So vets not being good in 13

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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Vets are my least fave class , there just a bit too normal if that makes sense so they were the only class i hadnt tried in 13 till last night , but intrigued by the claims im seeing on steam forums and here i figured id put together a build see what was up.

So on my vet found a Deadly Accurate + surgical vraks (mk 3 headhunter) in the stash to use. the talents are basically the left side down to marksman then middle botom leg to rending.

dived into the dmnation psyk to test, hit up volley fire and dropped a crusher with 4 bullets (each hit his carapaced head for 920) , one burst took over 90% off it. dropped a reaper with one burst (2130 per hit),and the dps meter i assume hit the limit at 4k and gave up.

so i ran through a dmanation run , i would use my chainsword +grenades on poxwalker hordes but i was killing all ranged targets as priority killing anything below a crusher easily with one trigger pull (if i had some of the buffs up not triggered in psyk even reapers dropped to one burst without class skill active!) massacring entire hordes of gunners picked up a couple of small ammo box’s and dont think ammo went yello at any point. and the speed a beast of nurgle dropped was frankly disturbing. the chaos beast and ogre i struggled with i cant reliably land weakspot hits on them .

but if this isnt a strong class what is?

details of the build for those that care.
vraks mk 3 with surgical and deadly accurate, think i put +5crit chance on perk
a green chainsword i found in my stash
curios are 2X +tough with tough+tough regen+ordo dockets and the third is a +wound with the same.

the nodes where theres a choice i took

volley adept
get back in the fight
killzone

class skill +relentless only.

exhilirating takedown
precise strikes
marksman - end of path

and in the bottom of the middle branch
bring it down
confirmed kill
competitive urge
rending strikes – end of path

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The problem isn’t that there aren’t effective builds anywhere. The problem is the tree is not flexible enough to accommodate the wide range of playstyles that veteran players have grown used to over time. Many of which did not boil down to ‘headshot sniper guy’ like your build here.

That might sound strange considering we have “more options” now, but I contend it is true. The old kit was so competent that it allowed us to take any ranged weapon and make it usable and effective; it fostered a larger variety of playstyles because any weapon could work. That is no longer true. We have more options, but those options are for a narrower set of playstyles, and in the new tree not every weapon has found a home to support it.

Some of the feelings towards the current tree stemmed from the hope that there was going to be more fluid transition points between the different areas, and that would make it easier to create hybrid builds. That was quite literally the stated intent of the overhaul.

So we made big, complex talent trees with lots of build freedom.

So, a character from the Veteran domain can be anything from a sharpshooter to a squad leader to more commando/spec ops type character and anything in between.

Instead we have 3 very deep sections, each very focused on one particular playstyle, a single crossover point at the top, and all are loaded with uninteresting filler passives. Making a hybrid build is disappointing because you lose so many points to random crap like +5% suppression or +15 toughness.

There is also large disappointment in what should be more impactful options. Like our auras: We can choose 3% damage, or 5% run speed, or… ammo regen… hmmmm. Real tough one there! Yep, choose any one you want #buildfreedom. It completely baffles me how that got past any sort of sanity check. Its like temporary filler that they forgot to replace. They need to make actually interesting choices for us. One filler node gives as much or more bonus than the other auras.

In your assessment you are being disingenuous in your gear description. You make it sound like you grabbed some random gear leftover in your stash and just crushed face easy peasy. The reality is you have a near perfect Vraks being used in the most optimum veteran spec available to it. Not every ranged weapon we have gets access to a blessing with a multiplier like 100% critical weakspot damage, and not every weapon has a tree so laser focused on exactly its intended playstyle.

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well thats fair enough, my little experiement really was in resposnse to the wave of “vet broken cant compete” over reactions ive been wading through in the forums. there are people claiming you simply cant build a non lasgun vet now.

