Thoughts on powercreep and the future of darktide

In forums, especially specific ones like this, you find the strongest and often most elitist players: they will never be a good basis for such a survey

However, the poll already starts from a subjective basis, because you assume that the Plasma Gun , VoC, etc. etc. are overpowered… thing the to me, and as explained in several threads why, is absolutely false. So each person’s opinion

However, considering how few people can handle even a simple T5HiSt (and considering that for the supremes hardcores Fatshark just added the waves and their “beautiful&fair” balance), I would hardly say that we are in a situation where our weapons annihilate the enemies

the best players aren’t on this forum, it would be an objective fact that darktide is much easier now than it used to be.

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to do that would require rebalancing every weapon, blitz and ult, then trees

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i.e. Fixing their damn mistakes.

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I forgot who wrote it here but it really made a lot of sense and it explains why they’re so selective and slow with nerfs: They’re probably trying to avoid bad PR and seek to bundle them with buffs, rebalances, and bringing bad outliers up to be fun.
See: Ogryn had it’s whole tree buffed, a bunch of weapons retouched to the tune of doing double damage to some targets, new builds made possible on the tree. Light em up was changed to be stronger for elites but weaker for bosses. The community reaction? Screeching because one aspect of light em up was nerfed from OP to just strong.

Imagine if they had done such a change without also bundling it with new toys and massive buffs. The reaction would be severe pantsshitting. This is why I think they’re waiting for new weps, talent reworks, other buffs to Vet before addressing shout spam, to pick a purely random example. To an extent it’s fair too; if you nerf something there needs to be an obvious alternative to have fun with. I think it makes balance sluggish and slow but from a PR angle I understand.

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I think one of their main problems is when they do nerf is that they usually completely nuder the weapon. Like they don’t bring it into line they completely ruin it. To be fair tho the outliers usually have always had one thing that made them ridiculous so when that was taken away the weapon had nothing else going for it
Shredder, blazing stacks
Power sword 9 powered swings combo
Recon lasgun insane infernius stacking
These 3 weapons basically disappeared from play once their insane crutch was removed

What’s funny is that only these nerfed weapons have really ever gotten major overhauls and buffs to make them a better rounded weapon. While something like the shotguns and semi auto autoguns were never in that state never got that fan fair and just remain completely untouched.

recon got overbuffed

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Yes, the people that sink thousands of hours into the game rather than playing it as a joyride aren’t the right people to consult on balance. Tigole got hired by Blizzard to design encounters based on his raid experience in EQ, and give me some time and I can probably name some other old EQ legends. Furor’s another.

I remember back in WoW patch 1.2 where I was explaining (and demonstrating) that I could literally dump 5 sunders worth of threat in a single maul to the devs, skyrocketing threat faster on my druid than any warrior ever could, enabling dps to go completely balls to the walls. By 1.4 it was patched. Because they listened to the top-end raiders going ‘dude, this is broken’.

FFS.

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I would differentiate between the weapon and the blessing. I’m not sure the weapon is overtuned.

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This is a perfect time for bad PR - IF nightmares and visions is a fun mode.

Havoc is the challenge mode. It is not for people who complain about balance or fairness, it is for people that want to overcome unfair bonkadonk. Releasing it at a peak window of winter break was a semi-odd decision to me.

If Nightmares & Visions is a ‘fun’ rogue-lite horde-defense mode as is projected, this is the perfect time to release a strong balance patch alongside it. People will be disappointed, but distracted by the new shiny object, especially if it’s anything close to Chaos Wastes in terms of entertainment (yes, it’s not chaos wastes, they said as much - my point is fun-factor). Even more importantly, as a rogue-lite it draws attention away from basic balance factors.

Perfect timing. Not that I give them the credit to realize it, but just stating the obvious.

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I agree, but this issue does go both ways.

I’ll draw a parallel. Heavy Eviscerators’ Bloodletter is weaker than Chainswords’ Bloodletter for balancing purposes, so why not also do that with Infernus on Recon Lasguns and Infantry Lasguns? Recon Lasguns are able to pump out way more Crits than Infantry Lasguns and this leads to an extremely noticeable disparity between the DoT/DPS potential of these two Weapons with Infernus. Therefore, it would make sense for the former’s version of Infernus to get nerfed while the latter’s version of Infernus remains intact.

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It did
It was fine before the buff at least the vlaa

Your auto-correct betrays you, penis, did you mean neuter?

Yeah no being able to repeatedly spam gold toughness to basically be invincible and the game needing things like emperors fading light and crusher spam to counter it to try and have a difficult mode

Is actually underpowered

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Is there confirmation of this? It’s in the Book as a bug.

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Ah, my bad! I had no clue it might be a bug. I heard it was intentional, although that information wasn’t from an official source and is therefore unreliable. That said, this is still an example of a good way for Fatshark to balance Blessings between Weapons in my opinion.

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the competence of the average troglodyte plasma gun user has nothing to do with whether the plasma gun is overpowered or not, you could give a malice-tier player a BFG from doom and they’d still find a way to die to 3 poxwalkers

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They also should nuke cooldown reduction farm and movement speed to some degree. Wasted your VoC or dome shield without need? Punished. Calculate treats better next time. Neither you can skip that narrow bridge cause of insane move speed, endure fighting in the hard locations.

I would say endless slide spam is problematic and it should be done something there, maybe slide limit like with dodge or minor stamina consume, make it a proper tool player should think about. But it’s a hot take.

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Not a hot take. The mobility problem isn’t just that you can get top speed above any of the enemies in the game, it’s that you can maintain that separation gap - a good chunk of the method to do so involves sliding.

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I’m pretty sure making slide not free to spam will cause drama. On the other hand, making it costs resources means you can make ranged enemeis to be less opressive.

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