If ammo is too plentiful, guns can be used to clear hordes. Many guns are designed to be able to do so, as they have poor viability against armor but excel against infested/unarmoured. IE: the lawbringer/kantrael shotguns, the shredder auto pistol etc.
If ammo is scarce high efficiency guns with armor piercing characteristics, such as the plasma gun, become much more desirable, as the less ammo efficient your gun is then more difficult things become for your team.
The meta shifts quite a bit depending on ammo availability. It’s a difficult balance to strike. In the current meta it almost makes you question why horde clearing guns that struggle against crushers even exist. What value does a gun without armor penetration have - as it’s purpose overlaps with almost every melee weapon? You’re simply a determent to your team as you’re using a limited resource that could be better applied elsewhere.
So is the solution to raise the base amount of ammunition of horde clear style firearms so that they are able to sustain well enough on survivalist to fulfill their role? Should a skill like survivalist determine if such a play style is even viable? A gunlugger ogryn backed with survivalist at present seems the only class playstyle is possible on, but that is due to the combination of survivalist + their own free ammo talents. I suppose an argument could be made that veteran is capable of the same with the las-gun talents, but it definitely doesn’t seem as flexible or powerful.
How do you guys think fatshark should deal with guns that aren’t capable of efficiently dealing with armor and their ammo situation?
Lasguns are just bad because they were anti-shooter weapons, and melee is just better at it. Lawbringer was never good, Kant shotgun was okay when you could permaspam special shot into hordes.
If FS wants to balance human anti-horde weapons there are two type of balance they can go for:
Either said weapon is better at clearing dense hordes than horde clear melee weapons, but have low ammo supply (like flamer).
Or they are better than most weapons, but not better than anti-horde melee weapons with some flex into other use while having a good ammo supply or “infinite” ammo on Vet specifically. Something like Kant shotgun on old Vet.
After about 5 minutes of thinking about it, I’d say that anti horde weapons could be given a flexible option to allow for them hit armor hard. The special shells could be changed over to deal armor damage. As guns like the shredder, it could get blessings that allow it gain the rending ability
I’m in general really against going for even more “this weapon can deal with anything”. If you take a anti-horde ranged weapon (if there would be such a thing), you can just afford picking up a single-target weapon that’s good against armor.
These are actually pretty good in a very similar role as the revolver, mostly used for special sniping and sometimes killing elites when needed. Like the revolver they’ll kill a special through a horde no problem. The horde clear aspect is simply a bonus to use in an emergency. Like when you would benefit from blasting a hyperstacked horde real quick you can do it, whereas the revolver can’t. I think they’re in a good spot balance wise and actually extremely powerful.
I think the important thing to remember here is that melee veteran is extremely viable and powerful playstyle. Not every weapon NEEDS to work the same amount of well for ranged focus vet. It’s completely fine to have weapons that excel when they’re used as a sidearm. If you were to buff the inherent ammo economy aspects of the shotgun just to make it viable as a ranged poxwalker clearing build, then you’ll suddenly find that melee vet gets even more gamebreakingly busted OP. (This also applies to zealot to an extent, a melee zealot with a shotgun can also deal with literally anything already, so I don’t see why that’d need buffing)
For an example for why it’s bad to just buff a weapons ammo econ and the negative repercussions on gameplay it can have, look at the kickback. Prebuff it capped out at like 25 ammo and barely killed hordes. I used it, I liked it, I played damnation pre aurics with it and found it very useful on a melee build. I thought it was a great weapon if your focus was killing everything in melee and you wanted a sidearm that gives you extremely strong stagger options in a pinch. Postbuff it caps out at like 50 ammo and kills hordes good. Suddenly you have an influx of ogryn players who don’t actually know how to melee they just empty their kickback into everything 24/7. As soon as anything happens they’re down. I don’t think that’s great for game balance.
To answer your overall proposition more directly, I think it’s fine that some weapons can’t clear hordes. I think most shouldn’t be able to do it, given that melee combat is THE balancing factor of the game, and the entire core gameplay hinges on the fact that guns are strong, but when you’re in melee range, you need to be able to block, dodge and stagger properly, which calls for a melee weapon. ANYTHING that destroys this core gameplay principle makes the game lame and boring. I’d like to see a general nerf of ranged weapons that just delete 10 elites in a shot too, and a general buff to melee weapons that currently suck at even just killing flak.
I agree with this take, but I don’t follow your logic.
Best Melee Vet was always played with horde-clear capable weapons like Catachan/Caxe/PS which are all best paired with anti-elite/armor/special weapons like revolver/plasma (when onslaught stacked on burn it included Laspistol). Having an option for hordeclear as a ranged weapon wouldn’t really be something that makes what is good now better.
