Lovely. We are now officially screwed. That was Verants way to deal with the “problem” of rangers out tanking their precious warriors in EQ1. Which by the way was mostly because most warriors were bloody idiots who ignored certain key stats (aka Dex) in favor of “big hits/ more hp always better”. They left the ranger stuck at release ability until three expansions later and then never actually fixed things enough that we were remotely competitive again. And its only gotten worse as more studios used it as a way to punish a class for daring to do better than they were supposed to.
And you just proved that this wasn’t a case of simple incompetence but willful malice. That attitude alone should have gotten the entire group thrown out as too potentially tainted to be even close to objective. To say nothing of triggering a full scale review of just how the criteria to become one of these “testers” was created. Which for those who have never been in business or management, is a polite way of saying that not only did those involve screw up but it was bad enough that careers WILL be ended and bonuses withheld.
Frankly I’m not spending a single penny or providing less than a scathing “do not even try unless you want to waste money better spent on a Gacha mobile game” advice on anything Fatshark touches until we get more than just a few quick fixes. At this point I say those players who play Veteran as a primary character deserve a full blown formal apology in addition to fixes. This whole mess was completely predictable and totally avoidable but FatSharks staff simply failed to do even the most basic due diligence.
It’s exacerbated too by how long it takes to make any changes, especially when tuning practically everything about a class that got changed all at once. Like its great the xbox port is done, hopefully that speeds up the turnaround time of patches, but I’m not holding my breath since a lot of issues could have been avoided if they were less gratuitous with the nerf hammer.
Not sure I would call it malice, they have good intentions for the game. Many saw the Vet as a big issue to the game, and game balance (and to be fair, he did cause issues, they were not wholly wrong) - seeing Vet as taking away fun from the other three classes as he was too strong previously. I understand the arguments, I am just sad that focus likely prevented the vet from having new fun options to discover and build.
I am hoping now that the other classes have been overtuned, that they can now look back at the vet the same way they did the first three to give him new options beyond “flat damage/toughness” for hit ult e.t.c.
I honestly think there is a good chance the Vet gets significant rework/love in the big patching for the anniversary and if my suggestions can stir any creative juices for FS wonderful. It is why I put forward suggestions, because I do think there is a likely positive outcome and hope to influence it that way.
They announced there will be one large update for the 1 year anniversary (November) and I am very confident there are going to be a few smaller patches in between to address some of the issues introduced by all the new content from Talent trees - and hopefully give some love to things left out (like the Vet talent tree)
Show me ONE bit of STATISTICAL and RELEVANT proof that Veterans were over-performing compared to their DESIGNED speficiation. That means no YouTuber “look at what this vet did!” videos, no “I have X posts so I’m an authority”, or any other bunch of biased opinion or outright lies being packaged as “authoritative proof”. You can’t. There is no proof because there was no problem with the class as designed.
Yes a Veteran stood above the other three classes - IF you never left Malice. Because very high damage ranged weapons (aka bolter, plasma, hellbore) combined with our utter focus on ranged damage (at the expense of nearly all survivability) to create the cannon part of glass cannon. We could kill most stuff before it reached us by going for head shots and abusing choke points to funnel multiple (ex mutant hordes) into neat little kill zones. Try that on Damnation or even Hersey were suddenly its not just one bolter shot to kill most stuff and you would be barely scraping by. There stuff could get uncomfortably close before dying, leaving a chance for its buddies following behind to get a few swipes in. Not having ammo issues was just a side-effect of being able to reliably one or two-shot most stuff and leave the really numerous trash to the rest of the group or grenade spam.
So no proof why the parts that made the Veteran class the Veteran, which were incidentally some of the parts pushed in the ads, suddenly were so unbalanced that they just HAD to be nerfed into the ground right that instant. No reason why a group who was perfectly fine giving three classes massive power boosts was so bloody stupidly stubborn about nerfing the 4th class into the dirt. Yeah, that is pretty much the definition of malice. No reason for the gutting, just a bunch of after-the-fact excuses and promises that “next patch it will be fixed”.
