I don’t want to dehumanize playtesters anymore, even though I’ve bad experiences with their circle, but in the end it’s Fatshark’s decision to do or don’t, so it’s only their fault if something is broken in the game
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Knife, Shovel and Psword are good options as well other than DS
But Fatshark is indeed dummy for making Rotten DR apply to melee as well
Unless you’re playing Scum with x3 Ally Revive Speed Curios, Nimble + Jittery and Combat blade or Shivs which do allow you to clutch any stuation possible xdddd
Something similar applies with Zealot Shroudfield, but that at least requires better resource mangement to clutch
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I’m very sympathetic to this dude.
I have won I think 70%+ of my rotten armor games by exploiting all the most OP mechanics.
NO. its horrible dog water and should be removed from the game. Absolutely nobody I know likes this modifier.
Rotten Armor spawns should be repurposed into a max 1 time per game special event like a Boss Spawn. Thats it.
I’m here to support your post because I hate this boring modifier.
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Not a single playtester likes rotten armour.
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Maybe consider fact testers give feedback but devs dont give damn about it.
Also once happen I talked with tester and turns out when Dueling Sword gona be given to other classes tester clearly say it mess with balance but devs do it anyway.
You stll gona blame testers for balance issiues?
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Hi im also one of the testers
I dont think I’ve ever had a single good thing to say about rotten armor, it exacerbates the issue of clown car armor spawns resulting in punishing people who dont run anti armor everything every game to the extreme, then doubles down on it with the scaling dr so that the good armor weapons are bad into it, and the bad armor weapons are being smothered alive while like the 2-3 dot focused weapons play like normal
It makes no sense, its not fun, and I actively avoid it because it never should have released remotely in a state like this
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I also don’t know why in the world they thought it was a good idea to even add this modifier to havoc after it ran as an event in the regular game mode and then to “bugfix” the melee damage reduction not working on them.
So in havoc 40 we got crushers with 9150 hp that have 75% DR at 90% hp or higher to melee and ranged.
This modifier accounting for the reduction in DR as they have less health gives each crusher the equivalent of 13,572 health while being covered head to toe in carapace.
AND it spams the f*ck out of them too, who thought this was even remotely fun to play against?
And don’t get me started on if they decide to combine this modifier with encroaching garden again.
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hi, another playtester here. Don’t like rotten armour, don’t like the havoc ranking system, don’t like the audio-visual pollution that havoc forces on you because of all the spam. My ideal Havoc design would’ve been a carbon copy of VT2’s modded realm where you can pick and mix the difficulty you want and go nuts without restriction lol
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Really funny to read because that game has a lot of the same problems as this one, and many more overengineered unexplained mechanics. Maybe HD2 suits your taste more, but Darktide is miles ahead in enemy, mission, and combat design despite its faults.
Less than a week? Give it time and you will start to get tired of the “It’s so over… we’re so back!” loop that game is stuck in.
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I’m not sure there’s a case to be made that Darktide is “miles ahead” in any of these things. Rather, they have different gameplay objectives. Darktide missions are all, for lack of a better term, Disneyland rides. They’re the same thing every time, set on rails through a singular path, and all in largely the same dank underhive environments. HD2 missions, while having common objectives, are not on rails, will be different every time you play, and you have more than one environment. HD2 likewise has more enemy factions, a far wider array of enemy types, and a far large number of potential enemies. Darktide doesn’t throw anything at the player that tabletop 40k doesn’t consider infantry, and outside of Ogryn they’re about the weeniest and least capable opponents the 40k universe has to offer, while HD2 has you fighting tanks, fortifications, aircraft, tunneling and flying enemies, etc. Darktide’s combat design is heavily built around twitch reactions and personal combative ability and repeating the same run to get better every time, HD2 is much more about completing a set of objectives within a given time limit given different tools and obstacles.
Also, Darktide’s combat designer left Fatshark and is now working on HD2.
You know what would really be boring? Always using the exact same loadout regardless of what mods are on a map.
You should have different builds based on what you’re being asked to overcome. Always using the same loadout is like bringing a knife to a gun fight just because you happen to really like knives.
The reason why teams typically fail high havoc regardless of mods is because they either aren’t skilled enough or the build that they’re using is not good enough to overcome whatever mods they’re up against.
