So since we are being pissed about chip damage, why doesn’t the boss on train station take chip dmg? Rules for thee but not me sayeth the Fatshark?
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Correct me if I’m wrong but chip damage only happens if you don’t manage to block/dodge the melee attack.
That being said, I think the toughness description should just be changed to “While you have toughness, ranged damage is blocked. Toughness will block a majority of melee damage”
I think toughness’ primary role is to prevent ranged enemies from destroying you outright since there is a larger abundance of them. I don’t think it should be relied on to absorb all melee damage if you fail to block or dodge it.
If we compare to VT2, if you failed to block or dodge an attack, you just took straight hp damage, as you should. In comparison, having toughness in Darktide absorbing the majority of that damage makes things easier than VT2 if anything, imo.
In regards to low hp Zealot builds, I know the way martydom works is currently bugged, but you can stack curios with +x% hp perks on them. So if all it takes is 15 hp lost for one stack(once it’s fixed), you could get 6 stacks for losing 90 hp. My lvl 30 zealot has 304hp, so I would still have 214hp, which seems pretty reasonable considering it’s more than the base hp. Of course grims are % based health reduction from what I gather, but they’re also pretty useless to grab anyways, I’ve even had times where we didn’t get the secondary objective reward for bringing both 2 the end, so there’s that.
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I will preface this by saying I am very much a newbie, I play on Malice right now and have a total of only about 100 hours across VT, VT2, and Darktide with the vast majority of that being Darktide. This is my “I probably am not accounting for high end gameplay into account, so if I’m totally off-base then let me know (constructively)” statement.
I do think the chip-damage is a necessary driver for Zealot, particularly with so many feats and its passives built around taking damage and being able to escape damage. I think it is something that was developed partly (or majorly) to allow Zealot function in its design and theme. I imagine it was (hopefully) tested with other classes and deemed that it still felt sufficient for other classes to play around (this might explain veteran’s relatively high toughness). I highly doubt this system will be completely removed.
So with the assumption that chip damage is not going away, I think the easier thing to do would be examining, analyzing, and tweaking the chip damage system. This can come in a myriad of ways, such as changing the threshold of when chip damage begins (I.e. chip damage begins at 50% toughness threshold at 10% health damage bleed effect) or the ratio/values of chip damage, or both or any combination of other factors.
I do not think that the current system toughness/damage bleed set-up is in a healthy, balanced place right now. But I also think it isn’t in such a state that it completely needs to be scrapped or should be scrapped.
I hope the system can be tweaked so that toughness has the feel of that extra layer of protection it is perceived/thought to be while still allowing Zealot have its core design and theme in-tact.
Very much agree that chip damage as a system should be staying. Finer details might need to be adjusted (thresholds, dropping from only chip damage, etc), but the system itself is fine.
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Yes, you are off-base. Malice, as stated earlier by me, is the middling difficulty just like Champion in the Vermintide games. Once you are maximum level and have all blue gear or higher you can just straight up facetank most of the attacks without any toughness.
I don’t think you have any idea how dramatical the difficulty spike on higher difficulties is. I will try to visualize it here:
|–Sedition----------------------------Malice---------------------------------------------------------Damnation—|
|-------|----------|-----------------------------|-----------------------------------------|-----------------------------|---------|
|------------Uprising------------------------------------------------------------Heresy----------------------------------|
Just the poxwalkers alone more than double their damage output on Heresy. On Damnation difficulty, there are very few enemy types that won’t burn through your entire toughness in a single hit or two. Which leads me to your next statement.
I believe you are overestimating the strength of those Zealot perks. Yes, they aren’t bad, but remember it’s the only thing Zealot has going for him.
If a player isn’t good at the game at high level plays, the Zealot’s tools won’t do a whole lot to change his playthrough on Heresy or higher. It won’t magically carry him to victory. It’s just like in Dota 2 with Abaddon, you get a final saving grace every so often, mess up again and you’re down. Not to forget that you have reduced downs on Heresy / Damnation regardless, so you might just be dead.
