Skitarii toughness and tax nodes

[Drakonhammer]

Since we’ve had plenty of threads on the abilities and blitzes I thought I’d give my feedback on some of the blue talents/tax nodes in the skitarii talent tree.

Build Editor - Create your own Builds - Warhammer 40k: Darktide

Toughness generation nodes in blue.
Toughness/damage reduction nodes in brown.
Tax nodes in yellow.

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So I’ve been noticing skitarii can feel quite squishy at times on several builds vs the regular shooter enemies, not gunners or other elites, not melee, but large packs of dreg and scab shooters just chipping away at your toughness during combat, and I think this is tied to how skitarii generate toughness.

As it stands, you may have noticed most of the toughness generation nodes available to all skitarius builds are based on toughness over time effects; the tree actually only has four nodes which generate instant toughness:

• +4% toughness on weakspot kill node
• +20% toughness on ability use to you and allies (just before chordclaw, which may take several points investment for non claw or non servo builds)
• +15% on elite or specialist skill from the flensing keystone at the bottom
• +20% toughness on power overload to you and allies (while handy for the team this can’t really be timed to give you toughness back when you need it as a player)
• 25+% on voltaic emitter use with the voltaic overcharge subnode

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For contrast, we have:

• +5% toughness back on all kills for vet (easily reached by all builds)
• +5% on close kills for arbites (as far as I know taken by all builds)
• +7.5% back on stagger for arbites
• +10% toughness back on elite kill for vet and arbites, plus rolling toughness
• +4% back on melee hit for scum, doubled for weakspot hit and tripled for critical weakspot hit
• +8% on ranged kill, doubled on ranged elite kill for scum (more a ranged build thing and yeah I know, scum is one of the two strongest classes)

Zealot is a lot more comparable to skitarii in that a lot of their toughness generation is tied to ability use like skitarii’s is, however zealot usually gets full toughness from these and zealot has its rolling damage reduction packed into fewer nodes than skitarii.

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Every other toughness node in skitarii’s tree gives you toughness over time, whether it’s from cleaving enemies (left side right side near servo skull), shooting enemies (right side near power overload and ammunition deposit), elite kills, critical hits, electrocutions or taking damage (the nodes by Redline and Voltaic).

Now, with several of these effects rolling you can basically have ogryn’s ability to hug his ranged weapon when he’s scared, but without actually hugging your ranged weapon (the machine spirit does not approve), and some of these are just very strong on their own like +10% from Advanced Combat Doctrine.

If you can keep these effects rolling, but this takes both talent points and fulfilling certain conditionals, some of which are build dependent (like electrifying enemies) and most of which are on a quite short duration.

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This brings me to the final part of my observations: a number of abilities and keystones are gated behind tax nodes for the skitarii. Let’s start on the left side of the tree, here we have:

• Target Prioritization Psalms (specialists that get within 12.5m of you are marked): now, most specialists in this game are best dealt with via audible cues, making this talent frankly unimpressive for longstanding players, however what this talent does do is tax us for moving back and forth across this line to get Capacitator Reclamation Loop (cleave → capacitance) + the other talents on either side of these branches.

I would recommend swapping this talent’s location with another talent that is not along a key path, so players can take it if they like but aren’t forced to.

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Coming to the top branch of the tree we have a potential tax node triangle:

• Electro-Strike Conduit (melee critical electrocute the first target hit): this is primarily a tax node for electric builds wanting to grab Augmented Power-Cycle (extra capacitance per second) or ranged builds wanting to take Galvanized Coating or arc grenades for utility. Most electric builds have reliable means of electrocuting enemies as is, and for other builds it also requires some crit chance to trigger the effect.
• Weakness Analysis Doctrine (+10% damage for 8s on hitting a dotted up enemy): this is mostly a tax node because of Ablative Wards and would be fine if the latter is addressed. Basically you have to take this or Ablative Wards to take arc grenades on a ranged build or non-dot melee build. It would be fine as is and where it is if the latter is moved.
• Ablative Wards (+90% corruption resistance; every 20s take 1 corruption damage): this talent doesn’t actually seem bad, that’s 25 mins for a wound below havoc at 150hp and may even be good in havoc for minimising corruption bleedthrough (with zealot’s aura in theory you’d gain no corruption? But I haven’t had the chance to test this out), but if you don’t want to take this it forces you to take Weakness Analysis Doctrine. I think this’d be fine if it wasn’t placed so that it is a tax node for arc grenades.

