Proposal For Replacement of "Make Every Shot Count" Penance

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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Anyone who has played Veteran Sharpshooter has seen this penance. In its current state the pennance reads,

Make Every Shot Count:
Complete a Mission on Hersey Threat or higher with no Ammo remaining, and 100% accuracy.

Not sure why the capitalization is like that but it is. Anyway, the point is there are 3 methods of doing this, only two of which anyone actually does or can reasonably do

  1. Play the mission normally, hit every shot, and end up with 0 ammo at the end. This is basically impossible and unlikely.
  2. Never pick up ammo, shoot until you run out, mostly targeting easy shots so you don’t miss anything, once out swap to melee.
  3. Dump all your ammo but 1 shot into a wall, Alt+F4, reconnect, hit one shot, melee.

1 is basically impossible, 2 makes you a major burden to your team as you’re a shooting class that can’t shoot, 3 is an exploit but arguably the nicest to your team as you can play normally up until you need to Alt+F4 right at the end.

End result of all of this is that we have a terrible penance that is bad for those trying to complete it, terrible for their teammates to play with, and results in a cosmetic that is a sign of you having screwed over your team rather than a sign of having completed a difficult and meaningful challenge.

My proposal:

Change the penance to be something along the lines of “Kill 50 enemies with your secondary weapon (gun), without missing a shot”.

These kills would have to be consecutive, in other words, in a row, however they would ideally only be on your secondary (your gun) so switching to your melee as needed shouldn’t break the chain. Also your primary (melee) kills wouldn’t count so you can’t cheese it with melee kills.

Problems this solves:

  1. It can’t be cheesed, I can’t think of any way to cheese this.
  2. Fits the playstyle of the class, you have to keep shooting and killing things, arguably puts a focus on sniping as you want to make sure you get the kill, which is in line with the “Sharpshooter” class.
  3. Players working on the penance aren’t a detriment to their team.
  4. Can reasonably be completed without focusing on it if a player just consistently has good accuracy.
  5. Easy to balance, just adjust the number of kills needed to balance it.
  6. Actually challenging in a good way, a real sense of accomplishment on completion.

Adding on to this proposal I would like to talk about the reward.

The issue is that, at current, the associated chest plate has a stigma around it. You get it by cheesing the challenge and screwing over your teammates. The new challenge is actually a show of skill, not a show of cheese. At the same time, while it would be easy to remove the chest plate from all people who currently have it and force everyone to complete the challenge again, that would be unfair to all those who’ve spent countless hours completing it as it is now.

My solution. Remove progress on the penance. If someone has it completed now, they will no longer have it completed. However, let them keep the current chest plate if it’s already in their inventory. Create a new variant of the chest plate. Nothing big, I would suggest either adding a raised gold or silver Aquilla across the chest or over the pectoral, or maybe 1 or 2 more purity seals. Then for the newly updated penance, give both the original and new variant of the chest plate as the reward. People who completed the old penance get to keep their version, but if they want to get the new variant they have to complete the updated penance.

The result is that there is a clear distinction showing people that a player has completed the new, more skillful, non-cheesy, penance, and ideally a small change like this to the design on the item shouldn’t be an expensive or time consuming thing to do (I’m sure there are already tons of a Aquilla or purity seal assets that can be pulled for this).

I have no idea what the back end of the game looks like and therefore how easy any of this would be to implement, but I think it would be a healthy change to the Veteran penances.

Thanks, please comment with any feedback/thoughts/opinions, and FatShark, if you’re reading this, thank you for the game you’ve created, it lots of fun, hopefully with a few tweaks like this we can take it to the next level.

8 Likes
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I should add that the new penance would also require playing on Heresy difficulty like the existing one.

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Don’t forget you get ammo from special/elite kills, so it’s not this easy either.

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There’s currently a bug or something where the ammo you get back from the coherency bonus doesn’t count unless you pull out your ranged weapon again.

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Didn’t they fix this?

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They did.

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I thought they fixed it for Overwatch but not Make Every Shot Count, since someone in my group got it yesterday.

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Uh okay, then i must have missed that one shot i took ^^ Didn’t work for me last weekend.

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Makes sense. They only changed the wording of Overwatch, adding “full game” to the description. I think they also added an extra space in-between two words.

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It can actually.

Boltgun, horde spawn, let it rip, penance done before your clip runs out.

11

Love this, Makes it feasible for Brace Auto Dakka vets like me, but still a challenge :slight_smile:

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it worked for other veteran in group just fine today. i just miss some shoots, my teammate shoots barel which knocks my target away or my teamates kill elite at end :smiley: 40h on heresy with veteran no luck so i went for number 3. too. one shoot left alt+f4 near end of mission, i log back and fell through floor → dead half ammo back :slight_smile:

13

Having done Make Every Shot Count, most of the issues come with the shoddy hit detection. I used a Plasma Gun for my penance attempt and just played it like I would play a normal game with Plasma Gun. Focus on big chunky targets. Most attempts for me failed both with Plasma Guns and other weapons because I fired a shot into an enemy and the hit detection just failed to recognize it, or a teammate already killed the target and it was in a dying animation and ate my bullet.

I’m not saying necessarily that your suggestion is bad, but it doesn’t really address the issue that makes the penance a pain to get, the weird hit detection.

14

While the penance is utterly, utterly stupid and must be changed, your solution doesn’t fix the problem.

Others have already mentioned hit detection, but the problem is that the penance is too easy to fail for other reasons that are beyond your control. Shots to a corpse and friendly fire both count as a miss.

There simply shouldn’t be a penance that is based around sustained 100% accuracy for a long period of time. It encourages the player to shoot only when they are absolutely certain to score a hit, just like the original penance.

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no, because you can restart the chain at any time. so you’re not screwed over if you fail the first time.

16

Atleast change the fcking passive ammo regain.
Almost had this sht; got a hound spawn after last boss, and ofc a +1 regain to ammo as soon as it died.
F*ck whoever designed this penance.

1 Like