Stealing kills

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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The fact that we all experience people mowing down the enemies we’re in melee with (super common, even when load of other enemies to shoot at) makes me think that getting the kills does matter to a lot of people. Maybe everyone just wants that frame with the skulls (I sure do).

Maybe getting the “red cross of death” or announcement of killing a special etc is enough of a seratonin hit to make people want it more.

I don’t think there is any way to change the way people play due to the game being so intense and mad, but a minor tweak to how deaths are registered could be a nice little mechanic imo.

As an ogryn I experience this issue A LOT. A single swipe never kills and second swing is so slow that they’ve all been shot before I get to swing again. It’s just a frustration as it sucks a bit of the joy and satisfaction out of it.

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Or maybe they just attack the enemies that are available to be attacked, because it makes sense to do that.
Getting a kill is not relevant for the individual.
Making sure that any kind of danger is neutralized quickly, is relevant for everyone.

In some cases, sure. People are sometimes really supid in regard to the enemies they choose to attack. But most of the time, people simply attack the enemies that are the most obvious target, or the highest value target at the time.

5 Likes
23

Yeah in your world of vulcan logic, but not in reality, as others in this thread have already agreed with having similar experience.

Imo people get a thrill from being the killer and attack the enemies they will get most kills from, whether beneficial to the team as a whole or not.

So we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that one.

1 Like
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If it’s for stats and such, at the end of the game you will see most damage dealt and such so even if you didn’t get the kill the damage you did is still tracked.

But I agree with @Flawless there is an issue when it’s the buffs and talents that work off kills like applying bleed or soul blaze or restoring toughness that matter more. I think if a psyker is about to brain burst someone, or a krak grenade has been thrown onto a crusher, should be obvious to avoid it.

I personally haven’t found this to be too big of an issue. But I usually run anti-special and anti-elite builds with not as much focus on horde clear/suppression/gunners.

But I do see, especially on higher difficulties, with people with similar builds, what feels like a race to kill the elites and specials with some players. Whether it’s green circle chasing or just to have fun being the killer I can’t say.

… But this is why breakpoints are so important and therefore gear is so important. If I spec my revolver to be anti elite and can down them from full to 0 in 1-2 shots it leaves very little opportunity for someone to kill steal from me.

1 Like
25

I 100% agree that final blows is more of a PvP metric that is important. That said, I still look at kills, even more than damage. Not because I look and think “amagad I did bettar den dis gui”. But, because I’m interested in how my performance was. I’m sure you know the general shtick by now. :stuck_out_tongue:

The scoreboard arguments have gone on since the Vermintide days so it’s a bit of a dead topic IMO. It’s just going around in circles over and over again, discussing the same thing, year in and year out. :grimacing:

Also, just wanted to point out that I don’t think you are wrong with the damage stat. I think that is the more important stat, just that I look at kills too. And I think many players do as well. No idea how many, but, again, it don’t matter overall.

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I personally don’t really even register killsteals being a thing besides finding it funny whenever I keep getting my BB targets yoinked from right out under me. There are plenty of enemies to MDK your way through, it is in no way an issue. Playing Zealot with knives I almost never run out of them unless I spam a few throws and miss all of them just because of the amount of elites and specialists I’m mowing down.

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There’s some merit to what OP says, but a further problem is how overpowered some weapons are. When you get a plasma gunner in a game with the slightest bit of brain in them, they’ll just delete half the enemies in the game, even packs of Crushers, before you can reach them. Ditto with the really broken staves like Voidstrike and to a lesser extent the Trauma.

Really, Psyker is the king of kill steals, even with something more balanced like the Smite staff (and also tending to get their own kills stolen if using something like Brain Burst . . .)

2 Likes
28

Depends. Clubs with Haymaker allow you to have some oneshots for elites and specials, and even chain them sometimes. You can go for cancel-heavy loop with Mk1 to spam overheads also.

Mk5 shovel special is a oneshot button

Mk 3 shovel heavy oneshots almost all specials and shotgunners.

+25% attack speed from charge and +10% from Just getting started

From my expirience i don’t have such problem with ogryn. It’s with zealot when you want to leech some hp and someone kills all enemies around you with aoe, playing psyker with bb, and when you play vet with somewhat slow weapon and there is another vet with plasma.

