Pretty much. That in itself is fine in my opinion. This inability to dodge with ranged out is the main problem I had with it. It’s flow-ruining to have to switch to melee during the ranged phases to deal with one or two trash enemies that you only learn about through the “you’re about to get whacked” noise.
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I think this devblog from Mats is very relevant to this thread:
https://www.playdarktide.com/news/devblog-hybrid-combat/
- Far Combat is the cover-based peeking and accurate shots of combat rifles.
- Close Combat is the chaotic and fast dance of short-range damage dealing while dodging and weaving between enemies to survive. Shotguns. Submachine Guns.
- Locking fighters in Melee Combat forces both sides into the hand-to-hand combat of Vermintide , which can be helpful as it removes the concern of the ranged threats and replaces them with much more immediate problems, often involving chain axes.
I also want to comment on:
A hybrid between meaty Melee and Classic FPS. Because 40K has never been about running around with rifles. 40K has never been swordsmen clashing shields. 40K, in its essence, is Bolter in one hand and Chainsword in the other, facing a tsunami of enemies. Do we have any examples of this from other games? No? Another silent Swedish nod
Space Marine is a great example of hybrid combat, it was the best melee&ranged mix i have ever played, except some Vermintide 1 or 2 builds (careers). It was very fast, fluid, shooting was simple but effective.
And i think ability to dodge melee attacks while shooting - is a big plus for Tide games. Which it has over games like L4D or Killing Floor
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Killing Floor 2 you can sprint backwards. It’s kinda silly haha.
EYE Divine Cybermancy had a decent option for melee+range, but the combat mechanics weren’t as complex as the Tide games and AI is a bit on the simpler side.
I guess my take was different. Based on so many other FPS shooters, I expected weapon switching to be cripplingly slow. So I was surprised by DT.
Also bear in mind, it might be slow so they can leverage weapon swap speed later as part of talents and gear.
the first impression for me was that it felt clunky, but i wouldnt go so far as to say that its a downgrade, the weapons swap is something that limits us now coming from V2 so naturally anyone who played 1000/2000 hours or even more would get the impression
that being said its just forces the player to aproach the situation differently, pushing trash into snapshot special kill doesnt work so, maybe we gotta adapt and use the surroundings more or maybe we gotta rely on allies to make room for the special snipers more
as long as there are opportunities to adapt to it im not against it.
question remains, are there? well impossible to know from just an beta thats something thats gonna show after a few weeks
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I debate it on design philosophy itself. Good hybrid combat in my opinion shouldn’t be clunky.
Slow weapon swap reduces ability to clutch and skill ceiling lowers. It also just feels bad.
You can reduce stagger and damage from guns, but fast swap is essential in this game as the battles are intense, the ranged fire is very punishing at high difficulties, if you’re caught in the open you just die at 4 or 5 difficulty. And its not simply a tactical shooter like Squad, there can be 20 zombies that spawn 2 meters from a door behind you, forcing you to get the hell out and right into the gun lines.
I imagine what it’d do is reduce the pace to a crawl - when horde or melee ambience advances, full team retreats far back into a corner to kill them first with melee, then goes out to kill enemy ranged enemies second, would be very artificially divided into phases.
Edit:
Or another example, which was frequently experienced: during an event, theres often a need to move in open ground (where cover is rare and weak), like covering a teammate doing hacking or carrying stuff.
So naturally when zombies arrive from multiple sides, you have to melee them. And when a group of lasgunners + 1-2 scab/shot gunner appear 10-15m away (from door, or around corner). They proceed to light me up, and i feel thats it, i’m dead. As a Veteran you’ve gotta switch to ranged and shoot back. But the switch is so awfully slow to lasgun or autogun with the unnecessary gun manipulations (racking charging handle like in CounterStrike), then also have to ADS which is also slow, since hipfire is so inaccurate for anything except pointblank. By the time i’m ready to fire, my shields are gone and i’m blinded by the suppression / hurt effects. The damage output enemy ranged units can do is ridiculous - which i’m not against if we had more prowess and less chunkiness in controls (among other things like visibility).
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You know what this reminds me of?