With zealot’s BoP aura in theory you’d gain no corruption? But I haven’t had the chance to test this out.

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Rotating to the right branch, we have:

• Precision Combat Augurs (+15% damage for next attack on successful dodge): Now normally I’m a huge fan of taking buffs which work on dodge as you can keep them rolling indefinitely, but this says it’s only on the next hit, ergo any sort of more spammy weapon is going to get minimal benefit out of this (devil’s claw, braced autoguns, etc.), this makes this a tax node for many setups. Either move this, give this talent a short duration or replace it.
• Restoration Pod (1% ammo/15s): This replenishes so little ammo over a run I consider it a tax node. Now, I’ve got no problem with FS reducing the crazy ammo economy of this game, but this talent is just very meh and I would flat out leave it out when taking Advanced Combat Doctrines if I could. I’d rather this talent were replaced with something different and useful, better yet something new and interesting.

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Finally, we have the bottom of the tree:

• Sureshot Cogitator Sync (+25% weakspot damage): This is mainly a tax node because of where it is situated. Frankly, it should probably be in the ranged tree and slightly off to one side, because 25% weakspot damage is either just enough to make you hit a new breakpoint or utterly useless.
  For those not familiar with how weakspot damage works in 'tide games, it is +25% to the portion of damage you get extra for hitting a weakspot over a normal hit. This means if your weapon does e.g. 500 normal damage and 1000 weakspot damage, after taking this it will do 1125 weakspot damage, an overall increase of 12.5%. Now, some weapons have a ~200% weakspot damage modifiers (I believe the galvanic rifle does) so it will come out to about 25% more damage on weakspot hit, however many weapons in this game have a modifier of 50% which means you get a damage increase of 6.25% in the end instead. Ergo, for most builds this is a tax node. Worse, it taxes you if you want to take Integrated Refraction Emitter which already is drowning at the back of the paddling pool while the lifeguard doesn’t notice.
• Target-Neutralization Feedback (weakspot kills grant stun and suppression immunity for 4s): Okay, this one is not bad, but if you’re coming across from Advanced Combat Doctrine you’ve probably anyway got suppression clear on activation + you have aimbot), and if you invested in Galvanized Coating you have stun immunity at all times. Melee builds can alternatively pick up uninterruptible by the flensing keystone. I’d keep this in the tree but move it.
• Ablative Motion Routines (25% DR while sprinting or sliding): you’re usually anyway successfully avoiding damage in those circumstances, so what’s the point? It’s not a lot of DR for what it is and pretty much just a tax node for taking Foe-Render Creed. I don’t see this ever being taken over Uncapped Arrestor which is actually good.

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Dishonourable mention (see the commissar after class):

• Slaughter Protocol, bottom left of the skill tree: this talent restores +25% toughness on melee kill up to 50% at zero charges. To the best of my understanding this works like the one zealot talent - what this means is skitarii’s melee kills, which by default restore 5% toughness, instead restore 6.25% at base or 7.5% at 0 charges - but the zealot talent at least has the decency of doubling the 5% of toughness you get back on melee kill unconditionally and even then it’s considered one of the weaker zealot talents. Inconceivable!

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In summation, I think the way skitarii generates toughness (and for that matter TDR) is a bit too piecemeal and takes away points/talent nodes from more interesting variety. I would start by consolidating a few of the nodes, then tune the numbers.

Similarly, there are several talent nodes that serve little purpose past taxing you for branching into other sides of the three or different blitzes than usual, which seems counter to the spirit of having a more flexible talent tree.

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That’s about it. Looking forward to hearing the forum’s thoughts!

