Tweaking the Difficulty Levels Discussion

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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Bearing in mind that havoc mode will come out, I’m curious what people feel is the need for adjusting difficulty levels in the standard game mode.

My overwhelming sense of the game is this, and this is levied mostly at Auric Damnation play:

When the team is good, and using mostly good builds and stronger weapon picks, the game feels like a cakewalk “most of the time.” Occasionally solid feeling runs will go sideways through a lapse in dealing with specials, a cascade of teammates getting disabled, but for the most part the run will be a breeze.

What sticks out to me especially is that certain threats that should be acute threats to the team just aren’t. Groups of bulwarks and crushers (and especially crushers) die way too easily for instance. So what should be a big scary threat often gets trivialized and eliminated really quickly.

Hordes overall provide very little challenge, as almost every weapon, whether it’s designed for single target damage or not, can easily deal with hordes. The popularity of the Moebian horde modifier was evidence that people liked stronger hordes.

Also hordes triggering based on location has totally undercut the need to maintain momentum and progress through a map, and made the experience less varied and interesting as a result.

I think there are a number of things that need to be done, and maybe these changes only apply to Auric level missions as a sort of “base modifier” to Auric:

  • Armored elites should be tougher - maybe plasma shouldn’t penetrate bulwark shields. Maybe the rending and anti-armor properties of certain melee weapons (dueling sword) needs to be toned down. Maybe these enemies just need more health across the board instead. I played VT2 a bit recently and was immediately struck by how much more intimidating chaos warriors are (and even stormvermin to an extent).

  • Enhance ranged enemy behavior - the short lived tweaks to range enemy behavior that increased their tracking speed and accuracy was awesome for making fire fights more challenging and reducing the ability to just sprint your way across huge open areas to engage ranged enemies in melee. Let’s bring this back (apply to auric only?).

  • Ragers - these enemies have been consistently nerfed and made easier to deal with. Increase their stagger resistance. Also the Scab Rager should be made tougher and differentiated better. Maybe the Dreg rager is more crazed and stagger resistant, while the scab rager gets considerably tougher and deals more damage (albeit with slower attacks).

  • Hordes - basic horde enemies need to have more health and/or more hit mass. To many weapons are able to just effortlessly cleave through hordes and/or have a fast enough attack speed to constantly interrupt horde mob attacks and thus grants too much safely. Bring back the horde timers in Auric.

  • Add in more modifier options, pulling some over from Maelstrom (mutated enemies as mini-bosses, etc).

It also struck me that in VT2 in general enemies were tougher, which opened up the utility for more crowd control and stagger oriented builds to be useful. Tougher enemies also meant players had to actually BLOCK more often at times, something that is rarely ever needed in DT.

Lastly, the difficulty in VT2 comes more from the base and elite enemies themselves being challenging to deal with, with scattering of specialists occasionally but not always adding to the challenge. DT’s difficulty spikes almost entirely due to just waves of specialists being thrown at players. In the absence of specialists, most encounters in DT are trivial. I would love to see both mixed melee and ranged encounters in DT become more tactically challenging and varied. I can’t help but feel like the game on launch was more that way and it’s been eroded overtime.

I also don’t want to devolve this into a discussion of weapon balancing - so let’s assume for this discussion that the more overpowered weapons are carefully reigned in a bit.

Thoughts on difficulty overall, what do you think the game needs to provide a richer sense of challenge?

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Fire is way too weak now that it doesnt completely delete toughness the moment you touch it. Fire could deal a little more damage. Flamers also should have their cast time sped up by quite a bit, maybe even have their range buffed too.

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Understood - but that’s also playing into the notion that today the difficulty is tied to specialists. Buffing fire just leans into that more - yes?

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Please no, if game had just one antiarmour weapon, this should be plasma.

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i got no experience with vt2 hence its havoc counterpart.

what i do know and has been proven by my recent space marine 2 lethal solo run, i need a difficulty that isnt immediately crack-able to break past my current plateau.

so far i’ve reached said stagnation with auric maelstrom and while i’m not “bored” i feel stuck nontheless.

solo could be the next step but some classes/talents seem mandatory and compared to the “normal gameflow” and i’m fully acknowledging the skill it takes to pull off, it drags on rather.

havoc could be that “conan-wheel” i need to bash my head against and come out a better ogryn.

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I would like to see bigger, normal and mixed, hordes with a more intense spawn rate than we currently have. The downside of this is probably going to be a further decrease in the games performance.

I would rather they kept the HP values as they are since i personally dont find much enjoyment in fighting damage sponge enemies, and worst case scenario, its going to lead to less loadout diversity due to the increase in HP making certain weapons less efficient.

I suppose they could keep increasing the spawn rates of specials/disablers, but i feel that at some point its going to just end up with half the map being on fire or full of gas, and good lord is it boring to just twiddle your thumbs while waiting for fire or gas to disperse. Could also potentially lead to some of the same loadout issues that comes with an HP increase.

But thats just my own personal bias due to what i find to be fun.

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This. The game becomes a walking simulator very quickly with competent players, even on the hardest modifiers and with off-meta builds. The powercreep and balance is just all over the place.

Exactly. The bandaid solution was to simply spawn a clown car full of them, but what difference does a pack of 3 or 15 crushers make to bolter/plasma vet, or a ds/bolter zealot, etc.? They get deleted in the same time. When I’m playing zealot I sometimes don’t even get to hit a single crusher in a pack of 6-8 before they all just get vamporized. It’s a badly placed bandaid that has long come off.

Auric modes at least should provide constant pressure to the player. That includes hordes to me. Even spawning double or triple specials/disablers at once along with a boss isn’t as bad, when they’re all there is. But once you have constant pressure through hordes that could overwhelm you in a way that you can’t kite anymore or get boxed in, then SHT GETS REAL.