L4D. Remember when the hordes would come and the dominant strategy was to pack yourself into a corner? Then they introduced enough specials to break up that mentality, and the game kind of progressed into people holding a loose but close formation in a defensible area that they could quickly shift out of as a group.
DT has kind of moved the needle back toward finding small spaces to defend. The ranged fire can be crazy punishing which means we not only need to find an area where melee enemies can be funneled, it also needs enough cover to largely stay out of sight of ranged enemies. All of which packs us into smaller and smaller spaces…that are perfect for a bomber to then completely wreck.
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I just want to add that i also don’t like that.
Having a Ranged weapon out should not penalize dodging.
The Melee part is too big in the game where Guns should be the focus.
I would even argue that a Gun with a bayonet should be more viable as it is right now as you effectively have a melee weapon(spear) in your hands all time…
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yet another design decision FS went with that i strongly dislike
ranged combat sounded good
and looked cool
but felt
absolutely awful in darktide
in my mind i was thinking
darktide would play more like bounty hunter in vermintide
constantly swapping between melee and ranged, dancing around enemy attacks, keeping an eye out for high value threats
instead it felt like
the first vermintide
but so much worse
it makes zero sense why my character cannot dodge with a gun
and again it feels so unrewarding
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It doesn’t help that you’re safer in melee than in ranged where enemies will fry you in seconds. I have to agree about your take on shooting. It sounds awesome, it looks fantastic but it feels odd. Risky and time consuming to fight using ranged weapons.
The melee meta (of beta) shows that it’s best to take a revolver or a shotgun and just melee your way through the level while bursting down elites and specials. In my feedback posts I listed things like running reloads, further sliding, no unnecessary animations (yanking at the bolt when equiping the autogun), flashlights for all ranged weapons to go with other special actions, no artifical block on shooting when aiming in and out and so on.
I understand Fatshark’s special is melee combat but I hope they try to master the gunplay as well ^^ I sure hope they can make autoguns worthwhile when all the other cools guns are in the game such as hellguns, plasma guns and melta guns to name a few. Right now melee is always superior to guns in any case in horde clearing. You can specialize in melee for killing soft targets and armored targets but in ranged combat I fear that there will be no need for lasguns and autoguns as you can just lock corrupted guardsmen in melee as you charge them and kill specials and elites with heavy damage low fire rate guns (maybe some particularly annoying guardsmen as well). This means that the gameplay loop is essentialy not 50/50 melee and ranged like advertised but closer to Vermintide. It’s more like 75/25 since you mostly swap to ranged to burst down specials and elites on higher difficulties and the rest of the game it’s just easier and better to not use ammo and quickly kill melee enemies with swords and axes while kiting.
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I agree about the dodging with guns issue, but if they implemented everything else you’ve suggested it would swing the pendulum back equally far in the other direction and ranged would be dominant.
The reason why ranged kills don’t restore toughness is twofold. Firstly, you might have noticed that generally speaking melee strips your Toughness much faster than ranged. I don’t have any hard numbers right now but generally speaking you can survive at least half a dozen potshots from enemy lasguns before your toughness breaks, whereas even a couple poxwalkers will tear it down in seconds if you let them. Secondly, suppression exists. Shooting at ranged enemies does suppress them, preventing them from hurting you in the first place. If ranged kills also restored toughness, then on anything below Heresy you might as well be immune to enemy lasgunners unless they come in squads of ten.
As far as running and reloading? Melee characters have farther to run. If you could keep up with them even while reloading, they’d never get a kill except in hordes. Plus the ability to empty a mag while backpedaling, turn and sprint away while reloading, and repeat, would make kiting the easiest thing in the world. Remember, sprinting wasn’t even a thing in VT1/2; seems to me like it was implemented in part to help you move from cover to cover, and in part to help melee characters still get stuck in despite the increased firepower of the guns they’re competing with.
As for melee being superior to guns in horde clearing, that has not at all been my experience. More sustainable maybe, since you don’t have to reload, but I have yet to meet a melee weapon that clears hordes as effectively as the combat shotgun, rippergun, or Psyker staff.
Lastly, if they’re going to implement game modes that require flashlights, they should honestly just make it completely disconnected from weapons in the first place. Give us a headlamp or chest lamp or something. No reason to make it take up an attachment slot and leave melee users blind.