[MarxistDictator]

Feels like another experimental element of the class, in general instant toughness backs are too strong even in havoc with heavily reduced toughness because all you really need it for is that sponged hit. And they get elastic-band potential on the bar using their class abilities that spew them and getting kills.

But those characters still have those and Skitarii doesn’t (and Zealot gets resist death so all they need to do is be careful on cooldown and they’re back to being able to literally die and heal off it for no wound again) so the stack up feels like they’re really squishy vs the others. Even scum the ‘glass cannon’ has a talent that gives 50% toughness back when broken instantly, allowing you to keep getting toughness back from getting shot again. As if they even needed another sustain for melee after that insane weakspot/crit based one that’s like turbo confident strike but on every hit…but you have to hit the head. Oh and when you press F on Scum with 2/3 combat abilities you get 100% toughness back too.

[Drakonhammer]

@MarxistDictator

Feels like another experimental element of the class, in general instant toughness backs are too strong even in havoc with heavily reduced toughness because all you really need it for is that sponged hit. And they get elastic-band potential on the bar using their class abilities that spew them and getting kills.

Yeah that is entirely fair and I agree, what I’m not a fan of is how many nodes these toughness talents take up on skitarii, it’s really piecemeal. Even if FS rein in toughness generation, the class could do with a few being consolidated and then tuned down.

It is busted how vet can stack up a dozen stacking toughness generations on elite kills or how cleave interacts with some of the insta toughness talents. I’m not against having those, I personally prefer them to juggling stacks of rolling toughness as they’re more intuitive, the numbers are just high on those characters currently.

Again, I notice it worst vs regular shooters on a number of skitarii builds which feels weird from my perspective, vs taggables and in melee generally the rolling toughness keeps the skittle topped up.

[Agayek]

@Drakonhammer

If you can keep these effects rolling, but this takes both talent points and fulfilling certain conditionals, some of which are build dependent (like electrifying enemies) and most of which are on a quite short duration.

So this is very intentional and a core part of the class design. It’s built to be a win-more class. Skitarii is at its strongest when things are going well, which means you’re much better equipped to prevent things from going wrong in the first place. But once things have gone tits up, skitarii starts to struggle a little.

[Drakonhammer]

That might be, but winning more toughness when the run’s going smoothly is just about the least useful I can think of.

[Agayek]

It’s there to make it harder to reach the point where things aren’t going smoothly, and it does work fairly well. Vet and Ogryn, to a more limited extent, work along similar lines, albeit expressed in different ways.

We can’t really change this without changing the fundamental texture of the class, and that’s very not worth it.

[Manacraft]

@Drakonhammer

Zealot is a lot more comparable to skitarii in that a lot of their toughness generation is tied to ability use like skitarii’s is, however zealot usually gets full toughness from these and zealot has its rolling damage reduction packed into fewer nodes than skitarii.

Appreciate the analysis. For what it’s worth though, I’d be careful comparing zealot to skitarii. Zealot is slated as the primary melee class, and their ranged firepower frankly doesn’t hold a candle to what skitarii can put out. Part of the story about zealot toughness regen is also that they don’t have a highly competent arsenal of ranged weapons to fall back on.

I agree that skitarii toughness is more piecemeal, but frankly I think that’s intended. I very much like where skitarii is at currently in terms of overall power level. I even think there’s room for some small buffs here and there, which I’m very happy to say. To my mind it’s the first DLC class that isn’t ridiculously broken out of the gate. I’d like to keep it that way.

But I’m always happy to talk about getting rid of tax nodes.

[JDLS]

@Drakonhammer

• Restoration Pod (1% ammo/15s): This replenishes so little ammo over a run I consider it a tax node. Now, I’ve got no problem with FS reducing the crazy ammo economy of this game, but this talent is just very meh and I would flat out leave it out when taking Advanced Combat Doctrines if I could. I’d rather this talent were replaced with something different and useful, better yet something new and interesting.