Yeah I’ll concede that, I am pretty highly biased since I have around 1600 hours on Darktide and ~400 on HD2.
I think this is highly reductive though, different enemy, loot and medical supply spawns make each run feel meaningfully different, and calling it on rails is an exaggeration. It is more linear but I think thats a strength, keeps the player focused, and minimizes time spent holding Shift and W between encounters.
The strengths of which are not fully realized within a single play session for a player like me. If I want to hop on and play illuminate, but the MO is bugs, my matchmaking time is significantly reduced. Even more so if the planet with the environment I want to play in doesn’t have a lot of people active on it. You have the same mission objectives every operation, the variance comes from enemy spawns and map generation. The latter of which is not a positive because it just means you spend more or less time running doing nothing. The former being exactly what shakes up Darktide missions. It has many different enemy types sure but the way you interact with all of them, and the way they inhibit you, is nearly the same, unlike Darktide.
This is more opinion than fact, humans are one of the major factions in the universe and regularly cut down “more powerful” opponents given they’re in enough numbers. So they may appear “weenie” but are in fact as capable a faction as any other. A veteran guard regiment turned traitor and a chaos cult capable of bringing daemons into realspace is nothing to sneeze at. From a tabletop perspective, this is Kill Team, not two max point list space marine armies going at it.
For all the good it’s done them, this game has only improved during its lifespan while Arrowhead is still floundering with their “grunt fantasy” mess and obtuse balancing decisions, while actively being disappointed by the crowd they’ve drawn to their game.
Bottom line is, different strokes for different folks as far as the gameplay and setting of HD2 compared to DT goes. But objectively, Arrowhead’s behavior as a studio and treatment of their audience is deplorable. And it’s enough for me to write that game off entirely.
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I think Rails is pretty accurate, you can’t really go the wrong way (at least for long), you have one route of advance, stations are which to catch up and regroup, you hit the same objectives in the same order every time, etc. While enemy spawns and loot drops do mix this up, they spawn from set points you eventually learn to look for, for instance while not every box will have loot, those boxes are there and in the same places every time you play.
Is this better or worse? I don’t think either, it’s different, and that’s why I don’t see where there’s a good way to state that Darktide’s mission design is superior, because it suits a fundamentally different style of play.
HD2 at least gives you the choice. You don’t have to play the MO, and you have the option to play totally solo. Yes matchmaking may take a bit longer if you’re not playing the MO, but I’ve never found it so bad that it was a major issue. I also like having MO’s and a moving story, it gives a reason to mix it up, do and try different things, and chase a goal that isn’t just a Pennance/Achievement.
With DT, you get the missions on the mission board and that’s it, if you want to play a specific mission, or don’t want to deal with a modifier, you’re entirely subject to RNG whims, and can’t play solo.
In both games, the “objectives” are pretty same-y, interact with a console and hold out in a kill area until a certain amount of time has passed.
With Darktide being based off L4D, a constant stream of enemies is inherent to the genre, you’re hacking your way through a horde of zombies to get to an exfil point. In HD2 you’re competing to accomplish a set of tasks against a clock, and travel time is part of that experience. By the same token, you don’t need the team to all do the same thing, and you don’t need to do objectives in a set order.
You may need to expand more here because dealing with flying enemies, indirect fire, long range heavy weapons, etc tends to offer a lot more variety than stuff running at you in a straight line with an axe or club. If we’re talking depth of melee movesets, sure, but melee combat is a core premise of Darktide, while I’d say being good at precision shooting is generally more important in HD2, particularly with armored foes.
From a tabletop perspective, a Darktide game is half a kill team slaying through a dozen entire tabletop army’s worth of Guardsmen 
That aside, we aren’t facing the full might of a heretic army in Darktide, what we face are a few thousand light infantry, with few if any dedicated heavy weapons, no artillery, no armor, no air support, stuck in a hive of untold billions, and underhive cultists that are almost universally present in most large Hive City narratives. None of the things that really make the Guard as powerful as it can be are in play here, and as far as the Chaos stuff itself goes, it’s extremely limited, really the only Daemon is the Beast of Nurgle, Spawns and Plague Ogryn and Daemonosts are corrupted corporeal beings, the rest of the Chaos stuff all being even weenier combatants than the Guardsmen are.
