Toughness negating dmg

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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It seems like there is more and attacks from enemies that completely ignore toughness. This has become extremely annoying as a melee Ogryn because I don’t have much choice but to take the health damage.

I for one think it shouldn’t be allowed at all, especially on an Ogryn, because it’s yet another metric thrown into the murky mechanics soup that we can’t actually account for. Health should only go down when toughness is at zero.

The enemies who magically bypass your toughness should have markers or warnings or something.

I’m getting downed in situations that I shouldn’t be getting downed in as I track my toughness non-stop.

A rager can seemingly take quarter of my health off my Ogryn even if I have full toughness.

It’s nonsense.

I love a challenge but there needs to be a CLEAR set of rules. Moving goal posts on such a complicated combat system is pretty unfair, especially as we often rely on muscle memory.

I don’t use mods so it’s really difficult to track and test this stuff because enemies don’t attack in the meat grinder (because reasons?).

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You know why they changed this… melee is harder with this change.
Only other attack that can be seen like that, is sniper. However, with enough toughness and/or resist, you can take a sniper shot with your toughness and not get damaged (I often meet that… often is a little exaggerated word considering that snipers are not the enemies that can hit you a lot of times in a mission…).

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Hmm? Toughness-penetrating attacks have remained the same since release iirc. Only the flamer mechanic was changed but that was ages ago, well over a year I think.

Snipers, mauler & crusher overheads and burster explosions. That’s it. Other than that toughness has always worked the same way:

  • Ranged can only hit health after depleting all toughness
  • Melee will dmg health by your remaining % of toughness. If an attack deals 80 dmg, then:
    • At 100% toughness you’ll take only toughness dmg, no hp
    • At 80% toughness you’ll take 16 hp dmg (20% of the attack)
    • At 0% toughness you take the full 80 hp dmg

This survival mechanic imo is a massive improvement over what they did with their previous game. Both VT2’s temp health (THP) and DT toughness mechanics revolve around player performance: the less you get hit & the more enemies you kill, the more resource you’ll have.

Difference being that with THP your baseline is zero: Your total health is always limited to 100% hp, so at full health you can’t even get THP. THP decays quickly so every fight starts at 0 THP, unless you rush. Which ofc means the whole system strongly encourages rushing, leaving coherency, and risks in general. (VT2 didn’t have coherency but the idea is the same: staying with the group)

With DT’s toughness however your baseline is always 100% regardless of your health. And since it generates automatically in coherency, every fight starts with it stacked. This system encourages the opposite behaviour of VT2’s and imo feels far more fair and consistent in general.

Changing melee toughness dmg to work the same as ranged would be a massive buff to players. To keep the game even remotely balanced they’d not only have to significantly buff the enemies, but also nerf/rework most of the toughness talents. And all that work & resulting bugs away from other development for… what?

There’s a reason oggies have the most ridiculously powerful toughness regen talents of any in the game. Their first top left set gives them 20% tgh per melee hit, on top of the usual 5% tgh per kill. They also have ~2x more hp than the rest on avg, far more +tgh AND tgh dmg resist via talents than others, the FnP keystone, AND have an inherent massive stagger resistance while dealing massive extra stagger & cleave compared to others.

tldr; Oggies are literally designed to facetank hits and not even feel it, provided you get a few swings - kills or not - inbetween each. But even with all that they still revolve around the same core mechanics as everyone else: If you can’t dodge & hit the enemy more often than the enemy hits you, you’ll start taking dmg. That means you’re making mistakes.

The rules ARE clear and have remained the same throughout Darktide’s lifecycle. Ragers in particular were designed to be murderously dangerous in melee. If you let them get close & start swinging before killing or staggering them in time then you made a mistake. This is especially true as an oggy, which by default is easily the best class for dealing with multiple ragers in melee. A vast majority of builds on any other class would already be dead at that point, and rely instead on maintaining distance before its too late.

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This was until they have given us the Holy Relic Blade!
/Joke

More seriously, Relic Blade is surely the best weapon against ragers. On Ogryn, the shovel is great even if pickaxe (or anything) can do the job if you anticipate the rager moves.

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Hell no, Ogryn will literally become immortal and what’s the fun in that?
I understand that Ogryn’s weakness is like talk of the town, but do not over exaggerate his weakness

Flamer’s afterdeath fire, Daemonhost’s aura, Dogs, Nets and maybe Poxburster - it’s not a lot, everything else do account for toughness, even sniper shots

It’s just double attacks, they do suck ass but fair

It’s not nonsense, it’s just some misunderstandings, you’ll figure it out fairly soon, just endure the frustrating part

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I’d argue the Crusher is the best zelly weapon for ragers. :joy: But yeah the Relic Blade is def pog too. Iirc it needs to be powered up to actually stagger & kill them tho, at least to cleave a group of them, which ofc isn’t always going to be the case. A Crusher tho staggers the lot of them by default, so long as you have enough of your buffs up. Even without stagger talents, just one of the stagger blessings will get you there in 1-2 swings.