Bull. I’ve seen that line every time a patch intentionally breaks a class “for balance reasons” and you know what is the one consistent outcome from it? The staff Never keep that promise. Ever. They will throw out a few scraps so they can say they did something, the shills like Raledil will peddle their “see all is well” lies, and the herd will swallow it all believing the problem is themselves. Not me though. I’m done with being polite and patient only for those selling outright lies as objective truth to fill that silence and get away with dancing over the line. I’m done with giving chances and trust only to have it thrown away. I will yell, I will be rude, and I will call things as I see them and if that offends the herd then good. Maybe if enough people do that they will start to realize that passively hoping for things to get better isn’t going to work.
As I’ve said before. The wallet has slammed shut and the advice to friends and family is “do not touch Darktide” until these issues are truly fixed and we recieve a formal apology.
PS
Really FatShark? The word Bull - excretment is literally in Websters, Cambridge, and Britannica. Its a term used in published papers of the American Psychological Association (you know - the people who created the APA format used in universities?) to refer to speech that attempts to sound profound but is untrue. You REALLY need to find a better censoring program. One that doesn’t have a pseudo-Victorian nag decieding what is acceptable and what isn’t based on her personal opinion.
So sit around like good little sheep for a month or more hoping that a vague promise of fixes to come will actually be true? This after they said this lasts patch was supposed to fix things only to have it utterly break our entire class.
No. I say we get loud. We have been polite and helpful. Heck we’ve practically done the deverlopers work for them in places. And our “reward” was a busted patch. At this point I’m pretty sure FatShark as run the balance on its player trust account into the red. And like a good banker I’m not going to keep extending them more until I see real changes that prove they are making good decisions.
I have no access to any of that. I do know the devs had it, and shared a lot of information with the community testers. Many changes were based off things like Usage, win rates, damage output and other relevant data.
Nope, I am making posts, arguing with various community testers to see if I can change their opinions, and offering up positive solutions to a problem.
In the mean time there are a few fun builds on Vet still, and there are a ton of fun builds on the other classes - it isn’t like the game itself was ruined. Yes Vet is my most played and favorite class - he IS still playable with select builds. I am sad how few options he has that are effective on Auric Maelstrom compared to the others.
I didn’t expect you too. If there was such testing against proper benchmarks I doubt we would be in this mess in the first place. If only because that sort of testing would raise huge red flags. Well unless the testing or analysis methods were skewed to produce a desired result. Which is something I hope FatShark has enough professional pride to not do. Even then fact that no one outside a self-selecting cabal has seen these claimed metrics is itself very distubring from a quality assurance perspective. It means that we have literally no way to actually check their claims and have to take them “on faith”. Its like someone asking you to give them money to invest because they have a great secret plan to make money but they can’t tell you that idea because then it wouldn’t be secret. Except this time we already know that they have previously screwed up and they’re still asking for us to trust them.
So in other words nothing actually concrete was used as a basis. The more you tell us the less that group sounds even remotely like legitimate testers and more like a cabal whose sole objective was to glorify their personal preferences and drive anyone else into the dirt. Balancing around useage rates is just stupid. Especially in a game where some gear is inseperable from certain characters in the mind of the players (ex the Death Korp and shovels, Space Marines and the boltgun/ chain sword combination, etc). It would be like a fighting game based on samurai nerfing katana’s because too many players use them instead of other weapons. And please tell me you are joking about win rates being used. Please. The thought of someone using something with so many - sometimes competing - factors and variables to balance around a single minor factor is utterly frightening. Its the game-balance equivalent of the three-body problem except now you have an unknown number of other bodies whose influence comes and goes at semi-random times. It makes me wonder just what the other numbers were and if they were used in a context that was actually useful. Or just gathered from manipulated data and sketchy methods to justify decisions already made.
You can be as hopeful as you want that that group of inbred rage peddlers will actually decide to change their minds. But me, I don’t expect them to change. That sort would rather die screaming on a hill than suffer admitting that they were wrong and taking a blow to their ego. If this mess is going to be fixed, its going to be because someone on the staff realized they need to sideline their tainted pool of testers before they make things worse. And that won’t happen unless the extent of how badly they screwed up already is made clear in a why they can’t rationalize away.
Having had time to experiment with things a bit, I think the sad thing with all this points taxing is that the first things I trimmed were team oriented things like enhanced target priority. You simply cant spare points for nice to haves when you need everything you can get to reach the meaningful deep end perks.