemies with an attack, increases your cleave by180% for 2 seconds.

What is cleave? Some weapons have the trait and some dont. The weapon itself has ‘cleave damage’ and ‘cleave targets’. So does it boost one of these perks? Or none of these? All of these? Is cleave just ‘any attack that hits more then 1 target’ or is it referring to a specific stat? What does boosting cleave do?

I could go on for every weapon and every waeaponperk in the game but ALOT of these perks arent really clear about what they do. Some perks boost damage and others power for example. Is the effect the same? I have no clue… Its kinda hard to make educated guesses on whats usefull to have and whats not. And the example perk on the revolver that refers to a salvo is just outright confusing.

For the skill tree im also left with alot of questions very often. One of the biggest ones one for me has to be aura and coherency size though. What is the standard size of coherency aura? If you have an aura is it always the same size as your coherency aura? Are they both the same? I sometimes see perks that increase 1 or the other and an increase of 50% can mean an extra meter range or several meters in range. But without knowing how big the aura even is, its hard to tell how usefull it even is. Some way of seeing your coherency/aura size ingame would be helpfull. Maybe a toggable function as I can see it beeing unhelpfull in tense fighting but beeing able to see at a glance what the size is would be helpfull.

That said theres plenty of other things I can point out that arent explained. Il list a few that just have me personally puzzled.

-Toughness damage reduction.

See it alot on the zealot and a few times on the psyker. Dont recall seeing this on the veteran? But what does it do, exactly? It sounds like it reduces the toughness damage that you receive per hit. So a 100 damaging hit with 10% toughness damage reduction would do 90 toughness damage? This is just me guessing, its explained nowhere…

The punishment perk on the zealot tree.
Melee attacks that Hit at least 3 enemies grant +30% impact strength for 5s. stacks 5 times. At max stacks gain Uninterruptible.

What does uninterruptible mean? I assume it means your charged attacks dont ‘reset’ after beeing hit in melee. But its explained nowhere. What is impact strength? Is it the same as damage? Is it the same as stagger because ive seen it used together with stagger alot. Explained nowhere.

Again could on go for skill perks as well but I think ive made my point. The game does a poor job of explaining its own mechanics and this makes it hard to tell what gear and what skill points are worth taking. Ive gotten friends join me on xbox and im always bombbarded with questions. As im the group ‘veteran’ when it comes to this game im it trying to show them the ropes, if you will. And ive noticed that every time that I have to tell them ‘I dont know, it isent explained’ it kind of discourages and demotivates them. Theyre all starting fresh from lvl 1 and someone with hundreds of hours in the game cant anwser basic questions to them. I think for the longevity of the game it would benfit alot from basic explanation of game mechanics.

It doesent need to be overly complicated. The weapon perks that you can mouse over for each weapon in the ‘inspect’ window give an easy explanation of what the perks/statlines do. And at the same time also give the player a wealth of knowledge what raising or lowering of these numbers means in the long run.

Doing something simular for every perk/effect/trait/whatever would go a long way of solving this kind of confusion. It would allow the playerbase more ways to find synergy in their builds and maybe inform them of mechanics they dident even know excisted which only helps to make your game be played more in the long run.

If it takes to long to implement ingame just listing it on your website somehwere would work a pinch as well. Heck, post it here for all I care But just having the information available to your players would help a bunch in keeping my group of friends motivated to continue investing time in this game!

Thanks in advance

[Dumlefudge]

@Demoulius

What the hell is brittleness?

Brittleness is a debuff on enemies that increases damage multiplier against enemies. If you do 20% damage to carapace/40% damage to Flak, applying 20% Brittleness will raise that to 40%/60% respectively. Rending does the same thing, but it is applied as a buff to your character.

If the combined total of base damage multiplier, Rending and Brittleness goes over 100%, the excess Rending/Brittleness increases damage by 1% for every 4% excess Rending/Brittleness. For example, in the Flak scenario above, if I had 40 Rending/40 Brittleness (bringing the multiplier above 100%), the excess 20% would translate to +5% damage.

Sadly, there’s no easy way to see the damage multipliers, without doing the math yourself. Unarmored is typically 100% base damage, but not guaranteed.

@Demoulius

Does the effect also apply when your weapon is braced? What is stagger resistance? What is impact?

Braced is the ADS mode (without the DS bit) - when you hold RMB or the controller equiv, that’s bracing the weapon

EDIT: I misread your post here. It should only apply to the single shot of fire,not the stream of fire.

Stagger resistance is an enemy’s ability to not get interrupted/stunned/knocked down (collectively, staggered). Some enemies have very high stagger resistance innately, and can get increased resistance in certain situations e.g. Ragers have very high stagger resistance while attacking, but certain weapon specials ignore stagger resistance and will easily interrupt them.

Impact overlaps heavily with Stagger, so they’re hard to separate. I think impact affects how forceful your stagger is e.g. knocking someone to the ground instead of making them stumble.

@Demoulius

Does there need to be a set time between the shots??

It’s more apparent on other weapons, but I think it’s the time needed for the gun’s recoil to reset (so you need to spam/hold LMB as applicable). It’s a fairly short window, but I don’t know the exact timing.

