Thoughts on Havoc and game balance

[Vertraxxx]

as many have already pointed out, i took some time off from darktide and thought about the issues again from my perspective. there are two major problems.

1. weapons
   as you know, certain weapons like the dueling sword, plasma, and boltgun are excessively overperforming, which causes weapons with lower performance to be practically useless at specific difficulty levels or have an abnormally low pick rate, narrowing player choice.

2. abilities and cooldown reduction
   the only ability that i think is fundamentally problematic is smite. it’s been pointed out in this forum for a long time now that smite definitely needs some kind of adjustment. being able to stop every enemy in your line of sight for such a low cost is clearly ridiculous.

as for gold toughness, the skill itself isn’t the issue.
the problem is that these powerful abilities can be spammed too easily—especially by veterans and zealots. zealots have cooldown reduction skills on both sides of their keystone, and both are far too strong. on top of that, being able to take both cooldown reduction skills is problematic. solving this will require a review and rearrangement of the skill tree. either way, the effects of cooldown reduction skills need to be rebalanced.

havoc
originally, darktide only had a single mission board. as time went on, players improved, and high-level players began asking for more difficult challenges. this led to the introduction of “auric” and “maelstrom.”
after the class overhaul update, meta builds spread among players, the boltgun became even more overpowered, and with the recent update, usable weapons were expanded between classes, allowing the dueling sword to be used by zealots and veterans.
as a result, auric and maelstrom, which were supposed to be high-difficulty modes, became dramatically easier, straying from their original purpose and intent.
this led to further demand for higher difficulty from players, resulting in the havoc game mode.
however, if the game’s balance had been properly maintained, havoc wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place.
in fact, you’ll realize how challenging auric HISTG or maelstrom can be without the use of op weapons or gold toughness.

havoc requires matchmaking and forces players to use the party finder, making it inconvenient in many ways. additionally, in the higher tiers of havoc, players are forced into meta builds and meta weapons, reducing diversity and creating a difficulty that feels far removed from what players originally wanted.

personally, i think that if there had been overall balance adjustments, the demand for havoc would have been much lower. for players who still find auric too easy, tweaking maelstrom a little could have achieved what havoc set out to do. (in fact, some maelstrom missions are easier than t5 HISTG.)

fatshark can create great games, but many of their decisions don’t align properly.
i sincerely hope that these issues are improved next year and post this with high expectations.
thank you for reading to the end.

[Molonious]

@Vertraxxx

the problem is that these powerful abilities can be spammed too easily—especially by veterans and zealots. zealots have cooldown reduction skills on both sides of their keystone, and both are far too strong. on top of that, being able to take both cooldown reduction skills is problematic. solving this will require a review and rearrangement of the skill tree. either way, the effects of cooldown reduction skills need to be rebalanced.

This is one of the weird issues in DT where player power scales proportionally alongside difficulty. The CDR nodes don’t make much impact at Malice and Heresy where most of the playerbase sits, because they literally aren’t getting enough stuff thrown at them to make too much of a difference, but they’re insanely powerful at higher difficulty levels due to the way the game increases difficulty by just adding more and more enemies.

Likewise, other things that can feel insanely powerful at the highest difficulty levels don’t have anywhere near as much capability on easier game modes. Dueling Swords are pretty astoundingly capable at any difficulty, but a Plasma Gun just can’t blap 10 Ragers at once in a Heresy game the way it can in Auric Maelstrom or Havoc because it isn’t getting thrown that many at once.

With how many weapons/abilities/talents are designed, adding more enemies just isn’t an appropriate difficulty modifier that Fatshark should be employing in as many cases as it is. Because they usually arrive in clumps or congalines that cleaves and blasts and automatic gunfire can chew through, they’re often just adding to the bodycount instead of the difficulty, which then procs all the various things that trigger on kills/hits and ramps player power up further.

Making enemies smarter (e.g. taking cover or dodging/juking when aimed at, having more movesets, focusing players in vulnerable states like reloading, etc) would be the ideal solution, but as we’re not likely to see that, at least dispersing them more would help a lot. Having 10 ragers come at you from 5 different directions is a very different thing than 10 ragers running up a single hallway.

