Vermintide is a game based on medieval combat, medieval combat is very simple, without projectiles that can hit you in an instant from a long range, combat boils down to people running into each other and stabbing away.
In darktide, bullets flying around, and guns change the dynamic completely, and it is something a lot of veterans/experts from Vermintide do not consider. To them all fatshark games are the same, so if they are experts on one, they are probably experts in the other one to.
So below is some of the top bad advice these players give:
“Melee is for horde, guns for elite”
The amount of players switching to melee when they hear a horde, wasting time they could have spent shooting it is what leads to most failures. The faster it dies, the faster you can deal with other threats. If the developers intended to have players play this way, they would add a feature that forces you to switch to melee.
“Take it slow”
This is a crutch players use, it subjects them to 40-60 min matches, where they spent a ginormous amount of time, trying to cheese there way thru the mission, by exhausting spawns. Players feel that if they can’t say that they are playing in Damnation makes them inferior. This is not true, it just means you are working your way up the ladder, like the rest of the players do. It goes against the whole purpose of our missions, as the npcs talking to us clearly state it multiple times.
“Conserve ammo”
This is just a tag line, someone in some office decided to add that sounded cool. It was not meant to be taken literally and used as a torch to keep insisting the game should be melee focused. There is plentiful ammo in the missions, and unless you are running around shooting at shadows, you will probably not run out.
“Veteran is the only balanced class”
It is the only class in the game Vermintide players do not immediately identify as a class from Vermintide. This forces there brain to play the game as it was a new game, rather than switch to vermintide mode, this leads to them having moderate success.
“Poxhounds are bugged”
They are not, and were never hard, players get lost in the meleeing, and ignore everything else that is going on, just like with barrels, and get hounded, it causes them to fail, they get angry, and complain here. It can be shot, naded, or you can climb on to a crate, its a four legged animal, with one skill, “lunge”.
“Dont shoot barrels”
They stand next to a barrel, or walk up to it, and not paying attention to when the characters say “get away from that barrel”. They can not move, can not blow up on there own, and can not be blown up by the enemies. On the other hand if u blow them up before u run in, u will kill a bunch of enemies.
“stay together”
They do not understand how cohesion works. They run together as a tight group to get all the buffs. This backfies since the whole group presents itself as a single target to the enemy, and get easily overwhelmed. This also leads to the 4 players fighting over elites/hordes, and players feeling left out, or like they dont have there moments. The way to move in cohesion is in pairs, its how you cover more ground, enjoy the game more, and get those moments to stand out. 2 players take one side/path the others the other, and meet up where the map naturally brings em together, or if they encounter a monstrosity, or a rather tough horde.
“The game sucks”
They expected to launch darktide on release, go in the highest difficulty, and lol there way thru it, while the rest of us new players marvelled at there skills. That did not happen, and they got super angry and decided to band up and take it out on the developers. The game is amazing, and constantly has more players online than vermintides.
So peeps if you want to improve in this game, stop listening to experts on another game, that have 0 experience or knowledge about this one. Instead do what the people that are succeeding do, work your way thru quickplay, advancing in difficulty when you’ve done enough matches with completely random people, that you can autopilot ur way thru the mission.
As someone new to tide games, I did notice that a lot of the youtubers making content, who had been great at vermintide, seem to be limited by their beliefs about what is possible or good. Playing darktide like it is vermintide does work, and so they tend to stick to what they’ve found to work, even though other approaches can work even better.
You give some good advice but it’s done in such a weird backhanded way. You’re putting a lot of words in our mouths and drawing the strangest non-correlated conclusions.
Here’s a title change suggestion: “Top bad advice [that bad players] give”
The following already existed in VT2: Ratlings, beastmen archers, Flamers, Flamer bosses, bombers (gas rats), and even homing projectiles (storms), and lastly you could consider leech beams and some lord fight mechanics. Yes - the dynamics of ranged enemies and the changes to THP/Toughness are massively amplified in Darktide, but it’s not like we have gone from playing soccer to playing sudoku puzzles. It’s not by accident why we were beating Damnation at around level 15 with subpar gear and VT2 vets.