I agree with everything in this post except this. That 1% ammo/15s is actually pretty solid on arc rifle due to that guns very good ammo economy to begin with. You get 2 bullets every 15 second and unlike most energy weapons the arc rifle uses 1 bullet per shot. So over a 20 minute game you get 160 free shots, and those shots are really solid damage especially when you take into account arcing and other buffs.

Using the Arc Rifle is also the only reason I would see to take Advanced Combat Doctrines, its very underwhelming on really everything else but lets the arc rifle hit some pretty insane DPS, like I have been hitting psyker damage ranges while using arc rifle + advanced combat doctrines without even picking up much ammo, those ~5 free ammo packs over the course of a game are pretty nice.

But yeah I guess I could see how you would call it a tax node since its the only way to get Advanced Combat Doctrines, and it really doesn’t help much on any other gun. I wouldn’t be against it being moved but currently, with what you are likely to use the ability it taxes for, its not really a tax since you would probably want to bring it anyways.

[Raichu]

Most talents aren’t particularly inspired but its also hard to keep coming up with new ideas… by being in a tree there are always considered tax talents to get to the things you want.

For me some of the biggest, after playing, let downs is…

-lack of any operative modifiers (surprisingly…)(1, 25 toughness tied to auras making them more mandatory)
-Consumable blitz with massive modifier choices (superseding Psyker Blitzes who don’t have limited uses)
-Advanced Combat Doctrines… with too many modifiers (niche ability issue)
-Unique artistic talent tree structure, while definitely cool, has some unique physical limitations to easily picking your otherwise core choices (Blitz,Aura,Ability,Keystone)
-Servo Skull Issues (Hard to command medicae servo skull with niche/shared usage with flame servitor)(Shoulder bound compared to CyberMastif command attack)(inability to name Skully)

[JDLS]

@Raichu

(inability to name Skully)

This does feel pretty pointless considering most servo skulls have no agency at all. But I would still want to call my skull Reditus lol.

[Raichu]

Every machine has a portion of the Machine Spirit if anything the Mechanicus value machines more than the flesh bodies value animals!

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Also every time servo skull gets away..Hadron “Don’t lose my SERVO SKULL” I wouldn’t doubt she cares more about them than named player characters.

[Garfielf]

The coherency aura nodes should give 50 toughness instead of 25 so they’re a little more beefy and to really incentivize picking one of those up, as I’ve seen some cursed builds that don’t pick those.

[f8fqgfm]

The Skitarii’s survivability perks are admittedly awkward. It feels like we have tons of options when allocating talent points, yet each individual perk has mediocre values with a wide range of strict activation conditions. Taken as a whole, the class ends up with clunky damage mitigation and toughness recovery. This stands in stark contrast to the Veteran, who only needs a small handful of high-value defensive talents.

[Drakonhammer]

@Agayek

It’s there to make it harder to reach the point where things aren’t going smoothly, and it does work fairly well. Vet and Ogryn, to a more limited extent, work along similar lines, albeit expressed in different ways.

I guess I just don’t see how other classes don’t have access to that, like vet with its rolling toughness on elite kill etc., but I guess that’s more testament to how powercrept the game is

@Manacraft

Appreciate the analysis. For what it’s worth though, I’d be careful comparing zealot to skitarii. Zealot is slated as the primary melee class, and their ranged firepower frankly doesn’t hold a candle to what skitarii can put out. Part of the story about zealot toughness regen is also that they don’t have a highly competent arsenal of ranged weapons to fall back on.

Sure, I’m mostly talking about how they generate toughness here, not their role. Obviously zealot needs toughness to gap close, but my feeling is if FS bring other classes in line with skitarii now, they will need to adjust the accuracy of ranged enemies a bit. You never notice it with other classes with their masses of toughness, but on skitarii it’s a reminder how crazy the damage output of regular shooters can be, or one gunner or ogryn lasering you across the map.

I still remember first season havoc where non-elite shooters were considered the biggest threat in the game bar none.

@Manacraft

I agree that skitarii toughness is more piecemeal, but frankly I think that’s intended. I very much like where skitarii is at currently in terms of overall power level. I even think there’s room for some small buffs here and there, which I’m very happy to say. To my mind it’s the first DLC class that isn’t ridiculously broken out of the gate. I’d like to keep it that way.

