I’ve been seeing a lot off and thinking of this discussion a lot of how darktide balance should be handled in the future.
Should darktide continue to have incredibly overpowered outliers in its sandbox from the plasma guns to the voc to insane ability cooldown times to zealot being able to stack an incredible amount of crit or 4 pyskers with smite can just go nuh uh to the ai director. Where to create difficulty in the game, gunners and shooters need to be set to l4d2 realism mode and what should be tough enemies are trivial and must be spammed in great numbers to actually make players take pause. And that weapons are perks that aren’t at this point need to be buffed to those levels as well.
Or does darktide need to focus on bringing the very obvious outliers into line and focus on a more refined balanced experience where difficulty doesn’t need to be so artificial because the players have their instantly regenerating I win buttons and insane damage stacking perks taken away from them and weapons that can completely negate what should be major threats on their own in a cooperative game should be toned down.
TLDR
Make everything on the same level as the outliers I want darktide to be as much as a power fantasy as possible
Bring things into line no matter the cost, darktide cannot continue with a nuclear arms race of power scaling
Curb the powercreep. Only from there can Fatshark begin the lengthy process of healing Darktide back to a status resembling that of Pre-Patch 13 balancing.
If we buff everything to the maxed weapon or arche or what ever, we will get into a case where we will need to buff the enemies too, which would take longer and do the same thing, so lets just nerf what need to be nerfed, rework what need to be reworked.
And git on with it. The one that would cry about would cry about anything anyway.
More than anything, and I’m repeating myself here, I believe the game went off the tracks when it switched from Scab Stalkers being scary to “why not spam spawn six Ragers, 5 Crushers, a mixed horde, and obnoxious specialists” over and over.
Tweaking weapon performance is fine and dandy (and neccessary), and I hope Fatshark buffs specifically Wahid’s Infantry Lasgun and Heavy Sword, but there’s a reason why people choose the obvious overpowered options: spawns are so obnoxious nowadays - because the game has shifted from being slower and “more tactical” to non-stop action - and the game becomes much less annoying to deal with if your weapon selections are on the stronger end.
Going into a mission as the only person in the squad with an anti-carapace/anti-boss loadout, for example, is a classic!
Today’s spaws in Auric Maelstrom forces you to use certain loadouts to counter the director’s crazy spawn spam.
now the thing with “bring it in line” and the overall way darktide plays and skyrocketed to my most time sunk into in recent history, is its giving me a platform that rewards physical skill like no game since quake did before.
the movement is sharp and spot on, mouse control smooth and on point and for better or worse the enemies behave in their corset of abilities as expected.
with that said, i want darktide to remain a fast paced game.
“dial it back” shouldnt result in cover peaking or corner camping, the meat of the game is its action.
what should be dialed down are pure talent based number tricks that excuse or omit flaws in said mechanical skills and allow to pull off stuff that would otherwise result in a quick dirt nap.
so in essence if darktide stays 40k-quake instead of turning into 40k-counterstrike, i’m all for “dialing it back down”
Old darktide had plenty of other problems and some weapons where even more powerful then than now, don’t forget that.
I like the sound of bringing DT closer to VT2s speed, aka slowing it down a decent bit but I also don’t mind DT being a decent bit different of an experience.
If we’re going 180 rn, I’d like DT to be in the 140 to 150 range.
Not much slower but ever so slightly more forgiving. Also the power level should come down to reflect this new pace. Again, not by much but just enough to make a difference.
If none of that happens and we just don’t get even more powercreep, I’d be fine with that too tbh.
In fairness, some of those weapon options are just beyond bonkers over the top (Dueling Sword, Knife, high mobility in general, infinite pierce).
The other thread was bemoaning large crusher packs and how they didn’t use to exist… but we didn’t use to have things like krak grenades, yellow toughness, cc via shout chorus and smite, etc. All those tools ARE tactical and fun to use (I’m not saying they’re perfectly balanced) and counter elite packs, but they’re overshadowed completely by massively overpowered weapons. I happen to love tank/control builds, so seeing posts that those tools aren’t worth taking / aren’t needed in Auric boggles my mind.
I’d argue the first step is getting the massive outlier weapons inline. People say you don’t need chorus before havoc - well, maybe if the dueling sword did 25% its current damage to carapace/unyielding and was less mobile, maybe they’d consider cc more valuable.
as i said a couple times, i find having less, but more dangerous enemies better than flooding the place with big armored dudes you can one-shot with a stabby thing, so the game needs to spawn so many of them that the sound engine doesn’t work properly.
So I have gone back to playing a new low lvl character as seeing how far I can push the difficult as I have friends who are new players.
So I have played the slower paced underpowered game as well as the fast pace end games
I can say without a doubt that fast pace is way more fun. The early levels feels slow and frustrating.
That being said some of the super overpowered stuff needs toned down.
Wouldn’t mind rager/ crushers actually being a threat and taking time to kill like in the early levels of the game. Just keep the stamina and speed of the new overpowered game
I absolutely believe they should bring things into line.
That class overhaul and the massive power creep that came with it was the starting point for almost all of the technical and gameplay issues we still have today.
