Ranged combat sucks

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

im sorry but ranged combat/enemies in this game are annoying af. not to mention the amount of reaper ogryns spawning. this game is slowly becoming more annoying the more you freaking tamper with it.

the amount of flinching and sway when you’re getting lit up by the numerous and annoying amount of machine gunners with seemingly unlimited ammo is insane.

and i once had a sniper, 3 reapers, 2 ragers all spawn at once when i was the last one alive. whole game is just clunkiness after level 2. feel like a movie thats trying too hard.

5 Likes
2

I think they are meant to be annoying, or at least to enforce a degree of tactical positioning.
There are multiple ways to deal with them and if done properly, handling enemy ranged units is usually not that hard.

I do agree though, that the flinching and sway caused by the enemies, is a bit excessive in effect and duration.

3 Likes
3

Intentionally putting annoying things in the game is bad game design.
Of course that the combat system we have is intentional and not a product of some accidental bug, but the experience (annoyance) we get from this design is completely unintentional.
It was, likely, a decision to add artificial difficulty when other design choices failed and the game launch was forced.

I don’t think OP, or anyone else, said that it was too hard.
He said that it “sucks”, that it’s “annoying af”, “insane” and “clunky”.

For an extreme example to illustrate the point:
If you have an Ogryn, 2 Zlots and a psyker in your team, and you are up against a room full of scattered ranged enemies in cover, then, in theory, you can all hide behind a wall and let a psyker just BB everyone from the distance - one by one. In fact, that would be the most efficient thing to do since no one will lose a single HP point.
Absolutely nothing is hard about that, but it is annoying and bad game design to basically stand still while this is happening, and the psyker is not having much more fun in that situation as well.

10 Likes
4

Interesting. There are many things I don’t like about this game, but I think the gun play is excellent. Sure there are tweaks that can be done but on the whole I’m really happy with the fire fights… even though, as an Ogryn, there are people much better suited at dealing with ranged (which is fine).

2 Likes
5

Avoid excessive damage by sliding. Seek cover. Stay within coherency range to regenerate toughness.
You flinch a lot when your toughness gets depleted. Don’t get your toughness depleted.

Soon you will learn to handle situations like this with ease. It is supposed to get harder as difficulties go up, that’s the point.

6

No, gunners is ok. Not ok is spawn pack of shooters right in your back.

5 Likes
7

The gunplay is indeed good, but when ranged enemies are over-crowding an area it becomes boring and frustrating real quick. Lexa explains it well.

The design intent seems to be that

  1. ranged enemies (bar a few specials) always take cover, and that
  2. there is a functioning supression mechanic.

The issues are that

  • there isn’t enough cover, by far, for the amount of ranged enemies in higher difficulties (+certain scenarios on lower difficulties)
  • the ranged enemies that can’t find cover doesn’t function as intended (more aggressive/shooting more frequently)
  • some open areas combined with director spawns become really tedious (cross-fire, super slow gameplay)
  • some ranged enemies (dregs) are broken, walk around in the open and keep shooting (ignore that players are in melee distance)
  • supression mechanics aren’t reliable (even though in theory they culd be utilized well in some situations described above)
5 Likes
8

On this I totally agree. An horde or enemies that come from behind abd spawning by a door… Ok

An enemy that spawn right behind you… NO!

We can add a demon that is spawning behind you should never happen. Two times I encounter this situation.

Back on OP topic… I try to play on heresy, as several here have advised to do. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail badly.
Yesterday I had several games where, at start, we encountered several bulwarks and crushers with 3 spawning mutants, one horde, several shooters etc.
We ended very badly. We continue, we found the same + a beast of nurgle and load of shooters… This time we did not survive.
I start a new game… Same thing. But this time the team was playing together. We succeeded to advance until the boss. All along the map, several of us thinked the game wants us dead. We had 2 pest ogryn, 1 nurgle beast, load of hordes etc. We failed badly against the boss, because of our errors… And the 2 hordes that had fallen on us during the fight…
I have spend a good time on this game. All along of it I had to take cover, eliminate snipers (i played my veteran), hit and run etc. Was great. We could not visit the map off course… Walking away the group was sanctioned by a death penalty.