Yeah I am also happy it’s this way around and not like arbites or scum, though there is definitely some missed potential such as not having the shield and flame skull blitzes interact with the capacitance mechanic, or advanced combat doctrine being bugged and randomly swallowing 2-3 extra charges when one drains.

In general I still think my point about this being spread over too many nodes stands however.

FS touted the class as having no tax nodes but the way the TDR is set up it really pushes certain layouts over others. I can see some clear, strong builds for skitarii, but a number of the more-mix and-match ones which I thought was the point of their tree are really penalised by taxes.

@JDLS

Using the Arc Rifle is also the only reason I would see to take Advanced Combat Doctrines, its very underwhelming on really everything else but lets the arc rifle hit some pretty insane DPS, like I have been hitting psyker damage ranges while using arc rifle + advanced combat doctrines without even picking up much ammo, those ~5 free ammo packs over the course of a game are pretty nice.

Really? I find arc rifle their most insanely good weapon and haven’t felt the need to take ACD with it, it can really deal with everything as long as your ammo lasts. Maybe:

Or some variant; the toughness back on electrocute and TDR node below toughness back on weakspot kill are very good for more sustain, the key talents are autoreload and brittleness + damage vs eletrocuted at the top. Then Enhanced Voltaic Arcs on the arc rifle.

@JDLS

with what you are likely to use the ability it taxes for, its not really a tax since you would probably want to bring it anyways.

At the rate it gives ammo back, I disagree. But maybe FS should just add a second talent link to each of the keystones/abilities that have just one on the tree, so you have two choices instead of one. Granted, that might be OP if it’s gunsmith and not Rad-Sink.

@f8fqgfm

The Skitarii’s survivability perks are admittedly awkward. It feels like we have tons of options when allocating talent points, yet each individual perk has mediocre values with a wide range of strict activation conditions. Taken as a whole, the class ends up with clunky damage mitigation and toughness recovery. This stands in stark contrast to the Veteran, who only needs a small handful of high-value defensive talents.

Yeah that’s exactly how I feel. Taken whole, skitarii actually has really good ticks of toughness and its TDR/DR can actually get quite high, their toughness gen is just split into so many nodes with varying activations and durations. Then when you factor in placement in the tree it feels quite limiting from a build pov,

[Manacraft]

@Drakonhammer

my feeling is if FS bring other classes in line with skitarii now, they will need to adjust the accuracy of ranged enemies a bit

Okay, I assume you’re a havoc player then? Just guessing, cause that sounds like something a havoc player might say. We need to go almost all the way back to the early days of Darktide to find a version of the game where non-elite gunners were a problem on auric (then damnation) or below. If anything, I think regular gunner squads deserve some improvements - particularly to their behavior and how they often fail to do anything before you close the distance to them.

How that would play out in havoc I have no idea. But then again, I’m just going to be brutally honest here and say that I don’t really care. If you’re in tryhard mode, you need to accept that the game isn’t balanced with you in mind. It was originally balanced for auric, and it should stay that way IMHO. You can disagree of course, and that’s fine, but I think havoc players need to adapt to auric being the standard - not the other way around. If something is a problem on havoc, but it’s fine in auric, then in my opinion that’s just how the cookie crumbles.

By the way, none of this is to say that I disagree with your overall analysis, I think it’s pretty good. But I’ve played nothing but skitarii on auric since the class was released, and I do just fine against gunners, non-elite or otherwise.

@Drakonhammer

there is definitely some missed potential such as not having the shield and flame skull blitzes interact with the capacitance mechanic

Speaking of, this will hopefully help change things for you, once we can convince Fatshark to let the personal shield use capacitance instead of grenades (who came up with that idea anyway?). IMHO this simple QoL change should just be implemented right away.

