I feel like for some time there is more and more changes that nerf melee and meaningful interaction with enemies , buffing ranged and AOE spam. The amount of enemies is alrdy causing it to a significant extent, with such unending hordes AOE is king, specially the ammo less psyker kind.
Blight Havoc modifier?
Makes melee a much more complicated affair, either you got a “corruption healer” in party meaning hive scum with stim pack builf or Zealot with beacon of purity or you simply cant rely on melee.
Rotten Armor?
Again with such amount of crushers and maulers and that greengoop mist, the safest option is to range it, because its incredibly easy to eat an overhead when 6 crushers and 8 maulers intersect with each other, in a blob, and start to hack at you. yuo literraly cant see what the second or third row is doing.
And i do feel Darktide is the most fun when everybody has run out of AOE and there is 3-4 crushers+ some support left and we got to dance with them, dodge the attacks, help each other…I feel likes it is its core , that its slowly erasing.
I did play VT2, it was fun, but somehow idint liek it as much as Darktide. Also im not afraid to admit VT2 graphics look to me a bit dated these days. Maybe i will give it another try tough one of these days…
I’m having a hard time articulating it exactly, but in VT2 you generally have to pay more attention to the individual enemies right in front of you and be cognizant of blocking, pushing, attacking when you have a safe opening, etc. There are less enemies, but each one matters more and you have to think more about how to attack and avoid trading blows. Even more so with elites.
In Darktide, it’s just a wall of enemies and so long as you can attack fast enough you’ll just mush your way through it. It plays more on auto-pilot. It’s less engaging. Sure, VT2 has its moments where’s just a horde of rats, but even then, I still find myself taking more chip damage if I’m not paying attention.
There was a period earlier in DT’s lifecycle where the combat felt better. At various points masses of ranged enemies were actually more of a threat and so there was a role for lasguns and counter-ranged play. Now you just sprint-slide or bubble shield your way across the map. At the same time, enemies of all types were fewer but more dangerous without having to suffer crazy buffs.
The class skill tree rework did result in a major buff to player power. And then removing locks on weapons allowed everything to get setup with the best-in-slot, which was another huge (probably even bigger) buff to players. I welcome those changes, but the enemies weren’t rebalanced in a comprehensive way to account for this. The approach thus far has been to just spam more and more enemies, and so here we are. I think the game has been having an identity crisis ever since.
Beside obvioust things like adding actual skiltres, give DS to other classes and DLC one being OP wasnt much of issiue even if its take time to adjust, but fact when devs signal nerfs to DS and Plasma Gun players from specific server rewievbomb DT on Steam droping it to Mixed and being quite close to Negative.
So yeah now devs avoid “upseting” this spoiled brats and harm DT in the process.
I haven’t played this in months and the enemy spam even on Malice alone has become beyond annoying. Never mind crap like Havoc.
The fact that they have made matters worse is truly astonishing.
The game can’t even give you a breather to reload your gun because it’s constantly spamming crap from all directions.
Wtf are there so many hordes on a Malice mission with no modifier? It’s just an endless spam of everything. There’s a thing called ‘pacing’ in games. Whoever the current head honcho is clearly didn’t get that memo.
Their AI “Director” is just getting worse with each passing month from the looks of it.
Thats a point too, about the pacing. Im a bit of a try hard and i play Auric and mid level Havocs, so i welcome difficulty spikes, but god damn it, atm there is no 10 seconds of breather in those difficulties. You loose focus for a second, and you loose half of your health. Imho there should be 5-10 seconds persiods of calm between battles, so you can refocus, its just healthy for human psyche, even when you are tryharding.
Almost every havoc mechanic and modifier disincentivizes melee, which I agree is the most fun aspect of the game.
Rotten armor cloud, specials spam, frequent twins, enormous gunner walls, massed bulwarks, rampage, unending moebian 21st swarms, blight, stimms, final toll, corruption damage from being hit, etc. Havoc is fundamentally broken. It’s only fun in the sense that it’s the highest challenge currently in the game.
The weird thing about modifiers is, yeah, they add ones that hurt melee the most, but never will like . . . make enemies who are resistant to ranged or immune to DoTs or something like that.
I agree with what others have said, that VT2 is a better experience in a lot of ways. I have a hard time going back, though, because I’ve already played that one for so damn long, lol. That, and there are advancements in the formula in DT that I think feel sorely lacking when you play VT2, like the more thorough use of the Special Attack function on weapons, sprinting, and sliding. (And yes, because someone always brings it up, I know we lost things like staged heavies and reach weapons, it advanced in some ways and regressed in others).
I know sliding is contentious, but as a shooter fan since the beginning I LOVE that there’s kind of a dodge specifically for ranged attacks that allows you to play a little more aggressively against guns. It’s imperfect, too easy to invalidate ranged attackers with, but it’s still a very fun tool, I think.
I cant comment on overall trend, but I like Havoc as endgame idea, a mode wehre you can try to get better and better and advance further and further. I got beef with a lot of current Havoc specifics , but the general idea imho is pretty good.
easy solution: delete arbites, delete hive scum, delete inferno staff, delete perilious combustion and delete ds4.
ogryns can keep their strength they are funny.
I gotta be honest, while Arby is strong I don’t think they’re too strong. They seem to be at an appropriate level of strength. The class is kind of one-note (I do play around with alternate builds, but at the end of the day it always plays similarly). But it does it very well. It fully embraces the class fantasy of being Unstoppable Armored Cop while still actually being very stoppable and having weaknesses. At least - within the game as it exists now. Unlike Hive Scum, who is completely a mess, getting into an even WORSE state with last patch (and this as a fan of the class). The kit has some good ideas, but I feel like halfway through they gave up and just over-statted it so that it can be good.
Really, though, one big thing that confuses me about Hive Scum is why they thought the tox chem stuff was a good idea? And why they over-statted it to such a ridiculous degree. I find myself wishing that the tox stuff just debuffed enemies and didn’t do much damage. Because I think that when we get a Tech Adpet or w/e, a Radiation DoT is a shoo-in, and (even if we assume it’s not going to be ridiculously OP at a baseline), now we’ll have yet ANOTHER DoT to stack on enemies.
