it wasn’t fun
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It was fun, but people didn’t like it because it wasn’t hard enough and took the slot from STG.
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I think more challenging enemies should be introduced at higher difficulties. Like auric maelstrom should have a unique enemy almost as powerful as a DH, but obvs more regular than a DH, and shouldn’t be encountered on other difficulties.
This should be a theme throughout the difficulties.
A crusher shouldn’t be encountered until T3 etc
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Welcome to the dark side.
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I loved it. It was such a breath of fresh air. You’re entitled to your opinion, though.
Although, comparing my suggestion to just “wanting Elite Resistance back” is an insane level of oversimplification. I’m thinking a little bigger… with huge changes to core gameplay, enemy mechanics, etc.
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yeah like how they had to gut ragers and bulwarks because of how not actually engaging the gameplay of them body bombing you is. especially when nets/fire/shotgun blasts are coming between them. instead of just not having bulwark patrols spawn in numbers like shield stormvermin.
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I’ve mentioned the combat of Dark Messiah before because imo it’s the grandaddy of kinetic first person melee. It felt so good and engaging.
I’m not sure this style of combat would translate to a coop game as well though. Better for a single player campaign.
This is also another reason why I think more volume of enemies is the way to go
They always have been horde enemies. They are not bosses or minibosses.
Evry enemy has audio cues not only elites and special, you need to pay attention regardless.
There is not going to be a new difficulty level.
That’s false I played both Vermintide and Payday games, there is nothing fundamentally different, lots and lots and lots of enemies that die very fast. But you are correct about original DT, at the start maps were empty, good luck seeing more than 2 crushers in one run. Everything that could be even remotely threatening was focused down in record time and by the players. I remember giving up trying to find a weapon that can stagger ragers because they were never going to reach me in melee anyway. Hordes where just Groaners and pox, no really much thought needed in dealing with that, just press LMB.
The game back then should have been called just Dark, because for sure there wasn’t any tide in it
well there is no tide again because fatshark with their great wisdom decided to make hordes only timer based
also events spawn half the enemies
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No they were not? Like back in the days if you see red laser you need to alarm your team and be careful, either way sniper would knock someone, or even several players. That why he is special, he is capable to be a high priority treat. When you need 8, they are just trash shooters.
But people were crying that he shoots to often, that laser is barely visible, while the only problem was he could insta shoot without taking aim first.
With your logic monstrous specials, weakened bosses are also a horde enemies. Like, what is difference to call mobs elites and specials? A slightly different stats? That’s an artificial thing.
They need to be less in numbers so you can have those “dueling” and skill expression moments. As i said, you can’t dodge 20 nets or bursters at one time, so you will end with range, nades, ultimate spam. There never will be interesting combo for crusher you need to pay attention, cause you can’t have 10 of them doing that. When you can’t make enemies to be interesting to fight with you just increasing their ammount.
They die fast, but they can deal dmg aswell, your range potential isn’t that strong, your dodges aren’t that long, neither your ultimate ability CDR is that easy to farm, and toughness allows you to eat hits without consequences.
If you want to hear specific examples, here you go
Summary
Like even regular trash mobs deal dmg, slave rat poke is something like 40 dmg, when your hp is ~120-150. Can you loose 1/3 of HP from poxwalker? No.
Assassin leap in V2 deals shittones of dmg, and he can kill you like in 3 second, aswell as he can land on you from above. Dog can’t do nothing of that.
Monks combined with shield stormvermins is much scarier and deadly then ragers+bulwarks. And monks combo alone is a more complicated mix (atleast at first) with grab alike hits and fast slashes.
The problem is that enemies are kinda the same as in V2 in their core design, but players are much more stronger.
But my favourite is V2 bulwark that was added long after DT release, has more attacks than DT bullwark, like he can charge at you.
And other stuff.
In Killing Floor 2 every enmy has it’s own special ability kinda, husks (ranged enemy) can perform a suicide blow, sirens destroy explossive projectiles with screams, scrakes moving slowly towards you untill you dmg them and they rush at you swinging their chainsaw, etc.
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I think another issue (which is often raised) is that there are a lot of difficulty modifiers for a game experience, e.g.:
- Player skill and selected difficulty (which the player has control over)
- Level modifiers (e.g. pox hounds, high intensity, etc.) and level design which the player has bounded control (i.e. selecting from a list)
- Other player skill level, game jankiness, etc. (which the player has no control over).
If you are a “Heresy Skilled player” and select “Heresy difficulty” (for example), your experience might go from trivial (low intensity, high skilled other players) to near-impossible (high intensity, low skilled other players). Or, to spell it out, even within one difficulty level, you can go from “oh there’s a horde, oh and now there’s some shotgunners, ha ha this is fun” to “oh, there’s a horde + 3 snipers + 3 ragers + oh, is that 4 crushers and a bulwark…ah and here comes the Plague Ogryn, whelp we’re dead”. All of this can make Darktide pretty frustrating, because if you just want to drop into a game then you could be playing significantly under or over your ability level without really have chosen to do so.
One of the things I quite liked in Aliens: Fireteam Elite was the ability to “play modifying cards” to tune the difficulty of the experience (players could propose and vote on them). So player agency could decide if you were to have a fairly easy time of it, or if you were to have some pretty tough gameplay (e.g. being chased by an indestructible Alien which you could only drive off periodically). I don’t know such a system would be popular (though I think some people would love to have the choice, particularly for modifiers like “endless waves” or “you are being chased by the Karnak twins and have to drive them off” in addition to the “lights out”, etc. we already have), but I do think that Darktide has too much inter-difficulty-variability and not enough player agency when it comes to overall difficulty.
