Do you want to improve your Darktide skills and be able to play Damnation difficulty and effectively contribute to the team? This guide covers a range of basic and advanced gameplay tips and strategies to help grow your abilities and confidently tackle Damnation. Welcome to the Hive.
The full guide is linked below and hosted via Steam.
Please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improving the guide.
A good read, nicely formatted and with heaps of useful information. My thoughts:
CHARACTER BUILDS & GEAR
DEFENSE
ENEMIES: SPECIALISTS
Yeah, nice, really really good guide. A pleasure to proofread 
Masses of gunners can pose a significant challenge to the team. Your best approach is to use ranged weapons to kill them, unless you’re able to flank and close distance without opening yourself up to their fire.
You can use ranged weaponry to either knock them down or suppress them to make the gap closing safer then just outright kill them. Engaging and locking down a sizeable gunner group before they spread out to take aim needs to be mentioned as it is the go to tactic for Zealots and Ogryns. Using cover, gunfire, movement abilities and slide spam to achieve this.
There is a lot of nuance that can go into curio selection and the blessings and perks they employ, based on a given build.
Feels like you can do a more indepth selection of blessings and perks for curios. Class, build and weapon loadout are what decides which curios I use. I only use Toughness Regeneration on my Ogryn, having a way to get back toughness that does not involve attacking or killing can be useful. However it is mostly a holdover from when enemy fire deleted the entire toughness bar.
Great suggestions from both of you. I’m away from my computer for a few more days, but I’ll incorporate these changes into an update.
Definitely agree that curio selection needs an expansion and additional considerations.
Some more thoughts on curios:
For Blessings:
+Toughness is most helpful on characters with higher base toughness, like Veteran. +Toughness is also helpful on builds that are able to quickly regenerate toughness (ie that have multiple talents or blessings to regenerate toughness) and keep it near max.
+Health is universally useful on most builds to increase longevity - especially on Psyker where the base health is relatively low. Most builds want at least one of these.
+Stamina is most useful on Psyker due to their low base stamina (recommend one +Stamina for most Psykers), extending their durability in melee. +Stamina is jalso useful on builds geared around frequent use of sprinting.
+Wounds has the least value in the long run, with the exception of Martyrdom builds. Sure, +Wounds lets you get downed more times, but doesn’t help in preventing you from going down in the first place. It may help transitioning to higher difficulties, but don’t rely on it.
General rule of thumb: Take one or two +Health and one or two +Toughness. Emphasize toughness on toughness-heavy builds. Psyker should take one +Stamina and two +Health.
For Perks:
Aim for two each of +Health and +Toughness across your curios to boost overall longevity.
Stamina Regeneration is universally useful to help you recovery stamina quickly and manage stamina during melee fights. Taking a few instances of this is usually good.
Toughness Regeneration Speed boosts your toughness regeneration rate from being in coherency and reduces the delay when the regeneration starts after taking damage. Can be helpful, particularly for builds that rely on sticking close to your teammates.
Cooldown Reduction is good for builds that rely on frequently spamming your career/ultimate ability.
Round out perks with +Damage Reduction vs enemy types you struggle with. Gunners cover the most common source of elite damage (shotgunners, elite gunners, Ogryn Reapers). Sniper resist can also be great, especially on builds with lower base health and toughness.
Looks like a good baseline to start with. A few things to add would be:
Toughness is good on Ogryns aswell, due to all the damage reduction and massive toughness gains tied to heavy attacks.
Should bring up using pushes to create some space and certain weapons have really good push attacks aswell.
Should only be Gunners and Reapers.
In the section “Making an effective build” I would recommending adding a thought or question like (What does my build accomplish?) so new players can think about running a more efficient build. I do see you elaborate on this topic in the further discussion below.
Additionally,
I would recommend including using space efficiently while playing defensive. A lot of players do not utilize the entire room, or rarely kite back into previous rooms, except for a boss. Additionally, playing defensive can include kiting enemies around with the goal of working back towards the team. Just because you are kiting doesn’t mean you have to split up, big tip!
A second idea is sometimes kiting is bad! Clumping up enemies for the team in a choke-point may be the best thing for a fight.
Overall great read!
Maybe as a separate guide if not on this one, I’d love to see this ^ expanded to include the absence of key nodes for certain builds or modifier nodes for certain abilities (ults) and keystones. I’ve made it a point to randomly look at people’s guides as I had some hunches, and a large number are missing crucial nodes in their builds, some level ~500 ones too.
I was thinking about a build guide that instead of necessarily presenting a bunch of builds, instead highlighted sets talents that have good synergies, and talk about how those could be combined with other talent sets.
In other words, giving people guidance for how to make their own good builds instead of just saying “here’s the build in full… go for it”.
The challenge is that this might get pretty complex and/or by the time you’ve described the synergies, you’ve described 85% of a full build anyway and might as well just present a full build.
You could do a sample build for each class without really going into how to place every last talent point. Going over strength and weaknesses for abilities and blitzes in certain situations might be what people need to start doing their own builds.
Adding in weapons that goes great with one another and/or talents, to cover certain weaknesses in a build to create a good strong generalist build so that they’ll have a good chance to complete a QP game.
