Smoke Grenade Manifesto

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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Kraks bust elites like Crushers very nicely. Frag grenades decimate most other enemies in a considerable aoe. These are universally applicable tools. Smoke Grenades, for the most part, negate the danger of the “room full of shooters / snipers” scenario that teams can sometimes encounter. Therefore, Smoke Grenades are gimmicky, which is bad enough already. To make things worse, the extended use of them promotes turning the gameplay experience for everyone else into a complete blur of grey smoke for most of the match. The worst aspect of Smoke Grenades which I believe is universally despised is that they block line of sight so long as they’re thrown in meaningful places, causing them to weaken the entire team’s ability to either see a dangerous enemy or group and kill them or prepare for them. I have personally witnessed smoke spam steer the team into losses or blind them to enemies that smoke made them unable to prepare for.

To avoid that end, I have some simple suggestions that can improve the usefulness of Smoke Grenades.

  1. Partially transparent smoke for the team. I wouldn’t mind them personally if they were a mild haze that could be seen through by allies rather than an overwhelming gray fog. As they are right now I find it more fun to run out of them than to stay in them. They are boredom inducing in their current foggy state IMO. To be clear, I mean them to be transparent to allies from all distances. They should never harshly obscure vision. If you are familiar with VT2, think Bardin, Ranger Veteran Smoke Bomb levels of transparent.

  2. Smoke Ally Buff. What I wish to suggest is a movement speed buff for allies which activates once they leave the smoke and persists for a couple of seconds. The status of the buff resets on entering the smoke again to prevent any weird high movement speed abuse inside the cloud. This buff could be used aggressively to charge forward or retreat defensively, giving Smoke Grenades a distinct identity valuable to any team composition and across very many different scenarios in the game. People would actually have a reason to fight with and around the smoke.

  3. Pox Bomber Smoke Overwrite. Currently, Smoke Grenades can conceal or partially conceal the AoE smoke effect caused by this special enemy. Smoke Grenades should negate Pox Bomber Smoke specifically within the AoE on detonation. This was suggested by @ElevatorEleven and I wish I’d thought of it much sooner because it’s so easy to balance and tinker with compared to my original suggestion of persistent tox bomber negation. I leave it to discussion whether Smoke Grenades should negate the Fire Bomber’s grenade as well, though I will say there seems to be support for that.

With the talent tree available to them, Vets can use grenades quite comfortably compared to other classes. These smoke grenade quirks would not only be useful but would be unique and compelling, giving the blitz a more interesting identity than its current iteration.

Anyway, I would like to see what others here think of all that’s been said. Thank you for reading.

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I think partially transparent smoke for the team is a slam dunk. Arguably smokes are the most effective version of friendly fire available!

Also bomber override is a cool idea, area denial meet area enablement. Niche, but I like the idea you can pop a smoke to disperse harmful area effects.

It would be cool to ninja your way out of a sticky situation, perhaps the initial explosion could provide a brief stealth + speed buff! Basically what you said – having it tied to the initial drop may help combat the potential abuse you mentioned.

OK one more, what if any enemy inside the smoke had something similar to the Volley Fire effect which lights them up for the team?

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If they block LOS, it most likely not a meaningful place

How about ability to position yourself properly? If you are going to stand just on the edge of the smoke cloud, then enemies can unexpectedly hit you.
In all other cases, it’s your fault that you didn’t notice enemies coming from the smoke, if you’re standing away from it. Or if you stand in it, and you didn’t notice enemies coming towards you.
(You can see through smoke if you stand in it).

I personally never had issues with smoke, either if I used it or someone else.
However, bad placement of smoke can certainly be annoying but not more.
Blaming smoke for losses or deaths is seams to me as an excuse people make when they’re getting mad because they died.

But I agree with your suggestions, and the fact that smoke needs an improvement.
Making it transparent is probably must have feature for the vast majority of people.
From what I understand, reading a lot of complaints about smoke, nobody wants to change their usual play style because they have smoke user in their team, or they just don’t know how.