That might sound strange considering we have “more options” now, but I contend it is true. The old kit was so competent that it allowed us to take any ranged weapon and make it usable and effective; it fostered a larger variety of playstyles because any weapon could work. That is no longer true. We have more options, but those options are for a narrower set of playstyles, and in the new tree not every weapon has found a home to support it.

not sure i agree here, the old kit was lacking choice, everything was perfect, bolter balanced by long reload? no problem use this build to skip it. the class had the ower sword utterly trivialising the entire melee game for the best part of a year.
i cant say i saw a lot of different playstyles it was all erase everything at range easily.

There is also large disappointment in what should be more impactful options. Like our auras: We can choose 3% damage, or 5% run speed, or… ammo regen… hmmmm. Real tough one there! Yep, choose any one you want #buildfreedom. It completely baffles me how that got past any sort of sanity check. Its like temporary filler that they forgot to replace. They need to make actually interesting choices for us. One filler node gives as much or more bonus than the other auras.

they are pretty underwhelming wont argue there could definitely use some adjustment. most trees do have some duffers though

In your assessment you are being disingenuous in your gear description. You make it sound like you grabbed some random gear leftover in your stash and just crushed face easy peasy. The reality is you have a near perfect Vraks being used in the most optimum veteran spec available to it. Not every ranged weapon we have gets access to a blessing with a multiplier like 100% critical weakspot damage, and not every weapon has a tree so laser focused on exactly its intended playstyle.

actually i wasnt, that is what happeend. went to the vet had that in the stash , yes its now a near perfect roll, but theres plenty of people that were calling it unuseable before patch and only las guns work post 13 , thats why i choose it , and yes i put a build together around that weapon. but i wasnt /am not that comprehensivley up on the vet tree yet (its not all memorised) , but this was first build i had no intention other than disproving two claims

1 the vet is now trash.
2 only las guns are viable.

the other stuff. i dont know , too early to tell.

I play all class’s. vet might be least played, but i still want him good. it just feels to me that a lot of the complaints are just way over the top and it sounds like a lot of vet only players are confusing being actually balanced with being broken.

sure they no longer have both the strongest melee and the ability to have the strongest ranged with every weapon. but i think thats a good thing.

just my opinion of course.

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You’re right OP. The Veteran continues to be a strong class. People have gotten used to Autopistolshredder and Bolter-magdump hypersexualimpactviolence, so now that it’s toned down and just “decent”, it feels weakish to them. Especially compared to the power boost the other classes just got.

That said, the Veteran is actually more versatile now as promised.

But that’s exactly what was promised. You quoted it yourself. “From a sharpshooter to a squad leader to a more commando/spec ops type character and anything in between”.

They never said you could be all of those things at once, it clearly implies a choice. A choice to be a sharpshooter. A choice to be a squad leader. A choice to be a commando / spec ops type. And inbetween means a mix that is obviously lesser than a full specialization.

+5% suppression or +15 toughness aren’t crap by the way, but I get you - You would have liked every single node to be a game changing effect, not stat nodes to be a thing.

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I appreciate the dialogue.

So prepatch I would say there was three main playstyles, with smaller variations based on specific weapons. They were:

  1. Marksman - accurate weapons, headshot focused, mostly ranged play
  2. Assault - automatic weapons, aggressive frontline play with lots of transitioning between melee and ranged weapons. Very fun and engaging.
  3. Heavy Weapons - Obliterate big things, lots of melee focus to conserve ammo between big things.

I think what you are seeing is the large population of players that played styles 2 and 3 realize that their playstyles are just… gone. You really cannot replicate them well with the new trees, and when you try the loss of Sustained Fire makes the gameplay feel clunky and far less fluid than it was.

Its hard to argue balance for that, because those playstyles weren’t removed. They were taken from Vets and given to Ogryns. Now we see them in games doing exactly what we did prepatch. No fault to them, its a fun playstyle and they needed help, but I don’t think we had to lose it for them to gain it. With how powerful other classes have become vets wouldn’t stand out if they still had it all.