But yeah for oggies everything save for cleavers (depends on cleaver attack but still), including many of the ranged specials, is enough to AoE stagger ragers. I really can’t stress it enough that oggies in particular should have the least trouble with ragers overall.

A lot of people seem to think the oggies should just be able to passively tank everything all the time no matter what you do, but how would that even work? DT is designed around skill-dependant mechanics, oggies can’t be an exception.

Ppl should see what skilled oggies look like: We’re not talking about some pretty dancing & weaving like how other classes have to do it. They can be absolutely, relentlessly brutally offensive. As long as you prioritize well & dodge the few things you need to, oggies are just on a completely different level. Imo their only real weakness is in ranged, but paying attention & taking cover (oggy-sized cover mind) deals with that.

But that’s kinda the point. Imo this IS a skill issue, and I don’t mean that in an offensive way. I’m a psyker main and while I play all classes and definitely do oggies far better than the average T5+ player (not a high bar, that), I’m very aware of my limitations as an oggy too. But as @Geadly said, buffs like this for the middling players would just make the skilled players into gods. It can’t possibly work as-is. The only thing ppl can do is either learn better, or lower difficulty.

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I have 1000% seen my health drop significantly whilst my toughness was practically full, during a fight with a rager.

If this isn’t intended then it’s a bug as I’ve seen it multiple times and with other enemies too. I’ve even seen pox walkers dent my health whilst I had full toughness.

Thing is, how are we meant to know what’s intended and what isn’t? There is zero information in the game regarding all these essential mechanics. It’s infuriating. Can’t even test enemy attacks as they stand still like dummies in the meat grinder.

Perhaps it’s something to do with havoc but I have noticed my health taking significant more damage and my toughness also not regenerating as much as usual (per attack, not passively). I have every toughness node available and use the heavy attack toughness regen weapon blessing (can’t remember the name) and always charge my heavy swings ahellava lot. But the regen I get from them recently is shockingly bad. Definitely feels like something has changed. A stealth nerf for more artificial difficulty in havoc perhaps. Dunno but it doesn’t feel right atm.

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And just for clarity, I have over 1k hours, the vast majority as Ogryn, and about 5600 penance points so I have played the game a great deal.

What I’m talking about is that it feels like something has changed fairly recently. It just feels different.

I’ve used the same build since the pickaxes came out so I’ve had a lot of time to get the feel for it.

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Yes perhaps that wasn’t the stance I intended…bad wording. I think what I meant was that enemy hits shouldn’t ignore toughness as many seem to have done so recently in my experience.

It hasn’t been consistent either. Something feels off.

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It should not.
I guess you know how it works, but…More you have toughness, less you take damages. So if you’re hit at 100% toughness, you take 0 damage. At 90% toughness, you take 10% damages: damages - (damages x 90%) etc.
So:

  1. the toughness should have gone lower
  2. it is normal to see the health impacted when you get a melee hit

If it was not what happened, then yes, there’s a bug.

totally true.
But, at the Fatshark defense, this a common standard nowadays. Ok, Fatshark game is above that cause of complicated mechanics.

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Yeah I’m thinking it is as I’ve seen significant health loss when toughness was full of nearly so. It’s made me do a double take quite a few times recently.

Seems just ‘some’ random attacks completely ignore toughness.

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Yes that could certainly be a factor. The game has been as stable as the Chernobyl reactor since havoc was released. They seemingly swapped their servers for a bowl of mashed potato too.

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P sure you always take health damage, toughness is just a dmg reduction modifier.

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If you can get the specific numbers that could help, as that was how the veteran’s toughness bug was sussed out when the 100% toughness = 0 melee damage to health change was first implemented. The bug was that the game only considered the veteran’s default toughness of 200 to be 100%, any less (as intended) or more (the bug) was treated as not being 100 percent, eg. being at 300 toughness (150% toughness) meant you would be slapped for 50% melee damage even at full toughness. Really gave some insights to how some of those systems were implemented.

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Oooo that’s interesting. Definitely sounds like that might be relevant here.

I’ve no idea how to find numbers for it but I’ll try and write down any I notice. Trouble is it happens mid mission so can’t take my hand off my mouse for a second, let alone to write down some stuff :laughing:

By the end of the mission I’ve totally forgot any numbers I’ve seen.

