Shooting becomes less and less viable at harder difficulties - Darktide is definitely not true hybrid combat

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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First off, difficulty feels up from the closed beta. And it’s not just new enemies and bosses - it feels like the game is just harder. More specials, less survivability. etc. This I am fine with, I like a challenge, but it’s the way the difficulty manifests and how it limits gameplay that is causing me some concern.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that shooting is not going to be a viable approach to general combat in game at higher difficulties. I’m only at difficulty 3 right now (leveling my Veteran to 15 before I start tackling 4 again) and already I am beginning to find that pulling out my gun is inherently dangerous and often a bad decision. Between the ‘lock and load’ animation that triggers when you swap from melee, the enemy’s ability to dodge track and 0 defence of any kind when using your ranged, it feels like a death sentence if you pull out your ranged weapon in intense scenarios.

At Malice, I’m already using my melee option for 65-70% of a level. Which is a shovel. Great, i understand that I need to fight hordes with this and I can only really defend myself while it’s out. But it feels ridiculous when as the shooting class it’s safer and more viable to play the vast majority of the game with my melee weapon in hand. Darktide is already feeling closer to Vermintide 2 in that the ranged weapon acts as a specialised tool to deal with specialised threats that only needs to be pulled out situationally, not as a viable or necessary alternative in approach to combat. And this is on Malice difficulty! I can only imagine how much more this is going to be skewed when I start doing Damnation level 5 difficulty and the hordes are thicker and stronger and the need to defend myself is even greater.

So far the best utility I’ve found with the Veteran is just spamming grenades that I auto generate while making sure I don’t die. Most enemies can be ‘pulled’ from one area to another with proper team communication and co-ordination, which is what my team generally does when we encounter mixed ranged and CC foes - pull back out of line of site, kill the guys pressing us in melee, then finish off the ranged guys. The only time I generally find myself pulling out my gun is when the maddening crowd is dead and there’s a room full of las weapon stragglers to finish off, or if I NEED to snipe a problematic special enemy like a bomber or flamer, and even that is incredibly risky in those high enemy count moments. It’s also pretty much the EXACT mentality i treated my ranged option in Vermintide 2 at higher difficulties, which was not advertised as a ‘hybrid combat game’ like this one.

As for solutions, idk. It feels like if you want ranged combat to be a viable and meaningful part of the game at higher difficulties, there needs to be some way to reliably defend yourself at higher difficulties. I also think the design decision of balancing ranged weapons around ‘pull out’ animations (the lock and load animation that plays when u switch to your gun) needs to be examined. On paper it’s clever but in reality, the fast paced nature of this game means that when you design certain weapons to be slow to draw and get firing, you’re going to invalidating a lot of weapons at higher difficulties when that need for a quick swap becomes absolutely ESSENTIAL.

Also, not sure if this is a bug, but if I switch to an empty ranged weapon, I should not be getting the ‘lock and load’ animation. That is so hugely crippling I can’t even. it makes using a ranged weapon EVEN MORE RISKY as now you’re stumbling about for an extra second before you can even reload!

At this rate, I can see melee being even more dominant on higher difficulties than it is in Vermintide 2. Which I’m pretty sure is not what you developers were aiming for. I think a conversation needs to be had

Suggestions to fix (either or)

  • Remove dodge tracking vs ranged
  • Give all guns a push
  • add some kind of melee defence option for guns/ranged weapon

I’d like to say speed up lock and load animations but then that’s going to compromise weapon balance. Not sure how you work yourself out of that corner since it seems to be fundamental to the game design.

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Adding more effective melee to guns could help. They could even implement a different control scheme. Having played Hunt: Showdown unless your weapon is raised you do a melee (light or heavy) attack with it. You aim with right mouse and ADS/Alt by holding shift. Holding left mouse plus shift could be block perhaps?

I’d like them to try and double (or even triple for some weapons) the amount of ammo that each weapon has during the beta to see what is possible when people have access to more ammo. I think the pools are a bit low at the moment for them to be viable at least half of the time.