I’ll give you 2 suggestions for things to try on your vet. This is a recon lasgun build. Surprisingly ammo efficient. You can easily melt down crushers from long range. It takes advantage of stacking rending bonuses to almost immediately apply 80% rending, and free lasgun crits makes it exceptionally ammo efficient. You will burn your stamina away immediately on firing, just be cognizant of that.

This is my current favorite build which I loosely call commando support. Its really strong in melee and gives decent options for team support. Whip out the revolver to blow away specials, but for the most part you can just stay melee and go nuts. Both Powersword and Chainsword work really well here, I prefer powersword. I also go full crazy and run revive speed on all my curious, giving me a total of ~50% revive speed. You can stealth and super speed to them at 45% movement and get them up extremely fast. I generally don’t like to plan on people dying, but it is the reality of pubs lol, getting them back in the fight is way better than being slightly better at slogging your way to them. Stealth is both offensive and defensive, use appropriately.

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It’s got nothing to do with the potential output of the class and everything to do with the playstyles that have been nuked. The people saying that vet can’t compete are trying to replicate the playstyles they enjoyed before the patch, which of course isn’t working because they straight removed a bunch of the key components of those builds, or they changed them too much to fill the same role in a build, or they buried them in a stupid place in the tree where you need to waste a bunch of points on talents you won’t use to get to them.

For people who don’t want to play one of the 3 firmly defined builds, the tree is excessively restrictive.

There are people arguing that vet now has more variety, which really just means they have the three prescribed builds. The ranged playstyles available have dramatically decreased. Previously you could pick just about any ranged weapon you wanted, most of which come with their own playstyle. Now you’ve got “marksman” and “recon lasgun” and that’s about it.

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You’re misreading people’s criticisms here.

There are people complaining about DMG. But this is clown world stuff, I’ve hit the 600k to 800k range with most high end weapons on executioner’s. Problem in this area is that officer and commando vet struggle I’m this area badly relative to other classes and executioner vet.

Alot of folks also are complaining about there not being enough flexibility in the tree to enable non lasgun/headhunter/bolter playstyles. Especially infantry autogun fudds like me, and shotgun/revolver lovers. We got f#cked hard, no lube, in this patch. Those are no longer viable at high end play due to the ammo economy changes. You turn into an ammo blackhole for the team otherwise even if you stack ammo talents.

Nevermind actually experimenting with hybrid builds. The tree is designed to nudge you into picking a blitz-aura-ult set if you want a working build for high end play. Want to try a 0.50 Stam DR, deadshot, and infiltrate build? Only if you want to play in survival horror mode.

The freeform appearance of the trees for vet is illusory, especially from the perspective of min -maxing while staying survivable at the endgame.

Finally there’s the issue of survivability, especially if you take the bait and play with a PS and bolter/plasma executioner. Good luck not getting hit and spontaneously combusting. Maxing for survivability here means you often drop on the third hit btw. I don’t necessarily mind this balance, but each tree needs mobility options that just don’t boil down to being forced into running only knives and high mob+sprint efficiency shovels. Good luck being relevant to the team without being a John Wick if you decide to stack all toughness on kill talents in desperation.

Overall the vet trees feel very restrictive when it comes to dictating your load outs and playstyle.

No one in their right minds was/is calling the Vraks3 bad. Before 13 they were A Tier, jesus, there’s an entire thread where we Vraks3 cultists jerked each other off raw over it. After the patch now they’re God Emperor Tier.

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I’m not biased towards bolter, since i mostly play mg12 on vet, more over i was asking for bolter nerf. However I can’t make a decent build for auric-maelstrom after patch. Neither i see vets with bolter there, maybe you can demonstrate bolter build and scoreboard with a decent damage?

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Nah he’s not terrible, there was just bad play test balance that was really obsessed with transferring the power of veteran instead of making sure all classes had a relatively even power scale. So already well to do classes like ogryn and psyker shot into the stratosphere, while Zealot no longer has any real opportunity cost to his best talents even with Holy Revenant nerfed. The buffs to melee are more relevant, meaning Veteran’s best builds now are less of a game change up than before. Prioritizing range damage builds are weaker unless its like infinite lasgun or crit damage dumping.

