I don’t care if you exclusively play H40 or you’re some big twitch streamer or you watch some big twitch streamer, balancing the game around Havoc is only going to perpetuate the endless cycle of buffs and counter-buffs.
Fact of the matter is that a large majority of people (including myself) don’t play Havoc at all, let alone run H40. Havoc is also an intentionally unfair and unbalanced gamemode tilted against you. Yes it sucks that there are few viable strategies in Havoc, but that’s more a fault of the gamemode itself rather than the game balance. Balance isn’t gonna “trickle down” to other difficulties, because H40 isn’t the same game as Auric.
Darktide should be balanced around Auric difficulty IMO, and Havoc should be balanced around that balance. Havoc should be a set of modifiers meant to significantly change the game, not the base experience you think of. Most people probably don’t even play Auric, they stick to Malice or whatever, but Auric is the highest “regular” difficulty.
It was genuinely baffling to see people arguing for the Rampage buff because it “wasn’t viable in Havoc” meanwhile I was tearing everything up effortlessly in Auric pre-buff. Play with the plebs for a little bit, get a feel for what’s busted for those guys, then talk balance.
TL;DR It’s fine to be elitist when you’re better than everyone else, just remember it’s lonely at the top and Havoc isn’t regular DT.
Also worth keeping in mind that Fatshark is horrid at balance and if they try balancing something around Havoc they’ll make it OP there and indirectly kill the challenge Havoc is meant to provide, anyway
“Balance around Havoc” as a concept means inevitably powercreeping the hell out of it and then we’re looking at walking simulator H40s and people asking for H50 or something
iirc, havoc was supposed to be an impossibly hard mode for masochists and strong premades. now every joe thinks he’s entitled to wear that h40 tag, and if he doesn’t, then havoc is not well balanced.
One could argue that counter-buffs happen bc people here keep crying to nerf stuff and that the game is “too easy”.
Uh…what? “It sucks you can win”? Excuse me, what kind of reality are we living in where the expectation is that you’re supposed to play a game…to lose? This isn’t Kenshi, where your character literally grows stronger by getting beaten up. The core loop of Darktide and Havoc by extension; was designed around progression: you start at point A, complete objectives, and extract successfully. That’s the intended rhythm. The idea that the game should constantly crush you until you hit a wall of repeated failures doesn’t make sense in this context.
It feels like people are trying to frame this as if Darktide were an asymmetrical PvP game, where one side’s “win” is another side’s “loss.” But that’s simply not the case. In Havoc, there’s no “other team” of players, just AI enemies. Why on earth would you want the AI to “win”? That’s not the point of a PvE experience. The challenge is meant to be tough, sure, but ultimately surmountable.
And honestly, I don’t see any other PvE communities out there complaining so much about winning the game you’re supposed to win. In co-op shooters, roguelikes, dungeon crawlers, strategy games…you name it; the satisfaction comes from overcoming the odds, not endlessly failing. If anything, the complaint should be about lack of variety in viable strategies, not about the fact that success is achievable. Because at the end of the day, the whole purpose of playing is to succeed, progress, and enjoy that sense of accomplishment (lol) not to glorify defeat like a stockholm syndrom abused wife.
Let’s set Havoc aside for a moment and focus on Auric. How exactly would you make current Auric “difficult”? I genuinely don’t see a path forward without gutting the entire system. To push Auric into true challenge territory, you’d have to strip classes down to barebones, gray weapons only, no talent trees, no synergies. At that point, you’re not balancing difficulty, you’re dismantling the game’s progression and identity.
And even if you did that, the end result would just be “Havoc but quickplay.” Best case scenario, you’d recreate Havoc’s punishing structure in a different wrapper. Worst case, you’d alienate players by erasing the sense of growth and customization that makes Darktide engaging in the first place.
To me, this route makes no sense. It would be a monumental waste of developer time; time that could be spent on new content, fresh missions, expanded enemy types, or more diverse mechanics. Darktide has been out for over three years now, and the idea of retrofitting Auric into some pseudo-Havoc mode feels like chasing the wrong problem. The game doesn’t need Auric to be rebalanced into misery; it needs variety, creativity, and reasons to keep coming back.
Nah, havoc is the next step in progression, what you are talking about here applies to something like mortis-trials/chaos wastes. That’s just how they developed the whole thing to be.
