The Utter Ridiculousness of Havoc AI Directory (rant post)

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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I play Darktide for fun. I enjoy playing Darktide (most of the time, when trappers aren’t hidden in Bulwark and Crusher clumps or silent poxbursters). I like to challenge myself, I’ll play with “off-meta” weapons and loadouts in Damnation and Auric.

But I don’t think I am ever going to actually enjoy playing Havoc. The past three times I’ve tried to play it (Havoc 26, Refinery Delta 17 “The Hourglass”), the AI directory decided that none of us can have fun.

We’re having okay missions for the most part, none of us lose too much health. All of a sudden we get to an enclosed space.
Twins. Okay, twins are kinda difficult in enclosed spaces (where there are plenty of in Refinery Delta 17), but alright.
Captain spawns while we’re fighting Twins. Plasma gun and sword. Okay so now we’ve got 1.5 of each twin. Not ideal.
Plague Ogryn spawns while we’re fighting the Twins and Captain. We hold out for a little while but, of course, any damage we make to any of the enemies gets nullified because of Garden modifier from bulwarks.
And of course, there’s also the usual elite and specialist spawns, so Reapers, Dreg/Scab gunners, and Tox Bombers that you can’t reach because of the hordes that keep spawning and healing from those Garden bulwarks.

We end up losing. And this happens twice in a row. Both times, the runs are going well enough and then we get double twins, then double monstrosities.

Who thought this was fun? It’s challenging to the point of unfairness. You can’t kill a Chaos Spawn when it’s being guarded by the twins and being healed by the Bulwarks, you can’t kill the twins because they’re being guarded by the Chaos Spawn, the shields, and being healed by the Bulwarks, and you can’t kill the Bulwarks because they’re being guarded by the Twins and the Chaos Spawn.

No, you cannot kite them. Because you’re in an enclosed space (and the sword twin also blitzes at you and can’t be staggered). So what do you do? Keep fighting in vain? Hoping you’ll maybe hurt the feelings of the bulwarks (which they’ll just heal up anyways)?

When the difficulties of games made difficulty as simple as increasing spawns, I could understand. When they opted instead to make the enemy bullet sponges, I didn’t quite understand but I could manage it. But when there’s more enemies that also take more damage? On top of super elite ultra enemy units that can’t be killed when working alongside one another? It’s not fun. It’s not challenging. It’s unfair. It kills your appetite to play a game.

Before anybody comes into the replies talking about havoc being “end game to end all end games”, please understand where I’m coming from. Auric (even Auric Maelstroms) are almost too easy and Havocs are a coin flip as to whether or not you succeed or get sodomized by four bosses at the same time. I don’t want my enjoyment of a game or the fun flavor of it to be dependent on if the AI director is feeling pissy. I just want to play and enjoy the game that I paid for, I want to enjoy all of the free content that is available to me without devoting my heart, soul, and every waking hour into becoming a master of the mechanics of a game.

Change the mechanics of Havoc. Decrease the number of bosses that spawn at once (at least in lower havocs, people on havoc 26 should not have to worry about so many bosses spawning in). Please.

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IMO the biggest problem of this is still the derank system. When everyone is at 40, and there’s no fear of deranking, and something stupid like that happens? It sucks and doesn’t feel great, but you can try again and either bring different stuff, hope for different spawn rng, or just play differently.

When there is deranking involved, it feels a lot worse and you’re just being punished for getting unlucky or not spamming AoE damage and chorus.

Also purple is a stupid modifier anyways because of situations like that, just trying to push players into bringing weapons that ignore hit mass so you can kill purple enemies behind other enemies.

I can’t imagine trying to get to 40 playing with pubs only. Sounds like a miserable experience and I probably would’ve quit the game a long time ago if I didn’t have people to play with.

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I don’t want decrease in number of bosses, but i want their spawns to be in places where there’s ability to control them or kite them and also no purple captains or twins.

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Yeah they really need to heavily nerf the players so they can provide challenge in ways that feel less “cheesy”.

The problem with the way difficulty is currently created is directly caused by player power level. Having our characters be this busted limits the design space for difficulty to pretty much exclusively things that feel bad or complex AI changes FS could never do well and is too herculean a task for them to even attempt.

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The main problem isn’t even deranking honestly. Even when you hit 40 and can’t derank these kinds of things are so anti-fun and still happen with Captain + Twins Spawn suddenly bursting out of a wall or there’s suddenly there’s a gigantic wall of purple carapace and bulwarks on your team.

I was told by I forgot who that the weapon balacing team and havoc balancing team are different. If this is true this explain a lot as to why the new Havoc is just waves of BS on your screen. Apparently they can’t communicate either because they chose to balance around Infinite cleave rather than nerfing it so we’re stuck with this unfun garbage.