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Your “solution” to the effect of smokes I described, i.e, that they weaken the team’s ability to see and prepare for dangerous enemies or groups, does not solve the fundamental problem of that effect. It is simply a reaction to a problem caused by the bad design of Smoke Grenades. As an individual, I can ping spam or whatever as a countermeasure, sure. However in the heat of the moment it’s ridiculous to expect everyone in the team to work around an effect that should not be handicapping the team to begin with. No other blitz can affect the team so negatively and with such minimal effort on the part of the user as Smoke Grenades can. This is why I suggested smokes appear as a light haze for allies - better worded I meant players. The current smoke is too much and it belongs somewhere like CSGO, not here.

I’ve played this game for roughly 2,000 hours and I have more than 4,500 penance points. I don’t specifically care much about losing. Here I acknowledged that it can cause game losses because that is how poorly Smoke Grenades were implemented into Darktide. Handicapping the team is an unintended feature of Smoke Grenades.

Again, the fact that the team would have to change their playstyle at all to adjust to a smoke grenade user because of a significant negative consequence attached to their grenades is the design problem my suggestions seek to address.

Smite, for example, is theoretically -1 player for its duration because the Psyker is channeling it. I’ve seen Psykers go down to unexpected enemies during Smites. Regardless of that the upside of the aoe stun of Smite is so vast that people often naturally participate in protecting the Psyker during the blitz. It works cleanly, it helps the team. Smoke Grenades have no such amazing upside yet their handicap is worse because it affects team vision. If the team can see enemies, they can kill them or plan to kill them. I myself love having a clean field of view because I kill specials on sight as much as I can.

I didn’t suggest stealth because I feel that stealth is a very strong ability and one that can break the game. Even if it were simply +% Threat Reduction, it would break Infiltrate oriented Veterans. They could potentially reach 100% Threat Reduction with Low Profile if Smokes granted a Threat Reduction buff similar to the movement speed buff I suggested. Plus, I’m of the opinion that moving faster is fun enough. As for a Volley Fire-like vision effect within the cloud, I think it’s unnecessary with my suggestion of changing the smoke cloud to a light haze for players. More than that it is redundant with Enhanced Target Priority, a niche Executioner’s Stance node that can grant team vision on important targets like specials and elites.

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Is it really that ridicules to simply step away or move in, based on given situation?
Those are countermeasures i offered, not ping spam, it’s very simple.
You’re already supposed to do that all the time, under pressure or not.

Is it always? And why shouldn’t it, if it had a worthwhile (more apparent) positive effect?

You only talk about “Significant negative” (which isn’t significant, you just don’t like it).
How about changing playstyle to gain significant positive? I know it hard to actually get it out of smoke, in its current state, but it is possible. I had some table turning, game saving smokes, but very few. And that is my problem with smoke, it doesn’t have enough of a positive effect.

Again, you can see enemies if you’re standing in smoke, and you can see them coming from smoke.
I guess the idea of stepping back and waiting for them to come out is just not something you like, but It’s not objectively bad. You like killing specials with your gun? Cool! How about me liking to draw them in to my smoke cloud and slaughtering them in melee?

I feel like making an argument about smoke preventing your fun, is much better than trying to say it’s objectively bad.
That argument is making me to actually agree with your suggestions. Make it haze.

It’s also funny to me how this community obsessed with team play (despite its being almost
non-existent without VC), but the idea of changing your playstyle to adapt to your team is something bad.

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This and enemies fire granade

Plus I’d like smoke made us “immune” from disablers like trapper, dogs, mutant… if they can’t see us, they can’t catch us

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They actually do make you immune to the trapper and dog, when you are in the area covered by smoke they are unable to target you until the effect expires. I don’t think the mutie needs any more nerfs, if anything he needs his guaranteed toughness break for slamming you on Damnation back imo.

