This patch has been the most fun I’ve had in Darktide in awhile. While the new weapons and map are fun, the changes to enemies and difficulty is the real winner here. Having every Auric mission finally not be a sweep is amazing.
I feel like there might be more enemies spawning as well, however this might be either placebo from enemies being stronger or mid and end events having their spawns working correctly again.
I’ve been telling all my friends about this, and in the past couple of days I’ve played and enjoyed games with people who haven’t played the game in over 6 months, because of these changes.
While I don’t think everything is perfect (gunner stagger and spawns ((not damage, just stagger)), and Trappers and Dogs being a little funky), in general this is such a step in a positive direction that has me excited to play and talk about Darktide, as well as get better to deal with the increased difficulty.
Please don’t nerf Auric Damnation. Or at the very least, don’t make any knee jerk enemy nerf changes.
anyone old enough to remember og '94 doom 2 when “nightmare” was unbeatable unless some dude came up with self made challenges?
doom tyson for example with only fist and pistol.
or even only fist and monster infighting?
i snuck my way into the local university in '96, fake id, poor excuse of a teenage beard an all, to access their it-room with a sportsbag full of 3,5" floppy disks and packed .rar files of demos on a 50 pack.
16 years of age, almost 30 years ago so any legal issues have long expired
thing was, ONE broken or unreadable disk and the whole batch was fked.
now why would i do such a thing ? to lift myself from stoneage keyboard only playstyle and enlighten my inner doomguy to the finer arts of m&k
jaws were dropping when we watched the score i downloaded and on a faithful day “hell revealed” was released as a 32 map megawad.
suddenly og doom 2 was a walk in the park compared to the arch vile cyber demon madness that was fired upon us.
guess what? soon someone did hell revealed “tyson”
these evolutions are one of my fondest memories.
memories i can relive through again thanks to darktide.
More enemies it feels like for sure, but even on non AuricMaelstrom missions it seems that every other enemy is a special or elite.
The mid level objective pre-shuttle on the new map is nuts for it. Difficult layout that one to defend too as the scenery obstacles basically make it a 6 spawn location.
As expected, some players are completely lost as soon as a lot of enemies show up, but overall it seems like the increased difficulty tends to make most people play a bit more team oriented, which makes the overall experience more fun.
I did not expect to see it happen so soon.
Not sure how it feels on other classes (i have only played psyker since the update came out) but to me, the updated auric difficulty feels good.
More enemies, more chaos, more difficulty. It is great.
New map is also great.
Can’t talk about the new weapons, i did not test them yet.
And the upcoming crafting update looks pretty promising too, if they polish it some more.
After a long time, i have caught myself feeling positive about FS and optimistic about this game again.
They always have the option to play on a lower difficulty.
Playing on a lower difficulty than what you are used to, might hurt the ego for a moment, but that is what a reasonable person would do.
some of these maelstrom mods are barely diff from auric. If you go into it with weapons that can deal with disablers they’re just as easy. And the worst part is you have to wait at least an hour for shitty maelstrom to move on
No one is entitled to play the hardest difficulty. You either unironically get good or admit to yourself that you need to step down a level to learn mechanics and improve.
Nothing shameful about it, but most people have too much of an ego to admit and do that. It’s always other players for these guys.
The increase in difficulty is honestly the best thing out of this content drop
including damnation they got 5 options to chose from.
meanwhile i’m deliberately skipping book penances cause there are non on auric maelstrom.
make custom map pool with + maelstrom tiers would only add to the game, not take from it.
my gym had arnold in his iconic victory olympia pose.
should i have felt bad because i didnt look like arnie despite taking juice as well?
no, it fired me up to get another rep out of my aching body.
some of those in lesser difficulties dont even have any aspiration to better themselves, some are fine relaxing on sedition.
those with a drive to thrive will have to beat those obstacles anyways to reach the top, better they learn early lest they are in for a rude awakening.
Some maps defo have more spawn locations and enemy density around specific sections. I believe community testers like jsat, telepots and others pushed heavily for these changes.
Not to discount the wider community, a lot of us have felt that many maps need more spawn locations and higher intensity.
I don’t like the increases, but perhaps not for the reasons some others might not.
I’ve noticed almost no difference in the damage I take, and my handling of stuff -feels- very similar to how it was before. Overall my gameplay hasn’t really changed. But the friends I play with don’t it, seem to be falling more often, and they’re getting tired of the deaths and endlessly getting picked up (hey thanks for getting me the penances for that complete!).
So since they’re getting less interested in playing and I play the vast majority of my games with friends, I don’t play as much, because the people I play with on Heresy don’t play as much. Sadness.
Would prefer they stretch the top, rather than compress from the top.
I would disagree, because I think continuously expanding the top will lead to not only more stretched thin player bases especially with DT’s matchmaking system, but eventually incredibly unfun difficulty.
I haven’t played normal Damnation since the changes, but I assume it’s probably a lot more fun than it was before and wouldn’t be horrible to play on.
I understand saying “go down a difficulty” isn’t the easiest thing to swallow or the mlst constructive comment, but I believe that the hardest difficulty should be the hardest difficulty and should require mastery of the game’s systems to complete. Going down and dying is part of that process, and something I’ve done more recently than my pride would like to admit. However that makes success all the tastier, especially when you know it was your preformance that contributed to that.
As an adrenaline junky for this game I can only speak from my experience, and how I enjoy(most of) these changes.
If we’re not making jokes and mocking one another while we play, we’re probably not returning to the game. So I think it’s pretty fair to suggest we’re mostly not a band of die-hard desperados! It’s just two approaches, I suppose, depending on the peculiarities of how we approach the content provided.
I’d argue that getting shuffled down difficulty thanks to the compression of lower difficulties, because of the needs of a bunch of players you’ll likely never understand, leads to the loss of more of the casual player base than a steeper increase of the upper tiers would cost numbers of the more hardcore strivers. But that’s just my perception from being vaguely between the two.
Appreciate the opposing view, and I try to understand it, though of course I’m going to disagree like some sort of stubborn monster! All I can say for sure is my friends are playing less and talking less about it, despite my dropping news and reaching out to them more. And I wanna play more!
I’ve been wanting more Maelstroms for a long time. I think they’re a really good (and fun) way into higher play. If you can deal with 12 muties at a time, even on the easiest difficulty, you are so much more prepared for higher difficulties. Also it’s so much more hilarious being knocked around when it doesn’t down you immediately!
Call it 1.5/2.5/3.5/4.5 tier difficulty – it’s a nice bump in intensity no matter the difficulty.
Sadly, there are already people saying it’s too hard. If it’s too hard, dont play auric 5! Or get on discord and find a group. I hope they dont go back on these changes, i love the difficulty
