DT is easier in general. Only comebacks and maybe carrying grims are harder here, but it´s not impossible to do so.
Sorry friend, why are you out in the open when you know there are shooters around?
I routinely clutch in Damnation games. Admittedly I have the best class for doing so (zealot) as my go-to. But I’ve done it as psyker and veteran too. Ogryn is probably second best and I’ve clutched some serious disaster situations with him too.
VT2 let you stand out in the open because ranged threats weren’t really a thing. DarkTide is a different game and you’re gonna have to adapt to using corners and playing around ranged threats.
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nice alright bye
It’s a different thing than “shooters are OP”. I think there should be some kind of last man standing mechanic in the future, since there is no passive toughness regeneration from coherency if 3 players are dead. It’s not necessary to have it now however. In a perfect world - they will buff/introduce more challange and will add LMS mechanic.
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Agreed, it is SO ANNOYING when a shooter is standing all of five feet from me and just drilling me with shots. If you get within a certain range of enemies, they should just automatically put away their guns. And if that mechanic already exists in the game, it aint working right!
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I firmly believe that chain-stagger by ranged attacks simply discourages aggressive play for a very huge amount of people, which makes engaging in melee a novelty.
When I use the scoreboard mod and I regularly see people with 3 attacks or less blocked on hi in t5 (nobody running flamer mind you) that tells me all I need to know.
And I understand it honestly - who wants to try and close gaps to shooters, when just one of them has to randomly crouch-shoot you - which you cannot slide under - and then you get dunked on.
People always talk about this game not being a cover shooter - and I tend to agree in theory - but if you look at enemies being able to chain-stagger you and randomly circumvent your mechanic for dodging their sh’it (crouching and then shooting you), then that starts to look to me like the game is actively and enforcing engagements primarily fought from cover.
Furthermore if I look at some high level true solo gameplay from Jsat playing Psyker - you clearly see these issues examplified with how often he is unable to/or decides not to close gaps.
You can just dodge slide right through that fire even if they are crouched. It’ll pass right through you.
But in any case I do feel that getting serially staggered with absolutley no resistence window feels bad. On the other hand it means i clearly misplayed if i get into a situation like that. I favor zealot and i run into melee with shooter groups constantly.
The psyker is probably a poor example. While the new force swords are strong the psyker himself has poor toughness regen in bad situations and tons of good options for infinite ranged work.
But yes, there are enemies and situations that force you at times to take a ranged stance. Thats a design intent of the game so i don’t see the problem in my view. I have a gun as a zealot and i use it.
You are indeed correct - just tested it quickly.
A lot of times this also happens, because enemies just blend so well with the surroundings and getting suprised once in that case can mean the difference between taking no damage or getting downed.
True but Zealot is also the only one who can consistently get away with it due to his (up to) two dashes and health regen on passive.
True, but just to remind you how much it is discussed on this forum, that range options for the players are too strong, hence it stands to reason how feasable gap-closing is for any class.
And that is a perfectly reasonable answer opposed to this:
The person you were responding to alluded to some general problems in the nature of gap-closing in Darktide and you respond with basically: “Deal with it”, whereas simply stating what I quoted above, that there are situations in which you simply should not push, would have been the far better answer.
While perhaps I came off as flippant in my first statement, and it would be my failure if I did so, I was responding not to a discussion about the general issues with gap close but the thread theme of shooters needing to be overhauled entirely because they were too oppressive. In my view, in both statements, I am saying that the dangerous nature of shooters and the way they can be difficult to engage are threats and challenges that need to be overcome with various tools. If you nerf shooters until all their dangers are mitigated and its easy to close gaps and beat them to death always then all you have done is removed a key challenge from the game.
How players address those challenges is a key part of the fun and variety in the game. Sometimes shooters don’t all switch just because you engage some of them. For me (as a chronic hammer user) I address that by dodging and fighting my way through the group of shooters into the backmost group, knocking them all over. I then work my way back through them before the first group gets up. Alternatively I may see a group too far away and too difficult to engage so I use my ranged weapon instead.
I’m probably running on as I tend to do so let me just say it this way - the way I meant “challenges to overcome” was in the positive sense of having something fun to do.
Sure and you did that in a response to someone talking about issues as they pertain to gap closing.