True, but those same players often struggle with the basics. Half of them can’t even hit their dodge key when it matters, so the idea of “power creep” (as this forum loves to throw around) is completely absurd from their perspective. If you can’t execute fundamental mechanics, the concept of balance shifts or creeping strength isn’t just irrelevant, it’s unfathomable.
Like I said above, for plebs, it’s even worse, they probably would ask for buffs even harder if you asked them. You should listen to yourself here:
I can’t quite see the connection between being elitist and asking for buffs. I think these two things are on the opposite side of the spectrum.
People want buffs to certain things so Havoc can be completed with these loadouts with some effort, and not unless you play perfectly or in a premade where you get multiple carry-tier players on the same team. Exe Stance got finally buffs some time ago but I don’t see it ruining the game (in fact, 90% of auric Vet players still play VOC), despite the fact that some people here said it doesn’t need the buffs. If anything, they were not enough, because Hive Scum simply does the same job 100% better.
By the way, if certain players didn’t complain “the game is tooo easy” while playing in a premade of 2k-3k Vermintide vet players only, we’d have no Havoc at all and the devs would focus their attention on balancing the main mission board. So if anything, don’t blame players who want to have easier time, blame players who always complained the game is not hard enough for them while they spend all the free time mastering the game mechanics.
For most players, even those with hundreds of hours, Auric is already the “harder than hard” mode. The average player is playing Damnation or Heresy not Auric or Havoc, with 30% of Darktide matches at all difficulty levels in 2025 ending in failure. The players that find Auric as easy as you describe are the tiny crust at the top of the playerbase, not a baseline to design around.
The larger point however regarding not balancing around Havoc was that Havoc’s distinct meta shifts what’s useful/good (e.g. psyker shield is far more useful in Havoc than any other mode/difficulty, ammo sustainment and cleave is far more important due to artificial scarcity, Rotten Armor, etc) in ways that Auric doesn’t. Balancing the game as a whole around Havoc results in unintended consequences for the rest of the game outside that mode where that meta doesn’t apply.
You are so absolutely obsessed with this concept it’s living in your head rent free. It doesn’t even make sense. You think downward adjustment is inherently bad? You think a dev can never attempt to make content more difficult or it’s “those evil nerf cultists whispering in their ears”?
Are you sure you don’t want to just consider, just to yourself, that maybe some people, including the devs themselves, like challenging gameplay and you just don’t? Neither party is in the wrong here, but one party can definitely just not play video games at max difficulty and get exactly what they want.
And for the record, this is a downright insane quote:
What meaning is there to victory, even in a PvE game, if failure is not a real risk?
I think both can be the case, they struggle on heresy but struggling is fun so it should be a balanced struggle for all skill levels
Like I got games I’m bad at and I don’t play max difficulty on. I cannot imagine what sort of mindset I would have to be in to start demanding that the game gets easier so I can start playing max difficulty. It’s like a combination of massive ego + nothing to back it up. Pathetic stuff, I’m happy better players than me get a challenge too
Your quality of posts was very high when you returned to the forums, but you’re starting to go down the same rabbithole of calling people insane or bad for having a different opinion.
It does make sense what he says. The devs want to satisfy both their casual playerbase and old timers. But what happens in the end is they both buff stuff and buff enemies, which in the end doesn’t change anything in the grand scheme of things. The game doesn’t get harder or easier, it just gets more annoying to play with neglected loadouts.
Are you sure you don’t want to just consider, just to yourself, that maybe some people, including the devs themselves, like challenging gameplay
Some people here have claimed in the past Havoc 40 is too easy and solo-able, because a few content creators rolled a broken mission seed with barely any roaming enemies and no challanging modifiers (not to mention after retrying the same mission dozens of times).
You guys like to act like people wanting the game to be harder only have sensible suggestions, and people who want buffs only suggest utter nonsense.
The game is balanced around a certain level of competence, and it will probably never be truly hard for a party of good players. That’s the point of a team game, you win when you have a good team. You can only lose so much against enemies that barely changed in three years, before you can counter anything the game throws at you, especially when you’ve spent thousands of hours mastering the movement.
Vermintide 2 by the way is exactly the same, the highest non-DLC difficulty is hard enough when you play with clueless randoms, and it’s mostly a walk in the park when you have great teammates on your side. So people saying “But Vermintide was soo much different”. No, no it wasn’t.
