I play DT for about 2500 hours，and though I think FS never listen to its players，I still want to have a try and give my own ideas about the latest DT balance here.
It’s true that in the pre penance edition，some ranged weapons become too strong，and ammo supply is more than just enough. That means in a team with at least 1 survivalist vet，players can just shoot at anything and no need to worry about their ammo count（unless they completely have no idea about how to use their guns）. And it is too easy to remove waves of enemies with strong ranged weapons like kickback and plasma.
However，that doesn’t mean I simply agree with the idea of nerf survivalist aura. It’s true that the aura ruins the whole ammo economy，but before that，the unbelievablely bad ranged weapon balance already ruins the ranged part of the game.
Let’s see an example，suppose a team with a laser gun vet and a plasma vet. Ideally，the laser vet should focus on enemy shooters and specialist，while the plasma vet should save his ammo for stronger enemies like waves of elites.
BUT what really happens is，the plasma guy can easily delete any enemy by simply click mouse several times，that means he has very low requirements for the a good engage environment. The laser vetmay，however，easily get disturbed by a small number of enemies( 1 or 2 melee enemy from his back，1 crusher in front，etc): the laser guns just become useless in a complex and narrow environment with enemies in player’s face. So what will happen in this game? In many conditions the laser vet will be forced to melee，and become unable to give his team support fire which he should give. While the plasma vet dont need to precisely aim，dont need a very good fire position ，can push with rest of the team and brings support fire the team need. So，even with survivalist aura nerfed，vets still favors plasma instead of more
ammo friendly laser guns. AND even if plasma gets nerfed too，vets may turn to braced guns instead of lasers due to same reason.
From my point of view，the terriblely balance in ranged weapons include:Grenadier Gauntlet and Kickback(one is extremely limited and another is extremely mighty)，the braced guns(braced guns except Agripinaa are weak )，all the precise guns(Lucius，Headhunter，Kantrael)，and all the shotguns(shotguns are fun to play，but not efficient at all)，and so on… And just think about THIS: bad balanced ranged weapon combined with bad balanced talent tree(mainly the vet tree)…
So what I want to say is，FS should think about ranged weapon balance seriously and listen to experienced players，and may also remake left side of the vet’s talent tree to make a real sniper vet using precise guns. And ammo economy needs a rebuild right now.
i think they listen to the players, in fact i think thats all they do instead of testing things themselfs, cause this game is no fun for them aswell, they all playing helldivers right now i can tell
i’ll repeat the same thing i said on my post on feedback
to fix the balance is to make no balance
flashlights should do what flashlights are supposed to do, and heavy weapons should do what heavy weapons are supposed to do
that’s all, if you want to bring smallarms in heresy+ is your business, your right, and its nice that you have the freedom to do so, but you shouldn’t expect to perform the same as the guys bringing the top tier gear
this is the way the original devs intended, and they made a great game off that
I didn’t enter this thread expecting to laugh, but here I am lol.
lack of variety is lack of fun，and a symbol of incompetent balance. I used to love this game，write guidance for players in Chinese DT community，carry new players and teach them how to play. That’s because I believe FS can do a good balance and improve the game design，now I am doubtful about that. Maybe I will go try VT2 or go to play HellDivers2，not DT anymore.
As another embarrasingly experienced Darktider, I feel like some of your points points here are good. But not all (sorry). I mean… shotguns are among the strongest, craziest weapons in the game. But I’ll say more on that later.
Your point about plasma extending to melee and defense was absolutely spot on. Its wide shots with infinite cleave make it easy to hit with while clearing your melee threats & horde on the way to your target. It completely ignores friendly oggies, which destroy precision builds. But more than that, it’s so strong off the bat that it doesn’t even need any talents to shine. None of those are things precision weapons can do, and they definitely need a ton of talents to barely even be functional.
That said, imo a big part of why many of these problems even exist is precisely because of Survivalist. Many weapons like plasma, revolver etc. are obviously balanced around their high ammo consumption, just like how precision weapons & lasguns have really high ammo economy at the cost of power. Sure there are other balance issues beyond this, but even getting to them was borderline impossible as long as Survivalist just trivialized ammo as a resource entirely.
Nerfing Survivalist was the obvious first step to make ammo matter. Now that it’s done, next they should adjust the weapons around the new meta. Nerf the overperformers like plasma (preferably through ammo first), and buff the underperformers like precision weapons. This includes the horrible Exec Stance ofc. where the first thing they should start with is for it to NOT CANCEL on switching to melee (like jfc, whoever thought that was a good idea in a game that forces you to melee on a regular basis x.x).
…
Now this post is already super long so imma make another post soon where I’ll get into shotguns.
So getting back to the shotguns.
As I said they’re absolutely insanely strong. They really only have two problems: 1) they’re expert weapons and far more complicated to build or use than almost anything else, and 2) their most powerful and stand-out builds rely heavily on either of the T2-exclusive blessings Flechette (+6 bleed on crit) & Man-Stopper (infinite cleave on crit), which ofc being T2 only are ridiculously hard to get at max level. I mean, I’ve played since release and only got these two after specifically hunting for them at the stores for 2 months last Nov/Dec iirc.
First, there’s a lot of stuff to know about shotties:
- The primary has a much bigger spread than secondary / ADS, but the secondary / ADS shot has a much higher crit & weakspot bonus dmg than primary. Agripinaa has a massive iirc +110% bonus on ADS crit / weakspot, and +180% on critWS. Note that since all crit, WS and finesse bonuses apply to this bonus dmg portion only, the bigger a gun’s native bonus is, the stronger the blessings & talents that buff those become.