The problem with this statement is that the issue you address is not the one the person you respond to thinks they have. They think that being unable to close gaps in a lot of circumstances is a problem, whereas you think shooters need to and can be overcome by utilizing all means at one’s disposal The person reading this thinks: “Ok gaps can be closed - it must be me”, when in reality you should have put their approach into question.
100% correct, which is why we shouldn’t do that.
Here we get into the actual meat of the debate imho. The question is - how much do we want players to take risks?
The way I see it - shooters are hard to turn into a difficult opponent that is hard to deal with and feels fair.
Their danger comes from three sources the way I see it:
- damage
- stagger/stun
- potential to reach you from anywhere/element of surprise
How does that factor into the shooter oppressiveness debate?
I believe players should be encouraged to close gaps no matter what class they play, because long stand-offs - while methodical - are very boring. In a lot of circumstances shooters make it hardly feasable to be aggressive, because:
- they can hide in every corner
- reach you from everywhere
- stun you for ages
So what is to be done about it?
The first two reasons cannot really be circumvented, as it is part of how range combat plays out.
So the only part left to balance is the stagger/stun.
Let’s say we were to remove stagger/stun from ranged attacks completely and up their damage. In that case shooters would not be dangerous, because you can simply slide under their attacks for ages. Shooters without any stopping power are not threatening.
If we tone down the damage and leave the stagger they become immediately more dangerous, because getting locked in place and subsequently shot to death is a real possibility, but gap closing still is not as shooters can hide anywhere and out left field stun you to death.
Suggestion:
I believe ranged fire should not stagger you immediately. I think you should only get staggered by prolonged exposure to ranged fire (time debatable). This way gap closing becomes more of a reality across the board. To compensate I would raise the damage ranged enemies do.
there’s plenty for me to respond to but lets leave it aside and focus on the meat and potatoes.
Are you aware that you do not get stunned by ranged fire unless your toughness is either broken or fully empty? Because your proposal, in some senses, is already in place. Assuming reasonable usage of dodge, slide, cover and abilities/regen you are generally able to survive under sustained fire without being stunned as long as you do not eat too much fire all at once. A few stray shots will not ruin you.
At what point should stuns begin to take effect in your hypothesis? Right now the first shots a shooter put into me after breaking my toughness appear to take me down by about 25% HP. If a shooter fires 3 shots, from my testing, and I am broken but at full HP, it takes me to 50% HP. So a single shooter in damnation, if I do nothing, can literally down me in 4 volleys of 3 shots. For clarity my zealot runs +8 stamina, so all 3 curios are stamina. I have 104 toughness and 200 HP. So I am practically unmodified on those stats unlike most players. This is how I have run my curios for all of my damnation hi-int and shocktroop wins. As a note I do not run Thy Wrath Be Swift so I am able to be stunned by ranged fire.
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Toughness break stun not happening would improve my experience 10x.
I kind of understand why devs decided to make this a mechanics but I still hate killing one tiny enemy, regaining some toughness and second later getting stunned again.
Yeah shotguns are really weak on damage reductions now, I’ll tank one in vet ult for like 8 damage because cover fire and if I get absolutely meatblasted with my 123 toughness Ogg I still have a chunk leftover.
Could’ve used a tone down so a Psyker with 130 toughness didn’t break and lose 65 HP in the same shot, but not a massive nerf down to the current. I don’t even bother shooting them most times anymore.
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I did some testing and that is not correct.
You are correct that there is a difference between having toughness and not.
While you have toughness shooters can stop/slow down your normal movement. The strength with which they do is dependant upon the direction you are moving. If you move towards a shooter and he hits you then that stops you for a short moment period.
If your toughness is broken shooters gain the ability to stun you regardless of the direction you are moving.
I want to incentivize players to close gaps and play aggressively to specifically prevent these situations where you have a bazillion shooters in one room behind cover, which you have almost no feasable way to head into.
Toughness is supposed to be the bridging factor that allows you to get in there and play aggressively, but fails to do so because shooters can inhibit your movement while you have toughness and are moving towards them.
You might reasonably say at this point: “But that’s what sliding is for” and you might be correct, but getting hit right after a slide stops your movement - if you so happened to be moving towards a shooter no matter if knowingly or unknowingly - and thereby effectively prohibits you from going into your next slide.
