Hello FatShark Forums! I was leveling up a new character, playing at a lower difficulty to unlock higher levels. It was Malice and there weren’t that many enemies around. To have some amount of challenge, I was using gray weapons I automatically got when I first made the class. This made it so each Gunner, Mauler, Crusher etc. felt meaningful and threatening. And when I was doing this, I had a realization about Darktide’s enemy spam. What is the reason as to why the AI director spawn so many enemies? Because:
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We are too hard to kill.
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We kill enemies too fast.
The issue with number 2) can be fixed by increasing enemy HP and in-turn reduce their spawn numbers by a bit, but what about us being nearly unkillable? Gold Toughness is to blame. It nullifies almost all enemies because as long you have even a little of it, you’ll take no toughness bleed-through dmg.
The consequences: When we die, most of the time we are downed in a second because we failed to dodge that one overhead from an army of Maulers/Crushers.
Because Gold Toughness completely invalidates the danger of all enemies, the AI director needs to crank up the numbers to give us a challenge.
This reminded me how people always said that in Vermintide 2, enemies slowly trickled down our health, while in Darktide we lose huge chunks of it in less than a moment. Without Gold Toughness, Darktide would be functioning exactly the same as Vermintide 2. We wouldn’t need so many enemies on the screen, and you know what? The game used to function like this, before Gold Toughness existed.
The way Darktide combat is designed is to have ranged and melee enemies work together to try to deplete the players health. When you have full toughness, the first hit from a regular melee enemy will not take away your HP, but a second hit will already take a small bit of it. That is why enemies like Ragers are very dangerous because their attacks consists of things like two hits in a very quick succession.
Now, players have a lot of ways to gain back their toughness, so this makes it much harder to kill us with only melee. This is where the ranged enemies come in: ranged attacks do not damage your health, only when your toughness gets fully depleted do they start to badly hurt you. Ranged enemies alone, however, can be easily dealt with by suppressing them or dodging their attacks by sliding.
And that, is where the beauty of Darktide’s combat starts to shine, because together, ranged enemies take away your toughness, so that melee enemies can run in and do damage to your health. This makes it, so your health gets slowly depleted as you continue to fight your way through the map, and if you are not careful you will not survive to see its end. Throw specialists and bosses into the mix, and you have yourself a challenging and fun horde co-op shooter.
But then, Gold Toughness suddenly enters the picture, takes this combat philosophy and throws it right out the window. No more do you need to be worried about melee units damaging you through your toughness because Gold Toughness has you covered.
And because of that, we are nearly unkillable, so the AI director needs to roll up its sleeves and start spamming 20 Ragers, 15 Gunners, 7 Crushers etc.
FatShark, I know you have people that read through the forums to see what feedback the players have to offer, so here’s my feedback:
Gold Toughness breaks Darktide’s combat philosophy by nullifying the threat of enemies damaging the player through regular toughness. Remove it, increase the HP of some enemies, and you can significantly reduce enemy spawn rates to successfully remove enemy spam.
As of now, I don’t think there is anyone in Darktide’s playerbase who will genuinely want to die on the hill that Golden Toughness shouldn’t be removed. It’s not that it makes the game too easy, it’s that it forces the game to become unbearably annoying with how many enemies spawn on the screen.
I am also aware that increasing enemy HP will only further trivialize weapons like the Heavy Sword and incentivize players to use things like the Dueling Sword. However:
- I am fully confident that FatShark will take steps to resolve this issue. They already nerfed the Dueling Sword once, and since it didn’t make it any less weak, due to the classes being reworked, they can nerf it again.
- The issue with weapons like the Heavy sword, is their ineffectiveness against Carapace. Carapace is a fully separate can of worms that FatShark will have to wrangle, but I think that either reworking or fully removing it will do the trick to make weapons like the Heavy Sword viable. For instance, they can either:
- Replace all the Crusher’s armor with Flak;
- Give the Crusher a Flak or Unarmored weakspot in the head’s area.
Whatever they’ll choose to do, they should also increase Crushers HP and reduce their spawn rates a bit more to keep it consistent once every enemy will be spawned in lesser numbers.
I think I mentioned everything relating to the enemy spam problem and how to fix it. If you have any opinions, ideas, criticism to give to my post, feel free to comment about it below.
Thanks for bothering to read through this wall of a text, and take care! 
Tagging @FatsharkQuickpaw for a chance he reads it.
