Even on the highest difficulty, every single enemy feels like a fodder. The specialists, the mini bosses, and the final bosses all come off as fodders.
When you focus fire on a Nurgle Beast as a team, the thing dies within a matter of 30 sec. Not very beastly for something that big when you can just focus fire that thing down this quickly. It’s just not satisfying.
The mutant charger dies within 3-5 sec after focus fire, and same for any other specialists.
Every single enemy in this game is like this, you get no satisfaction from killing them, because all of them are so weak. The gameplay focuses solely on quantity, not quality.
Hi. Welcome to HORDE SHOOTERS. Are you new to the genre? The whole gimmick is a HORDE. If everything took 10-20 seconds to kill, the team would be overwhelmed without fail every time.
Must be really frustrating to be a developer of this game reading these kinds of posts, considering the absolute scorn Elite Resistance got. But yeah I think the gameplay gets really cheapened by folding shovels killing 4 crushers in the same attack or a plasma gun killing 12 shotgunners at once because the game spawns everything on top of each other. The huge disparity between weapons like that and things like las pistol or even the default ogryn clubs is hilarious. And the ogryn club is already near invincible when played well, but it falls to the wayside because it doesn’t rip up clumps of elites for every heavy.
I think you guys are all nuts. I played when it came out, then stopped for eight months. Started again recently. It’s wild how much more fun it is, the game has moved in a great direction
OP is right specials and elites being horde enemies is bad, we already have poxwalkers and bruisers.
Current design when game throws at you 40 000 specials so atleast one of them maybe will survive and do something to you is bad.
Elites should be elite. Specials should be special.
They should bring more types of horde enemies and make elites and specials dangerous to fight not cause of sheer numbers, but cause mechanics, timings and tactics.
I’m not saying it should be 5 specials per level. Maybe even stay the same, but some enemies need hp/stagger res or move/attack speed buff or some abilities and new attack patterns.
it wouldnt even have to be that much of a variation to spice things up.
akin to the hell knight / baron of hell (doom) chips of the same block, the usual suspects could have roided out group leaders in their midst.
like a scab shotgunner beefed up weilding a ripper like variant, a bigger dreg flamer lopping piles of green flameable goo instead of a straight stream, etc.
you get the idea, its hard to believe in trillions of hive city denizens everyone has exactly the same height/shape, even more so in a moebian sixth army environment, there’s bound to be the big guys for the front lines.
keep the fluff around as cannon fodder but put something beefy in the odd middle as an anchor or centerpiece of the engagement every now and then.
I would very much like some enemies being an individual challenge to kill.
But, at the same time, it is a horde shooter, so even more I would like if the actual hordes are a challenge. Which they frequently are not. It’s just quantity of specials.
Maybe it needs an extra type of enemy that somehow counters the usual tactics for wiping huge swaths of horde enemies with little challenge.
They atleast need to bring enemies that were in V2 - shielded horde and elites. Bruisers with destructable shied, mauler with undestructable shield+shock maul or something (that maybe can stop ultimate cd or turn off blitz, reduce slow speed/dodge distance etc), bestigor alike officer that buffs horde enemies. Carapaced bulwarks and rippers would be nice, crushers should be more aggressive.
Yes, few in numbers but they change battlefield just by its pressence and some elites with Dark soul-ish approach.
I’ve long felt like the Darktide team lacked a central vision, and what central vision it did have was ‘copy vermintide and force fit everything as best you can.’
IE, the powersword vs shovel debate. Bend the powersword lore into a pretzel to keep the shovel alive.
Could do no PS, could do ‘shovel ends up obsolete’ but tried to do both at once. Also true of chainweapons and thunderhammers. Lot of other places.
Couldn’t make the choice to commit to a path, so tried to do it all but half-assed or put it in but nerfed until not worth it.
Same for a lot of things. It’s gotten much better over all, but still.