29

If you read properly i was also talking about effects such as various elite/specialist on-kill procs on vet, or the ogryns rending proc, etc etc. Then there’s the obvious brainburst kills being stolen which obviously is a very similar issue, especially with warp charges. The ogryn thing was just an example, but it’s a good example of someone being able to actually grief you via killing things before you can hit them (which on an ogryn is usually the same as lasthitting anyway)

It stands to reason that making a coop game, then making characters survivability reliant on hitting or even lasthitting enemies, is kind of bad design because you’ve now created competition in the cooperative mechanics. That can be interesting but probably not in this form, it’s just frustrating when you get toughness starved because someone kills every elite from under your nose.
People often complain that a scoreboard would cause players to greedily lasthit things to inflate the counters, but they totally ignore that you have to do the same when e.g. playing a veteran as a basic game mechanic to proc various fundamental talents.
VT2 had fundamentally the same issue with temp health, and you could REALLY mess people up by killstealing slaverats in VT2. Toughness regenerating via cohesion was the solution to this, it’s only a shame they didn’t consistently apply this concept across all mechanics.

2 Likes
30

This issue is near-exclusive to temporary health on kill. For most builds, one of the other three, thp on headshot/crit, thp on stagger, and thp on cleave, is a good option. Thp on kill generates so little from killing Skavenslaves that last hitting them is unimportant.

That said, I’m not a fan of procs on last hits. I never understood why they didn’t just make it so whoever did the most damage to the enemy by the time it died registered as getting the kill for talent/buff purposes; apparently it negatively affects performance, but they already track kills and damage in VT2, and the Scoreboard mod and Power DI don’t negatively affect my performance in Darktide. Must be different somehow.

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There was a time where you just got temp HP from killing and nothing else. Probably burned into my mind harder with how obnoxious it was, more than anything else.

They should really just make it so that for 1 second after hitting an enemy you count as having killed it if it dies for the purpose of talents, then tune the talents accordingly. Or atleast thats one solution that I think would work. Alternatively different triggers altogether

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Yes. And if you read properly, the part that i responded to, was you complaining about getting your enemies „stolen“ when trying to trigger on-hit effects on the ogryn.

Nobody is obligated to respond to every single one of your sentences.
Also, you talking about other things as well, does not magically erase you having complained about people „stealing“ the enemies from you, preventing you from getting on-hit effects.

This has been suggested before and it is a terrible solution.

As explained before, there are plenty of enemies to proc your talents and blessings off. If you actually suffer from not getting kills, due to getting all of the kills „stolen“, that is a skill issue on your end.
You are trying to solve an issue that does not exist in the first place.

What you suggest, would overcomplicate things and would likely nerf anyone who actually deals a lot of damage and kills things, while benefiting those who do not perform well.
If you struggle to get your on-kill effects because people constantly „steal“ your kills, that also means that you getting any buffs from on-kill effects would be a waste, since you barely deal any damage in the first place.

You would potentially nerf the overall performance of every group, just to appease a few people who are bad at the game and can‘t stand it.

At the same time, if your „problem“ would be solved by getting a kill for having damaged an enemy within a second before it dies, that would very likely mean that you were previously killstealing just as much, as other people were „stealing“ kills from you (because of how quickly most enemies die in darktide).

33

having a kill “stolen” usually triggers two ogryn brain cells, one at a time mind you :smile:

the superficial aspect is not getting my dopamine, which is a totally intrinsic aspect though it can mess a bit with the flow of the game.

when right in there, having a nice rythm and ragers ´n maulers drop to the beat it´s where darktide shines the most.

having this rythm broken makes for a less entertaining run, again totally between the own ears.

none of that has any “value” to the positive run of a round, stuff dead is dead stuff and not a thread to punies anymore, so dead stuff=good.

on a higher, gameplay relevant, aspect it should be an indicator that my own build isn´t up to snuff or my pacing not where it could be.

no one´s obligated to go with my rythm or target priorities, even bosses sometimes need no more than one hammer when the rest is keeping the trash at bay.

so if i miss my kill everytime i fire my kickback, something´s wrong on my end, the 1 out of 3 getting side-capped is totally the norm.

as for the perks or abilities proc´ing or not, when the stuff drops dead without your contribution, does it really matter ?
dudes were having it covered with or without x5 of whatever is shown on your screen, so maybe atoma keeps spinning without that as well.

just like the rabbits/foxes metaphor : alot of damage—> few heretics----> lesser damage----> more heretics.

and the nurgle snot wheel keeps spinnin´ on and on and on…

34

Can we all just agree that none of us can actually read and we are just blindly mashing our fingerstumps against the board with keys to make shiny letters appear in sequence that look pretty?

:clown_face:

Jokes aside, kill stealing is an age old problem in games that have “on kill” mechanics. Each game requires its own solutions and has its own pitfalls.

In Darktide, if someone is consistently killing things I am killing, I often take a wee step back and try and assess where I can be instead that isnt covered. In a team of 4 thats not always possible. Sometimes Im just along for the ride with 3 really good players.

6 Likes
36

Funny how often people try this “you took me out of context” excuse, when nothing was taken out of context.

Just admit that you did not think before you wrote it down, or that you made some other form of mistake.

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If you read properly you can see I literally call it “hitting enemies” so you just really didn’t read

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