So many weapons feel like hot garbage

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

Rather than just nerf the powerful weapons (power sword being the elephant in the room) - please don’t overlook the fact that almost every other weapon in the game needs some kind of buff.

Instead of it being like:

Oh this weapon can barely onehit a poxwalker, I guess it must hit a LOT of targets - maybe even going through carapace - and allow me to control the horde better.
Oh this weapon can’t even go through two poxwalkers. I guess it’s single target damage is really high which will allow me to dispatch elites better.

It’s more like

Oh this weapon can barely onehit a poxwalker. It also stops after cleaving four poxwalkers and leaving three of them at over 70% of their life.
Oh this weapon can’t even go through two poxwalkers. I still have to wail on a single Crusher for 15 seconds before it goes down though.

Nearly everything has absolutely glaring downsides that completely outweigh their meager strengths. And those that had specific strenghts (i.e., the dodge kiting of the Dagger) summarily had their wings clipped.

And all a huge chunk of the blessings are lukewarm insultingly banal increases like:

Plus 4% reload speed after sliding (wow i reload 0.1s faster!!)
Plus 2% damage on hit - stacks 5 times (wow! after 5 hits i do a whopping 10% extra damage!!!)
Extra 20% critical damage when you hit a weak spot only (why the extra condition to something that is already pure RNG?)

Where nothing outside of the the basic “here’s 15% damage for hitting 3 enemies” (something which requires net zero thought) or the cleave-boosting talents (important due to how dense hordes get at higher difficulties) are worth considering.

It’s all just micro-boosts that are technically an increase if you look at things on a spreadsheet, but that make no practical difference in-game in most cases.

If a damage boost doesn’t let you kill a target in one less swing, then that damage boost was practically worthless because you’re still swinging X amount of times. This is the “breakpoint” situation that the endgame of Vermintide ended up being based around. And it’s something that is frankly unavoidable in this type of game no matter how much the lead designer may detest it.

Let us have FUN with making builds in that case.

Here’s four free ones as an example:

Sliding instantly reloads X% of your magazine’s ammo.
Sprinting charged attacks deal XX% more damage/impact
Attacks made while dodging have XX% more cleave/impact
Successfully dodging an attack (ranged or melee) removes a large chunk of aim sway/flinching/etc. for a couple of seconds

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2

Please be more specific, are you talking about ranged or melee weapons? Which ones specifically. My brain is mash potatoes after attempting to digest this post.

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Weapons in general. Both ranged and melee weapons across the board.

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I’ve found most melee weapons are usable but require playing a specific way, or must have their weaknesses compensated by your ranged weapon. Like abusing the push-attack on certain axes, or dodge-spamming with dueling swords, or using specific Heavy-Light combos.

I also used to think pretty much the same, that everything felt kinda bad, but when you get to the higher scores (350+ grey weapons), they get a lot more bearable (like the trauma staff, or the slow as f**k axes).

Autoguns are irredeemable I’m afraid. I have yet to see a Veteran use one on Malice+.

And yes, most Blessings are just crap. Unimaginative. Not impactul. Later on we’re supposed to be able to buff these blessings up to their max rank, and we’ll have to see what’s what then I guess.

5

The really big issue with weapon balance in Darktide is that the extreme DPS gap between different weapons.

The way you would want to use armor / armor penetration in a game to balance things out is to make slow heavy hitting weapons that have low DPS penetrate armor better so that you can normalize TTK against big enemies by giving them armor so that rapid fire weapons with extreme DPS lose damage on not getting as much damage past the armor.

In this game they just made a lot of weapons that are low DPS and low armor piercing, and some weapons that are high armor piercing and high DPS.

Also yea, something like the Autopistol needs to just kill a horde outright if you unload a full magazine into it, like a Voidstrike staff does on full charge.

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I exclusively see autoguns on most classes Malice+

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Are you sure you’re not seeing Bolters instead ?

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lol yep.

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In vermintide all of the melee weapons weak to armour had fantastic horde clear or some other redeeming gimmick, comparitively it feels like half of darktides weapons are objectively bad.

Why would anyone not running a penance take a revolver over a bolter or kantrael XII?