We had tons of infinite ammo horde clear ranged builds in VT2 that are INFINITELY better than their Darktide counterparts. Shotty RV, Duckfeet BH, Blundy Huntsman, Engi, anything Sienna related, dwarf fire weapons, Elf waystalker ult and javelin on the rest of her careers (post-moonbow spam)…
Hmm, a crutch is something that people use to make something easier to perform. You’re implying that people going through levels slower makes the game easier, yet it goes against the game design intent or something? So are you recommending people rush through the levels? Or are you recommending that people rush through levels but only at lower difficulties? How are VT2 vets sabotaging the game/community here? If you are saying that we recommend to “Take it slow,” in the Tide game that objectively favors taking it slow (because you need to loot pickups/ammo), and also penalizes you less from an AI Director sending hordes perspective…then yeah, you got me I’ve never heard a Fatshark dev say anything differently either, they’ve always promoted Darktide as a slower, more strategic, more team-based experience…whereas in VT2 we can reasonably solo Cataclysm with almost any career. So I’m having a hard time understanding why this advice is generally incorrect and to be blamed on VT vets
The context and disclaimers needed for your assertion and any reply I could give here is insanely demanding, as you need to balance your current gear/build/career with the skills and loadouts of your team. This statement makes no sense if you have 4 staff Psykers, or if you have 4 pistol zealots without a Vet, or if you have 4 Vets with shotguns, or if you have 4 Ogryns spamming kickbacks and not bothering to loot everything. You should try to be efficient and effective with your melee and ranged utilizations, as they each have different roles to bear. Why rush to mow down a horde with your braced autogun if you’re not going to be able to sustain the ammo necessary to neutralize the enemy Specials that are coming next wave? Your melee will usually do the job just fine. Again, the AI Director in Darktide HEAVILY favors slower play and being conservative as opposed to VT2. If you recall, we had Temp HP and Ultimates that charged based off of hits dealt and taken, in addition to entirely different ammo regeneration mechanics. It takes tons of practice to balance the opportunity cost of expending ammo on a horde versus having it available for the next difficulty spike. Thus, you may hear the default statement “Conserve ammo” because 1) It teaches noobs to learn melee which they will need to do at some point if they are unhappy with being carried 2) If noobs learn how to melee, then they will inevitably learn the opportunity cost patterns for higher difficulties. You imply that “Conserve ammo” is bad advice, and then say to blast everything with ranged…
So which is it, do we give advice that is cautionary and leads noobs to learn good foundational mechanics that result in linear progression/learning, or do we say “just go blasting (kinda)”?
Nope, we very much feel the similarities to Huntsman/Waystalker/Bounty Hunter/Ranger Vet. Try playing Huntsman with a Longbow and tell me it doesn’t feel like the Veteran with a Helbore, only more difficult. You want machine guns? We got Huntsman Repeater, Waystalker Swiftbow, Engi ult. Veteran is currently the easiest class in the game to play overall, so I’m not sure what you mean by it’s the only class that allows VT vets to achieve moderate success. If anything, I would say Veteran is the most unbalanced class, but it’s more by virtue of other classes feeling under-tooled, rather than Veteran being patently OP.
That’s the biggest bait I’ve seen on the forums since another post by that “Genius” guy. The devs just added a lag compensation change to the dogs in the last patch, after a long series of fixes. The embarrassing jankiness of the dogs is so bad that community clips of them negatively impact Darktide’s public image.
We had barrels and lamp oils in VT so again I don’t know where you are pulling these baseless absolutes from, but yes - barrels are a useful tool if used properly, and they can also instantly kill teammates. VT vets are used to maintaining the necessary situational awareness to leverage and avoid barrel fiascos, but we are also at the absolute mercy of our teammates to not kill us with barrels unless we proactively kill every barrel in the pathway that we intend to walk in the future. I’ve never seen anyone type or say “don’t shoot barrels” but I mean…if you kill someone because you have poor planning/depth perception/aim, then yeah, that’s on you. If the barrel victim dies because they weren’t skilled enough to notice visual/audio cues and they had an alternate route to pursue, then that’s on them.