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well not really i just wasnt replying to all of them , just the ones claiming the vet is now nerfed to the ground and only las gun is viable hot takes.

There are people complaining about DMG. But this is clown world stuff, I’ve hit the 600k to 800k range with most high end weapons on executioner’s. Problem in this area is that officer and commando vet struggle I’m this area badly relative to other classes and executioner vet.

yes like those, well my opinion on the damage meters and how bad a source of useful information they are and how they draw unsafe conclusions is a recurring theme on these forums over the last year i dont think ill get into it again :wink:

Alot of folks also are complaining about there not being enough flexibility in the tree to enable non lasgun/headhunter/bolter playstyles. Especially infantry autogun fudds like me, and shotgun/revolver lovers. We got f#cked hard, no lube, in this patch. Those are no longer viable at high end play due to the ammo economy changes. You turn into an ammo blackhole for the team otherwise even if you stack ammo talents.

is this not true for the weapons rather than the class? i mean is it viable for any class to use just bolter on full auto or a braced autogun , should they? is that a global balance thing or a vet specific thing, i get its something vets used to have and now dont and i can see that annoying people and it should of been fixed a long time back. they have made a problem for themselves leaving it this long. its the power sword all over agaain. is it a problem and something that needs fixing i dunno.

Nevermind actually experimenting with hybrid builds. The tree is designed to nudge you into picking a blitz-aura-ult set if you want a working build for high end play. Want to try a 0.50 Stam DR, deadshot, and infiltrate build? Only if you want to play in survival horror mode.

been experimenting with this build this afternoon its a very heavy melee focused vet, krak grenades for tough guys and the ranged only comes out when you have mass gunners at long range , cant decide ont his version or one thats the same but smoke grenades , those things are just nuts powerful but watching ogres go pop… its just hard to give up !
very easily handled damnation , you have so much regen .

also been toying with a bolter dump / melee hybrid. less happy wit this one it picks up the old class skill and the right hand keystone to give a large dam buff for a mag dump on the bolter to clear large groups of oggies , smoke grenades to mess up gunners and maintain lethal melee to chop up everything else .

there are tough choices to make taking one thing does mean not getting another i dont see how this is restrictive ive got 3 builds already very differnet in style that all clear damnation with levels of ease in line with other class’s , actually this melee vet build might be the strongest build i have it just rolls everything

Finally there’s the issue of survivability, especially if you take the bait and play with a PS and bolter/plasma executioner. Good luck not getting hit and spontaneously combusting. Maxing for survivability here means you often drop on the third hit btw. I don’t necessarily mind this balance, but each tree needs mobility options that just don’t boil down to being forced into running only knives and high mob+sprint efficiency shovels. Good luck being relevant to the team without being a John Wick if you decide to stack all toughness on kill talents in desperation.

im sorry but flat out nope on this , everyone got fragile its all knife edge everyones going down in a few quick hits, but vet is doing well here. high toiughness, and ogre level sustain on it.

Overall the vet trees feel very restrictive when it comes to dictating your load outs and playstyle.

are you actually trying them? are you playing other class’s i just dont get how you get there.

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While not 100% true, given how oppressive some of the really good executioner’s + hellbore/Kant12 builds can be there is some truth to this if you’re a meta chaser. Given some time Helbore3 will become the new Bolter in balance discussions. I’ve done some insane T5 Auric Maelstrom special wave clears that not even sustained fire + bolter builds could match pre-patch.

Unironically, I have no idea what you’re trying to say here. Please clarify.

  1. Bolter is still pretty powerful even with the ammo nerfs and sustained fire removal.

  2. We’re talking about vet, so what is the relevancy of this? Even if it was, other classes are less dependent than vet on their ranged weapon (maybe not gunlugger ogryn, but I haven’t tried him yet). For vet your build revolves around your ranged weapon. Yes, this is the case even with commando “melee” vet. Offensive melee use with this one just puts you at the suicidal knife zealot meme tier, especially in pubs. It’s only really viable in premades or pubs with teams that actually communicate (unicorn scenario).

