Might be fixed by just giving some sort of ranged stun immunity to Zealot and Ogryn that lets them move unhindered to force enemies into melee, in addition to a defensive perk option to limit the damage done by ranged attacks (1/2 or 1/3 damage from ranged attacks?). That perk tier should also accommodate options for being a shooter specialist with more emphasis on ranged play (more ammo/damage from ranged weapons or something), or a support role like coherency toughness regen or mitigating damage on nearby allies, which would support the more defensive builds like shield ogryn or flamer Zealot who want to play as your typical bullet blocker or horde clear.
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I’d like to suggest extra solution for current enemy dominance in range:
- Bringing field COs for enemy rangers and maybe make them loud enough to understand group maneuvers and priority targets. Just the same models, but with some vox backpack maybe? For reason #2.
- Morale - killing LM gunners, snipers and officers to “shock” enemy for some time (2/4/8 seconds?). Benefits are obvious - possible counter attack for less range-efficient classes.
- Grouping ranged enemies into units, like in strategy series DoW? When player melee 1 unit - everyone from this group forced to melee. Like when enemy officer is down and regulars just doing stupid moves more frequently?
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Great thread. Shame Fatshark will not bother reading it.
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This is a really solid post, well written, and I didn’t see anything I outright disagree with in it.
I’m a little iffy on getting huge amounts of toughness back from killing big targets, since I don’t want a situation where if I shoot the Crusher my Zealot was fighting I inadvertently take away a big toughness boost they were counting on when they dove in to attack that target.
In general though, I really hope Fatshark listens to this kind of feedback, because I agree, this game deviates from the tabletop game in one fundamental way:
In the tabletop you want to shoot melee units and melee shooty units. In this game it’s the opposite way around. The enemies have the ability to dictate their preferred method of engagement and you have to match it.
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I think one of the biggest contributing factors to all of this is how the enemies react to suppression and player engagement.
When you shoot at an enemy, an internal meter begins to fill. When that meter reaches a certain value, the enemy becomes suppressed for a specific amount of time, after the suppression wears off, that enemy then becomes immune to further suppression for a short while before the meter is reset and it can all happen again.
Until that meter reaches the suppression level the enemy is not affected in any way (at least that is noticable) by incoming fire, even if its actually hitting them.
Once the suppression timer runs out they return to normal and are now immune for a short period no matter how much fire is thrown at them
This is terrible design. It has such a short term effect on enemies that immediately return to normal once its worn off, as if nothing happened.
AI for human based enemies should be designed to try and make that enemy act as if it is a real human in a real situation. The enemies in DT are not human, they are terminators. They have no self preservation and they have no fear.
I believe the solution here is to add a morale system into the game that is separate from suppression. Enemies spawn with maximum morale and the following situations alter morale
Enemy is hit by player fire - high morale reduction
Enemy is hit by melee - extreme morale reduction
Player approaches melee range of enemy - medium morale reduction
Enemy is almost hit by player fire - small morale reduction
Enemy is killed nearby - high morale reduction
Enemy is near deathspot (a point an enemy recently died at before this enemy arrived) - small morale reduction per nearby deathspot
Enemy enters suppression state - medium morale reduction
Enemy does toughness damage to a player - small morale increase
Enemy does health damage to a player - medium morale increase
Enemy does damage to a player in melee - high morale increase
Enemy downs player in melee - extreme morale increase
Enemy nearby does health damage to a player - small morale increase
Nearby player toughness is broken by enemy - medium morale increase
Nearby player is downed - high morale increase
Morale has several states which effect enemy behaviour
Maximum Morale - Enemy is harder to suppress, more accurate and more aggressive. Will keep using their ranged weapon when players are nearby and are more likely to advance into the open/push/flank the player
High Morale - Enemy a lot less aggressive and less likely to push/flank and quicker to switch to melee when a player is near or flee
Low Morale - Enemy is no longer aggressive and is now defensive. Falls back instead of pushing/flanking. Accuracy is decreased and coordinated targeting is out the window. They wildly shoot back at any player shooting at them
Breaking Morale - Enemy is now hesitant to engage, hiding or staying in cover, running from the players and their accuracy is shot. They will not engage out in the open, and will not advance/flank the player under any circumstance
Broken Morale - Enemy will no longer engage players if they have cover, will fall back if given the opportunity and will immediately flee if caught out in the open
Where suppression is a temporary shot term second-to-second system, morale is a much longer engagement-to-engagement system. A broken morale enemy realistically would not return to maximum morale on their own. For that to happen, they would need to be re-inforced by more enemies and then those enemies and themselves boost the morale through their actions against the players.
