There are melee weapons and weapon marks (XI Arbites shield’s heavy into light, horizontal heavy sword sweeps etc) designed around having a better horde clear than their peers, but then every single modifier on the mission board wants you to deal with either bosses, specials or elites, so most of the time you just want high damage single target weapons.
Weapons like heavy sword, devil’s claw, chainsword don’t have a good enough niche and that’s why barely anyone uses them, because every mission is balanced around armored enemy spawns.
Moebian 21st should return to auric pool and get fleshed out with additional tweaks, like:
Endless poxwalker hordes during the mission where players need to actually push through enemies while trying to progress through the map.
Less armored elites spawning so people can bring those underused weapons without worrying they’ll have to regularly fight clusters of 10 Crushers/Maulers/Scab Ragers.
Maybe some new mechanics to make horde clear a more of a unique challenge, to spice things up. Maybe give hordes 50% DOT/explosion immunity, so that people don’t just bring tox nades, flame staff etc and actually melee horde enemies instead of clearing them with abilities?
One of the most fun bugs I have ever encountered in Darktide was “endless hordes”. You could barely move initially. The AI director just went crazy and spawned endless hordes until we hit the Power Matrix mid event.
Send in the Next Wave was always one of my favorite deed modifiers from VT2, especially glitched up to Cata. It became non-stop, just an unending stream of mixed horde and elites.
I don’t think Darktide can handle that though. Not with the limitations imposed by crossplay. Consoles have real difficulty with the higher entity count. VT2 avoided it by having, effectively, completely separate games for each console that were balanced to their specs. Mostly, there are fewer entities and they are beefier to compensate. Since crossplay, DT has taken the same route by shifting the balance to be much more elite-heavy.
They should turn off the friendly fire damage from enemies. Even if you don’t have the magic anti-horde devices a single bomber or burster will delete an entire horde and there’s always like 3 or 4 up at the same time. Even crushers have an aoe on their attacks that will kill a couple guys every now and then.
The game should be playable at both fast and slow pace, depending on the needs of the team, otherwise every match is going to be the same. Auric is already way too fast in my opinion, most people don’t even bother looting side areas of the maps. Havoc can be closer to a middle ground pace, but with most random teams it’s on the slower side.
They don’t need to bump hordes for every single mission, just for a specific condition to create a unique gameplay experience.
I don’t think this is the root of the problem, I don’t really see bombers killing entire hordes with one grenade. I’m not 100% sure but I think enemies still go around the fire clouds (in case of barrels at least).
I don’t think anyone is playing Devil’s Claw in random auric lobbies.
I see heavy swords and devils claw maybe on one player every 20-30 games. 2+ Duelling Swords I see all the time. I don’t remember the last time I saw Psyker that’s not playing DS, Force Sword or Greatsword. Zealots may play with Thunder Hammer, Eviscerator, Knife and Combat Axes, but I rarely see anyone playing with the three weapons I mentioned. Maybe chainsword sees a bit more play than I claim, but that’s it. Certainly not popular picks.
Shock maul is also an incredibly rare weapon, I see it once in 20-30 games as well.
there is a modifier currently in the game that isn’t really in use outside of lights out, and that is large groups of static resting pox walkers that you bump into. i’d love to see that used again for normal game modes.
sorry, reading “I think enemies still go around fire clouds” from someone that I think regularly plays on havoc 40 just makes me wanna crash out. I feel like I need to stop engaging with this game. If that isn’t true about you then that’s on me.
Niche friendly fire facts include that it takes around 2 flamer backpack explosions to kill horde, one if you have global power bonuses up like slaughterer iirc, a single bomber nade will also delete horde regardless of tier (i.e. poxwalkers and scab bruisers both die to them the difference is like 1.5 second ttk), and while enemies will avoid barrel fire and the fire from the scab flamer’s backpack, they will not avoid the dreg flamer’s backpack fire.
crushers for some reason have adm scaling applied on their aoe, which means in scab seeds it takes like 4 swings or so to kill a scab bruisers but on dreg seeds takes like 2 or 3.
Havoc 40 pumps damage numbers so much higher than health that these breakpoints and ttks are all much lower.
I think people don’t realize the reason havoc 40 is so defined by elites and no small fries is that even if you decide to do “ethics” or whatever you’re still going to have a majority of the things you’re fighting melt to the special spam and crushers, especially in scab seeds. Hordes just aren’t allowed to exist in this game.
The way you phrase it, people routinely force enemies into attacking each other and clear way too many horde enemies this way. I don’t think an odd poxburster clearing some poxwalkers when it jumps behind the horde, or a random sniper killing 1 elite after you dodge their shot into another enemy is such a huge problem.
I’m not going to find a scoreboard to prove my point, I’m too lazy. There’s something like 300-600 specials in havoc depending on your team’s playstyle, maybe more or less on shorter/lengthier runs or when spawns bug out on some maps. You don’t have control over this, it’s rng whether a burster spawns and deletes the horde, or a bomber or flamer deletes the horde, and it’s pretty heavily in favor of those.
The mechanic they put in place in havoc, special assaults, is like a minute or 2 of nonstop special spawns up to special capacity. Really good teams recognize this and stop killing specific specials to reduce special spam. Worse teams will kill them as they come out. Regardless, this means a lot of bombers and flamers and bursters.
The special spam in this game is incredibly dull and defeats any purpose in having horde clear to be honest. Thinking about this for more than like 5 minutes is making me think about the last time I actually fought a poxwalker horde outside of like havoc 20. I think only when special spawns get disabled for a moment during a clutch, maybe? Idk.