The game is great on this. I continue to think that there is a space for an intermediate difficulty level between malice and heresy. Before malice, no problem. But malice to heresy is a big step. Don’t know for heresy to damnation.
However, how the game is done is to force people to cooperate. You cannot run on your own and expect survive more than few minutes. On heresy, even going to a room taking a chest alone is a danger.
When we need to return to a medistation, even if it is at 1 minutes from where we are, we never let one guy go alone… A dog and we can loose someone.
Gunners force you to take cover and to advance meter by meter (or feet by feet if you use imperial measures).
My feeling is that on sedition, that’s not serious. You cannot die even if you go afk. On uprising, this is a pleasant trip. On malice, you have to play carefully. However, except if your team doesn’t play on coherency, there are few risks. You can, still, visit the map quietly, even alone. On heresy… Well for me when I play malice, I have the feeling we, as a team, deliver the map of the heretics and purge them all.
On heresy, I have the feeling we just try to advance to our objective and everything around, and not immediately near my teammates, is hostile and can kill me.
I hope I will progress… I do yet really bad mistakes but I begin to play more efficiently. I can see it when I go back to malice and how it is so easy…

In conclusion… I don’t think gun fights suck. This is just that it is, maybe, not what you expect from the game.

9

You could have been more honest and quoted the full sentence:

The ranged units do enforce a degree of tactical positioning. And if you fail to position yourself tactically, they will annoy you for sure.

You could make the argument that being able to fall down a cliff, having random bosses spawn, having enemies hit you in the back, or even losing health and running out of ammo, are annoying things. And i would agree to an extent.
But these are “annoyances” that are created to challenge you and to be dealt with, which in combination make for quite decent gameplay.

Well that is not useful feedback in my book. And also not true imho.

That is exactly the problem.
The example you gave, shows exactly what people often do in such a situation.
However, this behavior shows the “there is only one way and that way is straight towards the enemy” mentality. This approach lacks any kind of tactical thinking and is usually a bad way to deal with the situation at hand.

The group from your example could fall back to lure the ranged units into an area that makes them easier to approach and take out.
Or the 2 zealots that you mentioned, could do their damn job and make use of their genades, class ability and the environment to go engage the ranged units in melee combat, thereby enabling the ogryn to safely engage as well.
If the zealots do their job to a reasonable extend, these ranged encounters will almost never happen in the first place because the ranged units will usually be engaged in melee combat before they get the time to split and take cover.

Standing still and having only one person do something while three people wait and do nothing, is a choice that is made.
Although there are a few, rare situations where it is actually the fastest/safest way to deal with an engagement, it is usually done due to a lack of awareness and tactical thinking (aka a skill issue).

2 Likes
10

imho they are mostly fine.
Exceptions:

  • Shotgunners too quiet and too fast recovering from suppression (especially drags).
  • You get no soundqueue when the Shooters (esp sniper) shoot you because you were just in the way of their actual target.
  • Enemies shooting in melee
  • Enemies shooting thru each other
  • Shooters shooting another salve without any warning
  • Buggy Suppression

If you get too many shooters you can reposition to where the enemy cant shoot you and they will most often follow you (except one of the team wants to stay there and get shot). Works fine on damnation and is essential to learn when playing with flamethrower or purge.
With my recently leveled zealot I usually just dive into them, dodgeslide stray’s shoots to the next ones or use one of my 2 ults to charge into another hotspot. Depending of the positioning of the gunners, i also often use my flamethrower to cover almost all with my flames - the strays’ shots go into toughness or are dodgeslided. Once i got enough of them into melee, their friends will mostly stop shooting at me, if my team hasnt killed them yet. There are always ppl who dont get that they should shoot the ones I’m NOT near, but usually it works fine. Positioning is key - and also seeing in advance when your current position wont hold.
Also is timing key - pulling shooters from afar so they can easily get into position? Let someone charge in and kill them in one go or at least bind em in melee.
I really like it that shooter are actual a real threat instead of being mostly ignored like in vt2.

11

Have you considered you belong on the second difficulty for some fun with friends, and few 3s if you would like to challenge yourself?

1 Like
12

You could have been better at making that sentence without suggesting that adding annoyances (also called “artificial difficulty” mechanics) in the game is working as intended.

You can call anything “tactical positioning”. Like:
“I am not waiting for that reaper to finish shooting at this area so I can shoot back at him without being suppressed because the range combat design is bad, it’s because I am using tactical positioning”
That’s just coping.