Outside bosses, Muties, and Ogryn, every enemy in the game would be a T3 W1 model with a 5+ or 6+ save (with a couple Elites getting 4+ saves) with not a single enemy being considered a “monster” or “vehicle” by tabletop rules. That’s about as low on the powerscale as one can go in 40k.
HD2 meanwhile has three distinct enemy factions, has stuff like enemy indirect fire and fortifications, threats from the air, actual armor and vehicles, etc. The most we get out of Vehicles in Darktide is terrain pieces and a single mission where a Russ trundles along and blows a hole in a wall.
For my own experience, I’m not sure how true that is. DT seems to be dealing with many of the same issues, we have a whole thread on Grudges for a reason.
Looking at available numbers, HD2 has, since launch, blown DT out of the water in terms of player counts, and is still pulling in substantially more players than Darktide ever has, at least as far as Steam is concerned.
If we look at Steam Reviews, Darktide is “Mixed recent/Mostly Postitive all”, HD2 is “Very Positive recent/Very Positive all”, with HD2 having almost a full order of magnitude more reviews in general.
Given the history of DT, I’m not sure I can hop in that boat. DT was knowingly launched and sold years early in an unfinished minimum viable product state, with just about every feature being in alpha status. DT was promised to have solo available on launch, it’s still not here. The classes didn’t get fleshed out for over a year and even then still weren’t totally solidified (Veteran for instance didn’t have Keystones with Patch13) and we’ve gone through numerous tree-revisions since then trying to make those work right. We spent 2 years with an awful Gacha-oriented crafting system that was never finished and ultimately got “fixed” with a still hilariously overcomplicated mess. Just about every ancillary system (Melks, Pennances, Omnissah Shrine, etc) in the game is overcomplicated next to anything we see in HD2 or DRG or any competitor 4 person coop game. Neither of the new classes have new cosmetics aside from what they launched with. Etc ad nausuem. For every thing anyone can throw at Arrowhead, Fatshark has engaged in the same sort of stuff to the same degree.
Do or don’t, it doesn’t bother me, I think Darktide is a better way to spend my time so I spend my time on Darktide. Both are $40 four player coop games, I’m going to compare them.
And you’re right to be critical of Fatshark, it’s just hilarious to me when someone says they’re swapping over to HD2 as if Arrowhead is any better.
I can stomach Fatshark not living up to some promises and their silence, I can’t stomach Arrowhead not living up to some promises while actively casting insults at their playerbase.
People abuse damage over time and kraks for every modifier because they are the best and rotten armor incentivizes bringing them so I don’t know what your point is.
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Shovel takes more than 10 light weakspot hits to kill a single Rotten Crusher, Power Sword is too slow to fight against multiple elites who bumrush you and can easily get you killed because of bad/limited dodges (although in other modifiers PS is fine, I like it), knife is good, but that lineup doesn’t inspire me at all
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“DoNt pLaY tHe GaMe”
Any other modifier is fun and challenging. This one is not. This one makes up the vast majority of my havoc losses. This is havoc 40 in the video. I didn’t get here by not enjoying havoc most of the time.
The game devs want to know if they’ve added things people don’t like. If they added a game mode where literally every enemy was a mauler or cusher that’d be an obviously horrible game mode. Even if you can beat it, it’d still be boring and unfun and not worth their time developing.
Rotten armor is very tough but beatable around havoc 25 and below. The crusher and mauler enemies by design are not meant to be spawned in massive packs, regardless of team composition. They’re meant to be a huge threat to prioritize but how do you do that when the enemy director saves up his spawn allowance and dumps 20 all at once.
I demo’d an un-released Fable game where 4 players went up against a player controlling enemy hordes from a top down view, while the other 4 try to make it through a mission. Every game devolved into the player enemy director saving up points to spawn several massive one shot killing bosses because it made the most sense. By the time you killed one, the enemy player would have saved up enough to spawn another and it was just game over, period. There’s a reason the game never came out. If the AI director in this game is essentially doing the same, it’s not fair or engaging gameplay is what I’m saying. It’s broken.
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You can cope all you want but higher player numbers isnt same as better game.
And even if HD2 is better for you than DT for someone else HD2 can be boring, anoying and lazy.
So what about you take into consideration something what you like gona be viewed diffrerently for someone else?
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Just change their armor type to infested, make them DoT resistant and increase their HP by several times. Now you actually could use high DPS low AP weapon in the mission.
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