[Agayek]

@Drakonhammer

I guess I just don’t see how other classes don’t have access to that, like vet with its rolling toughness on elite kill etc., but I guess that’s more testament to how powercrept the game is

I mean, I said explicitly Vet works along similar lines. And at the same time, every class is generally improved by things being under control and going smoothly. The difference lies in the fundamental design and elements of the class.

Some classes (Vet, Skitarii, and to a lesser extent Ogryn) are designed to leverage momentum and grow stronger from success, meaning that when they’re winning, they’re able to win more (hence the term win-more design). While other classes (Zealot, Hive Scum, and certain Psyker builds) are designed to be independent, with kits that are either frontloaded or don’t really require significant interaction with enemies or support from allies to take off.

This means that the second sort of classes are, comparatively speaking, much stronger in crisis situations when everything’s gone to hell, because they don’t need teammates making space, or can disengage as needed without needing to spend significant time ramping up their output again. Etc, etc. It’s just the nature of class design in Darktide.

[JDLS]

@Drakonhammer

Really? I find arc rifle their most insanely good weapon and haven’t felt the need to take ACD with it, it can really deal with everything as long as your ammo lasts. Maybe:

There are a few reasons I think Advanced Combat Doctrines is very good for arc rifle. I have played around with the build a bit and haven’t really settled on specifics, but I have played well enough to know its very good.

Ammo Regen

Ill just start with why I think the ammo regen is good. Its 5 ammo packs for free, think of most games and how many ammo packs people pick up. A ranged build is going to grab 10-20 plus a large ammo pack or two, getting 5 of those 10-20 for free is a noticeable amount of ammo that can then go to the rest of your team. I haven’t played it in havoc yet, but I imagine this would be even more impactful there. The ammo regen alone has gotten me through no ammo pickup auric maelstroms without me even toning down my shooting that much, but granted that’s mostly just the ammo efficiency of the gun talking.

For example: A game where I mostly used the arc rifle and barely picked up ammo and still shot the entire game comfortably while doing near 2x the damage of other skitarii builds hogging all the ammo on inefficient guns. (Auric Maelstrom I-II-V-E-G, 3rd player was disconnected and replaced late in the game so just excluding that guy). It was a 28 minute game so I would have generated 224 bullets, enough to replace the entire standard capacity.

Advanced Combat Doctrines

I haven’t gotten as many games as I would have wanted but I have a good ~30 games with this build in auric/auric maelstrom. But I have very consistently out damaged everyone else by a large margin if not close to double the next player, including games with poxbreaker/havoc forged/+100 level players.

But anyways this is the rough build, still being refined:

Core Concept: Every single stacking ranged damage buff
Play Style: Weapons Specialist Veteran

Key Talents:

Power Overload + Static Capacitor Drain: Very consistent +30% damage with essentially 100% up time.

Write of Ammunition Enumeration: +30% fire rate, MASSIVE dps buff for arc rifle

Calculated Priority: +25% damage for shooting elites.

Hybrid Combat Covenant: Mini weapon’s specialist vet talent. Easy +15% damage.

Gunsmith: Passive reload

Gestalt:

Consistent +150% damage AND +30% fire rate (Better then +30% damage due to how arcing works). You just slash into hoards then when the time is right switch to arc rifle and just blast away until everything is gone.

Yes Arc Rifle is a good secondary without this, but with this build it turns into a insane damage primary.

Also I have basically abandoned all toughness on this build just because clicking advanced combat doctrines is more or less a screen wipe whenever anything remotely threatening appears. Probably less so in havoc, but ranged builds are already questionable in havoc, I guess time will tell if the ammo efficiency on this class is good enough to manage it or if plasma vet will remain the only one.

Though I will be rather sad if the meta turns out to be plasma skitarii, arc rifles are cool af. Actually mentioning plasma, I really think the new plasma variant is the superior secondary option if your not going for the full arc rifle build. You get like 20 mini krak grenades, its very good, its what I run on my melee build.

[Drakonhammer]

@Manacraft

Okay, I assume you’re a havoc player then? Just guessing, cause that sounds like something a havoc player might say. We need to go almost all the way back to the early days of Darktide to find a version of the game where non-elite gunners were a problem on auric (then damnation) or below. If anything, I think regular gunner squads deserve some improvements - particularly to their behavior and how they often fail to do anything before you close the distance to them.

