The chip damage to your health from melee attacks needs to be removed

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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As someone that managed to go without taking a hit against a full horde attack after my party went down and I had to clutch save the run, I still very much believe chip damage is beyond bad for gameplay purposes.

The clutch save was done with a Psyker using the Force Sword which I have noted is one of the best weapons in my eyes in the game due to great dodge capability combined with decent cleave damage and ability to stun + oneshot certain elites. Now, I have done both the Veteran and Zealot to 30, and in the case of all three classes I have done, my Psyker has by far the least health taken followed by the Veteran while my Zealot is quite often 10% health.

The biggest contributor to this is chip damage and how melee vs ranged balancing works. Since you don’t take any health damage until your Toughness breaks when getting shot, both my Veteran and Psyker enjoy a high health life in most cases for this reason. I can just vibe at the back, shoot at enemies, occasionally get hit by the Poxwalker spawned directly behind me, but otherwise I can just take cover and fight. In case I get attacked, as the Veteran, I pull out the Power Sword and start cleaving effortlessly through a horde with minimal chip damage taken due to how the weapon itself work, aka it attacks fast and isn’t hindered by enemy mass.

Psyker on the other hand has incredibly dodging ability with his class weapon, making him really good at both ranged and melee so I find myself in that same situation, as I also have the free save button in the form of the F ability where I can just push everything in front of me away to get breathing room.

Zealot on the other hand I am tough out of luck. The Eviscerator and the Thunder Hammer both suffer from the lack of mobility, as well as canned animations for their attacks which lock you in place for the duration of the attack which is several frames at times, during which you can’t dodge or block. In these periods of trying to take out things like a Rager or Mauler that is harassing you, you will get easily hit by 2-3 Poxwalkers before you can get back to dodging, which already has you reduced to under half Toughness, if it isn’t outright broken at that point, but also now easily +10& of your health gone.

On higher difficulties, this literally means that as the Zealot, you are trading a lot of health in order to try to do your job. You are the only class in the game that needs to do this. The Ogryn can easily knock people down with his charge. Veteran can pull out the Power Sword or mag dump a Boltgun into the Elites rushing for them, Psyker can force push everyone away. Zealot? No such luck. Stun grenade you might say? Okay, well, first you need to pull it out, then toss it to the ground and then wait for it to explode, but it also still leaves everyone in-place, thus effectively blocking you and you need to keep dodging and blocking the whole time between the moment you know you need it and the explosion, which can cost you easily 10-20% of your health bar. Again, the only class that has this issue, and happens to also be the dedicated melee class, which exactly isn’t fair. It’s like making it so that the Veteran is far easier to suppress, thus making his aim worse. It is counterintuitive to the class’s intended playstyle.

If someone tries to recommend using a “more defensive oriented weapon” as the Zealot, I’d just switch to the Veteran at that point. Why play the Zealot when the Veteran’s Power Sword would top every single other melee weapon the Zealot can use that aren’t the Eviscerator or the Thunder Hammer.

This further brings us to the point that was done by both Simferius and Vandicus, if you are at low health, be that 1hp or 10hp, it is BETTER for you to go find the nearest Poxwalker and let him down you instead of trying to continue fighting on because a single MELEE hit will lead to that. If I was playing the Veteran, the Psyker or the Ogryn, I wouldn’t need to worry so much about it because if I am getting shot, I can play it safe, I can stick back and take potshots until I reach a med station or we find a medkit because even if I do get downed by the magically spawned Poxwalker, I am probably downed in a spot where I can easily be revived by a teammate.

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Mate, have you considered the fact that many times this is not a player’s fault because of the spawning, AI director, etc.?

Secondly, did you accurately read my statement and the one I was commenting?
If you have low HPs your better choice is just drop and get ressed so you actually recover HPs and this is counterintuitive.

About the passive regeneration, simply “lol”. Every time you go to 0 toughness you get staggered and this means if you are near your allies and recover some points you can get staggered indefinitely.

