Reduce Low Intensity Frequency on Damnation

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
22

Increasing the material reward on heresy negates my desire to play Damnation. It was like this before the change as well.

Maybe i am just lazy, but why bother with Damnation if i can get the same rewards without the added difficulty? Just so i can claim “i am playing on Damnation?”

I don’t see the point in this. Why would i want to play a Difficulty with a chance of failure, when i could just play a Difficulty with guaranteed success?

As it is right now, I am rewarded for the extra effort of playing Damnation. Without trying to be offensive: I don’t care about bragging rights on Damnation. And as it is right now, playing an HI Shocktroop on Damnation is actually worth my time. If i could get the same playing Hersey, why would i want to play the Damnation stuff? It is a lot of added stress, and i am playing Video games to relax from my stressful life.

Increased Rewards make the Stress of playing on harder Difficulties worth it.

I also disagree with making Low Intensity more rare. Low Intensity serves the means of allowing people to dip their toes into the higher difficulty in a way that HI do not provide, as the HP treshholds are different.

If someone does not want to play Low Intensity, simply don’t select Low Intensity. Unlike Vermintide there is no bonus for playing Quick Play. So you can just pick any of the other missions.

And to be honest, i think the issue with this is born from the fact of the limited missions available. And i think the Mission Select should, instead of showing you a mission of any difficulty instead have a way to select the general mission difficulty and then generate the maximum number of missions for that difficulty.

Meaning instead of having a 2 Tier 1, 3 Tier 2, 3 Tier 3, 3 Tier 4 and 4 Tier 5 missions, you’d select “Damnation” and it would show you 15 Tier 5 missions with various modifiers. Then you could guarantee one LI and one HI mission, and the rest is random. Everyone is guaranteed to find what they want. Because honestly i don’t need to be shown Tier 1 and 2 missions anymore. There is no way i’d pick them anyway, and i’d happily trade them in for more Tier 4 and 5 missions and more diverse set of modifiers.

People that click quickplay just want to play the game. People that have specific requirements should just pick the missions that meet those requirements as close as they can get. There is absolutely no need to take options away from people.

If people want to grind LI missions, let them. And most importantly, lowering the payout of Damnation missions just means i am less incentivized to play Damnation missions. It isn’t that Damnation is that much more complicated, but why bother if i don’t get anything in return for it? I mean other than meaningless bragging rights. It’s just making the game worse. Right now the payout is in a good spot.

I have a reason to play Damnation and do all side objectives. If you lower the pay out or increase the payout on lower levels, why play Damnation? Some rewards more work. To me that is like deliberately triggering the Demon Host. There is no point in fighting the Demon Host right now, so we don’t do it. Removing Damnation rewards (which doesn’t matter if you do so by increasing lower level rewards or decreating damnation rewards) will have the same effect for me: Why bother with Damnation?

23

For me its the challenge. I don’t even care about mats because I generally avoid the crafting system as much as possible. I don’t have any of the tier 4 chain axe blessings or thunder hammer blessings and I’m trying for neither.

I just want daddy director to f me up. I’m here to play a game and I want the intensity at max. None of this walking around in silence for 10 minutes waiting for the next horde to spawn. I find losing in PvE games to be almost as fun as winning, as long as its not because of some BS server behavior.

1 Like
24

If you don’t want to play damnation then don’t.

There are plenty of people who are happy to play it even if it does not provide extra rewards. Just like cataclysm in vermintide 2.

Sorry, but if you need a reason to play damnation other than the fact it is damnation, then you are doing it wrong.

25

Well, there is no easy way to say this without sounding conceited, but i can’t really tell much of a difference between Tier 4 and 5 in terms of “challenge” for me personally. Damnation is more stressful, because there is more that needs to be done, but I don’t really find sniping that Sniper on a Ledge during a Horde on Tier 4 about as challenging as sniping the Sniper on Tier 5 during a horde.

I mean you say its walking in silence for 10 minutes, waiting for the next horde to spawn, for me the lull in engagement between Tier 4 and 5 doesn’t matter and the enemies i engage on Damnation are no more challenging than the same ones on Heresy. They just have more HP… it is more of a piniata to hit, than actually more challenging. You can get the same BS moments where 3 hounds spawn right after 2 Trappers on Tier 4 as you can Tier 5. And usually it happens on neither.

To me its just a matter of how much stress it is, in terms of how many things i need to do and how often.

If enemies would have new move sets and tactics in Damnation it would be a different thing. Maybe if there would be unique enemy types in damnation, but after a certain point it really makes no difference if you dodge 2 Ragers or 4 Ragers. Its just a matter of how long it takes to dispatch them. Same with Crushers and such.