@Demoulius

What is cleave? Some weapons have the trait and some dont. The weapon itself has ‘cleave damage’ and ‘cleave targets’

Cleave improves your ability for attacks to continue through a target, and hit another. Each enemy has a hit mass - if you hit an enemy, their hit mass is subtracted from your cleave. If the result is greater than zero, your attack can hit another enemy (and the same check is done based on your remaining cleave). Cleave Targets improves your cleave amount (for more enemies hit), while cleave damage improves the damage dealt to certain armor types.

@Demoulius

See it alot on the zealot and a few times on the psyker. Dont recall seeing this on the veteran? But what does it do, exactly? It sounds like it reduces the toughness damage that you receive per hit. So a 100 damaging hit with 10% toughness damage reduction would do 90 toughness damage? This is just me guessing, its explained nowhere…

Exactly. Different enemies have toughness damage multipliers (to either increase/decrease how much they damage toughness), and toughness damage reduction is applied to that modified amount e.g. ranged enemies tend to do more toughness damage than health damage per shot.

@Demoulius

What does uninterruptible mean? I assume it means your charged attacks dont ‘reset’ after beeing hit in melee. But its explained nowhere. What is impact strength? Is it the same as damage? Is it the same as stagger because ive seen it used together with stagger alot. Explained nowhere

Re: uninterruptible, exactly. Re: impact, I’ve explained above. It does not influence damage in any way.

Some sort of in game glossary/guide is something I’ve wanted for a long time - the game does very little to explain what anything does, which is annoying - I don’t think I need to give any examples, since you’ve already come across plenty

[Demoulius]

Thanks for the replies The post was mostly aimed at the developers but considering I picked examples that confused me I appreciate the clarification!

-The clarification on the flamer for example also shows why the clarification is needed. I hardly ever use the single puff of fire and generally only whip it out for hordes. So this perk would be 100% useless to me given the way that I play with it. That said there is no other way to fire the weapon. Alt fire only brazes it, doesent fire it in a different way. Even though it allows continous fire. (You still need to press LMB (for pc) to fire the weapon I mean) This is why its so confusing.

-The handcannon perk doesent seem to work though. I just did a mission with the flamer and the one I use has a perk that applies to continoius fire and the perk does show up while im doing that. Same applies to the damage numbers of the flamer damage. But no matter what I try with the hand cannon the perk doesent seem to show up and the damage numbers seem to suggest the same. Bugged maybe?

-re: cleave. Whats the confusing part is that it doesent specify what part of cleave is improved. Is it all of it? Is it a cleave statline that each weapon has but not always visible? Because I think ive also seen weapons that dont have a visible cleave statline have a perk that buffs cleave. So what gets boosted there?

I just saw an easy example of why stagger and impact are so INCREDIBLY confusing though and felt like I should add it to the list. As it perfectly explains the confusion that the players feel.

Ive got a Agripinaa mk VII Combat shotgun as a reward for a mission. Under stopping power it reads ‘Measure of the impact and stagger inflicted on enemies’ as the explanation of the statline.

Then you look at the effects it influences. Outside of the last statline it influences (which is the stagger it causes) the rest of the statlines influence damage. But the description mentioned impact, not damage. But when you hover over the damage statline it likewise mentions damage(as one would expect) but theres no mention of impact anywhere. So is impact the same as damage? Is it not and is this case a typo in the description of stopping power?

Either way some clarification from the developers or people with insight on the engine would be greatly appreciated. The fact that we have to speculate at all, because noone knows; in a game where these features are main advantages (or drawbacks) of perks is beyond silly.

-edit-
Did some more testing on the hand cannon perk. And now it shows even with the weapon not fired yet. It shows the weapon perk greyed out on the perk list where it wasent before. The perk lights up when you shoot and if you keep firing while the perk is lit up it DOES seem to work. I dont know why its working now and wasent earlier. Maybe something to do with swapping weapons in the psycanium not applying perk properly or something? Either way yeah it seems to be that so long as you keep firing and dont let the weapon ‘come to a rested position’ it seems to apply the damage buff as the description says. Just figured id add that.

[Dumlefudge]

@Demoulius

Whats the confusing part is that it doesent specify what part of cleave is improved. Is it all of it? Is it a cleave statline that each weapon has but not always visible? Because I think ive also seen weapons that dont have a visible cleave statline have a perk that buffs cleave. So what gets boosted there

Many weapons don’t have a Cleave stat, so getting the exact cleave number is a bit tricky - I think people have dug up most of the numbers over time, but I’m not sure they’re compiled anywhere.

+Cleave blessings improve the amount of enemies you can hit in a single swing, and have no effect on the damage per target.

@Demoulius

But no matter what I try with the hand cannon the perk doesent seem to show up and the damage numbers seem to suggest the same. Bugged maybe?

The Handcannon blessing for the Revolver, you mean? I haven’t tried it in patch 14,but I thought it worked - you’d have to compare Revolvers with similar base stats/perks with and without the blessing to see for sure. It doesn’t show a buff since it should only apply to the (critical) hit that triggered the blessing.