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The light weapons are kind of problematic, because mobility isn’t enough of an advantage when you pay for it with bad damage. A dead enemy can’t kill you after all.

Maybe pistols could be given some kind of other advantage, like being able to carry more grenades, or a second utility item. I personally always enjoyed the idea of someone taking a light weapon into a fight so they can carry some other useful equipment.

I personally prefer giving some realistic upside to light weapons to balancing them around the idea that a revolver has to be just as good a ranged weapon as a machine gun.

I’d like it if light weapons and heavy weapons were equipment categories and equipping a light weapon in one slot allowed you to equip a heavy weapon in the other slot for example. That way you could make a melee weapon that is genuinely super strong, but you need to carry a laser pistol or revolver alongside it because it’s simply too heavy otherwise. Likewise you could have something like a Rotorcannon for infantry use, but you need to equip it alongside a shovel or knife because it’s just too heavy otherwise.

2 Likes
11

The Revolver actually has a useful niche as an emergency incapacitation tool. I’m running it on my Zealot at Heresy with modest success and I’m not even at level cap with it yet (so I don’t have decent damage rolls).
The draw speed is basically instantaneous a-la Vermintide so it’s one of the few weapons you can whip out mid-horde to shoot at a key target, then switch back. Even if it doesn’t kill - it will stagger any target short of an Ogyrn, allowing you precious time to close the gap or seek cover. This has saved me many times when a ranged enemy is just out of reach of my melee attack.

While the Bolter is just far more powerful. The fact that the draw speed and reload times are so lengthy means that you really need to make space before you use it.

This is not to say that it does not need a buff however. Either the Ammo + Reload Speed needs to improve (making it more proficient at mass CC), or the Damage + Stagger does (making it more proficient as an emergency stagger/killing tool).

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In that circumstance, the revolver absolutely shines. I just cant wrap my head around the ammo economy though, each ammo refill is worth far more to the team if you carry a bolter, or most other weapons, versus the revolver. Ammo count should be enormous for the revolver.

1 Like
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Seems like this post would be much more useful if you actually specified weapons you have a problem with and why. The vast majority of my hours are in Zealot but I’ve found a pretty wide variety of melee weapons very useable, or downright good. Hard to really discuss beyond “I agree” or “I disagree”, the way this has been presented.

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funnily enough my current favourite weapon is the autopistol. Can swap weapons and instantly burst most elites into oblivion.

It rips through hordes aswell and suppresses the crap out of shooters. Maybe not the best choice on a veteran but on zealot its perfect.

alot of weapons I thought were useless when I first looked at early game, turned into my favourite weapons (

Autopistol

Agripna mk1 auto rifle

Braced auto gun mk VIII specifically

There are still some weapons that I don’t really see the point of (or found a use as of yet)

Head-hunter autoguns

Heavy sword

1 Like
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Yeah, I just finished levelling a zealot to 30 and by the end, having tried various other weapons, I was having most fun with a combat axe and autopistol.

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Laughs in using veteran reload build with golden bolter
The bolter is a very versatile gun if you use all the reload orinted perks with the veteran. Its only decent with hordes, but it more then makes up for its ability to f!ck up crushers, bulwarks, and any other elite that would give a party without a phsyker a very rough time. Its a gun with a certain job to do. Its not like the lasgun in that it can be used in almost any situation and not have to worry about ammo consumption but thats the exact in lore reason why they dont just use bolters as the standard issue weapon to begin with (that and the potential cost). Its a stormtroopers weapon meant for f!cking up powerful opponents, like tyrinids, orks, and rival spacemarines. Not a solders weapon for extended combat. And they do a very good job of showing that through gameplay.

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The vast majority of weapons feel weak in some way or form which is why the post is a general one rather than targeting any specific weapons. It’s much easier to list the few weapons that feel okay than it is to list everything that is bad. But if you’d like a couple of examples off the top of my head:

  • Catachan swords are garbage with low damage and average cleave.

  • Daggers are only functional in a specific gimmick build with Zealot. Outside of that, again, garbage because low damage and low cleave.

  • Thunder Hammer - Pathetic single target damage on light attacks. Heavy attack only cleaves about 5-6 poxwalkers and barely kills one, maybe two per swing. Special Action is very clunky to use and would benefit from only discharging on cleave limit.