Yes this is a fair nuance, sorry I figured you were talking havoc balance. But I think we can have both: what I’d like to see is gunners losing a bit of accuracy and tracking speed + a little fire rate in exchange for higher lethality (or FS rebalancing toughness across the board instead of always cranking numbers up).

In expeditions the accuracy is quite absurd for instance, but it can largely be ignored because of how easy it is to farm toughness. I think if the latter gets nerfed a change to gunners like this would be possible. Obviously, not as it is now without trivialising them.

@Manacraft

By the way, none of this is to say that I disagree with your overall analysis, I think it’s pretty good. But I’ve played nothing but skitarii on auric since the class was released, and I do just fine against gunners, non-elite or otherwise.

I find if I take the obvious strong ones like chordclaw + a lot of nodes from the bottom trees (or just electro + toughness back on electrocute) you can easily shore up your toughness, but from trying really mix and matched builds I do notice there are lots of moments where I suddenly have zero toughness and have to play extra carefully. It’s always vs the little shooters too and not gunners/reapers.

The issue lies more in the talent spread (in terms of physical layout across the tree imo) and point investment.

I would say builds with Redline Capacitators and/or Chordclaw or Flensing Protocols all have quite a big advantage in toughness generation over the other sides of the tree despite already being very strong as is. Plus they can easily still grab the good toughness talents from the other sides.

Obviously I don’t expect all builds to be equally strong but it’s more FS advertising the flexibility of the class and then there being a bit of a skew in the tree rn.

@Manacraft

Speaking of, this will hopefully help change things for you, once we can convince Fatshark to let the personal shield use capacitance instead of grenades (who came up with that idea anyway?). IMHO this simple QoL change should just be implemented right away.

Yeah it’s baffling they did that for noospheric command which is imo maybe a little too good for how easily you get that 25% back and then didn’t implement it for the flamer skull as it is now or shield at a steeper cost. I mean the flamer skull already shares charges with the revive. I think giving it and shield a cost of say 75% and then maybe a short recharge so they can’t be spammed non stop would make the class’s blitzes a lot more engaging.

@Agayek

I mean, I said explicitly Vet works along similar lines. And at the same time, every class is generally improved by things being under control and going smoothly. The difference lies in the fundamental design and elements of the class.

Mb, I misread that completely.

I see what you mean now.

[Drakonhammer]

@JDLS

Ill just start with why I think the ammo regen is good. Its 5 ammo packs for free, think of most games and how many ammo packs people pick up. A ranged build is going to grab 10-20 plus a large ammo pack or two, getting 5 of those 10-20 for free is a noticeable amount of ammo that can then go to the rest of your team.

That’s a fair point.

In havoc it depends a bit, I haven’t played this season yet as I’ve been dragging friends up through the difficulties, but at least up until recently it was common to have one or even two vets per team, so survivalist. But havoc ammo pickups are nerfed so that is value.

On the other hand, said reduced ammo pickups mean you might not be able to lean into just the arc rifle.

I’ll have to try it, I like the chordclaw because it lets you delete crushers and help delete bosses so I’m not sure that’s worth giving up, but maybe the extra dps is enough to be worth it. The arc rifle already does pretty good against crushers thanks to brittleness on electrocute so maybe the claw is not needed then at least on auric.

[JDLS]

@Drakonhammer

I’ll have to try it, I like the chordclaw because it lets you delete crushers and help delete bosses so I’m not sure that’s worth giving up, but maybe the extra dps is enough to be worth it. The arc rifle already does pretty good against crushers thanks to brittleness on electrocute so maybe the claw is not needed then at least on auric.

With the build I posted with the buffs active it completely shreds crushers at least in auric. Like genuinely almost as fast as the chord claw strike and you are hitting like 3 at a time with arcs. Yes this example is with some elite kills already and +30% fire rate already active, but its not like its slow without these.