Question - what’s the current status of toughness regeneration mechanics from coherency?
Toughness regeneration starts after you don’t take a hit a hit 3.0 seconds?
Does toughness regeneration curios only affect the regeneration delay time? I thought it was changed (fixed?) to also affect the regeneration speed at one point? How does that relate to this bug?
The coherency regen delay (i.e. the time until coherency regeneration kicks in after its conditions have been met) is currently bugged: If the last enemy occupying a slot is in melee combat, it varies depending on the length of the death animation of this enemy and hence, only in this case, is unaffected by the toughness_regen_delay_multiplier provided by Toughness Regeneration Speed curios.
The curio stat does two things: (1) It increases coherency toughness regen speed and (2) it reduces the coherency regen delay.
The first thing works as intended. The second thing is bugged only against enemies in melee combat. The default delay of 1.5s then is overwritten by the length of the death animation and therefore entirely unaffected by the regen delay curio stat. Against enemies in ranged combat (who do not require a designated slot around the player unit), the stat works as intended, reducing the regen delay to 0.768s max (with three tier 4 curio stats).
But usually, in regular gameplay, there’s almost always an enemy unit occupying a melee slot around the player. So the scenarios in which the regen delay buff works can be quite limited.
Seems like, all things considered, the main benefit of this perk is if you stack 3x of them in order to boost the regen SPEED overall. Reduction of the delay before it starts is pretty secondary?
Seems like this perk is most useful on builds that are relying on coherency for toughness regen.
Imo you should always bring one on Vet, especially if you can’t get one of the stamina regen delay nodes. Helps out a ton for survivability.
I run toughness regen on my psyker and sniper resistance but thats only cuz i got it from the psyker anatheum or whatever that guides called. I actually really like sniper resistance because it prevents me from getting insta destroyed if i do get sniped and i really dont know what toughness regen is doing for me i just use it cuz so many people have said not to run gunner resistance so i run the former. Sometimes i feel like it could give me that extra second to turn around and bb that stupid gunner that spawned behind me but wasnt there .2 seconds ago but others would just say get good and dont run gunner resistance.
Is toughness regen speed worth using on psyker or ogryn? Cuz those are rhe two characters i run it on and only cuz ogrynomicon and psyker guide said so. I feel like i can feel the change with ogryn but tbh i really dont know. I feel like i like it on ogryn cuz hes so damn big and shooters wreck ogryn but thats probably just a skill issue and me not sliding constantly i really dont know. Ive seen really good ogryn players just run +health and toughness and revive speed. Ive also seen people say toughness regen and gunner resistance are good. I also like combat regen on my curios but im sure many would say thats redundant but i find it to be rather powerful because its just more ultimates at the end of the day. Guess it all comes down to personal
Preference but im always fine tuning things.
You should change it on both of them. They both have great options for T Regen by yourself you should never rely on coherency to do much.
I don’t think Gunner Res is amazing, but it’s certainly better. Personally I think stamina regen, + health ,+ toughness and revive speed are the way to go.
In general it’s not good. For most ults it will only change it by a couple seconds. The only ult that’s long enough cooldown to make that big of difference is Point Blank Barrage, but the cooldown talent in the middle of Ogryns tree already does more than enough to take care of that.
I run combat regen on everyone because ults are king in this game and spamming them is the goal. It is extremely powerful when combined with psykers aura etc etc etc. people can run whatever they want but i run combat regen on all my curios on every character and its been that way forever. Combat regen is extremely powerful in this game and especially given how many more times I ult a game compared to someone whose not running it.
Honestly the other talents for CDR are doing so much of the heavy lifting as @dragomusic said that I skip the relatively meh CDR curio perks and go with something else that doesn’t overlap and get overshadowed like stam regen.
I always take Tuf Regen on ogryns myself, and gunner res on all!
I still think that’s a wasted curio slot honestly.
That’s a solid guide.
On curios; I’d say one wound is good, any more bad. This is a guide for breaking in to Damnation after all. These players will likely need that cushion IMO. But more than one is wasting health and toughness options.
I run stamina and/or stamina regen on my builds, but again, I think heresy->Damnation players might be better served with a 1xW 1xT 1xH mix, and learning to dodge before block pushing. Ymmv. Stamina Def useful though on vet builds as you eat that fast on that left hand side talent.
No gunner resist suggestion?
1xsniper resist I think is pointless. 1x or more gunner resists are helpful as they’re so much more common. Unless you’re planning to tank the entire sniper shot ofc, in which case I think you’d need 3x which is generally detrimental to options.
On the weapons bit, I liked that you said find a weapon you like even if off-meta.
For newer players I would go as far to say make sure whatever you take makes it easy for you to hold off hordes. The number of low level players (psykers in particular) I see that fold at the first horde is amazing. I’d recommend getting something with a really simple vanguard style attack pattern first, as that gives you a way to easily clear when there’s pressure, then move in to more complex weapons if you want to. Eg “simple” weapons being knife, illisi, antax V, 3b club. Anything where the lights pattern doesn’t vary.