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It does not help that getting hit in melee while your ranged weapon is out is really terrible, because you get automatically stunned, as in, you cannot do anything for 0.3 seconds.
Can’t shoot, can’t dodge, can’t switch weapons. It’s as if you get your toughness broken every time.

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I agree, im in the lower 20s for level and i have barely touched malice difficulty because of this. I’d prefer to avoid melee if possible and use my ranged weapon exclusively but when youre getting swarmed you have no counter unless you pull out a melee weapon or have something like the Accatran lasgun which is a spray and pray

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It does not help that both Ogryn and Zealot (especially Zealot) are much worse than they were in CB. In CB they could reliably hold front line quite to protect Psyker/Vet quite away from them. But right now with how squishy/sluggish they both are the front line needs to be much much more closer which prevents your range classes to stay at range and do their job. Sometimes I feel like Fatshark doesn’t play their game, just watch some super-pro V2 veteran soloing Diff 5 on Closed Beta (hypreball, but you get my point) and they are like “Omg, we need to nerf everything, ramp up everything casue 0,1% of our CB players did Diff 5 already”

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At Difficulty 3+ (Malice and up) it becomes really hard for all classes to do what they do.

Ogryn and Zealot become SQUISH and Vets and Psykers can’t snipe specials and ranged because of density.

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Hell, not even higher difficulties…Using my gun feels like a burden at difficulty 2. Along with all the other games problems… Discouraging using GUNS in a Tide game where GUNS should be at the forefront…Is laughably bad.

Just another trash game release. Back to Killing Floor i go…

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Guns are not at the forefront though. To quote fatshark the combat should be 50-50 guns to melee. Also on higher difficulties melee is difficult as well as most enemies becomes ranged so your face gets shot off before you can close the gap. So guns are not discouraged at all, it just gets more difficult the higher you go all around.

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I’ve been really critical of a lot of things, but the “hybrid combat” is an area that I feel is in the ballpark of where it needs to be balance and gameplay wise. Admittedly I was mostly playing on Difficulty 3 (Malic) and hadn’t gone up to 4 yet.

There are a lot of norms in player behavior that evolved from playing vermintide, and playing on higher difficulties most vets had picked up on these norms. We knew instinctively where there were safe places to hold off a horde (e.g. along long walls but not deadends), how to pick off specials mixed into a horde, etc.

Darktide introduces much more pronounced ranged combat. I’ve had had runs on Malice where the team, through whatever stroke of luck or unspoken agreement, positioned themselves relative to a horde in a way that let everyone open fire with ranged weapons and pretty much handle the horde with very little melee (sure, someone would switch to melee maybe when an enemy snuck in from the other direction).

I think how effective shooting is vs hordes is really contingent on the exact terrain the team is fighting over, how they can channelize the enemies into fire lanes while protecting flanks, etc. This is GOOD for the depth of the game and player skill promotion. But I fully realize these norms haven’t fully evolved yet and there are plenty of times the team gets caught in a position where they absolutely have to resort to melee combat to stay alive. If you’re getting damaged fiddling around with ranged weapons at close range - stop doing that and realize the situation you are in calls for more melee.

The big roaming mobs of ranged enemies are absolutely easier and safer to deal with using ranged weapons unless you have a way to close the distance quickly or are willing to take some toughness hits. At least on Malice this felt pretty good to me and required me to appraise each encounter a little bit more and determine how best to advance. I think this is a great part of the gameplay.

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This honestly feels like a case of “Get good.” Seriously? Your weapon feels like a burden… at difficulty TWO?

I can only imagine your reaction time being comporable to that of a dying snail’s. I have no difficulty at 4 thus far utilizing my gun to snipe the plethora of specials that populate the levels we’re doing. However, my team is slightly competent, and the Psykers and Ogryn will keep melee units off of me for the small period of time it takes for me to snipe troublesome specials.