Darktide NEEDS to be it’s own thing, not chained to Vermintide. Team needs a leader with a vision.
It’s reversed - all good ideas from V2 was scraped and not transfered to DT. The finaly brought ̶p̶o̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ stimms back. Now they need to make staves to have a proper primary and secondary attacks, different for each stuff. Bring back enemies they forget to copypaste. And change crafting to athanor alike system.
You make dark tide like monster hunter fights that just have 1 dude your whole team fights for 15 minutes straight with almost 0 distraction.
People would complain there’s no moment to moment threat or some other BS.
The games not ment to have plague ogryns die in 7 minutes of focuse fire it’s ment to be a easy fight if you can get focus purely on the big guy because if he was any more threatening it would be impossible to fight in a giant horde full of disablers and elites while fire bombs burn you to death.
Hell the chaos spawn is very hard to just solo and you can 3 shot that guy with a hammer but if it’s only you and a single team mate alive with a CS and 20 elites it’s hard to survive.
The core gameplay is the best thing this game has to offer and is very high adrenaline.
It’s what Fatshark has been nailing about all the Tide games.
If anything, it’s always the surrounding quirks and technicalities of their games that stop their works from being 10/10 masterpieces.
I also don’t see the cannonfodder argument. There is a number of enemy types that are designed to be rushstoppers, such as Ogryn Crushers.
Edit: I’ll agree with @weeping.moon on one thing - This game needs even more enemy variety and most notably - with more variety in behavior. Shielded Stormvermin in VT2 were cool. I want more threatening patrols and more diversified bosses. Maybe chances for double boss spawns to go up, etc.
But the moment to moment gameplay this game offers is great.
I think the game needs to turn down the enemy numbers on higher difficulties with the exception of hordes which should be terrifying and legitimate threats.
But it shouldn’t be the opposite, the goal is to have different types of horde mobs, lesser elites, mid-level elites and high tier elites. Different specials - high damage, disablers, zoners, buffers. And some of them should be dangerous without relying only on numbers.
Having 10 mutes per map isn’t fun, having 1000 mutes desperately trying to get closer isn’t fun either.
There should be some balance and mechanics that allow mobs to be a threat not only because there are many of them, but because it’s hard to fight them - small timing windows, different attack paterns, higher speed, abilities etc.
And the course game is following currently - increasing numbers, not intorducing new and challenging mechanics. Like what if they will introduce red weapons and it will increase players power? There will be blobs of 50 shotgunners just to keep game challenging? It’s not an inspiring approach at all.
It’s hard to make a horde a serious danger to modern military weapons. It’s a massive danger to a guy with a sword, but to four people with repeating firearms and grenades at their disposal it’s just never going to get there.
What the horde can do is occupy you while the elites move in behind it, and when the bad guys used more ranged, (we used to have whole lines of infantry shooting, but it was too much so they reduced it while shifting toughness regen methods.)
And honestly the lines of shooters were the biggest threat at the time. Kind of sorry to see them go but we did need more toughness methods do deal with that situation.
So your saying flamers don’t deal enough damage to be dangerous.
Dogs don’t pounce fast enough to be a threat and muties don’t have enough HP.
Because this is stuff the community hated when it was in the game.
But jokes aside your right about them needing to remove one shotting tank elites like crushers from the game even more so since you can multi hit with blessings.
That’s a bit to strong for my liking.
I think it’s definitely a better idea to just ajust blessings than nerf the weapon base stats since really it’s the blessing combos that are OP.
That said let’s say specials are really to easy to deal with what’s the plan?
We make hook rat special that’s just ogryn in a medieval executions hood with a ogryn sized man catcher.
Or ogryn crusher flamer elite.
Because before you had 100+ hours you probably died to a lot of flamers just chilling in the back and throwing fire at you while you scream for your team to shoot him and panicking.
If you bulked one up to not die in 2 hits you would kill 90% of new players with them the moment a horde spawned together with them.