With players so much stronger, all they could do was massively increase the spawns. → Most single target weapons & talents (like BB) became niche, as the meta moved to exclusively favour AoE & cleave. Meanwhile we got technical issues like soundless specialists (presumably because the sound engine couldn’t keep up, which makes sense considering the timing and how it apparently only happens on T5+).
Ever since then, they’ve spent so many patches trying to fix those issues and rebalance the weapons and still are nowhere near done, all because that power creep & increased spawns so fundamentally shifted the game’s base design. Just think of the things we could’ve gotten if all that time & money could’ve been spent on content?
I’d much rather keep the numbers where they used to be but make crushers & elites actually strong, not just something that’s only a threat in packs of 12 or more. Above all though I’d much prefer a game where the sounds actually worked, the AI didn’t cheat on a regular basis, and where building for single target dmg & anti-armor would be worthwhile decision even outside of boss spam Maels & events.
if too many things are changed at once - such as enemy HP, spawn rates, weapon balance, and CDR, it will become unmanageable. for now, the biggest issue is the dueling sword, so it should be nerfed first. after that, it would be better to monitor the situation before addressing issues like CDR and gold toughness.
Havoc was their attempt to balance around the outliers and it’s a gimmicky mess. Gun enemies instantly vaporize you if you make a single mistake and Bulwarks are obnoxious as hell to fight in melee. Even then it doesn’t matter because gold toughness makes you immortal while Psyker and Vet’s Shredder nades have infinitely scaling aoe damage. The experiment failed.
FS’s ideas on how to increase difficulty as seen in Havoc are…not great in my opinion, it tends to reinforce the current metabuilds and shifts too much of the gameplay emphasis to melee just to make the experience onerous for its own sake, which isn’t what I’m looking for, that doesn’t sound fun. Likewise the director trend towards “just spawn a dozen Ragers on 'em from a single point” tends to overwhelm some builds and over-reward cleave/AoE. I really wish they’d set it up for enemies to come from more directions rather than just in big clumps that can quickly be concentrated on.
One issue however is, in part, in the emphasis on skill and the nigh infinite levels this can be taken to. There’s a lot of game design built around spiking player power level in proportion to how insane the situation is, there really is an intense emphasis on skill. The very best players in the most outrageous situations can do absolutely unreal things and make the game look trivially easy. The more enemies get thrown at the player (as long as they can keep up), the faster their ults refresh, the more crit chance they generate, the more toughness they regen, etc. As a result this means that lots of abilities and weapons that feel absolutely stupid broken in Auric Maelstrom, where you get a constant stream of enemies, feel pretty average in basic Heresy because you just don’t get the chance to blap a dozen Shotgunners at once with a Plasma Gun and have your Ult cooldown refresh in the blink of an eye or need that Gold toughness up more than once or twice a game.
This in turn makes balance difficult, as your average casual player sitting at Malice/Heresy a couple times a week is experiencing a dramatically different meta to someone who hops into Auric Maelstrom quickplay all night.
Aye, I’ll take Darktide now over Darktide then any day of the week. Whatever one wants to say about Darktide now (and there’s a lot to say), you can use a lot more of the arsenal and do well than you could back then.
Not really. The Weapons that qualify as “doing well” have just swapped over, and we’re now also dealing with disgusting levels of Enemy spam. The Weapons that should be commonly used (e.g. Infantry Lasgun) have barely anyone using them. Why? Because Patch 13 completely screwed up Darktide’s Enemy-Player balancing and led to the mess we’re still in almost two years later.
9-Swing Power Swords were an insane outlier, for example, but at least Darktide’s balance wasn’t dictated around them and they DID get nerfed. Pre-Patch 13 Darktide was significantly better balanced overall, made more sense and almost every Weapon was viable for its gameplay loop. If we could get back to that but with the current Crafting System, Darktide will finally be healed.
If we’re talking about the highest difficulty levels, sure, we’ve kinda just seen a swap. I’ll agree with that. And yes enemy-spam is an issue, directly related to difficulty level. But we absolutely had threads about stuff like power swords and bolters dominating metas and being unbalanced, but we also didn’t have the difficulty levels we do now.
For general play, for your average player, for the bulk of the userbase that’s not running Auric Maelstrom and Havoc, the arsenal is far more balanced and functional. The 9 autoguns we have in the game for instance actually have useable magazine capacities now, that accurately reflect their absurd quad-stack magazine visuals, while Plasma Guns just aren’t presented with the opportunities to cleave/clear that they get at higher difficulties, and Infantry Lasguns are pretty functional. The divergence in the metagame between “casual” levels of difficulty and the sweatrealm is tremendous just based on the volume of enemies and opportunities to trigger abilities/blessings/etc. You’re absolutely not forced into metabuilds for “average” gameplay levels.
While I agree that stuff like Havoc heavily reinforces metabuilds, that’s also why I don’t think it should be a factor in balancing the rest of the game, that was a conscious choice on FS’s part to play into the meta for that special game type, but those issues just don’t exist in the same way for people playing the “normal” game. The solution there is to adjust the Havoc design.
If we’re talking the Malice/Heresy difficulties that most players top out at - it works overall. Pretty much every weapon works there (maybe not vigilant autoguns).