[ZoroDaOtter]

Easiest way to solve the CDR problem is convert CDR nodes to do X% faster regeneration buff like Invocation of Death. CDR now will no longer scale with density and adjusting its power is just a numbers game.

And yea, we definitely need better spawning logic. Imagine if gunners didn’t just spawn in a single clump ready for cleaving/mag dump, and instead ambushed from several directions at once.

[Murderer]

@Vertraxxx

as for gold toughness, the skill itself isn’t the issue.
the problem is that these powerful abilities can be spammed too easily—especially by veterans and zealots. zealots have cooldown reduction skills on both sides of their keystone, and both are far too strong. on top of that, being able to take both cooldown reduction skills is problematic. solving this will require a review and rearrangement of the skill tree. either way, the effects of cooldown reduction skills need to be rebalanced.

I agree and just for completeness sake want to add this to that list, the by far worst offender:

On the topic of CDR as a whole I think someone here hit the nail on the head when he said Darktide balance is currently in that early-VT2-balance state where you could spam the hell out of pyromancer homing skulls because of how CDR worked. Those things have yet to be nerfed, but have to be.

@Vertraxxx

after the class overhaul update, meta builds spread among players, the boltgun became even more overpowered, and with the recent update, usable weapons were expanded between classes, allowing the dueling sword to be used by zealots and veterans.
as a result, auric and maelstrom, which were supposed to be high-difficulty modes, became dramatically easier, straying from their original purpose and intent.
this led to further demand for higher difficulty from players, resulting in the havoc game mode.
however, if the game’s balance had been properly maintained, havoc wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place.
in fact, you’ll realize how challenging auric HISTG or maelstrom can be without the use of op weapons or gold toughness.

Also extremely good analysis on this part and I really dislike the dynamic. The base game mode needs to be challenging again, because the challenge gamemodes don’t have the same replayability or appeal. I think there’s a broader set of reasons than just the ability spam for regular games though, one of them is certainly that some weapons just overperform by way too much. The more time passes the more I wish you could just play a Darktide version of cataclysm that is tuned to roughly Havoc 25-30 levels, on the auric board, with auric mods.

[Vertraxxx]

Havoc will undoubtedly become a dead mode if left as it is.
here are my proposals:

1. completely abolish the Havoc game mode.
2. perform an overall balance adjustment for the game (weapons, skills, etc.).
3. Improve maelstrom and make it more like Havoc (with fun modifiers and challenging elements).

Benefits

• T5 HISTG will return to its original difficulty, satisfying the majority of players seeking challenging gameplay.
  if some players still find it too easy, maelstrom can accommodate those looking for even greater challenges, similar to the current Havoc mode.
• players will be able to play the game with simple matchmaking without needing the cumbersome party finder feature.
• underutilized weapons will become viable, creating more diversity in strategies and increasing the variety of choices available.
• ogryn will have more opportunities to fulfill their intended role (for example, instead of other classes instantly taking down a horde of Crushers with weapons like the DS).

Drawbacks

• since the overall difficulty of the game will be raised, some players may find it necessary to adjust the difficulty downwards compared to the current settings.

[alsozara]

@ZoroDaOtter

Easiest way to solve the CDR problem is convert CDR nodes to do X% faster regeneration buff like Invocation of Death. CDR now will no longer scale with density and adjusting its power is just a numbers game

Strongly agree this is the right approach. Though I’ll admit it’s a bit dull to apply the same mechanic across the board, it’d be way easier to balance.

Like IoD is great mechanically, it’s just the numbers are tuned too high.

[sjarking]

This is as good as any place for me to ask.

Is it actually intended Havoc experience that enemies blessed by nurgle, specifically shotgun enemies and gunners, will just straight up ignore the Chorus effect from Zealot?

Multiple times I noticed them not caring at all about the Chorus being active - so they’re ignoring it better than a monstrosity.
In fact I nearly died while using chorus because of this.
I had activated Chorus near them, and instead of seeing any stagger, they deleted my golden toughness so hard that I lost 95% of my health before the situation stabilised.

It’s also wild to me that gunners will straight up not care that you are in hugging distance, or sliding beneath their knees. That gun is on you like a magnet on metal, even if they are pointing it at stupid angles and shooting at full throttle.