On top of that, gaining all of your toughness back will still take a lot of kills, a single stray hit will still set you back.
And that’s all the balance talk just centering on HP, Toughness and survivability alone. We haven’t even delved on the additional horde and special spawn rates. On Malice a Rager usually comes alone or with another within a horde.
On Heresy and higher it is common to get entire groups consisting of 6-10 Ragers, some of them with the carapace armor.
For every hound or trapper you get at least 2 on Heresy or Damnation. Often the AI Directors spawns more, though. It is a challenge, it will remain so without chip damage.
I honestly invite you to just try the mode and see for yourself. Chip damage doesn’t even constitute a full system. It is actually breaking a proper system, namely toughness and toughness break / toughness regain.
Why should it not go away? We’re in the endstage of the Beta and it’s our job to tell the developers what works and doesn’t. Chip damage does rather poorly and should have never been a thing.
If it absolutely must stay, then we need to get at least the stun immunity back as long as toughness is up.
But no, scratch compromises. Chip damage has to go. It does nothing for the game but hinder it. And it makes the game feel “more clunky” to casual players, too. They don’t even grasp that all the stunning comes from the toughness being ignored.
Take my word for it. If Chip Damage is on the full release, the post-beta reviews will all be filled with the words “Clunky”, “Unresponsive” and “Frustrating”. And I really don’t want that. This game is amazing, it deserves so much better than getting trashed.
It’s not a proper system, I refuse to use that word for it. I’m sorry for whoever had to program it, but it really really needs to go.
Or maybe they can leave it in for boss enemies in particular, since that would actually make sense and not disrupt the flow of the game.
Beast of Nurgle / Daemonhost / Plague Ogryn
They’re the only ones I see this make sense for. But in general it has to go. It disrupts the gameplay way too much.
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You might not remember from what I can tell, but Vermintide 2 had temporary health. It was temporary, but keeping it up was easier than keeping your toughness meter full in Darktide.
Maybe you haven’t been around when 1 HP Zealot YOLO playthroughs were the rage, but let me tell you - It was a lot easier than any Darktide playthrough on comparable difficulty.
And here in Darktide you do get proper ranged hostiles to spice things up further.
In Vermintide, Zealot was the God of War himself, tearing through anything, more survivable than Kruber thanks to a certain perk and put out more damage than Berserker dual-wield Bardin. He also pretty much ignored much of the enemy mass since every other hit was a critical, he had Horde delete mode on 100% of the time and would down specialists also within mere seconds. The only thing a Saltzpyre Zealot could not do in Vermintide was facetank any of the bosses. That’s why you’d take your favorite Elf Assassin with you.
2 man Cataclysm runs were a thing, just as a reminder.
Even after the nerfs still a very viable playstyle. Not comparable to Darktide’s Zealot at all. If we’re really comparing Zealot to Zealot from both games, Saltzpyre is a wild husky siberian wolf let loose to kill, while Darktide’s Zealot is a puppy with two broken legs. Maybe a bit of a hyperbole, but that’s really how it feels to the player, coming from High level plays in Vermintide and playing at high levels in Darktide.
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“If it absolutely must stay, then we need to get at least the stun immunity back as long as toughness is up.
But no, scratch compromises. Chip damage has to go. It does nothing for the game but hinder it. And it makes the game feel “more clunky” to casual players, too. They don’t even grasp that all the stunning comes from the toughness being ignored.
Take my word for it. If Chip Damage is on the full release, the post-beta reviews will all be filled with the words “Clunky”, “Unresponsive” and “Frustrating”. And I really don’t want that. This game is amazing, it deserves so much better than getting trashed.”
Are you talking about stun from ranged or melee with toughness remaining? I think if you get hit with an unblocked melee attack it should stun you to some effect regardless of toughness. Just as I think if you don’t block or dodge a melee attack you should receive some damage, but sure toughness should mitigate it. If you’re wearing plate armour in real life, and I smack you with a mace or whatever and you don’t block it, it’s going to knock you back, do some damage and you’ll be temporarily stunned to some extent. Why does it make sense here to get hit with a weapon and be completely fine, why even block or dodge then if toughness will jsut save you from stuns and damage completely?
