Contrary to how your veteran guardsman is mowing down 100s of trained elite heretic guardsman and taking on demon host and other heretical monstrosities and wrap entities you would instantly be cut down.
The truth is as a “veteran” guardsman you would not be taking on 100s of traitor heretics. You would be dead on your first engagement with the enemy. Another guardsmen will take your position before he is cut in half or limb blown off by the sheer amount of Las fire from the heretic firing line. Depending on where your regiment is deployed suriving your first engagement or your first day could make you a veteran as many are instantly cut down the moment the drop ship lands not to have even fired a single Las shot or seen the enemy.
The only reason your are able to endure 100s of shots and have a invisible shield called toughness is purely for fun factor so that a game can be made out of it. If the imperium of man truly produced such incredible guardsmen then space marines and other super human would be rendered obsolete.
Yeah, you say that, but you could put me on a team with my vet, and the other three guys can run hacked spacemarines in their power armor… And you know what?
As long as there’s no scoreboard, my vet will out perform all three of them combined!
The biggest gamification factors are not things like toughness.
It is much more this: you get another chance after making a mistake.
Imagine starting at “damnation” as lvl.1 with game over uninstall after character death.
Regarding taking on a seemingly stronger force. One could argue that the characters’ success ratios fall under “survivor bias”. For each one of those lucky few, hundreds of thousands tried and perished. Also, all missions are exclusively special operations by the inquisition - no normal guard duty. And finally, everybody has a named character (= hero with plot armor or death in the first scene … ).
But of course, you are right. The average success i.e. in measure of kill-death ratio is >500 (day 1: 314,264,113 dead heretics vs 634,640 rejects killed). This does not and cannot translate 1:1 to the bigger picture. Otherwise the imperium would be saved within moments.
So to make sense of the numbers, there are a few ways to interpret the data with respect to lore.
Either each mission’s enemy count and strength is smaller (i.e. after action reports are vastly exaggerated)
Or the number of missions (and rejects) is smaller (i.e. all playable missions are only done once by the rejects and all other (non-playable) missions have lower success, evening out the balance)
When this was first announced (the trailer that showed generic helmeted guardsmen) friends and I joked instead of a health bar you’d have a reinforcements bar as you continue to lose guardsmen as you get killed repeatedly.
“Beware of an old man in a profession where men usually die young.”
“Imperial Guard regiments are often called upon to fight gruelling wars of attrition lasting years or even decades. As time passes, each company will shrink in size as casualties take their inevitable toll. Those that survive are the hardiest troopers in the Astra Militarum. Their battlefield prowess has been honed in the fires of war, forging them into warriors who have learned to fight and kill with lethal efficiency. Veterans are battle-hardened elites, the first squad into an assault, and the last to retreat.”
– Games Workshop.
There do exist Guardsmen that survive and have “long” military careers and ofc in Darktide we for sure have a good amount of “plot armor” for the sake of balance (funny enough the Ogryn’s melee prowess is very much way below its lore-correct level). But it ain’t implausible that a penal squad like ours can pull thru the mission we do, except for being able to take on Beast of Nurgle, Chaos Possed Ogryns and Demon Hosts.
Well, everytime you die in the game, in that 2 seconds where your screen goes black, another guardsman who suspiciously looking like you rushes in and quickly takes up your gear, everybody knows this except guardsman players.
They should have just had us playing as Space Marines or Battle Sisters. Only Power armour should be shrugging off this amount of fire. Probably terminator armour really.
The tabletop stats are not relative to the lore in the slightest.
i guess a little suspension of disbelief helps with the beast of nurgle or demon hosts, posessed ogryns. i imagine for some reason they’d be lesser or flawed examples. maybe the inquisition is doing something in the background to influence the effects of corruption to give us a chance to take atoma back.
