Too many weapons are useless against Carapace armor

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
21

Viable? Yes, absolutely.

  • The closest to an actual exception is a scenario where ranged enemies are shooting from a balcony from midrange or further. Every class can handle that except Ogryn, who have no real weapons to deal with it (and unlike many situations they can’t tie them up in melee).
  • Naturally this doesn’t mean that every loadout can handle every enemy fine. Your loadout choices determine whether you’re really specialized, really generalist, or somewhere in between.
  • It also doesn’t mean classes are perfectly equal at beating any given scenario. For example if each class takes their best Anti-Crusher loadout and races to kill a Crusher fastest, I would guess Veteran comes out ahead.

Maybe there might be other balcony-like scenarios where a particular class literally has no good options for dealing with a very specific enemy type (I suppose Ogryn vs. Snipers might be another decent example), but at least in the broad strokes of horde, ranged, special, armored, and monstrosities, every class can fill the role of killing each of those things.

22

I don’t disagree with what you say here. Would you say Fatshark could do more though (without selling other subclasses), to improve class viability in any situation?

23

for a psyker the brain drain is sufficient.
for Ogryn, I don’t know this class, but I suppose there are weapons to deal with crusher.

24

I’m going to have to disagree with you there. I don’t think “brain drain” is sufficient, particularly on higher difficulties. It’s also an extremely boring solution to the problem.

25

then you can use a force staff or a void staff.
You can also use a surge staff and support your team

Finally, a force sword is enough to manage the problem.

Wrong answer is to lower the difficulty

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26

Well when there’s a clear shortcoming (Ogryn vs. Ranged balcony) then sure. But you sort of need those “problem cases” to be able to improve things in significant ways.

Improving in smaller ways is obviously possible too, just by making sure that any given weapon isn’t too strong or weak at its intended role(s).

For example Helbores don’t kill everything. But what they do kill well (ranged and armor) they kill well enough that it really puts them ahead of a lot of other weapons in terms of overall balance right now, and so I think they should just tone back that particular weapon.

There are reverse examples too, like I still don’t quite see Krourk cleavers bringing enough punch to be worth it compared with Bull Butcher. Also Maul+Shield doesn’t quite cut it.

But there are a bunch of isolated issues like that across each class (Thunder Hammer push-attacks should hit more than just 1 target, for example) and yeah they should work through all those imbalances. Another example is with flamethrower type weapons they should either (A) reduce range significantly or (B) reduce damage against mid-large targets. I feel like clearing hordes with them is fine, but the fact that they can take out maniacs pretty easily too goes a bit far. (I think they never actually do meaningful damage to Crushers/Bulwarks, but everything short of them it seems to do kinda out of control burn DoT damage).

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27

Some really valid points there.

I hadn’t even thought about it, but you’re spot on about the Flamer. And the Helbore basically outperforming the Plasma gun at its one niche (mainly due to ammo and RoF).

edit
I feel a bit silly now, but you mentioned that the Bull Butcher performs better than Krourk cleaver (I’ve been using the Krourk with the wider swings). I’m going to test that tonight.

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28

Egh, the one ogryn cleaver that’s all strike downs and stabs probably should get a slight buff against armor classes. I forget if it’s any better or worse vs flak, maniac, or unyielding, but i do remember it being not better than bull butcher vs carapace.

I don’t really think it’s a big problem, tho.

29

Both the other 2 knives have all strikedown lights, with higher cleave than their shorter angles suggest (screen scrolling mid attack is very good here). The 2 Krourk cleavers should have higher crit chance built in to their lights, like 10%. They do have good headshot damage and especially criticals.

But Ogryn doesn’t even get the crit blessings to make good on this at all. Bash should definitely be made 5-25% like the other crit blessings, it doesn’t even have an ‘on hit’ condition its tied to pushes.

Also the knives never got the speed buff the other non-shield Ogryn melees got for heavies. This is most noticeable on the Mk6 because it has 2 vanguard heavies, which are ridiculously slow to chain. Its so slow the fully charged frame is like another 1/3 of a second beyond that.