About zealot, well… IDK how it would be different than running flamer for example. Maybe you can deal with specials better, but there is throwing knives for that.
The point being that if you gave the shotgun double ammo so ranged vet can clear more poxwalkers, wep specialist wep can now whip out the shotgun after every 3 melee kills, drop a guaranteed crit deuce on any enemy nearby, then repeat twice as often. You’d never be in a situation where you would think “maybe I should not shoot this right now with my shotgun crit, I’ll just keep meleeing for now and save it”. This would directly buff melee vet to absurd heights.
Similar scenarios apply for shotgun zealot, if there’s no real world ammo economy cost to just dumping 9 kantrael shotgun shells into whatever melee elites came out that you would otherwise have to carefully fight with melee, then that’s what’s gonna happen every time.
I think they just give unnerfed scavenger to Vet at base only effecting him or like 60% bonus ammo to the whole class.
I tried it out when WS was released with Lawbringer and Kant and it wasn’t really effective. Played more like a gimmick. It was just better to spam light-heavy with Catachan.
One thing to keep in consideration is that there is no melee weapon that is really bad at clearing a normal horde. So using them to clear random poxes and groaners would anyway be a waste of bullets. I think the niche intended for them was to be used as a tool to pull up with a horde mixed with elites, but then again many other options can deal with that good enough without having the drawbacks.
For them to viable right now I think they need some buffs in what they can do more than some simple ammo increase.
I think that’d be extremely busted. The only thing keeping melee vet balanced right now is the fact that he either has to path to survivalist and miss some good talents or that he has to not get survivalist and instead preserve ammo more.
I think if anything Survivalist should be a deep left tree talent only affecting the vet himself. It would be a compelling tradeoff that doesn’t let vet just do everything at once.
Shotguns have some underlying mechanical knowledge required to actually use them which I’m not sure you’re aware of, the whole minimum pellet thing and how the cleave mechanics change when aiming down sights. Plus the blessings matter a ton. It’s definitely extremely capable, this is the last 2 times I used the shotgun wep specialist + tag keystone melee build, respectively.
Damage totals aside you can see it just lets you totally ruin specials all game long already. My build doesn’t use survivalist btw and I just play in pugs, not queueing with a survivalist friend or something. I really really don’t see why this needs a severe ammo buff that would now let me do this without even so much as worrying about ammo, realistically letting me just brush every single special off the map without caring about ammo economy. Can’t be very fun for the other people in the game.
Also, there’s the very real aspect of like, if shotguns could have the same amount of ammo-wasteability as a lasgun, then who the hell would ever use a lasgun ever again? Now you have to buff lasguns. This is simply a way to get extreme powercreep started, nothing else. I think Darktide has had enough of that.
It’s not that simple. To take your shotguns as an example, Kantrael’s special is one of the most ammo efficient ranged AoE clears in the game no matter your build. And if you put Man-Stopper & Scattershot on it with a crit build, it will now clear pretty much everything that isn’t a crusher in a smaller cone again with infinite cleave, per each shot (up to mid+ range at least). And while its shots won’t deal with crushers no matter what you do, those ADS headshots will absolutely destroy the other biggies. To say that it’s a horde clear weapon with bad ammo economy simply isn’t true. As long as you place your shots and use that special when applicable, it’s an absolutely fantastic weapon - and my favorite - for any range.
Lawbringer isn’t as powerful as that, but it has its place rather nicely between Agripinaa and Kantrael as a hybrid that can dish out decent AoE & CC with its special, while having a surprisingly good range & accuracy with ADS for those priority targets. To make up for that, it has more ammo.
Imo there’s something of a misunderstanding here, since there really isn’t a single gun suitable for horde clear without running into ammo issues, for good reason mind. What we do have however, are a whole bunch of weapons great for mixed horde clear, which isn’t the same thing. That ammo economy managament and situational awareness to know when magdumping into those mixed hordes is worth it and when not, or compensating that lack of armor penetration with melee, ults, or nades (or vice versa) are both crucial parts of the game’s balance.
As for Shredder and Plasma, those two don’t make a very good example for weapon balance in general. Plasma is pretty universally agreed to be overtuned as heck between its massive ammo & dmg and that same infinite cleave, among other reasons. Meanwhile the Shredder has barely been a shadow of its former self ever since the overdone Pinning Fire nerf, and losing to the BAG weapons in virtually every aspect from dmg to ammo to range to accuracy. They’re exceptions sorely in need of attention, rather than an indication of the ammo balance as a whole.