Now, you are just generalizing. It’s not what is happening to you that is annoying, it is why, and what can you do about it (player agency).
From your example, falling down a cliff is anti-fun, poorly designed mechanic IF you fall down as a result of some unpredictable or unavoidable (no player agency) event in the game, like if, say, barrels randomly exploded in DT and you fall down.
You have vary little agency in handling range combat in this game. The best you can do is try some alternate route if it exist or just stand there which is, again, anti-fun and a consequence of bad design.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think any range enemy follows you out of their cover except maybe those common shooters.
Dreg gunners never leave the post, and snipers and scab gunners only reposition themselves occasionally. Reapers also never follow you when you go back if I’m not mistaken.

1 Like
13

Again, you show the lack of tactical thinking.

Unless you are the only one alife, there are other people who can help you out.
If you are being targeted by a reaper, it is a completely valid tactical decision for you to take cover while the reaper is shooting at you.
If you position yourself intelligently, you enable your teammates to attack the reaper without standing in, or crossing through its line of fire.

If an ally is being targeted instead, i would hope that they do the same, thereby enabling me and the other teammates to take out the reaper safely.

2 Likes
14

I get what you’re saying, you can (and should) just wait there for the reaper to stop shooting if you have no alternate paths, but the idea behind posts like this is to say that this “sucks”.

What happens all too often is that the argument is perceived as “it’s too hard” and that argument is easily avoided by the typical “git gud” or “skill issue” arguments, or your variant:

The population is already nearing the point where everyone will only be playing on damnation. The game is not too hard, and most of the playerbase left playing is either tides vets or players who have more than 200h in DT. This is not the what people are complaining about.

Just as like, what feels like, most people here, I think the gameplay itself is great. I hate the RNG itemization and current state of crafting and end-game progression, but when you are in the game (map), it’s mostly great.
That said, if I could point to one thing that sucks about gameplay, it would be the ranged combat with it’s shooters in the dark, shooting in melee range, suppression coupled with aim-bot accuracy etc.

1 Like
15

Darktide is a coop game.
The game produces situations that make us play in a cooperative way, which is something that i like, and something i think a coop game should do.
When cooperating with teammates, these situations are usually quite manageable, over quickly, and just a regular part of the gameplay.

People complaining emotionally about “coop stuff” in a coop game, make me think that they are either bad at “coop”, or at the “stuff”, or both.
Complaints about ranged units usually sound like a skill/team issue to me, because these gameplay situations (if handled properly, as a team) are over in a few seconds. I find it hard to believe, that someone would honestly call an easy encounter that takes a few seconds “annoying” or something similar.

And because complaining about the existance of coop elements themselves in a coop game, would make no sense at all.

Totally agree on that.
Doing an hourly check at the rng store and the “crafting” we have, are not something that should qualify as acceptable itemization or endgame for anyone.

16

With the AI of the shooters in this game, we should have a “cover position” function, kind of like Ubisofts “The Division.”

Without the ability to use cover, we’re pretty disadvantaged. Especially since the enemies seem to have pretty immaculate aiming. This is why Ogryns and Psykers using staffs can feel very underwhelming on heresy+ when the entire Dreg and scab shooter battalion spawns.

17

Dreg shotgunners in particular are just silly.
In any shooter (and IRL too) shotguns are quite inaccurate starting from midrange and not so damaging because of the round shape of the pellets. Here a shotgunner is pinpoint accurate and devastating even if he’s many meters away

1 Like
18

Ranged units are definitely overtuned to some extent, or rather various melee units are undertuned. But damnation remains easier than VT2 cata

Doesn’t help that the field of serviceable ranged options is narrower than that of melee options.

1 Like
19

Darktide has some of the most terrible gunplay I have ever experienced in a PvE shooter and it’s not even close. Bad hitreg, some half-baked suppression mechanic, huge stun and stagger on being shot, nonfunctional cover, nonsensical enemy spawns, clunky-ass guns, terrible sprint, no customization with terrible ironsights, etc. List goes on.

Just because the game is freakishly easy doesn’t mean it’s fun.

4 Likes
20

What’s the lore reason for us having a bolter and a powersword, but not getting a simple optic for our marksmans rifle?