The conceptual problem with [Power] and how to solve it

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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Or rather, the problem with everything else that isn’t Power.
By now everyone with an understanding of Darktide (and also VT2, it goes that far back) knows immediately what I’m talking about.

There is a whole host of Blessings and Perks to choose from, but why bother?
There is breakpoints to reach, enemies to oneshot and Reapers to stunlock. So you go for Power and whenever not possible, you choose damage instead.

The Problem:
Power is the only thing close to an “attribute”. It nets an aggregate of bonusses, unlike everything else. And they happen to be the most useful in a game that’s all about rushing head first into the moshpit, Dynasty Warriors Style.
1 point of power equals 1% damage, 1% stagger and 1% cleave (damage as well as distribution). Meanwhile everything else is left behind on the slow lane.

The Solution
So how do we adress this, without taking the fun of Power away? We make everything else a competitively compelling choice.
Tie up all the loose ends of useless bonusses by gathering them under their own respective umbrelly categories. By doing so, we can also tailor our characters even more uniquely to our desires. It’s a win-win.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I proudly present my horrid Windows Logo Knockoff.

Darktide Attribute Idea
Darktide Attribute Idea900×900 120 KB

*values might need tweaking

It’s pretty self-explanatory and as immersive as possible. Power makes you generally stronger, Fortitude hardier, Agility faster and Zeal makes you… less heretic, shall we say.

Now picture this. You roll a new Lasgun and you get ‘Speed Load IV’ of all things. Under our current system, you have a few curse words for Hadron. But with 20 Agility however? You’ll be singing Hadron’s praises, because that’d be a universal bonus that can come handy in many situations. You still get reload speed, but you can also use the temporary buff to disengage your enemies or charge a Brainburst as Psyker faster.

What’s more, you now have new other interesting breakpoints to reach.
Getting 20 Fortitude together, means 1 extra wound and 2 stamina bars. But since that will probably require several Fortitude perks, it means you can no longer hit those classic breakpoints for oneshot kills comfortably.
You want a critfishing build or just don’t like corruption? Spec heavy into Zeal and become one with Smegma the Emperor.

No matter what you pick, your decision is more impactful and at the same time more meaningful. It’s no longer just a case of doing the thing everyone does.

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So scrap the weapon stats we have currently, and replace them with 4 stats? And some of those stats impact non-attack stuff like additional health or wounds?

Sounds cool.

What happens when you swap weapons? Would your HP go down, or would it you just get the stats from both weapons all the time?

Any thoughts on doing the same thing for Curios?

Any thoughts on some sort of iterative improvement thing? Could we bring something to Hadron, pay some tokens, and get a +1 Zeal on something?

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I really like this

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I don’t disagree with the basic idea of making those attributes that aren’t damage/power more attractive, but the focus on raw killing power is a direct effect of the game being about “running head first into the moshpit”.

We typically build our stats to excel within the framework of the game; In DT, that almost exclusively means being effective at killing things. How does this system make other build options more attractive while that’s the case?

Like, having a single attribute that gives a whole range of buffs to survivability or utility is nice, but why would it be preferable to invest in those instead of the power attribute, which gives me a whole range of buffs to my ability to kill things?

On the structure of the proposed system: I do like the idea of simplifying the system as a way of reducing the number of undesirables, but I’m generally not huge on incorporating a bunch of small effects under one attribute. That’s the entire reason that the base weapon stats are so esoteric - You need to go do a deep dive on youtube or something to even understand what they really do. Attributes and their effects should be immediately clear without having to do external research on them.

As a side note, it’s possible that the new class system will alleviate this somewhat - If such a system allows for people to build into specialised roles (and they actually do it), that’s a change to the core framework of the game, which changes the desirability of attributes. A player who focuses on supportive play will be after different stats to one who focuses on combat, for example.

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In that case, do you make every stat provide an equal amount of weapon damage, so that you would build towards your preferred playstyle (without significantly compromising your effectiveness)?

Granted, some of those stats are still damage improvements (directly or indirectly), they’re not going to be useful on all weapons and, point for point, are not likely going to give a comparable improvement to 1% damage - if needs be, you could spread things a little more to reduce double-dipping (like crit + weakspot damage being under the same heading)

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I just wanted to say how great I think this post is. For a very long time I have seen talents and weapon traits/blessings that increase power as very critical because all other talents and traits/blessings then pale in comparison. This is a very good idea to make all the other elements more interesting without having to remove an important component like “power” and thus incur the wrath of the remaining player community. I wish the lead designers and management would at least try to integrate such great ideas instead of continuing to be so stubborn and obsessed with their own ideas (locks/RNG/general paternalism…) thus spoiling the best game series in this genre imo, until it is completely overshadowed by other hardly better heavyweights like LfD2 etc.