Quite the opposite - us VT vets are notoriously bad about maintaining cohesion uptime and wonder why the heck our Toughness shields aren’t coming back naturally. Thousands of hours of learning spacing/wall-hugging/solo clutches has damaged us in this regard, I admit.
Wrong - we did lol’ our way through the highest difficulties, got bored, and tried to experiment with class weapon combos to fill the waiting period for new content. The lack of a crafting system, the RNG fest, and the silo’d account resources prevented us from being able to do this - thus we gave negative feedback on that front constantly. This is the context you’re missing. We don’t think the game sucks; we think we are prevented from enjoying the full product because of those insane reasons. If those aspects were fixed, we would’ve patiently waited for new careers, content, maps, weapons, etc. Stop kidding yourself - we played VT2 for years through multiple disasters like WoM and some Chaos Wastes issues. We are still here, and still playing, and still giving money and constructive feedback to Fatshark.
Your post has been ad hominem, used strawman, logical fallacies abound, unsupported claims, bro I can’t even
My playtime for VT2 - 3820.2 hrs
My playtime for DT - 622 hrs
Can I only be an expert on one of them? Are my supported facts wrong compared to your opinions? What are your credentials? Have you been playing Tide games solo/pubs/premades/twitch/modded/tournies, throughout all the DLCs and successes/failures throughout the years? Or did you just arrive to the party to discredit and supplant community vets because you think their opinions are wrong? Are you just trying to change the game into something that will make you look better than others? I don’t understand your motives and malice here. I don’t even know how to wrap this post up because your accusations are so wildly wrong by large quantitative margins.
We barely have 4-4.5K people playing daily, and who knows how many people are just popping in to check Melk/Armory. We’ve got 161 people watching DT on Twitch right now. Could you please kindly not antagonize a largely loyal playerbase that is currently working on getting the game into a state that the general public will come back to?
holy novel batman. this helped make me sleepy though lol
Being a Vermintide 2 veteran, I can understand why some of them would give general advice like this. Darktide plays almost identical to what Vermintide 2 does. However with more specials, ranged warfare, and arsenal of weaponry to choose from, this is vastly different game because of that fact.
However, the basics of Vertminde still reigns good advice to keep in mind but not to take 100%. But just for reference sake, here is why V2 Vets would say something like this. And this is someone who plays (and still does) an unhealthy amount of V2 from time to time.
The hunt for red weaponry and trinkets is a blessing/curse…
In Darktide, the weaponry allows you switch up this dynamic quite a bit. The Thunder Hammer is a prime example of this as this is used to one shot specials and elites with ease. The auto guns and lasguns are mostly used for horde control as well. So in retrospect, sticking with this kind of gamplay strategy is good, but very limiting on what other players can do.
However mastering the art of melee combat is paramount within a game like this. Because relying solely on a ranged weapon will prove meaningless once it is empty or has a long reload time (plasma gun being the worst offender here).
Only in Damnation, I can see this being said only to encourage team tactics over making rash choices and charging at the enemy blindly. But after a player gains familiarity of all enemy types, going fast and hard within certain missions will become a more common thing.
Although it may sound condescending whenever this is uttered, it should be understood as, “There are way too many ranged enemies and specials out there. So to play it safe, we need to be careful for the time being.” This is especially true if grims are being picked up or if a map modifier is in play.
There is ammo scattered everywhere within the map and ammo crates allow people to restock 4 times if need be. So there is no reason to do so unless your current build is focused on shooting everything that has a pulse and not even touching your melee weapon.
But if your weapon is a high DMG, low ammo reserve, then this is where that advice comes into play. Otherwise, you are taking everyone elses ammo who may need it as they are running low too. Especially if someone is fan firing a Revolver within a horde of enemies and constantly picks up ammo because “they ran out” a bunch of times.
Currently, they can lunge at you, get recoiled backwards if you managed to hurt them in time. But during this animation, they will suddenly bounce up high in the air and fall down. THIS is the bugged animations they are referring to and it happens more often than people would like to see. Leading to confusing moments of you not knowing where the Pox Hound is until they lunge at you again. The ragdoll animations of them going to outer space after being killed isn’t a bug. It’s just a funny feature.