- The special benefits from +reload speed, and each has their own interesting and unique “hidden” effects
- Kantrael special does almost no direct dmg but applies 3-6 burn, does high stagger, and has infinite cleave (note, infinite cleave doesn’t include carapace or oggies / monsters). That infinite cleave however only covers the special effect, not for example Flechette. To get Flechette to likewise do infinite cleave you need Man-Stopper too.
- Agripinaa special is a single shell so like a sniper, does extreme dmg and has penetration, and has a high stagger and crit & weakspot dmg bonus
- Lawbringer special has high spread, extra cleave so it passes through quite a bit horde and some specials and huge stagger
All of the above comes together in so many ways I can’t possibly sum it up. But to give a few examples:
An Agripinaa with Scattershot & Man-Stopper with tons of +crit% and finesse bonuses becomes so strong it surpasses plasma even with the same bonuses, and is WAY stronger than a plasma without those talents. Ofc all while also having more ammo, faster shots, higher precision, etc.
A Kantrael with Scattershot & Man-Stopper with crit talents basically lanes a small cone of everything with every shot, and can easily take down 20 specials/elites with 1-2 shots and anything else there. You can use the special burn & cleave to either stack scattershot in advance if you like, to keep up a massive DoT on bosses with super low ammo cost, to take down snipers a mile away, or just stagger most everything in particular just to interrupt them or set them up for an easy headshot with zelly’s Blades of Faith etc.
Both of the variants above emphasize that expert usage. A vet with Deadshot for example can guarantee a crit with a stacked Scattershot & Deadshot. So you can alternate between hipshots or specials to stack Scatter & recover stamina, and then do ADS where it counts to burn the stamina and get autocrits against priority groups. If you have Reciprocity (+5% crit on dodge max 25%), you can lead the fight as above until it’s stacked and then ignore Deadshot entirely for a ~100% crit. Or you can do special spam builds with Deadshot, Reci & Opening Salvo (+10% crit on first 10% of ammo) for a base 75% crit even without Scattershot, using some other blessing in its stead.
If you put both Flechette & Man-Stopper on a Kantrael with a stealth zelly, you can use the stealth’s grace period for 2 autocrits with infinite cleave massive burn & bleed DoT’s on everything in a cone, per ult (or monstrosities for some huge passive dmg). Then recharge that ult in a few seconds with a knife or something.
Or you can do a bit of both with a Lawbringer - which is a hybrid between the other 2 shotties anyway -, using the special & hipshots for AoE and ADS for decent sniping. And you’ll have more freedom since the special’s native cleave means you won’t even need Man-Stopper against regular groups.
There’s way more ways to build shotties than these, and way more quirks to them too. For example No Respite (+20% dmg on stagger) actually doesn’t do just +20% dmg, but adds a stack of +20% for each shot while the enemy is staggered up to about +180% or 3x dmg iirc. You can do CC builds with massive dmg, or in-game do things like use regular shots to stack it up & knock an enemy to the ground, then finish it off with a special that gets all that bonus dmg.
Shotguns are more powerful than plasma. You heard this here first. I do agree on one thing tho, both plasma and Man-Stopper blessing should have lower cleave values. Same as the OG revolver. We can come up with multiple other especially ranged weapons which need some downward adjustments, some don’t even require ammo - hint, hint.
I mean… I’d hate to see my favorite weapons nerfed. 
And in their defense, the fact that they’re hard to build & use right and almost nobody does definitely should factor into their balancing. It’s how psykers work after all: insanely strong but balanced because so few know how to play them. Also, thanks to how the game works, T2 blessings are basically legendary drops and just frigging insanely hard to get unless you’re lucky.
But objectively speaking you’re absolutely right. If people actually knew how to use shotguns right and had those blessings to work with… well.
Just a note on these, they rotate through on Brunt fairly often, and since most blessings there are 1-2, odds aren’t that bad if you make a habit of checking in between missions, or even cycling alt classes that can get shotguns even if they’re all 30.
Still a silly way of handling weapon blessings, but at least Brunt is on a 1h rotation and multiple classes can theoretically find it, unlike tier 4 things from Melk or ogryn-specific blessings.
(provided you have one of each class at 30 that is)
I am actually pretty interested about your opinion，but I have to say it is against my own build test and game experience( actually I test similar shotgun builds before).
So my dear sir，would you mind play with me for 1-2 run and show me how your shotgun build works?
Heres my steam id:1113730282
Fairly often?
Checking the stores several hours a day (considering they cycle every 1h) for ~2 months, AFTER playing the game for 10 months prior, is not something I’d call “fairly often”. 
They should seriously just either move all T2 exclusives to T4 instead, or give us another way of getting those.
Sorry but I don’t do that. It’s nothing personal mind, just I have a thing with privacy and rather play on my own, doing whatever I happen to feel like doing at the time. 
Again, not defending the method they chose, but i still see it now and then when checking the store for random high stat rolls and it’s arguably significantly better odds on paper/average compared a few others, more so when you factor in combat shotguns availability vs say ogryn rippers just based on probable alts.
(which in no way is intended to diminish anyone else getting screwed by timing and luck on this lottery so we’re clear)
Also, zero argument from me on moving it up to T4, the system is 100% schizophrenic and rage-inducing on some blessings.
Yeah I believe people have slept on this. What’s the point of balancing guns if your players can slap on old Survivalist and pick the next best option for a weapon, post-weapon balance update?
In concept that argument has merit, but what overtuned weapons currently would be relatively less overtuned with less ammo that wouldn’t impact other weapons just as hard if not harder? Especially given that it applies to the reserve not magazine.
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