Ranged wise, I think is where toughness should be used, purely because of how many ranged enemies there are. I wish I had more toughness in those situations as a Zealot cause man does it get broken fast. I think this is the intention of the system but it’s poorly explained. Toughness is for negating ranged damage to allow you to reposition or engage them. I don’t think it should be used as a crutch in melee combat.
This is just my interpretation/opinion however.
Zealot in VT2 was overpowered and still is overpowered. And reading your post, edits included makes it seem like you still want him to be this overpowered god of war, which if that’s how you like your games, that’s fine but personally no thanks. Temp health exist sure, and if you missed a block or dodge you were punished for it by losing said temp health and regular health if it hit hard enough. Toughness still mitigates a lot of the damage dealt to you in melee, just not all of it.
Should you be able to regenerate toughness faster, maybe and as a zealot player, ranged depletes it pretty quick so that would be nice, though when in melee, I don’t find my toughness going down often. Especially if you’re in a tight formation with an ogryn player using the feat that buffs toughness regen.
Again, relying on toughness to stop all damage if you miss a block or dodge just seems bad to me and doesn’t encourage people to hone their skills within melee.
Zealot also has damage reduction in vt2 if I remember correctly, which it does not here.
I think zealot feels pretty good here, it’s kinda high risk, high reward imo. I don’t want it to be god mode where nothing can hurt me in melee and I slay everything. I’m just some reject cutting through literal hordes of enemies, which is a feat within itself, i’m not a space marine.
The game encourages you to play at low health to benefit from your feats but punishes you at the same time for doing so with the chip damage, trying to have it both ways just makes it feel bad to play.
Why encourage and discourage something at the same time? I get trying to balance it so you dont have people being semi immortal but also its there so you have some leeway.
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To this I would say, chip damage is pretty low and if you block/dodge the attack you don’t take any damage. It’s a high risk, high reward playstyle. You’re also not forced to be at low health, it’s just an option to increase your damage output if you can manage to stay alive.
Otherwise you just get god tier Saltzpre Zealot.
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I will still reiterate my previous point, Why encourage and discourage something at the same time? Why encourage playing a certain way and then punish someone for playing said way? Does the tutorial not say you dont take health damage until your toughness is depleted?
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I agree that the description/training should be changed if chip damage is to be a thing 100%.
But I think taking the very minimal chip damage if you miss a block or don’t dodge is completely fine. I hardly think it’s punishing a player for letting them take a small amount of damage for failing to dodge/block an attack, it’s a core gameplay mechanic.
Punishing would toughness not blocking any damage at all in melee.
It is not a small amount of damage, especially on Heresy and above. It is a significant portion of your health, especially if you’re not at 100% Toughness.
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I think you view this a little too much from the realism / believability lense.
In reallife if someone beats your heavily armored belly with a heavy mace, your lung will cave in and you will die, very quickly. There’s a reason blunt weapons were predominately used and the Age of the Knights ended pretty early into the Middle Ages.
The problem is - Stun is a game mechanic everybody loves dishing out, but nobody likes taking. See any review of any game where stun is an important factor. Most people HATE being immobile and HATE being stunned.
They feel this strongly about it. It goes so deep, that games with millions of players like Dota 2 had several re-designs, shortening stun times or replacing them with slows. Because when a player is slow, he at least can attempt a thing. If he is stunned or interrupted, that feels terrible to him.
And fun is an important part of the game. As for the argument of believability - We already have great games for that. See Chivalry, Chivalry 2 or Mordhau. One thing you will notice - Those games have a small playerbase, because they are incredibly niche. Same as with any of the Arma Warfare simulations. People always talk about realistic, but a real redpill here: They actually don’t like realism. Not when it is properly applied.