Besides using barrels to kill a bunch of enemies, they now do insane amounts of damage to monsters and bosses (if their shield is down). Saving these barrels is ideal in order to do massive damage in a short amount of time rather than relying on the current weaponry you have.
Another thing that players like to do, especially Vermintide 2 OG Zealots, is to damage themselves using these barrels as they rely on the Martyrdom stacks and “Honor thy Martyr” feat to gain an insane damage buff at the cost of being a glass canon. Although it isn’t required to do so, these self hurting players enjoy the perks of running this kind of build as it forces them to either understand the enemies attacks or to be easily down when overwhelmed.
This goes without saying as coherency allows players to gain buffs either from class feats or toughness should they need it. Though the counter-argument here to what you are saying is that it doesn’t truly matter who kills what at the end. This is a PvE game and anyone in your squad either chooses to melee or fire a ranged weapon adds to YOUR progress within challenges and the like. Same with Vermintide 2 where Cousin Okrie’s challenges.
Although there are moments where the group will get split up at times (and this is perfectly understandable on when this happens), going lone wolf will get not only you killed very easily, but it will be a determent to your team members as well as they were relying on you to being fairly close to the group.
The reason of the anger and frustrations is that Vermintide 2 showed us what Darktide could potentially be. We were expecting Fatshark to leverage some of the design ideas within their previous well known title and to apply it to this game as well.
Multiple sub-classes to pick from once a certain level has been obtained
New sub-classes were unlocked when a player reaches their 7th or 12th level of that particular class, encouraging to try those sub-classes to fit their kind of play style.
Having enough resources to freely customize one’s weapon or character
Meaning no locks to any kind of stat you wished to be edited. Simply gain the resources and do as you will to customize your weapons to your liking.
Being able to freely choose which missions to go into
Some players enjoyed some missions over others and enjoyed doing secondary objectives as apart of doing jumping puzzles or going off the beaten path to discover new areas.
Having meaningful NPCs to care for
Being your character is one thing, but enjoying the banter between the characters you are fighting with and who are giving orders to you is another thing as well.
Warhammer and the Warhammer 40k is packed with too much lore to ignore
We can see this in both games which enjoyable to bare witness. There was even weapon lore within the Closed Beta of the game which was removed as well.
But when the game game out and V2 veterans had reached level 30 on either one or all classes the game had to offer, we all saw the hollowness on what this game truly is. We could forgive certain things being not readily available as seasonal content updates were being implemented within the game as originally planned.
But for a base game to have little to no story to follow and to see the current restrictions this game has on the player base already caused the fanbase to immediately conclude that this game sucks. The cosmetic shop was the only thing being constantly updated at the time which brought huge concerns on what the developer’s priorities were. Fatshark even acknowledged this within their Open Letter statement as a bad launch to the game.
[--Closing thoughts--]
Hopefully now with all this explained, you understand the mindset of what Vermintide players are currently saying. We truly wish to enjoy this game with newcomers to the series and for them to enjoy being within the Warhammer 40k universe.
But when a game developers promise to deliver an engaging rich story, promote this game as the successor of Vermintide series, show several things within the trailer and then flip the script at the last minute, it brings the unwanted feeling of being used. This isn’t the first time Vermtinde veterans has seen Fatshark pulling this kind of game development strategy and Veterans of the Vermintide series are sick of seeing this same kind of actions yet again being dropped onto our laps and being forced to accept it for what it is.
We wish to be heard by the developers so we can help them any way we can do so
We wish to see this game to BE the successor of the Vermintide series and to prove this fact
We wish for the freedom that we had before within the Vermintide series and to enjoy this game for what it can offer us
The advice you’re criticizing is like day 1 advice that (most of) the playerbase has long since adapted to Darktide’s changes. It feels to me like you’re here just to be a contrarian to your perceived opposition seemingly without even attempting to engage in a constructive discussion. Thankfully there’s a few kind people who care enough to engage in good faith.
I’ve never heard a Fatshark dev say anything differently either, they’ve always promoted Darktide as a slower, more strategic, more team-based experience…whereas in VT2 we can reasonably solo Cataclysm with almost any career. So I’m having a hard time understanding why this advice is generally incorrect and to be blamed on VT vets
