With the buff to Gunner damage and mobility those enemies are now extremely threatening. Unlike melee elites (mostly) and hordes though, engaging them isn’t as interesting or interactive: instead of having to maneuver around to find an opportunity for advantageous attack it’s mostly either shoot them to death before they shoot you to death or - in case of melee builds - just rush into them and kill them before they kill you.
With the amount of Gunners and Shooters that can spawn on higher difficulties, I have found many of my favourite builds - ones that do not use typical panic buttons such as Voice of Command - to be no longer fun to play, as I feel like the margin of error is simply not large enough.
Given that Gunners are the only non-special enemy for which we can take Resistance stat on Curios I believe the developers to be well aware of the impact this enemy has on the gameplay. Perhaps it’s time for it to be addressed. At the moment, the problem is likely obfuscated from the community by the prevalence of overtuned options at players’ disposal (Voice of Command, Duelling Sword etc.) capable of trivializing every problem (including this one), but it’s gonna be painfully obvious should those be ever nerfed - and they have to be nerfed, unless making Havoc the new Malice is a long-term goal.
Also, please introduce slide limit just like the one we have for dodges. It’s part of the problem (especially when paired with Duelling Sword), but even worse the slidespam meta is simply ridiculous.
I have asked for this before, but given that a major update has been released and the problem is still here it’s only proper I reminded about it.
Completely disagree about sliding. Limiting sliding just nerfs every single melee build into the dirt. Even limiting it to when you have stamina only. It turns every ranged engagement with any amount of enemies into waiting behind cover and peeking for single shots while the ogryn has to wait behind a corner because none of the cover is big enough for him. It’s a complete reversal of every bit of progress in maneuverability and ranged engagements that’s been made since the beta when that was how you had to engage with every ranged squad.
Slight agree on gunner damage. The problem isn’t just their damage, it’s their lock on and never disengaging no matter where you go or what you do. If a single gunner targets you and nobody stuns it, you either close the distance with that target, take cover, or take a huge amount of damage because they just don’t seem to miss at any range they’re capable of hitting you from. Fix the behaviour slightly and they’d be much more fun. Lower accuracy, less aimbot, disengaging or swapping targets after a burst all seem like better potential fixes.
You have opressive gunners cause of slide has no limits, not reversed. That stagger on shots was there to stop player’s rushing. They themselves said in some early trailer or interview that slide wasn’t a feature from the start. DT enemies wasn’t designed to counter unlimitted shots evasion and travel skills.
They added shots stagger as a crutch, but it was awefull, and they removed it. After that they start spawn gunners in bigger numbers.
Game was better then, now it’s a braindead zoom zoom slide and ability spam.
I really wish people would be clear and specific when talking about sliding. Dodge sliding does use dodge count. I often see people get confused by topics like this and think it’s all sliding being referred to here.
Sprint sliding could be limited in any number of ways but we should be very careful of the monkey’s paw furling here. We spend a good portion of time traversing a level and if we end up in a situation where the optimal way to traverse is always just sprint till out of stamina, walk for a bit, sprint again, that’s kinda dull no?
TL;DR Specify type of sliding you’re referring to in these discussions (they are NOT equivalent). Soft tap for sprint sliding please I wouldn’t want it functionally removed.
Please no. Its a huge buff, and demand, for better Vets. Get better at dodging them, using/taking cover, and making sure your Vet, which will be skillchecked by how they deal withr anged depending on your teams comp, has the space and time necessary to deal with them?
I dunno about that. The problem is that it’s a simple mechanical action one should always take when facing enemy fire. It’s make work.
But the answer isn’t to make the game more realistic by tying sliding to stamina, or forcing a major momentum loss afterward (so you’d slide from cover to cover). No, to get out of this ridiculous situation sliding should simply be always on, and every character constantly races around each mission on their ass.
I like dangerous gunners and shooters on principle because they force you to slow down and not just speedrun a level. Release gunners and shooters struck the balance in a great way, they were very dangerous on their own, but easy to address via flanks, suppressing (except the yellow coat guys who werent suppressable for soem reason) and staggering and then engaging. Failing all that you could still have a shootout. It made shooter sections feel pretty tactical. Nowadays outside of high havoc (where you get pinged for half your HP if you don’t react instantly which is kind of lame too) they’re a joke, free kills for slidespamming at them. It’s something about their AI deciding to not shoot you most of the time coupled with everyone having toughness regen out the ass.
I’m also a fan of removing gunner resistance though. It’s just so mandatory it’s boring. There should be one damage balance, curios giving straight damage resist are boring and pointless.
To sum up though, I think gunners having their damage vastly overtuned is just a matter of players having their defenses vastly overtuned. If players didn’t get powercrept as stupidly as they have, gunners could be more reasonable too, rather than being “free kills that oneshot you”
Slidespam sucks ass and I hate using it. If gunners have to change so that they’re actually dangerous I’ll be happy. Shootouts were fun in OG Darktide.
Precisely my point. Obviously there’s more going into it than just the powersliding (VoC, Enduring Faith etc.) so I hope those are addressed as well.
