Toughness 'bleedthrough' needs to go

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

The letter brought me back to give this feedback. As the title says, I really think it’s toxic (to use the buzzword) because:

-The tutorial specifically states that if you have toughness, it blocks all damage.
This is the big one. You tell a player game works X, and then the game works as Y. I even checked and in the tutorial, partial toughness blocks melee damage. It confuses new players and makes them resentful because despite relying on toughness to block damage in melee, they still get hurt and the hp debuff against chaff.
This is as corrosive as saying “medkits heal you” in the tutorial and then they don’t, or “aiming makes your shots more accurate” and they don’t, ect. I have had friends refund the game because of this-if the tutorial cannot be trusted, why give anything in the game a chance?

-Because ‘chaff’ enemies give a permanent stacking hp debuff, the bleed-through is effectively cumulative as your total hp pool is nibbled away along with your actual health.

-This undermines melee, half the game.
Shooting is lots of fun, and it’s enjoyable, but right now there is a massive disincentive to get into melee, despite how fun melee is. If you don’t want to take hp damage in melee you effectively have to go for no-melee-hit runs.

-This undermines two of the classes
Ogryn is built around wading in. The zealot is designed to risk low health for more power, relying on toughness to keep them alive. Even the veteran’s plasma gun’s heat vent is a ‘trade health for more shots’. However, the bleedthrough-especially with the permanent hp debuff-ensures you don’t want to engage with these mechanics, at all.

-Some penances are obviously built around toughness actually working as the tutorial says.
Not allowing your toughness bar to break in melee fighting as a veteran, or keeping yourself alive on low health as a zealot is workable if toughness blocks 100% of all damage. Currently, they’re effectively no-hit runs. Again, I know people who looked at specific penances and, having just learned the actual toughness mechanic, this helped them decide the game was not well made and bailed to get a refund.

If you really want to stick with it then at least pull the voice actress in to redo the line, so new players don’t get confused and upset when they learn the actual gameplay. It won’t help the other problems it causes, but it will at least help them understand why they’re being punished for playing the game the way it was explained to them.

I hope this feedback’s helpful for you guys, because the core of the game is fun.

9 Likes
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No. You just have to get back to 100% toughness between instances of being hit in melee. Every class has good toughness regen options. You take 0 health damage when hit at 100% toughness.

Ogryn has dummy good toughness regen options, they’re not undermined at all. Zealot also has 0 issue maintaining toughness in melee. Low health Zealot as a build option is bad but HP chip in melee is not the main issue. Will avoid going on a tangent about this but very few Zealots who know what they’re doing try to run low health, the benefits are miniscule.

Yes this is the real issue. Pretty silly they haven’t fixed the tutorial yet.

1 Like
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Nah melee chip damage is fine. Darktide’s greater interactions with damage reductions already get pretty insanely easy with how straight up trashy you can play and recieve no punishment. Just 100% toughness is like a constant IB gromril armor with no cooldown.

Otherwise the melee elites would be an even bigger joke. I actually kinda like the bugged staggers on Crushers atm, it makes them more threatening than their usual get thrown around the room in stagger state and maybe body block some shooters thing they normally contribute.

2 Likes
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I would prefer the game be balanced around having toughness block 100% of damage but Fatshark seems set on keeping this system. It takes some getting used to, that’s for sure, and I strongly doubt that Fatshark will ever have the motivation to make the necessary changes even if they wanted to.

As it is right now changing the tutorial is the least that should happen.

5

I don’t mind the chip damage now that 100% toughness means 0 bleedthrough

Except, I REALLY still hate how you can be downed if you have toughness remaining. I Just get so frustrated when I know I have a decent chunk of toughness left, like 60, 70%, and still go down. I would so much rather have that shot “break” my remaining toughness, so that then 1 more hit and I’m dead. That would feel far more fair to me.

6

What I still can’t excuse is when a hound pounces someone else and you’re in the way it chips you for 2 hp damage even at 100% toughness. First of all why chip everything that is in it’s path? It’s already janky as hell so the jump is all over the place sometimes. Secondly why the direct hp damage. If this were corruption I would at least somewhat understand it since hounds do corruption damage to you when pounced on, but no it’s hp damage instead of 2 corruption.

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I wouldn’t have an issue with the way toughness works currently… if ranged enemies didn’t exist, and it was a little more resilient.

The problems in my experience are:

  • regular shooter dudes (and shotgunners) delete your toughness in the blink of an eye, and in some situations you have literally zero counterplay.
  • a stray shot plus taking a melee hit means you take health damage, which means some jerk dreg can turn a single mistake that was supposed to be buffered by 100% toughness into taking 40 damage.
  • fire shouldn’t deplete the entirety of your toughness.
  • the abundance of stagger, suppression, and stun effects mean that you don’t usually just lose your toughness, you are stuck in place while the enemies have free reign to kick your inquisitorial ass.
3 Likes
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Shotgunners I’d agree with. Gunners though? I’d recommend getting some gunner resistance if they pose a problem. I’m running ~50% (cause res is really one of the more worthwhile stats on curios) and I’m doing perfectly fine against anything but shotgunners (who I then can prioritize)

Also, chip damage works in tiers, so the higher toughness you are, the less goes over to health, and if you are in melee, just melee back, so you actually regain that toughness back that you receive as damage.

You can balance the toughness between gunners and regeneration from melee kills just fine in my experience, especially as melee classes.