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30

I think your looking at it the wrong way round.

Carapace armors great design until you meet crushers.

It’s on maulers heads and bulwarks arms so you need to aim well and so you can maximise damage and deal with them quickly since you don’t even want to ever hit the carapace.

Crushers have no weak point or strong point they are all carapace.

Give them a weak point or let us strip armour off them after we hit them in the same spot enough.

That way we can always interact with them but if you don’t have a anti crusher weapon you need to clear everything besides the crusher then aim well and take him down.

2 Likes
31

Unless you stack the burn first then press F. Then flamer annihilates even Crushers. Still not sure if Zealot Ult on ranged is intended but it did survive the last huge patch so looking increasingly likely. But yeah I think most people would agree flamer is pretty busted.

Regarding Crushers generally indeed every class has good tools to deal with them. Ogryn Paul and GG might not be Bolter level but they’re definitely up there as Crusher killers. I think club is decent against them too but I’ve hardly used that weapon.

Brain Burst is honestly good enough as your only anti Crusher tool on Psyker, letting you not worry about that at all with your weapon choice is one of the things I really like about Psyker. You probably do wanna take KB on the last feat tier if you are gonna rely on it solely for those threats. But if you don’t want to rely on it you have Force Sword, Trauma (that controls them and everything else around them while taking sizeable chunks every cast, and applying brittle to make them easier to kill with the right blessing too), I think Surge does solid Crusher damage too, then of course there’s the old faithful Caxe V which is universally fantastic.

To address your general point earlier regarding whether or not you could reasonably make the bad Carapace weapons less bad, so the margin between them and the good Carapace weapons isn’t as gigantic, yes, I agree you could make the cleavers, duelling swords, Devil’s Claw etc less awful against carapace without seriously affecting balance.

TBC I would be fine with narrowing that gap somewhat, it just isn’t necessary and probably wouldn’t change a lot, as most people are already going to pick their melee and ranged slot to cover each other’s weaknesses. You could double cleaver damage against Carapace and it wouldn’t change how desirable GG is to run with it. Similarly with Zealot if my Heavy Sword was doing a heap more Crusher damage I’d still be pressing F then drilling it with me Brauto. Duelling Sword could probably do triple Crusher damage but I’d still be spamming BB from across the room cause it’s better to repeatedly stagger and kill it before it even reaches melee range.

I’m sure that’s plenty of examples, basically I agree the variance in Crusher output is wider than it needs to be, it’s just that every class does already have good tools for them already, and loadout choices likely wouldn’t change much due to how well many melee/ranged weapon combos compliment each other. Also 2 out of 4 classes having built in Crusher tools already makes it very unlikely to get a team with literally 0 ability to deal with Crushers.

Psssssst, this exists, it’s called rending/brittleness. I do wish blessings with those effects were more wide spread mind you.

Only if you actually take a Carapace damaging weapon. The bonus Ogryn damage by itself ain’t making ripper, kickback, or cleaver do noticeable Crusher damage. I just think it’s a bit sad that Ogryn nades, which already have very niche uses, has a whole feat associated with it (which is very cool in concept and visuals), and it doesn’t even really give it a wider variety of use cases, it just gives it the ability to collateral some trash if you decide to use one of your 2 grenades to kill a single Mauler.

32

Yeah absolutely! Bash should get redesigned to, “+1-5% critical chance with this weapon for 8 seconds on push. Stacks 5 times.”

Either that or non-stacking, “+5-25% critical chance for 8 seconds on push” since it’s a little awkward to stack a push-triggered blessing. I mean it’s totally doable it’s just weirdly costly to dump all your stam getting the stacks to max. So I think this second version would be the best actual design for Bash.

33

Hmm? With +50% feat those are easily the best two in the game. Way beyond Bolter.