Both systems effect each other. A unit with high morale is harder to suppress and remains suppressed for a shorter amount of time. A low morale enemy is easy to suppress and will remain suppressed for longer. Morale regeneration is significantly slowed while the enemy is suppressed, reducing the morale gains from positive actions of nearby enemies.
During an engagement the enemies start with the upper hand, they all have maximum morale and are accurate and aggressive, pushing and flanking the players, but as the players fight back their morale lowers, they become less aggressive and less accurate. Eventually morale starts breaking and they engage less, fall back more and become less of a threat. Unless players make mistakes allowing the breaking enemies to get a few wins, or a new enemy spawns in getting a few wins thanks to their high morale the players now have the advantage and can be aggressive and flank, push into melee and flush the broken enemies out.
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While your right about all of the problems I think the simplest fix would be to just scale down the range damage to heresy level.
I regularly play heresy with evis flamer zealot and run in head first forcing them all into melee and cutting them up and only using flamer when there’s no flank i can take and have no CTW or I need to give my team space from a horde while bulwarks and ragers rush in as well.
Heresy for me is just wreckless fun where I might die if I mess up but can power though most of it with CTW timings and good aggressive movement.
Damnation is where you really see range enemies make the game unfun because I’m forced to not play like that and just hide but I can deal with all the melee “easy” enough.
Even worse I don’t really like knife/T axe zealot so I can’t even have fun with the immune to range damage crit build.
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That’s a valid opinion, however saying that something’s okay because it’s only a problem on Damnation is a slippery-slope argument to use.
First off, Damnation isn’t a DLC-only difficulty like Cataclysm. Secondly, on Malice many team comps and weapons are usable, or passable. On Damnation however, you’re hella restricted to the meta weapons. That’s in part due to the issues outlined above, but also because 80% of weapons are simply statistically undertuned compared to the optimal pick or build (not even counting the obvious Power Sword problem).
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They are not randomly spread. Enemies effectively have one of several ways they can land shots:
If you’re stationary/walking you’re in the normal state and enemies will aim at you normally, landing their shots.
If you’re sprinting enemies have a chance to miss their shots.
If you dodge/slide at the appropriate time, enemies will miss their shots entirely. (Good luck with server lag on this one at times)
Gunners and reapers function like gun rats from Vermintide; they fire a barrage of rapidly moving projectiles in your direction.
The servers already can’t handle all the various calculations it needs to on higher difficulties. While I’m not averse to this in general, I’m really not seeing this being feasible with the number of enemies shooting at a time.
Whenever you are within 5m of 2 or more enemies you now gain the “Soft Cover” buff, which reduces incoming Ranged Toughness Damage by 50% (after other reductions).
Additionally, Zealot’s “Enemies Within, Enemies Without” (1-3) increases the benefit of Soft Cover to 70% for the Zealot. Ogryn’s “Towering Presence (3-1) expands the radius of Soft Cover’s check to 8m for the Ogryn.
Zealot would become ludicrously unkillable with that while not fixing the issue of the talent being situational.
In addition, all enemies have had ranged knockback or ‘push’ effects completely removed. This should resolve issues where players would become locked in place when they should otherwise be invulnerable or uninterruptible.
STRONG disagree with this. This just dumbs down the gameplay significantly. So far in terms of keeping the balance intact, I’m not seeing it.
Ogryn is now completely immune to the effects of hitstun.
No, no, no.
During the effects of Zealot’s “Chastise the Wicked” they are now completely immune to hitstun and knockback.
They’re supposed to be. It’s a bug from Vermintide 2’s zealot/foot knight classes that made it into Darktide.
Currently, almost all melee weapons in the game have a dramatic falloff on consecutive targets.
Hordes are already some of the least threatening things in the game and you want to make them easier? Not to mention depending on weapon cleave already does increase your damage to subsequent targets.
First, all enemies suffering from meaningful amounts of Suppression are now outlined with an intensifying soft white highlight. When Suppression expires the outline vanishes, and the highlight visibly fizzles out to signify that the enemy is now a threat again.
God no, there’s already enough visual clutter as it is. There’s audio and visual cues already.
Second, Suppressed enemies will no longer treat doors to AI-exclusive areas as valid retreat paths, and will prioritize routes that do not involve jumping or climbing when able. Suppressed enemies can no longer use teleport triggers, such as those inside monster closets.