Watch the whole picture instead on talking about the single mechanic as if it was in a vacuum

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No, it is more that people would like to be able to do their job if they are playing a Zealot instead of looking at the Veteran with envy who can be at 1 HP and still rock the enemy like they were at a shooting range since as long as their Toughness doesn’t break, their health will not get dropped by the magical 1HP while getting shot.

To me, there are two very easy solutions to the issue if the Chip Damage absolutely must remain.

  1. Chip damage only happens when below 90% Toughness, which obviously means that you tend to only negate one hit at most against most enemies as even a single stray shot from a Guardsmen will lower you to that point and then from there continue with the same way it does right now.

  2. You passively regen 10% of your health or you can’t be downed by Chip Damage if at 1HP and your Toughness is up.

The current system in place only encourages to avoid the Zealot as much as you can and instead stick to the Ranged Classes or the Ogryn with the Shield as you can avoid chip damage while also doing what your class was intended for. Not so much with the Zealot.

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If it’s such a problem just re-introduce temp HP. Leave toughness but only let it affect ranged enemies.

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If you don’t have chip damage then being low hp does not incentivize going down.

Game doesn’t really need to be redesigned in the case of no chip damage because it appears to have mostly been designed with that in mind in the first place. Other parts of the design are clearly compromised by the existence of chip damage.

And so we have useless feats and an incentive to go down.

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This is one of those subjects where people who are pro-chip-damage are objectively wrong. The worst kinds are the people who basically say “lol you just noobs” in way too many dumb words.

KarampaFIN, thank you so much for the patience and clear words. People must be truly ignorant not to agree with what you wrote.

The “git gud” people aren’t fooling anyone. Anyone experienced in Tide games know exactly that sometimes, even the best of the best take damage enough to reach 1hp. Right now “Until Death” is just delaying the inevitable.

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But again… any word from Fatshark that they’re investigating? Or is chip-damage somehow sacred to them, despite it obviously being injected in the latest stages of beta development?

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The thing with the git gud argument in Darktide is that the characters have been nerfed compared to the VT2 characters. Dodging and blocking are both much weaker in DT than they are in VT2, not to mention the abundance of ranged enemies that stun you & things like a lot of the trash enemies having those long windup attacks that can’t be consistently blocked/dodged since all the enemies have staggered hit timings (meaning there’s a high chance of you getting hit at any point during a dash), unlike VT2.

Now, stuff like dodging being weaker isn’t a huge deal on its own (ignoring how bad it feels compared to VT2 anyways), but when you combine it with a mechanic like damage bleedthrough, it just feels terrible when you account for everything else going on in a game.

I’m generally okay with the git gud attitude, but even on lower difficulties in DT there’s a lot of moments where getting hit is an inevitability. I exclusively play Cata+ difficulties in VT2, and I barely get hit there, assuming the game is going good.

Here, a random video I posted on this forum a few days ago to prove a point, I literally went from the forums into game and queued with complete randoms on cata. The large majority of my vanilla cata games go exactly like this. I get hit a TOTAL of 7 times (and yes I actually counted). 2 of those 7 were hits from stray gunner rat bullets, 1 was from a plaguemonk in a dense crowd who landed 2 hits on me in his flurry, and the other times were hits from behind where I failed to react to the sound cue of a backstab. With 257 damage taken at the end, this is consistent with how my games tend to go.

I’m not posting this video as some sorta gotcha or boasting measure, I’m just trying to make it clear that I’m not someone who is against difficulty or who is against learning mechanics and getting good at those mechanics. I love hard games, and I love games that demand you play well. My problem in Darktide is that getting hit is inevitable and is NOT purely an issue of skill. Hell, if I played better I wouldn’t have gotten hit at all from those backstabs where I had the audio warnings, so the only hits would’ve been from the plaguerat in the horde, and 2 instances of catching gunner stray fire.