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Why?
If the other stat bonuses are strong, this is absolutely not needed.
As usual, defensive bonuses would be more useful for lower skill players (and rarely picked by higher skill players), but there is no issue with that.

Completely fine. All this means is, that you should actually use your brain to make a useful build, instead of just slapping random stats on your stuff.

Crit bonus dmg is usually not very useful without a decent crit chance. A good crit chance is not valuable if your crits do not deal a reasonable amount of bonus damage.
In the context of OP’s idea, it makes sense that bonuses like cc and cd come from the same stat.
Otherwise, you would just end up with a mixed salad of bonuses, no matter what you would like to focus on.

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But are they as strong as raw damage? There’s an argument to be made for defensive stats because their primary goal is to keep you alive before killing enemies, but anything damage-adjacent (especially when they may be hard to observe at low values, like attack/reload speed) has to be on par, or reasonably close, to damage otherwise it’s not a compelling pick.

The main problem is that damage (and therefore Power) >>> all. The gap between other stats is IMO far lower such that, if damage is excluded, they present useful alternatives to each other.

Ability damage, burn/bleed damage etc could remain stat-specific, since they are somewhat specialised forms of damage.

Like I said, if needs be. If double dipping doesn’t tip the scales massively, it can be left alone.

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Not quite. The idea is to add the umbrella attributes to have an equivalent for Power in every other category. And to use these to spice the game up. But not force it 100% of the time.
This also explains your question @Dumlefudge about double dipping. Yes, all of these attributes double dip, but so does Power (offense). They’re meant to be it’s equivalent (defense, speed, utility) whenever a singular utility or defensive buff wouldn’t be meaningful enough.
As for the temporary HP issue, the game would probably treat it the same as every other weapon. Active while wielded, not active while put away. It’s not a big deal, the gained and lost health doesn’t affect gameplay weirdly. You keep percentage based what you already have, just like how it works with Stamina right now.

I’m not saying these new attributes should be omnipresent and replace every other stat or Blessing fulltime. Instead, they can be used in those instances, where Blessings, weapon stats, curiou effects and talent effects are disappointingly weak. Those instances are relatively common, however. So they could find a lot of usage.
Just like there is currently Blessings with Power bonus and other Blessings who “only” give damage or impact or cleave, the same could be true for Fortitude and Block Efficiency for instance.

Examples:

Summary

Let’s take Vetern lvl 20 talent “Duck and Dive”, a universally panned talent. At current it gives 30% stamina when you successfully dodge, dive or run from ranged attacks. If it gave you 30 Agility for X seconds instead, you’d get a lot more out of it. It would amplify everything a Veteran does, reloading, attacking, picking up allies. It would make dives to downed allies while getting fired at a risky but possible strategy.

For static stats on items it depends. The +1-2 Stamina Perk certainly could be +2,5 / 5 / 7,5 / 10 Fortitude.
Things like Weak spot damage could be replaced with Zeal.
But Crit Chance on the other hand can stay, it’s already a good pick. Just needs to be balanced against the universal stats, which improve so much across the board.

Just like how Power works now. It’s a percentage based bonus. Weapons that are weaker but faster get less damage added per point of Power.
The other attributes would work much in the same way. Of course this also means that some archetypes gain more from certain choices.
An Ogryn gets more out of Fortitude than a Psyker does. A Zealot gets more out of Zeal than an Ogryn. This is fine and plays to the game’s Unparrallel Class Design. Differences are intended.
Still, the non-conventional choices can be interesting.
You pick Zeal to get Corruption Resistance or Toughness Regeneration speed.
You can pick Fortitude as a Psyker to play a decent melee Psyker.
No attribute is completely useless to anyone.

The only question is: What build do you desire? You want your Ogryn to be a Speedy Boi? Or do you want a tanky Veteran?

Edit: I also just realized, this thread was a big missed opportunity to color and theme code the bonusses to the 4 Chaos Factions. Damn!

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If it makes you feel better you nearly nailed the Simon Says game from my childhood. Simon (game) - Wikipedia

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Interesting. Like.

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I should have clarified, when I said an equal amount of damage, I meant damage %

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We’ve all got a real hateboner for speedload right now, don’t we :laughing:

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I like the current implementation of Speedload, even though I rarely use the supported weapons :pensive:

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