I also felt ranged was still very useful on higher difficulties (to keep lasgunners from tearing the melee apart from afar in particular.)
There’s also kind of a headlamp, but it only illuminates when you’re REAL close to objects. It could probably use a bit of a range boost.
I can’t agree with most things you said BUT I also think that the “lights out” affix to the mission should give everyone a headlamp that is just as strong as the flashlights on the lasguns.
I agree about the dodging with guns issue, but if they implemented everything else you’ve suggested it would swing the pendulum back equally far in the other direction and ranged would be dominant.
I’m not asking for double the damage and double the ammo cap. Here’s what I’d like to see:
-
flashlights for all guns to go with the special abilities (you have to be able to see to shoot)
-
stop yanking the bolt (this would make ranged weapons more responsive and would allow autoguns and lasguns to take down the so tanky specials before they charge past you)
-
further sliding (so that you can slide to cover with easy without having to slide cancel to dodge lasgun fire)
-
running reloads (no brainer - if some players in the team prefer ranged combat because it feels nice and some players prefer melee because it’s the meta then they will be split up and break coherency which is only natural as an average team is not a hivemind)
-
the ability to shoot when aiming in and out (this is the most artifical anti-fun roadblock I have seen in an FPS, it doesn’t feels nice, it’s obstructive and it’s also doesn’t make any sense)
All of these 5 changes would not only make the ranged weapons more competetive against the melee but also would make using guns a lot less clunky and awkward. Now I don’t know what difficulty have you been playing on but as far as I remember a lasgun shot on the 3rd (out of 5 difficulties) difficulty dealt 25% toughness damage while the melee chaos guardsmen removed 50% of your tougness with a single strike.
The reason why ranged kills don’t restore toughness is twofold. Firstly, you might have noticed that generally speaking melee strips your Toughness much faster than ranged. I don’t have any hard numbers right now but generally speaking you can survive at least half a dozen potshots from enemy lasguns before your toughness breaks, whereas even a couple poxwalkers will tear it down in seconds if you let them. Secondly, suppression exists. Shooting at ranged enemies does suppress them, preventing them from hurting you in the first place. If ranged kills also restored toughness, then on anything below Heresy you might as well be immune to enemy lasgunners unless they come in squads of ten.
Both of us remember something else happening so I found this comprehensive video to make sure we are both on the same page. Here’s a video I will refer to down below. It’s worth to remember that this video is a damnation run (difficulty 5) but the statistics between melee and ranged enemies seem to scale as expected.
At 2:13 the Zealot player is fighting a small mixed group of enemies while suddenly he is hit with a single melee attack by a corrupted guardsmen. The results? 100% toughness is removed and also some health. Let’s compare enemy melee attacks to the threat that awaits if you don’t lock the enemies in melee combat. Ten seconds into the video the player hangs over a ledge to find the enemies and is shot first shot for 42% toughness (about 50% of melee damage just like in the 3rd difficulty). Then his toughness regenerates to 70% and he is shortly after dealt the remaining 70% toughness plus 8 health with a single shot/burst. Later as he fights through a few enemies in the next minute or two you see 4 more examples of him getting shot with autoguns and in each burst he takes about 50-70% toughness damage. But that’s still not as strong as dangerous as melee where most of your toughness is lost. Right?
Wrong. Just for a second, picture 8 corrupted guardsmen with swords out in front of you. Can you beat them without losing any shields at all? Of course it’s a cakewalk. Now picture the same 8 guardsmen with autoguns and lasguns equipped. If they all had a chance to fire at you you would at least lost all your toughness not to mention some health even if you dodged a few of these shots and shoot them down. You could try to slide cancel into them but that doesn’t help your argument where the melee is more risky as you charge in to lock the enemies in melee to avoid ranged combat. Well, how do you think a Sharpshooter Veteran would approach this scenario?
