Sometimes during a mission the spawn director will go nuts and dump huge numbers of a single enemy type onto the map. Sometimes several identical waves in a row. I suspect this is a bug of some kind because it’s rather immersion breaking and doesn’t match the other 99% of the time where the game functions “normally” and enemies spawn in packs of different sizes and compositions.
In this example a huge wave of dreg ragers appears and attacks all at once. Catching the game in the act is difficult because you don’t always see the enemy approaching and they may mix with other groups before they reach the players. But sometimes you’re waiting to respawn and get to see what the AI is doing behind the curtain.
I have also seen this happen with shotgunners of both types, as well as one time with a dozen scab bombers. The latter is rather strange because they are specials not elites and shouldn’t be using the same spawn systems.
Steps to Reproduce (Required):
Happens randomly during a mission, only in damnation games. This is not limited to maelstrom or auric because this has been happening since launch.
This is a variety of patrol, a concept that was much more pronounced in Vermintide 2 but is still re used in this game. They are an optional encounter. Any time you see enemies that aren’t Specialists moving when they don’t have aggro on players, its a patrol. There are a lot of types in this game, melee/shooters and mixed elites.
That is a patrol as mentioned. I agree it could be more clear because the patrol sound is REALLY subtle, and nobody in Darktide gives a damn about patrols anymore as opposed to VT2, but it’s supposed to be a big patrolling mob of elites that you would (by intended design) be inclined to avoid by walking around it or waiting until it paths out of the way.
The fact that they’re easy to kill in this game and the fact that their sound is hard to hear combine into nobody caring, aggroing it, and you end up thinking “whoah, 40 ragers”
I have been at this for over 1250 hours now and I have only once seen a party deliberately avoid a patrol. It was on excise vault where we saw a small patrol of crushers and bulwarks on the other side of a huge hangar and just went around them. In every other case the patrol is either unavoidable because there is only a single path or the players have no idea the patrol is there because we aggro them with stray bullets from miles away.
If they want patrols to be an actual game mechanic they need to formalize it as such. Have the patrol make a distinct “marching” sound like in vermintide. Give patrols less of an aggro radius and only activate on direct damage so that you can actually avoid them, stop hordes from aggroing them by proxy and provide relevant voice lines such as “that’s a patrol, leave them alone” ala daemonhosts etc. They would also need to ensure that areas with patrols would have at least two paths for the players to take, but that would be substantially more difficult.
In my experience, players deliberately engaging patrols is a combination of patrols being relatively easy to kill, insofar as large numbers of elites are manageable for an experienced party. But also because leaving them alive is a huge risk, if a horde or boss spawns that forces you to backtrack you might end up aggroing the patrol when you’re already in a bad situation.
they do have a singular chant in this game, very hard to hear in hectic mods with players calling out all kinds of enemies every second. there’s also the design choice of letting the patrols in the air lock enemy spawns, some of which have no audio report for the player. and then there’s a lot of maps simply having no alternative routes to go. where would you even put a patrol route satisfying that criteria on vigil station, or hab dreyko. I don’t mind being forced to fight them, I think those and large mobs of poxes should be used more if anything. the problem is more the ludicrous power scale, like kinda hard to take a bunch of maulers seriously when the Veteran killed 10 of them with 4 plasma shots. another balance pass for the players would ease the need to cram enemies on screen every milisecond, which in turn would sort out a lot of the sound problems by letting them queue up properly.