Realism means the following things:
→ Long periods of no action, but fast and short encounters that usually immediately end after 1-3 attacks and in a brutal unforgiving manner
→ The first guy to get a shot or stab in will win, 75% of the time. Any 2 on 1 engagement or higher is instantly over
→ Being encumbered by heavy gear, having to account for everything you carry, being immobile
→ Coming prepared actually IS half the battle and being unprepared means being punished harshly and quickly
What is generally considered fun:
→ Very short down periods, non-stop adrenaline and action, drawn out fights that test your skill and mettle
→ Dominating several enemies with a single individual
→ Being able to make a come back from critical situations at any time, increasing tension for all parties involved
→ Being able to move freely and fast, usually more than would be sensible
→ Being able to clutch unwinnable odds, making up for bad preparation with high skill
As you can see, what is realistic is exactly the anti-thesis to what is considered fun and vice versa. Hence you get all of us here and elsewhere coming together to game with escapist intend.
We like to spend our time in fictional worlds more than the real one, because in the real world every missstep costs us dearly. All the tension is short-lived and the punishment for mistakes is long-winded and staggeringly brutal - Sometimes to the point of no recovery being possible at all. Nobody likes that. Nobody but those willing to suffer pain like realism. THERE I SAID IT. 
Have ye mind freed from the curse of Realism. Enjoy the fruits of fiction, my friend!
He is not Overpowered by any stretch of the imagination. The dodge system allowed him his shenanigans and here in Darktide it’s already been nerfed. So no more acrobatic clownery, if you don’t have it down to a science.
I don’t want anyone to be a God of War here, but I want the game to feel proper. Right now it feels like Melee is not worth it. Being constantly hit with that annoying “crash through wood table sound” when you get hit with a stun on top and chip damage is too much. That is not fun.
This isn’t just about the Zealot, either. Ogryn suffers from this non-sense as well and in my humble opinion, nobody should be able to stun the Big Man except for other Big Men and the sniper.
I just want my melee to feel good, sensible and rewarding, but it doesn’t feel either of these things right now because you constantly get taken out of the action despite playing right and keeping your toughness up. That is not really acceptable design in my book. It was a test for the Beta by the dev team and I’m here to tell them - Nice idea, but for this title it doesn’t work. Not in the current iteration. It feels a bit off and the game would do better without it.
If they want to crank difficulty, just spawn in more ordinary gunmen or introduce more enemy variety into the AI Direct so it doesn’t do all of one type at once. That’ll be enough.
That’s the thing, it is not high reward. You just stated you don’t want it to be high reward because that’s “OP”.
The current Zealot is high risk, low reward hence nobody playing the low-health playstyle. Absolutely nobody does.
And again, removing chip damage (and with it stun-through-toughness) does not make the game trivial.
Play Heresy. Play Damnation. I invite you to try it and I don’t mean this in a deregatory way. You need to see it to believe it. One hit, two hits, maybe three hits - ALL your toughness is gone - If you have all your three trinkets slotted with it.
May I humbly ask what difficulty you play? I’m pretty confident you are on Malice.
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Unlike THP, toughness is its own bar. Players also have to deal with much more unavoidable damage in Darktide than VT2. There’s relatively minimal downside to using THP instead of real health in VT2 whereas lost health in Darktide is genuinely smaller hp pool.
Haven’t been playing Darktide Zealot but it’s easy to see how chip damage is an issue if they’re encouraged to play with minimal health. Even if toughness blocked all damage, they’d still be intentionally playing at half “health” compared to someone with a full health bar and toughness, so this seems like double dipping on the mechanic.
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All these points are well and good but let me ask you this:
If this whole chip damage is a case of “learn to dodge” and “git gud” attitude. Then why have toughness at all? Wouldnt the best couse of action to have a higher health bar and have at it? If you’re good then you will survive if you’re not then “git gud” right?
The fact of the matter is that chip damage is not native to this game, VT aside as its a loose comparisson at best, chip damage in this game is not advertised in any way shape or form so the issue is not only that it exists but the concept is flawed from the ground up. I would bet that if the game was to explain chip damage and how it works, introducing it to the player from the offset in level 1 difficulty then it makes for an easier learning curve.