He would aim his autogun and try to clear the ranged enemies but what would happen is he would be chipped down to 0 toughness and 50% and also he would be stunlocked and blinded by the guardsmen’s fire as his toughness snaps. According to the video the ranged enemies seem to shot 1 second after locking you as a target. This means that even if the player was really good and he would manage to kill 3 guys before the 1 second grace period ends he would still have 5 more volleys coming at him. Ranged combat like this is not sustainable like melee where you carve the horde and shape it with pushes however you like as you replenish your toughness when you make a mistake and get hit sometimes. Unless you’re a Psyker of course. Then you can just brain burst spam the guardsmen as you peek out and into the cover as you charge the ability to not allow them to fire back at you. Here’s the same match but from the perspective of a psyker in the team. Look at the 4:10 minute mark will you? There you see that the Veteran Sharpshooter struggles to fight while the Psyker just locks the target into brain burst and skidaddles away behind the stairs (cover) as he dealts damage. You might not like it but this is how peak performance looks like and I expect we see an obligatory Psyker in nearly all damnation runs. These guys have always perfect accuracy on the head weakspot and can do damage while behind cover while not requiring any ammunition to begin with. This allows the Psyker to also have 100% toughness at all times as well as being able to dodge without ranged weapon penalty as they’re using a “grenade”. What do Veteran Sharpshooter get? A fistful of lead in the face and a cool lasgun. They can’t even have Cadia anymore.
Unfortunately it seems that your arguments are based on what you’re projecting to make sense to be the case rather that what’s actually going on. I hope that my breakdown helped you to understand how the situation actually looks when you try to make the most out of ranged combat. Cheers
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I feel like they need to give you a bit more of a chance to respond, like the first few shots of the burst (depending on difficulty) being near-misses because their accuracy is really good even with only a tiny bit of your hitbox outside of cover.
They buffed the dodge in dt, so if you could dodge with ranged out there would be no reason to melee except for ammo conservation. I guess that’s why, to force melee.
Vermintide 2 already went through this which is why I find it odd. Dodge was too strong in VT2, which meant the other tools weren’t used. So they made it so if you dodged too much they become slower and less effective. It was perfect because it forced you to use everything at your disposal, dodges, pushes, etc. In DT, it seems like their solution to nerf dodges is to gimp it while holding ranged. Which makes literally no sense; again, why would the enemies choose to attack you differently depending on what weapon you’re holding?
…why? Why not apply the same solution applied in VT2 which is proven to have worked? I really hope that this is addressed because it just makes the game feel jank and objectively less fun to play.
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The change that made dodge op in vt2 (wasnt in the game on release) was that dodge cancelled mobs running attacks, which enabled kiting backwards and it made combat very easy. It also hade a way too big window where the mobs tracking broke.
They later shortened the window and made running attacks keep going in the direction where you started your dodge instead of stopping.
The thing with darktide is that there is no slowdown after a dodge, so you can chain your effective dodges in succession.
I hope they find another solution other than making the dodge slowdown again, because frankly, it feels much better without the slowdown, especially dodging with a ranged weapon out (you can still outspace mobs since you have no slowdown).
I didn’t notice the “no dodge on ranged” too much in beta, I generally found it pretty easy to dodge with ranged out, compared to vt2. But that might be because the weapon I played most with had good dodge distance, or simply because I didn’t play enough to really get a feel for it.
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the thing is that dodge breaks tracking that’s the function that allows you to avoid dmg, if you have a ranged out (DT) it doesn’t break tracking wich literally means as long as you are in range of said attack its going to connect
the only way to still be able to avoid a hit with a ranged weapon, is if your location is so far away from an enemy that it exceeds the maximum distance of that attack.
meaning that sideways dodges (assuming your looking at the enemy) don’t work, backwards dodges only work if the enemy is trying to attack you from a decently far away position.
in vermintide this isn’t the case. ranged weapons do often have lower amount of dodges and weaker distance, but the’re is no difference on any dodge in its ability to break tracking.
you can see the “not breaking tracking” while dodging with a ranged weapon out in almost all Darktide beta gameplay videos, this is the most blatant example where he slides for an eternity and does a 90 degree turn if you wanna see an example This is DARKTIDE - A Comprehensive Beginner's Guide to Warhammer 40k Darktide - YouTube
lmao it looks so jank. I swear this feels like this is a bug that they’ve just turned into a feature just so they can address it later after “listening to feedback” and look like the good guys for listening. Because there’s no way anyone can look at that and go “yep, looks good, this is exactly what we wanted”