Yes, thank you, I could not agree more. @LVSpooky here’s a good example of how chip solves a problem rather than creating one. I just haven’t seen a better suggestion anywhere as to how you make melee mobs somewhat threatening without throwing the balance of everything else completely out the window.
I really disagree it creates many issues, the only one I’ve been presented I can somewhat agree with is that it feels bad to cop a melee hit right after taking exactly one shot from a trash mob, and to be real that is close to negligible as far as concerns go.
It absolutely seems necessary to me. Without it pure melee struggles would be largely a joke, and as ComradeHX has pointed out, removing chip then trying to rebalance toughness regen around that creates a slew of bigger issues.
Like i said in my original post… just make melee do more damage to toughness. Enemies in this game seem to do bonus damage when they hit you in the back anyways so people can get chunked if they get caught lacking too.
That is actually extremely common I have a half dozen friends that play this game and all but 1 of them has mentioned it sucks.
Also I don’t really think rebalancing the toughness gains would be hard at all and I have recommended easy fixes and I’m sure there are even more ways to make it better.
messing with elite spawns and stats.
that’s how people did increased difficulties by mods back in v2.
i think buffing enemies rather than nerfing players is a better approach
Yes, but all those changes do have their own effects on pace, and game feel beyond just difficulty. Melee chip is at least as much a mechanism to balance the threat level of different enemy group compositions as it is a contributor to overall difficulty.
It’s only a “nerf” insofar as people got used to a different system in the closed beta. Nerf is a relative term. Melee chip is certainly a limitation put upon your character, and naturally whether or not it’s one you enjoy is going to be quite subjective. I personally enjoy the looming threat it presents, others clearly don’t.
I do think you run other risks just buffing enemies though. There are limitations to what you can do there, eg health can only go up so much before fighting enemies becomes an utter sponge fest, and increasing enemy numbers similarly has the balance effect of further incentivising cleave/control weapons while leaving low cleave single target weapons in the dust.
TL;DR I think placing power limitations on the player character is a necessary component of achieving a good balance point, so I kinda disagree generally with your core premise there.
You can write all the code in the world but if you cant dodge and block enemy attacks whats the point of it all. Chip damage doesnt need to be removed and its very clear that anyone currently advocating for a further nerf to the game has a serious skill issue.
It’s an important part of it, because of how toughness works. The lower your toughness the more chip damage you get and ranged enemies do massive amounts of damage to toughness. We can’t try to balance it or even discuss it in isolation, because it doesn’t exist in isolation. Ranged attacks will always interact with it.
Pulling melee trash behind cover only works if there’s enough cover for the team, and the ogryn is a good example of how you can’t really do that in “hold position” encounters. There’s just not large enough cover there for the ogryn.
Any discussions on balance when it comes to toughness (and health) really does need to consider all enemy types, and a lot of common situations where it could be affected.
agree. but i’d say mele chip here is not to increase threat of all mele enemy comps, but to increase threat level of horde to a ranged classes.
shooters bad against horde but good against ranged enemies.
brawlers good against horde but struggle against ranged enemies.
that’s the formula i see.
agree again
i don’t think low cleave will be necessarily left in the dust in that case.
because usually low cleave weapons meant to deal with elites, not the horde.
low cleave is already hitting it’s limits on normal difficulties yet it still viable for its purpose.
so increasing enemy numbers should not be a problem for low cleave, but may require someone with high cleave weapon.
that way two rapier will be less efficient than one rapier and greatsword.
i have to agree on that as well. even though i prefer buffs over limitations.
expanding players kit to match overwhelming threat seems more fun to me.
but keep good balance that way may indeed be very difficult
Honestly, I agree with the players “power budget” not being to high. There are tons of games with horde killing where the players ended up too overpowered and the games lost all their hardcore players and by slow extension the entire playerbase dwindled. I don’t think Darktide is even close to something like that though.
When I recommend removing toughness bleedthrough, as stated above, I also recommended thought out difficulty adjustments that would keep the melee combat dangerous without the irritations that bleedthrough brings. The current toughness system as is needs work even ignoring the bleedthrough conundrum and I don’t think keeping the current bleedthrough dynamic will do anything but make it harder to work with and balance in the future.
Summarizing/polishing my ideas mentioned above:
-Remove toughness bleedthrough and then…
-Replace the difficulty of it by making enemy melee damage do bonus damage to the players toughness. (but not health, obviously) Let’s use 50% more damage to toughness as an example; You have 100 toughness and the enemy melee hit does 100 damage(+50% to your toughness). You would lose 100 toughness and then take 33 health damage.
-Change globally accessible sources of toughness replenishment, like weapon blessings and (maybe?) toughness on melee kill, to give static values instead of percentages so that having a bigger toughness bar (which is more useful since damage now wouldn’t bypass it) wouldn’t be so easily refilled. This would also enable toughness replenishment blessing on weapons to give slightly higher values without having to worry about balancing the values around the Veterans 200+ toughness bar.