I personally don’t like it but im palying heracy on a Zealot and getting to grips with adjusting my playstyle… “Gitting Gud” if you will. But its doesn’t pull from the original issue that logically chip damage as a concept does not make a lot of sense, seems more of a baindaid over an issue that needs to be thoughtfully reqorked in some way ( im not a dev so I don’t pretend to know the answer).
Whats I would say is that unless the game is going to 100% keep the mechanic and explain and teach the player to adapt to it via at bare minimum something about it in the prologue or in tips or whatever form that takes from the beginning then it should not be a part of the game.
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I think Toughness should be used for ranged attacks giving you some ability to reposition/engage without being instantly melted due to the significant amount of ranged enemies.
And I think this should be what is in the description/training as I’ve stated earlier. Toughness should mitigate some melee damage, but I think the focus there should be on dodging/blocking.
This statement really has no substance to it and is simply reiterating that the player needs to “git gud”
Taking from what I think you are trying to say in regards to toughness not being the absolute shield in melee then you would need to give the player a way other than blovking and dodging to replenish their base HP aswell as toughness, toughness is there as a coating over your HP and should be treated as such.
One could argue that maybe a halfway point could be met and satisfy both side in that the “chip damage” is only going to happen when fighting things like Maulers and Ogryns, Standard infested and “trash” mobs would not impact toughness again giving the player a chance to learn, this could then be something they add into damnation or Heracy as a % based difficulty modifier for when the player feels ready to progress into that.
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I 100% agree with what you’ve said in the first portion of your post, people don’t like realism. I’m probably an exception there for the most part. I do like realism in my games, I mod games like Skyrim for example to use more realistic systems, food, sleep, water, cold, blunt actually piercing armour, stuns, attack commitment. I want a challenge.
I will concede that if you have toughness, it should prevent a stun, if that’s what people prefer to make it more fun, cause yes, loss of player control sucks even if it’s realistic, though I think it’s fair if you failed to block/dodge, imo.
I’ll also agree that an orgryn probably shouldn’t get stunned unless it’s another ogryn, he is a big boy afterall. Perhaps that should be a passive, immune to stuns.
I’ll agree to disagree about saltz, as i’m not the only one who feels he is overpowered. But we’re discussing Darktide here, so that’s for another topic.
I think personally, and no offense to anyone. But if you’re attempting higher difficulties and don’t have your block/dodge game down and then get mad that damage went through your toughness then perhaps you should practice more. The tide games have a high skill ceiling and the high end difficulties are the end game, they are punishing and they will make you regret any mistake, that’s the point,imo.
As for Zealot not being high reward, I think part of that is also his passive/feats being a bit bugged at the moment as well. If they want to remove the chip damage/stun then fine whatever, it’s not going to ruin the game for me.
I’ve played heresy, even had a match where a level 5 veteran was their constantly needing to be carried, making that round even harder. But that’s another issue (level capping difficulties) and I felt perfectly fine as Zealot and did really well.
I also stack health increases on my curios because I think toughness get’s depleted really quickly by range so have chosen to focus on higher health instead. Do I try and play zealot as a low health class? No, not really, but that’s because I prefer avoiding all damage and I like using the eviscerator and flamer lol.
I’m not claiming to be an amazing player or anything, and maybe toughness should be buffed for melee characters. I just personally think it shouldn’t be relied on to negate melee damage and that the description/training should be changed to reflect that it’s purpose is to negate ranged damage in order to reposition yourself to better engage them. That’s just my perspective and I don’t think your’s is wrong either, we’re just of two different mindsets.
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Sure, maybe it is just git good. Darktide like Vermintide before it is a game with a high skill ceiling, heresy and damnation shouldn’t be a cake walk for any player.
I died numerous times on legend before I was finally able to do it successfully over and over and then progressed to Cataclysm where I repeated the same practice to finally be able to achieve success. That’s the end game in these games, honing your skills over and over until you succeed.
If people don’t want to do that, that’s why there is multiple difficulties. Some friends I play with can only do champion or veteran, so malice or lower here. That’s fine. I personally find it too easy, but I’ll play it if that’s what everyone else wants.