DPS vs. Crushers (damnation):

  1. 842 Grenade Gauntlet (special; grenade punch)
  2. 808 Plasma Gun charged
  3. 616 Power Maul
  4. 515 Hellbore Mk III
  5. 422 Force Sword charged lights or heavies (78% damage, 76% finesse, 76% first target)
  6. 411 Antax Combat Axe
  7. 397 Brain Burst (with 25% speed feat)
  8. 381 Chainaxe
  9. 251 Brain Burst (regular)
  10. 192 Boltgun primary spam (80% damage)
  11. 159 Boltgun secondary spam

Now the main reason Boltgun is that low is it doesn’t quite one-mag Crushers at 80% damage, but it’s close enough that it probably would with the right ability/perk/blessings involved.

Also that list isn’t every single weapon above 159 DPS vs. Crushers, just a couple relevant to each class as their best options against Crushers. But Boltguns really are pretty bad at it until you exceed the one-mag threshold. I mean they put out great damage and do like 90% of the thing’s HP which is fantastic on its own, but the slow reload means they can’t just solo the thing outright without good blessings/perks/ability involved.

34

You and some others here are right. It’s really about Crushers lacking a weakpoint. If their helmet was flak or anything other than carapace that would probably solve the issue entirely.

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35

So that DPS calculation is including the reload? TBF most people running Bolter are gonna be running the rending blessing, which pushes that up a huge amount and definitely removes reload requirement.

I find it hard to believe GG DPS is that high when the time between specials is pretty noticeable but whatever, we agree GG is a very good anti Crusher weapon.

36

GG DPS is just straight-up 4 punches and that kills em.

I’ve actually heard you can 3-punch Crushers too, with the right perk/blessings, so then it’s more in the 1000+ range.

Also remember that many of the other weapons here also have access to Rending, so while Boltgun hits an important breakpoint (no reload), the other weapons creep up a bit too when running optimal perks/blessings.

37

I’m actually think more along the lines on back the knees or elbows or back of the armpits but somewhere you can’t hit from the frount at all.

Crushers should be very hard to take on still not just shot it the head 10 times as he walks towards you.

38

I think we need to add the Lorenz Mk VI Rumbler to the leat of fairly effective anti-crusher-wepons.
Direct hits cause (in the meatgrinder) 500 norm/600 weakspot (head) Dmg. The explosion is neglegible with 52 Dmg bit it staggers the crusher. So all in all at least in theory the Rumbler is the ranged Option. I testest is also against a (better) Blastoom GG and the Rumbler got the better DPS ranged and GG-meelee alike.

(but i have to admit: the Rumbler got Shattering Impact (+2 Rending) on it, that might perhaps have increasde the dmg a little, i tested (unforntunately a worse) rumbler and that still got 400 Dmg on direkt hits (though the blast did more dmg)

39

I generally agree that a weapon that has no armor piercing capability is too much of a liability in this game, which is why all the top end weapons are armor piercing.

40

Pinned tier lists from Ogryn Discord.

First the one for without a Vet on the team:

Without_Vet
Without_Vet1140×465 145 KB

Now the one for with a Vet on the team:

With_Vet
With_Vet1140×465 145 KB

Notice how both have Cleaver in S Tier? Stubber makes it into S on one A on the other. Ripper gets into A on one and B on the other.

My point here is not to say that you are categorically wrong, but that your statement is not universally true either. Generally weaknesses of your melee weapon can be covered by ranged and vice versa. For Zealot you have a built in way to deal with Crushes with flamer and brauto (2 of the most popular Zealot ranged options, neither deals with Crushers well if examined in isolation). Psyker can cover armour impaired melee with Surge, and can cover Purgatus armour weakness with FS or Caxe. Rending shockwave on Trauma (which actually applies brittleness description wrong lol) can significantly soften armour weakness of your melee.

So on and so forth. It’s correct to say that bringing a loadout that has no anti armour capabilities is a poor choice. The same cannot be said about individual weapons without taking them out of the context of the rest of a build.