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Record your mission

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I think this is the answer regarding ragers. Unless they changed them at some point and I missed it they have a move in their flurry that hits twice very quickly, hence draining health through max toughness if you’re hit with it (first strike does no health damage but depletes toughness so the near instant second hit does health damage).

Hard to say what else could be causing this for you without specific examples. It probably is just a combo of ping and being hit with more than 1 strike nearly simultaneously.

This would further trivialise melee enemies and make toughness even more over centralised for defence so I can’t say I agree with that idea.

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I’m surprised it took me this long to learn how this works…granted that’s partly my own issue (didn’t read the top of the big ‘enemy attack values’ post I found a while back that explained all this I just assumed I knew it already and skipped it xD but I didn’t…) but dang, lends credence to the idea that it would at least be nice getting a little explanation in game as to how melee verses toughness works.

But, this explains so very much why I routinely found myself getting clubbed over the head for almost half my HP on my Psyker despite having 100+ toughness, turns out that’s exactly how it’s meant to work when I have 200 toughness total so half of it bleeds through xD absolutely gotta focus more on keeping that topped off…(though have been especially with the release of havoc but it’s great to learn even more so that I gotta keep that at max if I want to not fall over XD).

I will say to OP’s point though I do think Ragers are ignoring this rule in some way. While I can look back on all my games with this new knowlage and understand a lot more why the ‘small fry’ where ending me so abruptly, Ragers continue to pop up in my head as an outlier.

It could by all means just be the frequency of attacks they administer resulting in this system getting overtaxed and feeling bad (from what I recall they got an update at some point to make them more lethal and they ALWAYS double hit now with all their strikes, making every hit knock you down drastically more quickly and making even the first hit always tax health), but even to that degree they do feel like they are ‘doing more’ than intended, given I’ll routinely find 20-40% of my health bar getting nuked away cause ‘I screwed up’ and let a rager land 2-4 hits on me, but while I’m sitting at like 164 toughness or something my 165 HP is down to like 100 and that doesn’t feel like proper math. (these all being anecdotal numbers, I’d need to record a game to be sure this isn’t just my gut feeling being wrong).

It’s to the point I ALWAYS thought ragers just had an innate ‘piercing’ mechanic to them to make them more dangerous in melee combat, I didn’t know they actually (at least are supposed to) did just normal really fast melees, as it’s NEVER felt like that to me/always felt like they where taking more health than toughness. Part of that is likely the fact that most of my characters have more toughness than health, but it still leads me to rub my chin a little.

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It’s hard to say what happened here. You could be right, it could be a bug. Or it could have something to do with Havoc as you said. The game has so many exceptions and you can really assume nothing, so it’s well possible Havoc has some mods which add a toughness bleed-through effect, even just to specific enemies. But ragers are also really fast, so it could also just be a case stuff happening too fast to notice, like getting hit multiple times in a split-second where the subsequent attacks bleed through, but you generate the toughness back so fast you didn’t even have time to notice it dipped.

It’s honestly impossible to say what’s going on.

Yeah this absence of information & codex has always been a source for debates. As Fatshark’s old lead designer left the company under a year ago iirc, they left a letter here where among other things they mentioned how leaving so many details and nuances for us to discover was by design. And how they really enjoyed how the community uncovered this stuff and learned how to make use of it.

After being with the game since release it made every sense to me, since DT is just filled to the brim with stuff like that and I’ve really come to love it personally. I have a whole sheets project just for tracking the stuff! :joy:

But it’s not a binary thing, and I do agree that there’s just too much basics that’s never explained to people. They can’t possibly expect casuals to spend so much time scouring the net & random guides for all this data. Simple basics like how toughness, stamina etc work should be explained in more detail.

This is also why I believe they should’ve added mandatory tutorials & tests to gatekeep endgame difficulties. Nothing hard mind you, just some basics & examples of advanced tricks about the game. Both to teach people the bare minimum to survive Aurics, while also piquing their interests by showing just how deep the game’s mechanics are.

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Exactly, the game is deceptively (or not so deceptively) complex. It 100% needs some tutorials or tool tips at the very least.

I only learned what the celerity stim does a few days ago after 1k hours played :laughing:

Literally never used it as it didn’t seem to do anything then saw the new penances which kinda describe their purpose.

The “fighty” stim doesn’t last long enough to be useful at all imo. Takes about 5 seconds to perform a single charged heavy as Ogryn so its only useful for bosses really.

Why are there no tool tips…why?! It’s simple text. Would be so easy for them to implement