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Been playing on Damnation since the toughness bleedthrough thing got patched, cause Heresy feels relatively easy now. Dear me, the smell of my farts are wonderful - not the point. Playing Ogryn, got my rippergun out about 60% of the time, as long as my teammates aren’t just blindly hoovering up every single ammo tin they come across. Ranged weapons are all perfectly viable, some moreso than others.

I would like to see more weapons with melee attacks, and for them not to be a waste of time over simply drawing melee. Give us power-bayonets. I hope there’s more in the way of weapon customisation in general as well - optics in particular. Some of the sights, irons especially, are dogshit.

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One thing I’d really love to see is some special melee weapon option that lets you use your force staff as a melee weapon. I know force staves have the special melee attack button. But I mean actually wielding the force staff as a melee weapon with the full range of attack sets. Would be really cool IMHO to have that.

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I find this weird, since almost all melee weapons in the game suck. The basic swords are okay, the Power sword is really good, the two handed chainsword is decent, and literally everything else sucks.

The Chainsword sucks because it has no bonk, feels like it’s lawn furniture. Not crazy heavy but kind of awkward. The two hander is better, but still feels like it’s missing something.

The thunderhammer is crap. It’s a one trick pony on a melee class that is basically only good for one hit against a heavy and lousy for everything else, and it sort of stun locks you with it’s wacky rebound.

The Force sword gets by on it’s utilities and push,

The chain axe is okay because it has a fair bit more bonk but looks kinda funny for what it is, feels like it would be more chainsword effect and the chain axe should be ripping buffed, made two handed, and use the model the maulers use, or at least a longer cutting edge.

Ogryn Knives are great but plain, shield is good for utility but sucks for offence. Grenade gauntlet is technically ranged but used to be decent, hear it’s been nerfed.

Basically ,the ONLY melee weapon in the game that feels like it is a 40k weapon is the power sword. Everything else is either a straight vermintide import or lackluster in the extreme. And even the powersword needs you to keep turning it on! Yeah, not as much as the chainsword, but even so, the only weapon in the game that feels like a 40k tech magic melee weapon needs to be constantly rebuffed. First game I’ve heard of where the melee weapons needed this kind of constant managing.

By comparison, while the ranged weapons have many short comings, they problems mostly stand out when you switch to them instead of actually are firing them. I find I can manage to stay ranged almost all the time in Malice, though I tend to use whatever has cleave for hordes of pox walkers, but they are pretty squishy and numerous.

Meanwhile, when you hit malice and higher, there’s so many guys shooting at you that the best option is quite often to take cover, aim carefully, and throw a lot of grenades. As you go over malice, the number of shooters and their activeness increases as well.

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I personally find the guns extremely useful at difficulty 3. There is only one gun that has an extremely long deploy time, and that is the bolter. It’s very powerful, sure. Especially against carapace enemies, but ammunition is limited, and it’s deploy and reload times are so long that I find it a liability. Especially vs the ease of use and fast deploy time of the other ranged weapons that as a result do a much better job at specifically, the task of killing specials or mowing down a choke-point.

The Kantrael MG XII shines in particular for special killing with it’s high damage and good sight, as the Lucius patterns clearly needs some buffing.
The Agripinaa autogun also packs a surprisingly heavy punch for it’s fast deploy and relatively high damage. Making it useful for shooting specials and marksmen past the pack, while having the penetration for dealing with a coke point. The Columnus and Graia braced autoguns are also very mid-range useful thanks to it’s high ammo count and ease of control, killing all but carapace and mutants easily.

It has thus in conclusion been my experience that the faster to deploy and reload guns have been more rewarding in high intensity engagements and special targeting. And the lack of ability to shoot say, Carapace armoured crushers can be mitigated with a melee weapon that can do the job.

At difficulty 4 and above, all bets are off as all enemies become tankier and tankier. Higher rating guns with great stats start becoming needed.

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