An example. Yesterday, I played auric with a friend of mine, and other 2 players we matched was very unskilled. We had to babysit the other two, which resulted in a fail. Then we duo aurics, we don’t have to babysit no skill players, just 2 of us, aurics are much more easier than 4 players
In this situation, can you say auric is too easy(2 players can win) and players need to be nerf, or just the other random no skill playes have massive ego to come to a difficulty that doesn’t match their skills and make the game harder?
Havoc is same as auric
For me and many of my friends, the only challenge of high difficulty is matching players whose skill does not match the difficulty, that makes us distracted.
I appreciate what you’re laying out but I don’t think that’s what he’s saying at all.
The reason for that is because buffing enemies does not actually accomplish the same thing as nerfing select weapons. It was always a stupid approach, and Fatshark going for it has nothing to do with people actually asking for nerfs to outliers (the correct or at least far more reasonable and logical balancing measure)
The idea that those people who asked for nerfs on outliers are somehow affiliated with Fatsharks messed up “don’t nerf things, buff enemies instead” idea is just not sensical to me. Isn’t the “don’t nerf stuff, just buff everything” the oft repeated counter-mantra to “please nerf outliers”? We can see now how well it worked, endless powercreep permeating the game and making actual balance near impossible, but somehow it’s still the people who wanted nerfs who are wrong?
Trying to pin this on “nerf cultists” (not my term btw) the way he’s doing it is lunacy and there’s no other way to put it. It’s huffing farts. It’s nonsense. This is literally what “never nerf anything” mindsets got us into.
On the topic of H40 and general game balance though I will say you’re heavily misunderstanding what I’m saying. I’m not saying game must be harder and nothing should ever be upwards adjusted.
I’d apply this to cata. Cata with randoms was actually great fun and a challenging experience, unless you godrolled a team.
The same can’t be said about Aurics. Powerlevels creeping up made aurics basically soloable by one Havoc-capable player. Meanwhile Havoc is designed to be a preformed-party experience which is fine but doesn’t have the same appeal as quickplay. As relative as things can be, Darktide is balanced far worse from this angle and the insistence to “never nerf anything” is a primary culprit in this issue. There’s not actually any way to create challenge in aurics other than nerfing overperforming weapons, because these weapons and talents overperform in a way you can’t address by making enemies tankier.
And no, sorry, but nerfing the dueling sword to not be 120% better at killing carapace armor than it has any right being is not “stripping the game of its identity”, that’s silly.
Also:
I don’t remember ever saying buffs and reworks aren’t needed in some aspects of the game.
If the issue is that certain things trivialize game mechanics which is detrimental to balance, how would buffs in this context ever not be utter nonsense? “Yeah it’s fine if X can make aurics a walking sim because Y can now do it too?” Not a viable way to view balance unless your goal is having a walking sim.
Which is where honest to god player skill factors in. Bad elitist angle but lower skill players can enjoy heresy. Fatshark on their streams is having a blast on heresy as previously pointed out. Fatshark specifically made Havoc 1-20 or so for players who want Havoc but not too rough. Not everyone has to play every difficulty and have fun. That’s a concept reserved for single-difficulty games like Elden Ring, where your difficulty slider is the build you pick and tools you use. It makes no sense in a co-op game where one can drop down one difficulty or more.
I hope I could articulate my takes clearly without simply calling you bad or insane. I’m really just reserving it for that guy cause he’s a goober
it can be indeed harder with people who don’t know what they’re doing, but insist on doing things.
imo what can doom aurics easily is having the team stretched thin, then one goes down in a bad position, and the chain of lemmings comes to the rescue and gets taken down one by one.
bonus points if the one downed first was little useful, went away for no reason, and then pings frantically and creates panic.
had one fitting example here:
it’s so simple if people just stay calm and pick up the guy at the next spawn point.
On second thought I may as well just throw this whole thread in the trash because this is the core issue I was trying to think of. Thanks for posting, everyone.
I don’t think any of the players deserve be blamed for Fatshark’s cowardly approach to balancing, be it pro-nerf or pro-buff. The devs should act like a strict parent who smacks their angry fist at the table when it comes to those things.