That’s literally why the melee classes (especially Zealot) have feats to prevent you from getting staggered or interrupted. Every other class simply has to be careful in melee, cause they’re not required to be in that position during “neutral”.

Fire is just about the easiest thing to avoid if you aren’t charging your face into hordes you shouldn’t charge into and get circled in, and even if you do, you’re fine as long as you have an escape option before the bomb goes off or the flamer sprays you down (which, again, zealot has, for instance.)

All of this basically boils down to “Don’t monkey brain into hordes when you don’t have to and you’re fine. Just let those classes to the job that are meant to handle it, and don’t pretend you’re a zealot as a veteran, just because you have a powersword.” :crazy_face:

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Gunners are the elite shooters. Damage resistance (Gunners) doesn’t do anything against the non-elite Stalkers and Riflemen

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They also don’t do that much damage if you aren’t literally standing there, waiting for your team to pick them off at range.

Melee classes kinda have to dictate the momentum of your game, because they have to kill as fast as they safely can to keep their toughness up, while not running straight into a horde they can’t handle.

In other words, too much hesitation means certain death, over-confidence does too. Finding that middle ground is your best way of defense and offense.

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I believe this is a skill issue

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The game would be way to easy without the chip-damage. It worked already differently in EA and no matter how many toughness you had, you always got like 10% melee-damage. Poeple were mad about it, so it changed to what we have right now.

And it´s in a good state, if not highly forgivable. You still don´t get damage on health through range units and you block ANY damage from a melee hit, even those deadly overheads from crushers, as long as your toughness is on 100%.
In reality you do even get those random hits while fighting a horde or so, but since you´ll kill one or another enemy, you´ll get back to the 100% very fast.

Yes, gunners might hit you while taking care for a handful of adds in melee mode. But that´s the challenge of the games combat. You try to avoid as much as you can, and yes, you can dodge bullets aswell. Or you kite the melee units back into a safer spot, whatever is possible in the situation you´re.

If we won´t have the chipdamage, the game would become a no-brainer. Poeple will just stack toughness and call it a day. The game would need a complete rework in kind of balancing, to keep melee units a threat, etc…

I´m really sorry to say this, but if poeple have issues with the current design, then it´s some sort of skill-issue. It´s either missing game-knowledge, wrong decision-making or you play your class wrong.
Bad luck and bad spawns can happen ofc, but again… it´s the challenge in this game. They current system works fine.

1 Like
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They need to at the very least fix the tutorial.

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I am personally fine with the system the way it is.
But i still see an issue with it, since it is quite unintuitive.

Although it is only two sentences and only the most basic explanation, I would assume, that most people would be confused if you told them:
“As long as you have toughness, a % of any melee attack that hits you, is dealt to your toughness, while the remaining damage goes directly to your hp.
The % of the damage that goes to your toughness, is equal to how many % of your toughness you have at the time.”

Simply because this is different from the “shield absorbs any damage” in most if not all other games that they have played before (at least for me, it is the first time i see a shield work in this specific way).
Because of this, the tutorial should explain this very clearly, which afaik, it does not.

1 Like
15

Of course they should change the tutorial to give some proper informations about it. But there are no gameplay-changes needed. The system fits the gameplay well and i guess it´s pretty hard to find something different fitting the gameplay meanwhile offering pretty good balance-options.

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I literally just said I would prefer the game to be rebalanced to still be challenging even with toughness blocking 100% of damage. Literal hundreds of shooter games with energy shields or similar bars over health that block 100% of damage manage to be challenging despite your perceived problems with it. Did you read anything before going on a huge “skill issue” rant that nobody asked for?

17

Yes i did and i explained the “why” and didn´t rant by any means.

Other shooter games are shooters, not melee in its core. If melee can´t go through shields, then the whole part is pretty useless since we´ve a real melee combat with blocking / dodging.

If you´ve any idea to do better without changing the whole game, then feel free to post it. But it´s really just about “I get damage, it sucks.” like the early complains about chip damage, then yes, it´s a skill-issue.
The current system is highly forgivable since it can also tank really hard hits and you can melt down hordes mostly before they reach you. Poeple just should get used to melee and stop thinking this is a shooter only.

18

Chip damage doesn’t undermine melee or the melee classes. As others have pointed out, it’s completely avoidable if you get back up to 100% toughness. If you’re dodging/sliding constantly (and pushing as appropriate; and in rare cases even blocking) it’s very difficult for enemies to even land those two hits in a row.

I’ve been running low-HP Zealot all week and loving it (though I’ve put more time on Ogryn/Psyker lately). In fact on many of those runs I’m the one clutching things – had a Heresy run today where everyone died during boss and managed to get everyone back on their feet. I don’t try to stay at super low HP, and the main reason I run +25% HP is so that my 20% and 50% thresholds are high enough to budget for the occasional Rager gettin’ through (otherwise I’d run basically pure toughness).

Now maybe Zealots are just too good with slide invincibility and that will need to change at some point, but as-is they’re definitely fine. It’s only Ogryns that I’m somewhat worried about because while slides will successfully dodge a lot of ranged fire it’s definitely not quite at the same level as with Zealots. Should be easier as I stack a bit more Toughness Regen though, as just getting a second one should make my Ogryn’s toughness pretty insane.

The only thing I wonder about is whether the player gets any sort of immunity from toughness breaking, then restoring (due to kill), then breaking again less than 2 sec later. The first break it makes sense to stagger them, but the subsequent staggers can feel brutal.