Fatshark, do yourselves a favour and just scrap Havoc.
It’s an ill thought out steaming pile of donkey doo, that does nothing but make the rest of you game appalling.
It was just a quick and easy insert, pandering to those that felt the Auric was to easy. As such, pandering to a minority of players, has ruined the game for the majority of players.
You have serious balancing issues, especially around armour which is pointless on enemies now, as it is so easy to remove.
Everything now is far too melee focused.
All because you wanted to avoid having to put effort in, to make the game harder in interesting ways.
Get rid, and actually put some real effort into making the game harder, whilst keeping it balanced so that all weapons are viable with the right builds.
Yes, I believe Havoc should either be removed entirely or rebuilt after a proper rebalancing of Darktide’s core systems.
The biggest mistake was creating Havoc without first addressing the elements that make the overall difficulty far too easy, such as Gold Toughness, Smite, and overpowered weapons.
As seen in VT2, having too many game modes is never a good thing.
It splits the player base and makes the game confusing and uninviting for new players who are unsure where to begin.
Currently, Darktide offers five base difficulty tiers, plus Maelstrom and Havoc.
However, both Maelstrom and Havoc serve the same purpose: they are modes designed for players to test and improve their skills.
In particular, the lower tiers of Maelstrom and Havoc overlap almost completely in terms of challenge, which makes one of them unnecessary.
The difficulty consistency within Havoc, especially between levels 30 and 40, also feels very unstable.
Because of the AI Director’s randomness, I have often found level 30 missions harder than level 40 ones.
Without pressing TAB to check, it is almost impossible to tell whether a mission is level 30, 33, 36, or 40.
The game should first return to the basics.
The standard five difficulties should be balanced to cover around 95% of the player base.
Then, for the top 5–10% who find Auric too easy, Havoc can serve as a true endgame challenge.
However, Havoc does not need 40 different tiers.
A simpler five-step structure would be more than enough.
Having too many difficulty levels does not add depth; it only creates confusion and divides the community.
The best thing would have been to balance player power around Auric so Havoc becomes that nigh-impossible mode people want. Instead we got two years of power creep.
Can you expand on this? I dont think I understand how havoc has ruined the game for the majority.
People who dont want to play harder content, dont have to.
I definetly agree that the game is in dire need of rebalancing, the game is far away from its narrative design.
My intuition tells me that this problem is exactly the same as for Crafting.
Everyone complained about Crafting at first because we could not choose exactly what we wanted. It feels we’re all saying the same thing about Missions now. We should just be able to choose map, difficulty, conditions/modifiers/mutators from the list and create custom missions for a fee in Ordo Dockets.
Or choose a randomly generated one from the board.
There is an idea that FS is now focusing their balance passes around Havoc instead of the normal difficulties up to Auric/Maelstrom (even thought IIRC FS rep. said they would not? Don’t quote me on that one).
Based on the belief that statement is true- it is negatively impacting game play and weapon/talent balance for the larger majority of casual/skilled casual players in the normal difficulties for what appears to be a very small minority of high skill premades/party-finder enjoyers.
Too pooly implemented. Spawn tiles are very boring and lazy, and the gamemode itself gets boring when I’m slapping around the 157th carapace enemy just to suddenly get overwhelmed by unlucky boss spawns because the Havoc devs balanced the gamemode around the hard meta builds instead of nerfing those said builds.
Also I stand by the opinion that Havoc 1.0 was better. It was easier but far less frustrating.
The only way that removing havoc wouldn’t cause a riot though is with a comprehensive retooling of balance and game systems from the ground up to allow for challenge without server-melting quantities of “dumb melee-carapace spam” and “lol you got no ammo”.
I don’t care for it because of the party finder. I dunno why they locked an entire game mode behind that instead of making it less of a waste of time. It is nice for a quarantine for people who claim 90% of the weapons in the game don’t work. I appreciate that element of it.
The restrictive nature of finding a party, being unable to just select a map, Havoc level and difficulty modifiers are easily the biggest time wasters for that game mode. Oh your havoc lobby crashed, before the game even started? Well sucks to be you. You cannot start havoc now until you demote yourself because the game isn’t stable enough.
I’m coming to bump this thread because I am really, really, really put off by this 3 strike system. I absolutely hate it. HATE IT. HAAAAAATTTTEEE IT!
IF Fatshark need to keep demotion to appease their Tencent gambling overlords then simply tie it in to the weekly reset. It doesn’t need to be complicated.
If you don’t win a mission equal or greater than your current rank that week then you lose 1 rank on weekly havoc reset.
its not rocket science. Open up the game to be played by different builds but still have a small threat of demotion that the player is given a week to achieve.
If you’re the host then perhaps your mission gets reshuffled after 3 failed attempts? Might get stale otherwise but happy to hear other people’s opinions on that.
exactly this. lack of agency in a game is a blight that makes me quit. the fact that i kept playing darktide shows how good the game could be if it just let us customize more.
to prove a point, yesterday got my “40” eartag, luckily on the first try even cause I wouldn’t have put up with the “rejected” sh!t for long.
dafuq I’m going to beg myself to some strangers through all those ranks when time and again I finished 40 in every “season” so far on my own terms.
so screw this until the end next reset, for the next 3 weeks I can’t play out of hospital anyways so why bother building something that’d get “demoted”
That’s one of the things that also really REALLY bugs me.
I have completed H40 games a lot! I have all my havoc penances and finish a h40 a week.
BUT I can’t host one! Because this TERRIBLE system where only premades (or people without IRL responsibilities) can slug/grind for days just to host. I don’t play with premades and don’t have the availability to grind it out.
I have proven time and time again I am good enough to successfully and regularly complete h40 missions but this disgusting gatekeeping mechanic means I have to sit and wait to be chosen like a kid in a schoolground footie team lineup. AND THEN it could all go t!ts up within 30 seconds because one team member wasn’t up to it - so everyone gets demoted.
I don’t mind people giving higher difficulties a go. But 3 strikes MAKES ME MIND and I HATE THAT! It turns me toxic against my will.
AAAAAAAARRRGGH!!! It boils my blood. My ADHD justice sensitivity gets peaked into orbit over this.
Ik don’t think havoc should be scrapped but I do think It could be greatly improved if Fatshark did away with the invite only and swapped it out for match making instead, they could still allow private matches….
until the end next reset, for the next 3 weeks I can’t play out of hospital anyways so why bother building something that’d get “demoted”