Let’s picture this:
You want to close in on a group of shooters and each of them fires a salvo at you, but they do it out of phase and not at the same time.
In this case if you slide towards them, you will dodge the first shooter’s salvo, but the moment you leave your slide the other’s salvos will hit you, stun you and kill you.
New Suggestion (after more testing and rethinking):
It is a difficult question, but I am currently thinking to either stop shooter’s from slowing your normal movement down while moving towards them or at least give you one second of immunity to such stun right after a slide - both only while you have toughness - so that slide chaining towards shooter’s becomes easier.
Of course you could say:
“This is all fine and dandy, but why don’t you just slide from cover to cover”
To that I’d say, because there is not always cover, this game already involves too much passive cover play in general for my taste and you don’t always see all shooters that are hiding behind cover.
Which leaves us to the question of design philosophy. Do we want such cover play? Yes or no?
Me personally - I could absolutely do with less.
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Interesting. This makes some sense from my ingame experience though. It didn’t come up in the way I was testing it because I rarely if ever directly run at shooters. Instead I was checking melee swings and sideways running so that explains a lot. Thanks for testing that further!
I think I fundamentally disagree with this idea. If there’s a bazillion shooters in a room behind cover there should only be three ways to assault them.
- Cover shooter
- Flanking maneuvers
- Shields
I do not believe that an un-protected direct assault on a firing line is appropriate, believable, or enjoyable. I understand the desire for aggression and aggressive play but I think players should be forced into different approaches. There is only like two sections within any of the maps I can think of where this happens. One is Smelter complex near the beginning after the first medicae. That area, if populated with shooters, offers little in the way of flanking paths and usually has to be shot through. The other is Water Treatment right at the beginning staircase. That always turns into an enormous cluster and its one of my favorite maps for that reason. I’ve had more wipes there than anywhere else. (which I love).
As to shields, weeping.moon and I have been in discussion and have had some disagreement on exactly how they should be rebalanced. But their ideal use case, to me, is precisely as you describe.
I think they exist and more of them will exist and when they are properly realized they will allow exactly the kind of gameplay you want, of rushing directly at entrenched shooter groups. But until they properly adjust stamina drain from ranged fire to be sensible to the 40K universe, we are stuck with the remaining two approaches.
The design intent of the game was pretty clearly specified as containing sections where the map design demands different approaches to solve, one of those approaches was a cover shooter. Its not supposed to be a game where one strategy (rush them!) is always viable.
To quote the game itself on this matter:
Admittedly this is funnier because I was using a long ranged melee weapon and didn’t bring a gun, and the “fire” in question appears to be mine. But there’s an army of shooters outside that door.
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I guess we will have to agree to disagree then.
Playing cover shooter is by far the most boring part of the game to me. It is not difficult it’s just straight up boring. Shields don’t score much higher with me either unfortunately (partially because I hate playing Ogryn).
The change I propose if anything were to enable flanking maneuvers better and allow you to take more direct routes towards groups of shooters, so that the entire process gets sped up a bit.
Pertaining to the design intent - I don’t really dare say anything anymore, because let’s be honest when I look at the overall state of the game in regards to design intent, I hope there was more accident than intent involved. Also I remember a lot of people in the beginning on this forum vehemently denying that this game is a cover shooter even though in certain passages it has all the makings of one except that it lacks a cover system.
In terms of drawing inspiration from 40k sources - I really do not care tbh. I am neither a 40k nor Warhammer fan in general. I am solely concerened with how the gameplay feels to me and how that gibes with the essence of tide games historically, which so far has always been aggression and overcoming bigger, stronger and more stuff being thrown at you.
The biggest adrenaline rush I get is from having the AI director going crazy and throwing everything at me and playing cover is like adhd medication in comparison.
I accept that there are people who believe in this design and want this variety in approach you speak of, but I don’t care for the variety if that only results in me being bored 40% of the time.
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To me, I feel like ranged scales more with difficulty than melee due to avoidance options. If I have 15 melee targets coming at me I have a pretty good chance of taking zero damage. If I have 5 shooters targeting me I have to be very careful and I’m probably going to get hit a few times. Getting hit a few times on Malice is nothing. Getting hit a few times on Damnation is brutal.
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