I guess I didn’t specify, but I’d expect a slide counter just like the dodge counter we have at the moment. I don’t think slides (aside from dodge-slides ofc) should be tied to any of our existing defense tools.
I can play Duelling Sword Zealot + Blazing Piety / Enduring Faith and the problem instantly goes away, then switch back to generic melee Veteran without VoC/DS and it appears again.
Man I guess my “skill” is somehow entirely dependent on the build I’m using, gotta be sorcery amirite?
I thought it’s pretty obvious that without explicitly specifying it’s about dodge-sliding people would assume I’m talking about sprint-sliding. The former is even limited by dodges so no issues there. So yeah I was talking about sprint-sliding.
Couldn’t put it better myself since that’s exactly what I meant. And we even have evidence that this is exactly what’s happening and not the other way around:
(the poster is a verified playtester and co-author of the Ogrynomicon)
As @weeping.moon has already pointed out, the problem is exactly that we have ranged enemies so strong because our defenses are so strong (and obviously it got even worse since the moment Duelling Sword has been unleashed), not the other way around.
Wholeheartedly agree. I might have oversimplified the matter in this post, but by talking about “damage” I generally mean their ability to lay it down on the player coupled with the amount itself.
This is definitely on me, I just don’t take the time to explain everything in detail since, to be honest, I don’t expect this time to not be wasted really.
Fully agree. Slides should take 150-200% stamina instead of 0% and count as rest.
Anyone who doesn’t agree with OP should go to the first training sessions in Sefoni’s room. It’s a reminder of what gunners were supposed to be in this game.
I know because I didn’t play until the RNG got removed from the crafting system. The contrast to what I expected gunners to be like and what they’re now is huge.
On one hand, I think it would hurt melee builds a lot, and that’s what I play.
On the other hand, this is as ridiculous to be able to slide an entire mission and not being hurt by guns, like the current spawn fiesta we see actually
My problem is that this simple change is a revolution in the Darktide combat we have. I would say no to that, not because I think it is a bad idea, but because I fear it could break Darktide combat to something not enjoyable. And we all know that Fatshark does 1 patch every 6 months. And a such important change would have no turning back. So, sorry, I don’t support the idea cause I am far too afraid of what could be the result and knowing the fact that Fatshark would never correct the situation or fix any problem that could appear by implementing a change on slides.
(though it looks unimmersive as fkk and i rather have it as a dash animation instead of my character scratching his rectum on the floor like a dog trying to get rid of worms)
its the mechanic taken from arena shooters but put into a game without any verticality.
given options between sliding or rocket jumps there was a plethora of different engagement options for each situation, that kept things fresh and felt appropriate.
darktide though lacks this verticality completely and relies heavy on rock/paper/scissors checks when dealing with obstacles such as disablers, gunners and the like.
given how effective slide is both as a means to completely ignore gunners as an obstacle AND traverse the map faster/safer its almost script-mandatory/no brainer to not use it.
dont get me wrong, i want fast paced action.
take that from darktide, i’d stop playing this instant.
yet this ice skating from a) to b) gets boring after a while and takes loads from 40k/darktides incredible atmosphere.
maybe its the spammable part of slide that needs tweaking, maybe they should add innertia or weight to your movement.
being able to zig zag almost from a standstill looks and feels off in my opinion.
and this is coming from a guy who judges your very existance based on your skill in quake
maybe change slide so you cant alter your direction at a whim and have to comit to the path you’ve chosen, making it an escape mechanism still, but punishable at bad choices
I personally think there’s an easy solution here - make suppression more accessible. A melee build can advance under the cover of auto pistol or other one handed weapons (or charge or use stealth) rather than the current ‘slide on ur ass to victory’ nonsense. It’d feel a lot better imo.
Seriously make it so the gameplay flow is about either firefights or suppressing enemies while advancing and you have a much less ultrafast game that doesn’t NEED enormous enemy spam to slow the teams down.
So don’t do it? Gunners are pretty much as dangerous as they’ve ever been. And the underlying Darktide experience hasn’t really changed much, there’s just been more and more and more added on top of it. Watching any Damnation run from launch shows that pretty clearly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeUCfVNmQMI
Compare that to running sub-optimal kit in Damnation today and you won’t see much of a difference. I sure haven’t, testing this pretty extensively over the last few days.
If you don’t want to slidespam, don’t. If you want a slower, harder experience, don’t take perfect weapons and a full kit. If you don’t want XYZ in your game, then don’t play with XYZ.
Everyone (including me) agrees there are outliers that need to be buffed/nerfed. But most of us have sunk hundreds of hours into the game and are pretty damn good now. There’s no balance pass that’s going to give us back the feeling of how DT was when we first started.
You’re posting a veteran with camo vet though. That playstyle is explicitly gone and doesn’t exist anymore (and that’s a good thing but it makes the comparison very awkward, if you tried to play like this today you would get chain killed and sent to the totem pole over and over)
Between that and the 75% DR on exec stance, veteran was probably the sole class that was allowed to just ignore game mechanics. Everyone else had to play the game
There’s a whole team there, but mostly I was referring to the enemy compositions/density/threat/TTK/etc. throughout the level. It’s all damn near identical today.