Relevance? You didn’t even engage with what you quoted me saying, talking past people is not a counterargument. At no point have I stated that Commando vet isn’t viable, only that he needs tweaks and re-balancing. He is good, fun to play too, but when it comes to team composition he is irrelevant once you’re reminded that Ogryns and Zealots exist.

Trying to build a hybrid build off of his tree, this is what I’ve desperately been trying to do over the last few days because I love infiltrate. All I’ve come up with will always either turn you from a glass figurine to a paper mache origami, leave you starved for DMG options, or be semi passable but be starved for at least 2 to 5 more points and ammo efficiency buffs to be competitive relative to executioner and officer builds/reccy lasgun builds (nevermind comparing it to other character builds).

“Nuh uh” isn’t an argument. Plenty of other multiclassing folks are saying as much as lot of us vet mains are. Also, the issue here is that tradeoffs between survivability - utility - DPS are way too steep relative to what we get in UX. Especially so since most of the vet’s toughness/HP stat boosters are siloed off at the bottom to nudge people into disregarding or limiting utility picks, and shepherd them into picking single archetype blitz-aura-ult sets. Especially if you want to have enough room to get ult modifiers at the bottom, and still have room for additional utility or survivability picks that are often either not enough or leave the build feeling bland.

What adds insult to injury here is that this is likely because the devs for some reason decided not to bring weapon ammo efficiency in line with the ammo economy changes. Because if we had actual build flexibility, under the current economy, people would run only ammo talents plus whatever build they actually wanted to play. It’s pretty rigid design intended to funnel people into the three archetypes with little wiggle room to experiment beyond the boxes they made.

This is not to say that the the old system what some beautiful ultra-flexible thing. Given the choice I’d stick to what we have now, but at least the old system (for vet) allowed for a wider range of skill expression relative to the current system. If they’re going to describe the current set up as allowing for more flexibility relative to the old system, then do what’s one the tin, geez!

Reading comprehension can be hard. I’ve been playing non-stop since the patch release, and experimenting with builds since then, but whatever. . .

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My main complaint regarding vets and this patch is that they did my plasma dirty regarding ammo economy. The enemy buffs messed up my breakpoints to the point where it’s now often taking two shots instead of one to kill many elites/specials, the weakened ammo regen makes it harder to regain ammo, the +ammo supply talent is usually WAY out of reach since I need to delve deep in to the central central tree for the +rending talent just to recover a subset of my old breakpoints, and the plasma gun STILL recovers a smaller percentage of ammo from ammo kits than other weapons (~8% per small box vs ~13% on the other weapons that I’ve tested).

I would GREATLY appreciate some buffs to the plasma gun’s ammo economy in any capacity. Whether that be extra damage to hit more elite/special breakpoints, less ammo consumed per attack, normalization of ammo recovery from ammo boxes relative to other weapons, or even just a larger ammo pool so that it regenerates more per activation of the ammo regen aura.

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Vet is amazing for 13 in Damnation Auric. Sure Zealot is technically harder to kill, but you’re not supposed to get excessively hit at this level.

Personally I favor run and gun sprint recon meleeing build, but I finally tried Executioner’s Stance today and it’s fine. (also meleeing btw :laughing: to +15% attack speed node)

Sure you lose terminator shields, which were cool and OP, but you really get a gunner feel with an Autogun, even without the refresh on kill talent.

Executioner’s stance has a fast cooldown and even faster if you nailed Specials

Spec the gain toughness on elite and special kill. Don’t get hung up on the left side’s “headshotting”; you don’t have to use a DMR or sniper; they’re just trying to cover all weapon types. Remember that if you had a super accurate weapon you’d miss out on the benefits of the stance’s increased accuracy

You have to melee sometimes, whoop de doo. Just imagine you have an actual machine gun, of course you need something to do on the move before you get set up

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