This I can get behind though, please.
Third, Suppressed enemies will no longer alert other enemies until their Suppression expires.
…What? Why?
Buffing melee toughness based on enemy type
No, please no. This will just make things a janky inconsistent mess in a team game. Warp charges are already a major pain point for psykers trying to get them, let’s not make that apply to any melee character in the game please. Consistency is key.
I can’t keep reading this honestly. You claimed " should preserve the original balance and design philosophy" but all of the proposed changes make the game miles easier.
EDIT: Whelp that was basically the end anyway.
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This very adequately summarizes my thoughts. I do think these changes would make the game significantly easier, but overall much more fun. Some of these changes do go a bit too far, but a lot of them should be in the game.
One thing that I’ve noticed, but didn’t see is enemies seem to complete the full animation of an attack before switching state. It would seem to me that this is at least part of why ranged enemies seem so inconsistent about switching to melee. You get into melee range as soon as a “shoot cycle” starts for a group of enemies, and none of them are going to switch to melee until after they’ve demolished your health.
My proposal here would be to allow enemies to cancel the startup of either shooting or melee attacks into state change meaning that if you retreat too far you couldn’t kite forever anyway, and also that if you charge into a group you don’t get blasted to bits.
Honestly, the best way to do this would just be to make most objects that things are supposed to hide behind covered by invisible “cover objects” that stop bullets, but don’t stop enemy targeting. This should also apply to most fences, which are probably the bigger culprit of this feeling for me. Having a sniper target me through a fence and dome me for like half my health through full toughness sucks.
Honestly, this is too far.
This isn’t necessary. I don’t need to know an enemy is suppressed or not, and I don’t need random enemies to start glowing.
Normal enemies shouldn’t go back into monster doors and other places the player can’t access unless it isn’t possible to reach players via normal means. But otherwise this is a very good change.
I think the numbers are too high at the top of the range, but I agree with this idea of “harder to kill enemies grant more toughness”. I’d personally have the range max out at about 20% toughness. That way you aren’t just yoyoing back and forth from full to almost empty, and your teammates don’t need to worry about screwing you over by shooting the wrong enemy at the wrong time.
If they are it’d be real great if they actually fixed it. It makes it feel both unsatisfying and inconsistent to use the charge.
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Overall a very great write up.
I’d still want a dodge UI, as different CDs for dodge make it hard to get the muscle memory down, but that is probably beyond the scope of this post.
The only part I am still iffy about, is getting toughness back based on kill in general. I’d much rather it was on hit, because then it would synergize better with more weapons. Hammers that mostly swing targets around have a very slow kill speed and suffer a lot more compared to axes.
Or just give us the option to choose if we want toughness back based on kill or cleave/hit.
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This is one possible solution, but would require them comb through every map to add and adjust this, and I feel like that’s something Fatshark tends to avoid doing.
It’s definitely one of the more severe changes, but with how many of these instances of knockback affecting players when it shouldn’t that seem to stem from previous 'Tide games, just saying “fix this” felt like an empty suggestion.
Of course, I didn’t mention this in the original post so that’s still wholly valid feedback!
I will agree that this decision was rather arbitrary, and that it mostly came about through discussion with another vision-impaired member of the community and their frustrations with trying to identify Suppressed enemies (and trying to understand the very opaque Suppression system as a whole.)
If not desired as a default feature I would still very much like to see it, and subtitled Specialist/enemy action callouts, as accessibility features.
The numbers given are simple examples, bringing it down to a range of 5~25% would still help accomplish the goal the change is aiming for. I also agree that this would help alleviate any frustration or anxiety over allies or ranged attacks scoring the killing blow against larger enemies.
Thank you for your feedback.
I generally agree with what these two people have said. I feel like the simplest way to make ranged enemies less frustrating to fight against (without redoing half the game mechanics) would be to tweak their damage and stagger numbers.
I disagree with several of the points in the OP, but some of the issues raised, I find are very legitimate and it would be great to have them fixed or improved. Enemies shouldn’t be able to shoot through cover, they shouldn’t have 100% accuracy (as they seem to have) even through tiny gaps, andd melee locking and suppression should be more consistent.
As for this comment:
There is nothing restricting players to use the stronger weapons in higher difficulties, other than player skill. Any weapon combination in the game can kill any type of enemy in the game (maybe with very very few and very edge-case exceptions). I am not trying to tell you to “git gud”. You “git” whatever you want to “git”, and you have fun with the game however you want to have fun with it 
What I am trying to say is that the fact that some weapons are worse than others doesn’t mean they can’t be used to beat difficulty X, it just means it’s going to be harder. It adds another layer to choosing the difficulty level, if you want.