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just powercreep things…

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this ain’t fun

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What if I told you the game mode has been intentionally designed to FAIL players.

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Is it possible to take 40 in random - yes, it’s difficult - as luck would have it. Havoc is about luck, alas, no matter how good the team is, you simply physically cannot solve the problem when you have at the same time: twins, captain, 1+ boss and horde/elites.
Would you like something to change? No, but it’s worth editing. How many times was there when the captain was a medic, well, there are no words to laugh.
And even if you don’t change it, then really the only thing I want is to see how the sharks (not testers), namely the shark representatives themselves take the 40th Havoc, and not just one mission, but a path from scratch. And not with a video, no, but with streams, they have such experience, it would be very interesting to see how they play their brainchild and play the “final” of the game. Yes, several streams, show everyone with your own eyes how to play Havoc, but there is an opinion that if this happens, they will not take the 40th and will stop around 30

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Well when it comes to healing we could start by editing how purple buff works, so enemies you are focusing don’t heal damage you are doing MID combo:

If an enemy has been recently damaged (at very least in melee), then it should not be affected by any healing for x seconds. Well unless Fatshark insists on doing nothing about weapon/ build balance.

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Finally had it with this stupid game yesterday.

Played Ogryn and we kept getting stupid twins+3×BoN spawns or similar, right at the beginning of Oubliette.

Then had multiple fails to bugged rituals.

Then I went back to psyker, and a game went well until DH placed in the middle of a cluster of gunners and tox bombers on lower platform before stairs event on Oubliette. Nobody could get past this with unending bulwarks spawning. Then finally DH triggered.

Was pissed by stupid bugs and game design so went back to ogryn again and wanted to finish on a high note so went auruc maelstrom chasm logistratum with dogs. Soundless buster twice takes out team mates early. Me and psyker going for revives, chaos spawn hits me while I’m going up a few stairs, I get pushed out of bounds through the ground (not over an edge) and fall through void outside map architecture for a good 8 seconds before I die.

I feel like I’m done with this game. The endless bugs and terrible balance has finally ruined the fun for me.

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See you in The Mourningstar tomorrow

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I am the 1% tryhard sweat who plays 40 to have any semblance of fun in this game and that doesn’t stop purple bulwarks from being an affront to God. Balancing around infinite aoe instead of removing it from the game has done terrible things to every game mode.

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selling yourself short here…

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Pen and paper gamers have a term for people like the “AI” director. “Power Gamer”, and no its not in any way a good term - its an insult. Its the kind of game master whose reponse to the group wiping out a his latest “unstoppable scenario” is to put in more and/or bigger monsters that fall to the same tactics. All these players see is the numbers on the sheet and assume that that is all the matters, not how well said monster can be used.

Is fixing it possible? Very. Drop the number of “special” and “elite” opponents to sane levels, drop handing out NPC powerups like candy, and a bunch of other ideas players have been suggesting for months for starters. Will it happen? Very unlikely as its a major piece of work that requires a hefty investment while not resulting in a readily obvious source of new revenue. On top of that the players who lucked/ cheated/ etc their way to the “top” are going to throw hissy fits if there is even a hint that the “status” they gate-kept so hard for might become more accessible.

Its the classic situation of new “content” built on a mediocre temporary fix that no one wants to touch either out of greed or fear. Never a good thing.

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Had a game earlier where, just after we planted the second charge in Carnival, we got six bosses. Twins, a Captain, two Pogryns and a Burgle.

This wasn’t on a 40 or anything. It was 33, maybe?

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I think the issue primarily is spammability of ult abilities that are all way too powerful.

Gold toughness, extreme stagger and knockback, from chorus and VOC, combined with cd reduction, together with the complete protection from ranged dmg/BON slime and extreme toughness regen while inside bubble, (and stimms) all contribute to player power scaling and ability to handle massed enemies being ridiculous, is what creates this problem in the first place.

Characterizing this entire issue as a problem borne from “infinite cleave” seems is misguided, and sort of suggests the problem is the cleave of psykers inferno builds specifically (as opposed to cd reduction auras+ults), as if teams without psykers (or with psykers that don’t use soulblaze builds) can’t steamroll enormous numbers of enemies abusing the cdr and ult mecanics described above. But they can, and the addition of arbites has just made it all the more ridiculous.

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You’re a few patches behind there. Havoc 1.0 was gold toughness spam. Then Psyker got buffs for like 5+ patches in a row and became the aoe monster. Then Ogryn rework showed up with tankiness and the enemy of game design that was the Rumbler buffs. Now the cop is here and he’s basically unkillable with the dog being an extra player with infinite mass-ignoring grenades. Every class has awful design choices.

So this brings us back to purple being awful and not fun and the main counter to it being to stick a grenade into it and that sucks.

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