Melee doing more damage to toughness still doesn’t cure your problem of lacking punishment for people who don’t watch their back. You already got the first hit for free.
Again, that little chip damage is already far lower than what was almost half your healthbar(of 100hp char) in Vermintide2 higher difficulties.
id say that for most careers gaining thp wasn’t so difficult. thp is complicated topic tbh.
huntsman can fill full half of his missing hp to thp for one shield bash. but for bh it’s impossible.
and they both supposed to be squishi ranged dps.
there is diffrent resistances as well. dont want to dig in thp subject realy deep.
so ill just add that, for me thp decay was mostly noticeble on high thp bar while searching for books and during last skittergate ending walk for boss
Shield bash is only good for filling thp but it doesn’t kill melee enemies much if ever, so it’s often undesirable(you want to kill enemies to go back to shooting; spend too much time in melee and you might as well be playing the other two careers that have ranged weapons), I find spear+shield much more useful there. Stagger on kruber weapons is generally pretty good such that most will work anyway(especially in cata where enemies are less likely to outright die than go in stagger to give thp on stagger).
Elf and Mage(pyro, at least) are the squishy ones.
The point is in VT2 there was a choice between staying safe and keeping up more effective (ranged) dps. For the most part thp decay incentivizes people to continue moving forwad and fight enemies to keep thp topped up.
In darktide all of that is handed to the player in automatically regenerating toughness(melee kill will generate it but it’s obviously not needed for veteran) regardless of melee weapon choice…etc.
It doesn’t punish player through decay, but rather reward players for camping/being slow(in certain ways; of course overall it’s still dumb to slow down/camp).
Hence a little melee damage bleedthrough is the very minimum it needs to keep gameplay less braindead.
are you talking about ranged dps here? because ogryn and zealot benefiting from aggression and fast movement.
tho they still can sitback and wait for veteran and psyker to clear ranged enemies.
and if you just sit and camp you don’t take melee damage at all. so how chip will encourage less camping more moving?
i like it more as well, if i want a shield. m&s is a beast tho, if you procking hunter especially.
Weren’t you referring to cuntsman and bh? Of course this is on ranged dps.
Melee has very little issue since they’re already engaged in melee(hence paying attention to melee enemies around them).
Melee class sitting there is just being useless.
Chip damage will encourage ranged class to move, because if they don’t move forward(or actually become slightly more skilled by paying attention to enemies around them) - their skilless ass is going to be worn down by chip damage. This would do the same thing as decaying thp in VT2.
I mean, I played Cata in VT2. I think the way chip damage is set up is, simply put, not fun and doesn’t work well. Does that mean I have a skill issue? It’s painfully obvious that the game isn’t designed around chip damage. At all. They’ve created more bugs for the game than they’ve solved trying to hastily implement it while trying to not overpower Veteran because they want to have their cake (Barrier on ranged) and eat it (bleedthrough on melee).
The solution, as implemented, is bad. What they want to do, is bad. On heresy+, even with bleedthrough removed, you will still get chunked through your toughness because undodgeable ranged attacks hit like a truck and regenerating from 0 toughness is actually hard.
It’s not a skill issue if the complaint is that the mechanic, as implemented, isn’t fun. Remember, you can balance the game however you want, but that won’t magically make a balanced game fun. The end result is just that it’s, simply, not fun to interact with that mechanic.
People complaining about it don’t have a skill issue, they have an issue with a mechanic, simply, not being fun.
Kind of like dogs, at the moment, aren’t fun to interact with due to how twitchy they are, them being able to snap onto people who look like they dodged, or staggering them into an instant point blank lunge.
Toughness and chip damage remain convoluted. I’d suggest making changes like having toughness work differently for “ranged” and “melee” classes so that they helped more respectively with different enemy types and generated differently but that’d make a needlessly complex system even more complicated.
In VT2 we got backstabbed way less, they did more damage, but THP recovery was generally easy.
but wait! if zealot have passive toughness damage reduction in his coherency + he will increase toughness regen for rangend classes. so he is not being useless by just sitting there, he is doing teamplay!
if there will be enemies to chip them down.
while playing vet i noticed that game likes to spawn a couple of enemies in the back some times. so it might work for newbies. but i think they will not realase that they slowly dying of decay and they need to keep up with their mele bros.
and if mele guys just sitting back with ranged guys and dealing with all mele mobs, there is no reason for anyone to move fast and keep the pace. unless they have grims
i think it might become a common strat on higher difficulties to just agro whole room and then sitting in some choke waiting for all ranged and melee enemies to come close out of the cover and nicly stack, so they can be esealy dispatched without taking much risks damage and
saving ammo. kinda like in hotline miami
and that what people probably see as a teamplay right now.
not looking fun to me