EDIT: Just saw your edit. You mean the salvo-related blessing for the Revolver, I was confused for a while there!

@Demoulius

Ive got a Agripinaa mk VII Combat shotgun as a reward for a mission. Under stopping power it reads ‘Measure of the impact and stagger inflicted on enemies’ as the explanation of the statline.

Some of those descriptions are… confusing, at best. I’m not sure if Stopping Power only affects damage, or if it also improves stagger/impact as the description says. There’s a few similar weird things, like Cleave Targets lists a Damage Distribution and Stagger Distribution - an early build of the game had separate values for these stats, which was eventually scrapped for a single number, but the 2 values are still presented.

[Demoulius]

Oh no I dident mean the handcannon perk. lol. That was a typo on my behalf. I meant the Substained fire perk. I just edited my previous post to mention I got it working. Dont know why it wasent working earlier though.

I always call it the handcannon when im talking to my mates because thats what this thing basicly is. This isent a stub revolver. A stub revolver is basicly an old western style 6-shooter. Firing the same caliber rounds a autogun does. A stub revolver in lore does nowhere near the damage thats shown in game. A hand cannon on the other hand… Its basicly a magnum revolver dialed to 11. Even has 5 rounds capacity like the ingame ‘stub revolver’ does. With man-stopper rounds it basicly ignores carapace armour.

Im also a DM for a dark heresy 2nd edition campaign so I know the difference between the 2. And they are…rather big. Weapon model aside, what we got ingame is basicly a handcannon.

[dragomusic]

Not going to read this whole thread, and I think helping each other learn what these means is great but it should not be required to come to the forums to learn what a blessing does. Thos game desperately needs a codex for people that goes over stuff like power, cleave, rending, finesse, first target, etc.

[Demoulius]

Yeah I know. Thats what this thread is about, lol.

[dragomusic]

I understand. Just voicing my support and agreement.

[FASAStampede]

@Demoulius

Ive recently been getting alot of my friends play Darktide

Why? Have they wronged you in some way…?

Okok, for real now - go to the DT Discord. Pick the appropriate class channel, ask away and don’t be shy. Don’t settle for the first answer, or the second. You’ll get to know who the bone’eads are very quickly. Some classes have nifty guides already in place/pending.

Oh, and - beware, you might be exposed to sexual innuendo, weebiness or, if you visit the oggy hangout - unsolicited food pictures…

Enjoy! Learning what the tooltips don’t tell you and how the math is trying to work is literally the endgame of DT.

[Demoulius]

No I dont hate them. Theyre xbox players and I think the game got added to xbox gamepass or something?

Not a huge fan of visitng a discord group to get information on the game dont mind discord groups itself but one would expect the information would be more easily available?

Got another perk that gives me…ALOT of questions.

Lorentz mk VI Rumbler on my Ogryn. Got one with the Blaze away perk.
Blaze away: +8% power for every shot fired during continous fire. Stacks 5 times.

The weapon is a single shot grenade launcher. How do I continous fire with it? How do I turn a single shot into 5?

[zaygr]

According to a CM/dev a while ago, if you fire immediately after reload it adds to the stack, but it has to be hip fire, not aimed.

[Molonious]

This game has a ton of intricate mechanics that can have wildly different levels of impact on gameplay, and Kark-all in the way of meaningful explanation of any of it.

If you need to research the game independently to determine how mechanics work and operate, and rely on 3rd party YouTube videos and Discord groups doing their own testing and evaluation to determine their effect and utility, the developers have fundamentally failed in presenting the game to players.

Darktide isn’t the only game like this (have fun learning armor and module mechanics in games like World of Warships or Warthunder), but it’s particularly frustrating given how much highlight many of these vague keywords are given.

[Dumlefudge]

@Molonious

have fun learning armor and module mechanics in games like World of Warships or Warthunder

At least many of War Thunder’s concepts are rooted in things that exist, or some things could be reasonably inferred - the characteristics of certain shell types (e.g. chemical vs kinetic penetration), the consequences of crew/module damage, etc. You may not know what HEATFS means, but understanding the real world concept let’s you understand the WT concept more easily. Or what happens if your engine suffers damage - someone who hasn’t played the game could make a reasonable guess

Then volumetric collision appears and nothing makes sense anymore because somehow your huge tank shell colliding with a small viewport means your shell is too big to fit and therefore, does 0 damage to a tank which shouldn’t turned into a flaming wreck

To the point of the thread though, Last Epoch is a great example (IMO) of a good implementation of this; terms that have a specific meaning in-game are emphasised in tooltips etc, and there is a searchable in-game guide which categorises gameplay terms and provides a complete description of what they do (e.g. the Shock effect reduces enemy resistance to Lightning damage/stuns by X, and stacks Y times)

EDIT: An example

EDIT 2: I think I’m confusing Diablo 4 and Last Epoch re: emphasised terms. D4 emphasises specific game mechanics in tooltips (and the extended tooltip describes those terms). Last Epoch doesn’t emphasise the terms IIRC, but pretty much anything that is a gameplay mechanic can be discovered in the Game Guide.