On it’s own, sure, getting hit here and there isn’t a big deal, but it feels basically impossible to NOT get hit in a large wave in Darktide, even on Haz3. When you add bleedthrough damage, it feels horrible, because there’s some moments where you get downed no matter how much you spam your dodge and shove despite being full toughness, and it’s just not fun. There’s no skill to it half the time that would’ve prevented you from getting hit, all the mechanics working in tandem as they do basically make it unavoidable to a certain extent, and that’s what feels bad.

And keep in mind, I am (apparently) in the minority of the playerbase who actually plays above legend. The large majority of players can’t even beat Legend consistently, according to the stats the devs have released in the past. I can’t imagine how many hits your average player is taking in DT, when I feel like I’m getting bombarded from all sides by little 2hp chip attacks even on easy difficulties like Haz3.

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Sure, but not sure about how that counters my point that you quoted. The point was “the problem is that you are low HP (no matter how you got into that situation)”, not that that chip damage exist.

You are doing a trade-off:
Lose 1 wound and go into battle with some health or go in with 1HP, be careful in melee, and trust that your team mates can get you back up in the middle of the fight if you are downed.
This also plays nicely with the wounds mechanic since having more wounds gives you more downs, but leaves you with less health when you get back up from 1HP.
Not to mention that this is only relevant if you have 0 medpacks.

I agree, though, that this mechanic is cheesy, but I have yet to encounter this situation. It’s very situational and certainly doesn’t require changing a very core mechanic just to fix this.

I already said in a post above that melee classes may need some help with mitigating bleed-through damage, but, again, not at the cost of changing a core mechanic thus introducing a whole new set of issues.

Let’s look at Zealot (my main):

  • We get twice the HP compared to toughness. Why?
    Could it be because we need a larger pool to mitigate bleed-through damage?
  • We get “Until Death” (avoid death for 5s on a 90s cooldown). Why?
    Could it be because we need to mitigate bleed-through damage when 1HP?
  • We get a feat that returns 25% damage taken over 5s. Why?
    Could it be because we need to mitigate bleed-through damage?
  • We get a feat that heals when you lose that last 1HP and go immortal. Why?
    … you get the idea

Ill add in that we also get a lot of toughness damage reduction. Why would that be if not because Zealot is supposed to mainly take bleed-through damage by keeping their toughness up.

Should melee classes get more options for bleed-through? Should we get temp health as both you and I suggested as a possibility? Passive healing? Buffing already existing feats? Adding more HP to zealot to get 250HP? - definitively maybe, but, again, that’s a whole different topic.
You shouldn’t have to change the core mechanic to fix Zealot’s mediocre kit.
I am not saying Zealot is fine, but the state of range damage/suppression/stagger is a 100x bigger issue for Zealot then bleed-through damage.

It does if you would rather go into a fight with some health and 1 wound less instead of going in with 1HP. I explained this trade-off above. Again, potential, very minor, very situational issue presented as the main reason for a core game mechanic change. Really?

I disagree. Just look at my comments about the Zealot’s (main melee class in the game) design. The game is clearly made with chip damage in mind.

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There is a small problem in that you do seem to be looking at the situation in a vacuum more than the full picture when you think about chip damage.

Funnily enough, it is actually a combination of these two which is why it is such a problem for the Zealot. If the chip damage wasn’t there for example, the ranged damage and stagger wouldn’t be such an issue to the Zealot. The reason for this is quite simply that you have a talent that you could take instead of the mandatory Holy Revenant that makes you immune to the said effect, which removes one issue outright.

However, the major problem is how they do Toughness against Range vs Toughness against Melee. The lower your Toughness, the less you resist, and you can at most only mitigate the attack down to 10% HP loss in Melee. Against Ranged however, no such problems, you simply ignore all damage until your Toughness breaks. This is the key issue with the system that specifically affects the Zealot.