My general take on the topic is that, the harder the game the better. In my ideal world I should never be able to beat the hardest difficulty 9 times out of 10. That’s boring. In my veiw, the problem is the big disparity between how hard and deadly range combat is compared to melee combat, making half of the game too hard while the other half is too easy. But then again, I think the solution to this can be achieved (at least in big part) by tweaking some of the numbers.
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Incredible post. Please listen to this man, Fatshark.
The only thing I strongly disagree is the change to Cleave. Not necessary at all and kind of dilutes the post which I think should be focused on ranged combat only for maximum effectiveness.
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Fatshark needs to read this and think about what’s being said here. Although I still stand by my personal thought that this shooting game has always been a little too focused on melee, all the points here are valid. If there is going to be a combination of both melee and shooting, then there needs to be functional checks and balances to each both against themselves, and against each other, so that players who want to focus on one aspect can do so without an overwhelming imbalance.
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I completely agree with your take.
As an old Vermintide player I jumped into Zealot class. For the first 3 difficulties I was extatic about the game’s ranged and melee balance.
On Heresy I found myself forced into using a combat knife as the only way to force ranged enmies into melee combat. It’s very hard, but still possible.
Than I played Damnation.
I found I have two options:
Hide behing Veteral for most of the game loop and wait untill he clears eveything one opening at a time.
Or just die.
Another thing that adds to the issue is that the game doesn’t have the best optimization. And on lower settings I am have to run (despite having quite a decent PC) it’s litterally impossible for me to distinguish ranged enemies that are further away form the background. But those enemies have perfect accuracy on me.
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I loved the cover system in BF1, its extremely ‘sticky’ in that it’s effortless to take a shot from behind cover or lean around a doorway, and you can just as quickly disengage. Just door leaning would be a night and day difference for this game, but what really needs to happen is common shooter mooks need a good 50% reduction in accuracy. They should not be able to land every shot in their burst guaranteed unless you slide, that is just awful to play in. If you ADAD they should miss 1/3 of their burst minimum. Basically make them more like Archers, which could be dodged with strafing and did not aimbot. The whole ‘shooting while retreating’ is another thing I’d toss, since it is the main issue with shooter enemies in melee. They recover from a push, start backpedaling and vault up to some nearby ledge players can’t stand on to start shooting you. Absolutely aggravating.
There’s a seperate issue on animation overload that ties into this, the sheer amount of ranged you have to play now makes the lack of fast swapping basically the definition of artifical difficulty. There isn’t any challenge afforded by it, just more lacking player agency.
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If they’re going to give enemies patrols in the platoon to company sizes (20-50+) they need to balance their health to that too. As it is Dreg shooters spawn about 50-100% the number of Scab shooters in a patrol, but also have more health, meaning the damage needed to be dealt to the Dreg patrol is up to +150% more than a Scab patrol. Scabs superficially have flak armour to balance it, but has there are so many anti-flak options that they might as well be unarmoured, meaning the amount of health they have makes a much more tanglible difference than what types they are. That’s one source of frustation dealing with shooter patrols at higher difficulties.
Also with the accuracy, more could be done to differentiate the shooters by having the Dregs, being gangers or cultists at best, have low accuracy; because currently they can outshoot the professional riflemen of the Moebian 6th just through their sheer numbers, accuracy being the same.
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Or have the company walk in fixed routes so you can easily avoid them and if want to engage in a shootout you can. Kind of how Vermintide 1 did it. Vermintide 2 did patrols worse though cause they weren’t in fixed routes but spawned randomly.
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Patrols are in groups of 8-14 or so from what I can tell. The issue is that people are very “An enemy! PEWPEW!” instantly and aggro patrols along with all of the ambient enemies. This is especially evident on maps with longer sight lines where stray shots aggro half the map. Also a huge pet peeve of mine on zealot/ogryn where you can easily delete the patrol in less than 5 seconds if people hold their fire and let your melee approach.
They literally already do this. The map design is more linear/less open though, which makes avoiding them more difficult. (Combined with the above)
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It’s been a while now since I last played Darktide but from what I remember I encountered large groups of ranged enemies that weren’t in a patrol; however, I’ll take your word for it. Also do they have fixed routes like in Vermintide 1 or do they randomly spawn in weird places like in Vermintide 2?
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