But this is a personal opinion – YMMV of course.
Yes the modifiers are kinda crazy. I do enjoy that they exist but I think the trouble is they’re not obvious enough on the map menu. They should be in giant flashing lights because they essentially affect the gameplay experience more than the difficulty level.
Or if you drop randomly into a game then you have no idea what condition you’re playing as it’s not on the loading screen.
Honestly, the combination of increased mob density AND different health pools/whatever variables they apply other than increased enemy presence (damage?) is both confusing and a poor way to approach the “difficulty” conundrum.
Helldivers’ approach of having more enemies of “higher quality” appearing in greater numbers, more patrols, reinforcements and objectives etc, but having static health and damage outputs from enemies makes it far easier to grok the difference between difficulties and know what you as a player are able to deal with and take on alone or with other people (the more people the less difficult because of the access to additional strategems imo).
I think my approach/philosophy on difficulty may differ from folks here, but I’d rather see uniform health/damage per enemy type preserved across difficulties and adjust the number of specialists and elites as well as horde calls as difficulties go up.
Chaff enemies should always be present in significant numbers across the board to gum up the works and impede progress or clean shots on what is actually a threat to the party while also doing minimal damage themselves.
Elites obviously should appear in greater numbers as difficulty increases, but I don’t think that having a crusher ball of 8-10 of the lads all standing inside one another is what I’m looking for.
I want specialists to feel special, they shouldn’t be appearing in massive numbers, but frequency should obviously increase with difficulty. They should pose a significant threat to the party, or at least a threat enough that they need to be prioritized immediately or risk getting half your squad downed/wiped.
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Snipers didn’t change much, only one sniper is very easy to counter, like it was when first introduced maybe you felt it was scarier because you weren’t used to deal with them at first. They made the laser more visible because an enemy that has no counterplay is just bad design.
Different types of enemies have different roles and they are grouped accordingly, mobs role is to fill the space and chip away players health, special disrupt the player and elites are there to pressure the players and grab the players attention so they can’t deal with the others.
What you saying may be fun and cool but there are plenty of other games that give you this experience, when I go in Darktide I want to feel in rag-tag team of 4 against the whole hive city.
I’m assuming you are only referring only to V2 since in payday is exclusively ranged and V1 you have no abilities, and that’s debatable because there is plenty of CDR there too.
Yes but doesn’t mean that they are more interesting to fight, if anything in Darktide you have more options so it creates more interesting combinations.
Terrific, since we have a game with quality enemies already let’s have one with quantity.
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Hard to disagree with most of this 
i think at the moment the balance is okay to me, but some of the end events are kinda not enganging/interesting, because of how easy they are. and most of them are camp spots imo.
most of the end events kinda short also. so it’s also map design mostly, with placing certain enemies that do not make a threat as well.
it’s not like this for all end events however, some are in the right spot, others are not.
conclusions:
we are powerful but there is still the feeling of struggle sometimes, which is even more if a player dies. not everytime everyone plays perfectly, so the result always change.
also in the end these type of games, just like Left 4 Dead, etc.
they are meant to win 100% of the cases once knowing the game, if sometimes there are wipes, it is because of unfortunate moments, conditions, decisions, mistakes, etc.
I always see defeat as something that did not work out well, because of multiple reasons. mostly oriented to myself only.
anyway the game is fun regardless of balance issues, and it is cool the amount of enemies in higher difficulties thrown at players, cause makes it more fun, and it feels really like we are there to purge the heretics from Atoma Prime.
in vermintide 1, the quantity of enemies was lower, but the gameplay was slow paced and stamina worked differently there where punished you more if depleted.
and armoured skaven rats (black rat) are very more tankier and dangerous than the vt2 ones.
in fact an armoured skaven patrol in vt1 was more dangerous than the vt2 ones because they had more hp and more stronger.
and in vt1 back then, we didn’t have any ult. xD
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I strongly agree with this sentiment.
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I do the opposite, I play Malice because I want to be extremely comfortable with everything I can before I move up a difficulty. Im fully capable of playing Damnation with even a half decent team and Auric Mael with a good team, although I would probably be a slight detriment to the team rn as Im not used to that level of difficulty.
I played Champion on V2 for about 1.5k hours before I moved up to playing Legend regularly (and even then I generally play with bots because people are so unpredictable) . That way is not everyones cup of tea tho, I understand. Some peeps need to see and attempt to reach the peak. Im happy just chilling at the base-camp until I acclimatize.
Having played malice for about 400 hours now, I can safely say that the density and difficulty at that level is fine. Half the players I come across struggle. Its a good difficulty to practice on for mid-range players.
I rekon I win about 95% of Malice games (likely more). A third are because the other players are easily skilled enough and my absence wouldnt have affected the outcome but this is not considering if I was replaced by a liability which can destroy a slightly flakey team.
The other 2/3rds I helped greatly and a portion of those I helped carry by being a cohesive team member i.e. keeping track of dangers the team wouldnt handle and completing objectives the team ignores.
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Yeah I didn’t play above T3 (heracy? I can never remember which difficulty is which) until I had reached level 30. It takes no time whatsoever to reach level 30 so I just wanted to take level related nerfs out the equation before tackling higher tiers. So if I died I knew it was me and not a lacklustre HP issue.