Without a reward to go along with the extra effort… why expend the effort? I mean, there is a reason why we walk past Demonhosts, without triggering it. It is just not worth fighting it.

Yeah, but that argument is the same as mine when i said “if you don’t want Low Intensity, then don’t play Low Intensity”, except that I didn’t argue for taking away something from people.

Right now you are properly compensated for the extra effort it takes to play Damnation in comparison to the lower difficulties. I don’t see a reason why this needs to change.

And what is wrong with providing rewards corresponding to the increased challenge? That is the thing i don’t understand. Why do we need an elitist gamemode that has no rewards other than bragging rights, to gatekeep those that do not play for the sole sake of “challenge”. With Challenge being highly subjective.

If you say so. I, however, never really cared for bragging rights and like my time to be properly compensated based on the effort i expend. Meaning if i have to expend more effort for a thing, then i also expect greater benefits from the thing and not just expend effort for the sake of expending effort.

26

I’ll politely disagree. Damnation intimidated me for a very long time, so I stuck to Heresy. But I slowly dipped my toes into Damnation, starting off with low intensity missions and working my way up from there. It took time and practice, but now I can handle some of the harder conditions.

My point is that less experienced or less skilled players use those low intensity missions as a stepping stone to harder content. Its easier to handle regular Damnation when you’ve run a few low intensity ones first and gotten used to the damage you take and the new damage breakpoints.

1 Like
27

Reserving 2 out of 3 Damnation missions for Low Intensity seems kind of asanine to me. They increased the amount of Damnation missions for a reason. People want to do the hard difficulty for the challenge. Slapping Low Intensity on the majority of them is pointless.

The less experienced/skilled can play regular Damnation just fine. So what if you lose a couple of times. That’s what makes it fun. Low Intensity is a joke. Just stick to Malice or Heresy if you’re scared of losing. There’s nothing wrong with that. But demanding you get to play Damnation while Low Intesity is holding your hand to the victory screen is just stupid. You’re forcing everyone else to deal with a plethora of EZ Mode in a limited set of available missions because you’re scared of losing but still want the ‘accomplishment’ of Damnation.

2 Likes
28

I can say exactly the same, you know? There are plenty of times when the only damnation missions available were high intensity or high intensity shock troop gauntlet. I don’t complain about it, other people get to have fun too. But that includes people who want low intensity or regular damnation missions. Like it or not, its an important gateway into doing harder damnation modifiers.

Without those gateways you might end up not having enough Damnation players to get full games later on. Its certainly true for me. I play in a less populated region, so having those gateways to harder content like low intensity damnation is important, or I might run out of people to play with.

29

The issue here is the system itself. I don’t want to limit any players access to low intensity, I made the post with Fatshark’s current implementation in mind - that of limited, time gated modifiers. What I ideally want is to do away with that arbitrary restriction so that everyone can play whatever modifier they want. This idea of one or the other is unnecessary.

But based on systems in Vermintide, I don’t think they’re going to make them any less restrictive. Anyone remember heroic deeds? They were fun mission difficulty modifiers that you could earn as loot, and a common request was to make those modifiers available all the time as an optional challenge. They sank into obscurity in the late game because no one wants to be bothered engaging with the loot grind once they’re max level/equipment. Twitch mode and mods were more reliable ways to up the ante. So, like weaves, a fun system died that could have been saved by making it more accessible.

I hope it’s different this time around - mission modifiers in Darktide look to be more modular. Simply increasing the number of levels and modifiers available seems very feasible.

30

They’re already digging their own technical debt hole if instead of building for modular conditions where multiple of them can be applied easily to a mission, they’re making every combination of conditions a unique condition. Hopefully the icons are just for visibility, but I have a feeling they’re going to have some interesting back-end things to sort out if they keep increasing the number of conditions.

31

this. imagine making a mechanic so unbelievably bad and then hunkering down on it so much that it forces you to do even more work rather then just letting people choose whatever conditions they want to add to the map.

32

With 3 different damnation missions available at the same time:

  • One low intensity
  • One normal intensity
  • One high intensity

Make that consistent, everyone is happy, end of debate x)

2 Likes
33

Imagine…3 damnation missions…3 intensity states…its almost like there’s a 1:1 ratio of options to slots…HMMMMMMMM :thinking:

34

Can’t have good design override the holy RNG.

1 Like
35

Jeez guys, nobody wants low intensity removed (except for a tiny minority of toxic elitists, but their opinion doesnt matter for obvious reasons).

Nobody wants to gatekeep you from dipping your toes into damnation.

We just dont want more than one of them active at one time.

1 Like