  • Chain weaponry damage isn’t high enough for how risky the gimmick is. 1H Chainsword feels like you’re whacking enemies with a pool noodle. Eviscerator has this weird behaviour of camera-locking when it hits the cleave limit. Can’t comment on Chain Axe because I haven’t earnestly tried using it yet.

  • Combat Axes - Filler weapons that just serve to muddy up the pool. Too much overlap with existing weaponry (Shovel, Tactical Axes, Chain Axes)

  • Dueling Sword - VT2 Rapier without access to the things that made it good (Assassin, WHC crit kill passive, very high charged melee damage, etc.)

  • Force Sword - Awkward moveset that doesn’t complement the nature of the special attack (let’s make 80% of the attacks low-cleave diagonal strikes).

  • Autoguns - Redundant and don’t do enough to diffrentiate themselves from Lasguns outside of just having worse ADS on average.

  • Lasguns - Reverse damage falloff being a thing. Ammo counts are needlessly inflated (literally the only reason they’re like this is to justify the “micro-buffs” where you consume 3% less ammo for 4 seconds after scoring a ranged critical hit or some other asinine condition). Only like two of the 8 or so Lasguns are worth using.

  • Laspistol - Bad because suppression is buggy and inconsistent.

  • Revolver - Absurdly low ammo count for some reason.

  • Autopistol - Bad because suppresion is buggy and inconsistent. Innacurate and unreliable.

  • Ogyrn Melee Weaponry in general - Lots of weird delays making weaving heavies and lights feel clunky. Selection is incredibly boring. Players goaded into using shield because of poor design (off-topic to get into here - many other threads on this)

  • Rippers - Ammo-hogs. Burst fire is impractical. Insultingly redundant (why are there three variants when the core difference between them is how and when it does burst fire)

  • Kickback - Damage isn’t high enough. Stagger isn’t high enough. Reload isn’t fast enough. All-around weak weapon despite the low ammo count and low ammo clip.

  • Rumbler - Awkward to use due to delayed explosion (that in and of itself isn’t very powerful for such a low ammo weapon. Basically inferior to the Grenadier Gauntlet in most ways.

  • Trauma Staff - Straight clone of Conflag from VT2 and it’s just as bad here as it was there. Damage, AoE and charge speed are all too low - plus it knocks targets TOWARDS you.

There’s more - and perhaps one or two weapons might need revisiting at level cap with a semi-decent stat roll. But this is just off the top of my head.
Many weapons just need general buffs across the board to cleave, damage, stagger, etc. Or perhaps even straight up redesigns. But each of these could occupy a whole topic by themselves.

Not to mention how boring and ineffectual a large number of the blessings are (wow this target with 2000 HP now takes an extra 50 damage from my heaviest attacks for five seconds! - etc)

Makes me wonder what the usage metrics are for successful runs in Heresy and above. I bet there’s definitely interesting data to be gleaned there.

2 Likes
18

You’re not wrong that it’s actually quite strong when you’re going to town with it, but it practically a whole magazine for each trigger pull if you want this weapon to feel strong.

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I find it makes up for it with collateral and suppression, As im a zealot I tend to rush groups before they can scatter or maneuver until I cant hit multiples. and reloads real quick too so.

on damnation I figure about half a mag for the most common specials. I happen to have a good autopistol with not too bad perks (Roughly 80% on the 2 damage stats and suppression on close range kills, 25% more damage from behind. 20% damage unrelenting, 20% damage unarmored)

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Chain axe is just built weirdly. The lights have a half sawing effect, which has some penetration, feels different but isn’t really a problem. Heavy attacks are diagonal swings that are meant to be the multi target attacks, problem is the angle is terrible for hitting multiple enemies let alone a whole front like horizontally swinging weapons can do, also has no sawing effect and deals poor damage. The only redeeming factor is the push attack is a horizontal with great cleave and control, but you can’t spam it as much as you need to and it doesn’t offset the terrible heavies enough. Special is similar to the 1h chain sword, works fine. This is all only on malice, would be just terrible at heresy or damnation.

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