I think anyone with 1000+ hours at this point agrees that Duelling Sword’s heavy attack damage should be nerfed by at least 30% at this point, or they should somehow nerf Flame Staff which is at least 50% better than the other “best” staff (trauma), with both void and surge nowhere near the same levels of output. I have insane accuracy with void staff, but even if I play this staff at the best of my ability, I will never come even close to a semi-decent Inferno player who doesn’t even switch to his melee weapon for more than 50% of the game.
Things like Duelling Sword or Flame Staff just cheapen the experience playing with other weapons, because high difficulty is balanced with them existing in mind, so maybe if they’re nerfed the devs could stop spamming 5 Bulwarks and 5 Crushers at the same time (which they claimed they removed, but apparently these squads still spawn), expecting people to heavy attack wind up Crowbar at each one of them (because of course it’s similar to quick poking them with DS, right Fatshark?).
But at the same time lots of forum people allude to, as Dagoth said, stripping down most classes off their power without buffing anything, just to maintain their private club. Some people here have asked for Psyker to be just turned into something else entirely. Nerfing Duelling Sword by 30% won’t suddenly make chainaxe or heavy sword more appealing to use, unless devs change how armor and enemy density work in the game, which would be an enemy nerf in a sense.
It’s not a problem that people ask for nerfs to highest performing weapons, but it’s a problem they act like other things don’t need buffs at all, simply because “they can clear aurics” with this or that weapon or ability. I can play smoke in Havoc 40 with randoms, and in fact the last time I did I was told that “they’ve never seen a smoke Vet do this good”, but I only laughed at that and downplayed my contribution because I don’t think smokes is a well-designed ability that’s good “as is”.
I remember saying Surge needs buffs a year ago (extra lightning bounce) and the older type of Surge (with multiple lightnings but barely any damage) to be returned as a new mark, and you were one of the people who told me that old Surge staff was “grossly overpowered” and nobody wants it back.
I disagree. Actually it makes a lot of sense that extremely hostile reactions to the concept of a nerf would be connected to the devs not nerfing things. They even tried to roll out nerfs and didn’t go through with them after community reactions, no?
Strategically, nerfs should come along with buffs/reworks to underperformers/bad design for variety. It does feel bad to just nerf something and not also create a new option in the same breath. I fully agree and never claimed anything else
I am certain I never said this was the core issue with it because old surge was an annoying piece of garbage. Maybe I did say it was OP, but then again it kind of was. The reason I might’ve said nobody wants it back is because it was basically just smite. It’s certainly strong and trivializes many mechanics, but that’s doesn’t mean it’s primarily OP, just that it is trash design and wasn’t fun for anyone involved. You could argue smite is OP as hell too (and it is, by all metrics you could provide) but I’d still say the core issue is that it’s trash design because it doesn’t interact with the game in a good way.
In fact I looked through my profile and this is the only post I could find where I mentioned surge staff balance and it’s exactly what I thought I’d have said, down to the “annoying piece of garbage” phrasing. I know myself very well I think
It’s their moral obligation to do things that’s good for the game, and players should not feel responsible for devs’ decisions. The game should not be a community-driven project.
The game had mixed and even mostly negative reviews on Steam at some point, even if some people will complain about certain nerfs, decent players who play the game regularly (and purchase cosmetics regularly, too) will come to realize sooner or later it’s for the good of the game (as long as the changes are actually good and well thought-out, and not just nerf every good weapon but leave enemy density as is).
Also maybe they need to stop designing overpowered stuff like Hive Scum’s pickpocket in the first place, which begs for nerfs in the end. This is a failure of game design on Fatshark’s part, they put themselves into this corner where they first create something OP without proper testing and now then they can’t amend that, because even if you like that OP-ness it will leave a bitter taste in the mouth they’ve sold you “a power fantasy” only to take it away later when the sales plateau.
Oh I fully agree, it’s just that I think it kind of is when they backpedal out of nerfs because of pre-emptive reviewbombing. Unfortunately this trend started sometime a couple years ago and it ruins game balance in a lot of games I’ve enjoyed.
As for the pickpocket thing I think they do these sort of things to help sell the class. I’m sure playtesters were screaming at them that it is absolutely busted and needs to be changed, so I suspect it’s by design.
Whatever the case it is incredibly stupid and shortsighted either way because people will 100% reviewbomb if it gets any change that amounts to it not being infinite free ammo anymore, and Fatshark doesn’t want that, so I’m afraid it’s staying.