As you try to approach the enemy ranged units as preferably you will be using very close range oriented weapons, be that the Columnus Braced Autogun(s) or the Flamer, you want to close the gap, but out of the four classes, this is significantly more painful to achieve. The issue simply being that unlike the Zealot, the Veteran and Psyker can regen their Toughness prior to making contact in melee, which can easily mean their Toughness is not going to be below 50% needed to take significantly more damage in most cases, or in the case of the Ogryn you have your Shield or just incredible melee range to help you avoid getting hit.

The Zealot, again, not so much. Zealot has the charge, yes, but since the AI can still shoot at you perfectly even during it as it does not count as a dodge, you can easily find yourself at halved Toughness even before you get to melee, at which point every hit you take hurts notably more than it would the three others, while also lowering your Toughness, making it a game of desperately trying to kill more things in melee to try to keep your Toughness at least high enough to not take as much damage through it.

The issue simply lies in the fact that if you have a low health Zealot, he should simply down himself to heal if at a safe spot without a medkit/healing station, nearby OR basically be reduced to a rearguard, or become a Veteran but worse. Meanwhile if the Veteran or the Psyker is reduced to low HP, they still can contribute 100% into the encounter without major fears, outside of the AI Director just dropping the Poxwalker right behind you to get one hit in. Because even if you have the invulnerability, it only lasts for 5 seconds, and it takes a minute and a half to get back again. The time you have it is not enough to make a clean escape because the AI is faster than you even when sprinting, or you just need to get shot once or twice in the back to get downed once it fades even if you are focusing solely on dodging.

Personally, again, the two solutions I personally would implement to fix the situation is to make it so you can’t be downed by chip damage at low HP, and the Zealot ignoring melee damage until at 50% Toughness.

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Did you just call them zombies? Literal heresy. :rofl:

Looks like i didn’t even quote who I was replying too. Fail.

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I believe you are the one who is looking at the situation in a vacuum since your arguments all revolve around Zealot and its issues, but I don’t want to argue about personal perceptions about others. We can stay on topic.

Are you talking about “Thy Wrath Be Swift”? Because that feat only works on melee damage. If anything, this is yet another feat that indirectly helps you avoid chip damage which only further proves my point about having a lot (but not enough?) of things in the Zealot’s kit to deal with this.

The rest of your arguments are about Zealot’s range issues which I already mentioned, but is off topic. You haven’t provided any arguments for or against removing chip damage from the game.
The topic is “REMOVE CHIP DAMAGE FROM GAME?” and you are derailing the conversation to “HOW TO IMPROVE ZEALOT”.

I’ll just conclude on Zealot and I won’t be talking about Zealots in this thread any more cause it’s not the topic.
Personally, on first look, I don’t think that your first suggestion about “not losing last HP if you have toughness” would work well, but your second suggestion about 50% toughness is interesting.

With these suggestions you made, I can only assume that you are also pro chip damage (like me), just have concerns about melee classes, (like me).

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I mean, we already have streamers ready to leave the game because Damnation is too easy for them. Yes, it’s a get good problem. There’s a reason we have wounds. Going down isn’t the end of the game. Revive or res your mates and keep going.

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Maybe the game is too easy for some classes. Personally, I carry the entire team as a Veteran. My Zealot, however, relies highly on the competence of the rest of the team and has the worst survivability of all classes.

People here who defend chip-damage are either only Sharpshooters/Psykers or played Uprising for 5 hours and think they know better. Or they’re just trolls. The joke is on them once Fatshark fixes this.

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Just a minute ago we got confirmation on the stream that the toughness will now block 100% damage again. Saved

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For clarification: it will block 100% dmg when you have full toughness. Otherwise it blocks a % corresponding to your toughness level.

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You are a very mean person on these forums.

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I don’t inherently have a problem with chip damage, what I have a problem with is melee mechanics being nerfed so that it’s much harder (and in some cases impossible) to avoid incoming damage. Bring the melee back up to the VT2 standard and then I can hash out whether the health system needs to be changed or not.

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Block and dodge.

It’s not VT2.

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Yes, block and dodge, exactly like VT2 except worse because the mechanics have been nerfed.

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