Iv been using the lawbringer quite effectively on Heresy vs specials. Its genuinely got a LOT of range. I deal with snipers on the regular and I dont even need to be that accurate.
It does have trouble with bulwarks and crushers, but thats what my infinite krak and PS is for, also the slug shot isnt too bad vs crushers (Iv not actually tried it vs bulwarks.
Also its not a godroll at all. 8% vs specials + 10% vs groans and poxs, lvl2 bleed on crit and lvl3 whatever the stagger close enemies is.
Edit: also I generally wouldnt waste it on trash mobs, maybe 1 or 2 shots vs the yellow shooty dudes to close the gap.
I don’t really like random Scoreboards without context, so no comment from me on that sorry.
Lasgun’s problem is shooters being weak and that engaging them with melee is far too easy. Lasgun was basically dead the moment patch 13 dropped, people just needed a bit more time to figure out Zealot and Ogryn. On top of all this current density also severely hinders “sniper” playstyle.
Why I don’t really follow your reasoning is that even when ammo was absolutely abundant Shotguns were pretty mid outside release version cleave of Kant, and agri being good as a “balanced revolver” on Zealot.
That said I’m not really a fan of powercreep either. Let’s hope the itemization changes come with a balance reset so not all melee weapons are good against hordes. Probably even that won’t be enough, since there is way too much mobility and TDR/Tregen in the game, but one could hope it’ll make a difference.
I explained the context pretty well, but it’s fine if you think they’re not legitimate. If I really wanted to I could show you the full ones with the names, but scoreboards are just stored in a .txt file anyway so it’s kind of pointless ot begin with. I’m more or less expecting the principle of “what would I get out of lying” to be on my side here.
Regardless I think if you’re saying shotguns were mid in p13 with the unnerfed survivalist then I can’t really say much to that. I have no other angle than “worked for me”. It’s fun to have weapons that require some skill floor to use.
I wasn’t trying to imply to you that you were lying, sorry if it came out like that. It just that reading data from scoreboards really needs a lot of context to be valuable. Game lenght, how effective/agressive/good players teammates were, etc. are all very important factors, as well as melee/ranged damage split (which your version doesn’t even track).
That’s basically my take, and it didn’t ever become better than mid (like when WS was introduced). Mid based on other weapons mind you, not overall game state.
One could easily make the argument that currently half the builds and weapons are broken OP and the other half is “just OP”, but I tend only argue along those lines when I’m replying in a thread about something like general difficulty.
I think that honestly “it worked for me” is sortof a metric - because at the end of the day there is a middle ground of “too much ammo” and “not enough” where people feel forced a direction… the original post was a post kindof musingly wondering “where is that middle ground and how do we get there”
They should experiment with new enemy types that fly, especially Elite types. Flying ranged, flying melee, flying hybrid. Powerful ranged weapons are central to Darktide’s gameplay. As long as this is true, we need enemies that we would want to shoot, not simply enemies like Crushers that are free kills with the right ranged weaponry. Fatshark already has a system for trying this out within the game in the form of special conditions like Vent Purge and so on. They could collect information in an isolated space there and learn how to make it work without angering people by changing the whole game suddenly.
I think this is our disconnect then. Compared to the likes of the new plasmagun or revolver it’s definitely not even close, but I think the shotguns are roughly at a good level of power that other weapons should aim to be at (in different niches) compared to where the game itself is at
You’re definitely riht though that the upcoming patch has a good opportunity to balance things out, but it remains to be seen what direction they take this thursday
I feel like graia brauto is almost a good general horde and light elite clear weapon with its ammo pool and fire rate.
Mainly it’s held back by:
Awkward unnecessary delay switching into and out of braced mode
Complete lack of cleave making it very inefficient per bullet compared to Agrip
Every other issue of the graia can be solved with Vet kit. I think it’s fine if specific variants end up only gelling with one class, as long as there is a variant of each weapon that has a niche for every class it’s available to.
Auto pistol needs more ammo if it’s to stay in its current form. It’s still a decent answer to close range maniac specials and dogs with its high stagger and low attention cost but if it’s gonna have damage output like this with very low effective range it should be more spammable. Another case where slightly higher cleave (passing through a single poxwalker) would go a long way.
Lawbringer special needs slightly higher base damage so you need less of a god roll to hit good horde enemy breakpoints. Alternatively buffing flechette by 1-2 stacks would make it do its job on a weapon specialist build. All shotguns could still do with a touch more ammo. Not a heap but a little more would help.
Flamer reserves are unnecessarily low in its current state, but I’d love to see it tuned for higher mobility instead. I know that’s kinda against the aesthetic though so not expecting many to feel similarly with this one.