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Uhm weird, I got caught more times while under smoke… maybe it was a bug or my error. Nice info, thanks

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Smoke grenades in my experience are useful for getting enemy shooters to leave you alone while you fight melee enemies. They’re not great for attacking ranged enemies, cuz neither of you can see the other. They can sorta help protect you against some specials, but they’re unreliable, and it’s better to just, yknow, kill them, which becomes harder for you and your team if either of you are in smoke because you can’t see. Apologists always chime in with “dur just use your ears” or “buh just tag them,” but those people are so selfish they can’t grasp the frustration of being denied the unparalleled usefulness of being able to see things coming. It’s a lot easier to tag things if you can see them, and you can’t tag hordes anyway.

So in other words, smoke grenades are good for reducing everybody to melee. That makes it strange to me that they’re on the Veteran, who is, last I checked, kind of like the ranged damage specialist. Even their melee focused skill tree is largely built around switching between melee and ranged.

So, I kinda think smoke grenades might be better on the Zealot. Krak grenades could be moved to the sneaky saboteur-y righthand side of the Veteran, and the middle Veteran could have something more team oriented, like a plasma pistol sidearm, or a flare gun that does the light up enemies thing, or snare mines. Yeah, snare mines, those are in the tabletop somewhere right?

But then again, this would only move the problem somewhere else, because smoke grenades would still be garbage. And if anyone wants to argue they aren’t garbage, even if they’re not total garbage, which I’m not admitting to, they still aren’t worth the opportunity cost of not having frag grenades or krak grenades.

To the end of making them less garbage, I’m basically on board with everything said in the OP. Make it possible for players to see through the smoke, at least partially. The smoke could just be like a bit lower to the ground and we can see over it, and while in it players turn partly transparent to convey that they are now Concealed. yknow, exactly like Ranger Bardin’s smoke bombs.

One alteration though, I’d posit instead of a movement speed buff, smoke provide allies with a Chance To Evade buff, and maybe Suppression Immunity as well. Chance To Evade would be basically like a small percent chance to completely negate incoming attacks, working on both ranged and melee attacks, with an exception to big bastards like maulers and crushers and monsters. This would make fighting while inside the smoke cloud useful for taking on melee guys as well as for staying in the smoke while trading fire with enemy ranged guys.

I like the idea of smoke being useful for clearing enemy flame or gas, but I also think that enemy flame and gas are specifically for flushing the player out of cover, so I would suggest that enemy area denial attacks and smoke grenades should both override each other. If you throw smoke on a bomber’s flame pool, the flame goes out, but if a bomber throws a bomb into your smoke, it blows the smoke away. That would make smokes useful for aiding, but they couldn’t be used to turtle up in a corner and be immune to enemy disruption.

Although then again being immune to flame wouldn’t be that bad, since mutants could still just barge in and kick you out.

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I think Smoke Grenades should also be allowed to disable Scab Bomber firebombs, like you can in CSGO. If its purpose is to create a safe-zone, then it should do that.

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I really enjoy smoke grenades and dont think they need to be majorly changed, but thinking about it made me realize that it would be pretty fun to have a grenade that works like a typical ninja smoke bomb. You throw it at your own feet instantly, it gives you (and every ally inside of it) stealth for 3 seconds and suppresses ranged enemies. The obvious play enabling being that everyone in it “vanishes” from sight from the perspective of the shooters and then pops up right behind them. Real weeb stuff

I’m not really thinking about this from a balance perspective though, only that it would be really cool and thematic

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They could slow down enemy movement and attack speeds and make enemies unable to track you.

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Mostly transparent. This game is a mush of greys and browns, it’s already hard enough to pick things out. Anything more than a mild fog is a problem here. The team shouldn’t be punished for the smoke user’s poor choice of blitz.

This would actually give teammates a reason to use it as intended instead of treating it as the +difficulty modifier that it currently is.

Fire extinguisher + pox gas disperser would give it some real utility. Others have suggested this too. It’s a good idea.

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I realized I was vague in the original post so I edited it for clarity to reflect I was thinking of Bardin’s Smoke which I remember to be quite transparent. Thanks.

You summed up the problem perfectly.

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this myself when I posted, so I edited the original post to reflect your suggestion. It’s a solid idea and it wouldn’t totally destroy waves of bombers like a persistent AoE negation from one smoke grenade would as in my original suggestion.

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