The auric board should operate on some kind of endless/constant horde modifier. Pressure is something that should be felt by the player. Especially pressure to move or watch their positioning.

HISTG should be the minimum baseline for all Auric missions, with the usual modifiers added on top.

Health is a bad choice. No one likes that. I’d agree with plasma and rending though.

Fully agreed. Make it an auric standard.

Agreed.

Not sure about health but as I said above. Make auric hordes on a very very short timer. Maybe even add a modifier that constantly spawns endless hordes, like in VT2

To sum it up:

  • Increased horde density and spawn rate. Auric should mean constant pressure.
  • Make rager packs a threat again (more hp for scab, more stagger resist & speed for regular)
  • Fix outlier weapons that can trivialize armor packs to make them threatening again
  • Rework rending/anti armor talents and blessings in general, reign in player dealt damage.

None of these changes would turn damnation into auric over night. Instead regular damnation would feel harder to the point where people that barely make it into auric have something to challenge themselves with, and the harder daddy crowd can enjoy getting properly brutalized on auric again. We don’t need a new difficulty. Just a better seperation and proper balance.

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it’s a bit problematic when on the “hardest” difficulty entire game can be carried by a single player, unless some bullsht no sound/no warning special happens

true, crushers for example should be made invincible to range fire and we have rending removed entirely

sliding is really strong and negates them kind of, i dont know how to balance shooters honestly
but i would make gunners walk while shooting, and maybe give shotgunners grenades

scab ragers could be made carapace with a flak head, and when they run at you they would cover their faces with their weapons maybe?
i would slightly reduce the attackspeed given to dreg ragers, but also give them a leap like monks in ratclick have
both could be beefier probably

groaners should be removed entirely from the game, they genuinely serve no purpose, barely do any damage and get suppressed (why?)
we could have some enemy variation in horde, like mixed moebians with poxxies

we need twitch mode and twins yesterday

we could have roaming captains on the map that would maybe function like standard bearers from vt2

but generally there are just too little enemies on the map, bump the density
range also trivializes everything, staves being the biggest culprit

infinite horde bug was so fun

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yea this is true, and when people use bad builds and weak weapons, is the opposite :laughing:

however I think there is still the horde bug where hordes don’t even spawns at all
i got once, and i was surprised how in an auric damnation HISTG did not have any horde, it was literally empty for the entire duration of the game. it seems to be a rare bug, but when it happens is crazy.

imo in some occasions they can still challenging but it is true, they often get blasted away
perhaps i’d like to see new moves for them.

also true, they only function as bodyblock objects and slow down players imo.
in fact it is way easier to get trapped/disabled if there is lot of poxwalkers bodyblocking you.
for example not giving you space to dodge by side a net.

the mutated horror horde was cool tho the poxwalkers with the tentacle, i think when they hit you, they also give you lot of corruption more than normal.
but it’s very rare to get hit in the first place anyway :sweat_smile:

i like to cut them like if it was butter :smiling_imp:

btw, i think specials in general are too way weak.
since you are mentioning VT2, if we do a comparison between hounds and assassins:
assassins were way more challenging due to the tight timing.

the hounds when jumping to you, there is seem to be a big window of time to push them/dodge. which makes them easy as well, perhaps also too way low damage, since what it does is just giving you corruption while disabled.

trapper, will net you and stay frozen
(which many people will simply free the player first and then kill the trapper as efficient way).

packmaster mechanic was different, when hooked, it was slowly moving you away from others.

and then hooking you
(adding another res mechanic, freeing you from the hook and then ressing eventually)
i think they should honestly rework trapper and making it like when you are trapped, the trapper will slowly drag you away with them far away.

currently it feels too way much of a downgrade imo.

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there is seem to be an unused special condition where it adds captains in regular missions as regular bosses in solo play.

called more_captains i think
if only fatshark would released this modifier :thinking: hopefully it’s not for havoc mode only…

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I think we need overall fewer-but-tougher enemies (for elites) and MORE HORDES.

Like if a giant horde from one direction was a tangible threat the zealot flamer would have a purpose as it would delete that one direction in exchange for being too clunky to be useful in many other situations. Consider the horde as a single ‘enemy’ which needs tactics to deal with like any other.

Ragers being tougher/harder to stagger would be fine if the game didn’t dump 3 on you at once.

Anti-armor activated weapons like the thammer would be better if crusher packs weren’t a thing.

Plasma would be less of a must-pick if bulwark phalanxes didn’t happen.

Infantry lasguns would have a place again if ranged enemies could lock down an area and force a careful approach. Autopistols could gain a niche as suppression machines if firing bursts while sprinting forced the enemy to cower, allowing zealots and the like to break a deadlock dynamically while still needing them to be aware of positioning.

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we need more hordes yes i agree too
the ones we have now don’t feel that much

we should almost struggle with hordes like it was in vermintide 2.

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We’re at a point where a single player can delete a 40-60k hp boss within seconds. Just how do you want to make ‘tougher’ elites work?

This only works in conjunction with a massive rebalance pass that brings player and weapon power levels back down to a reasonable point.

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I mean, I’m cool with turning down the power levels to achieve that, ngl.

You still want powerful weapons to feel powerful but there are ways to deal with all that. Mostly by making them clunky/specialized.

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From a PR and change management standpoint, I don’t think there is any way to “win” by nerfing weapons or abilities. Even if needed and perfectly justified, nerfing something, even if only by a fraction of what’s needed, will just create a firestorm of unpleasantness that pours salt on the games reputation.

The solution isn’t to get into this mess to begin with … but now that we are here I think the approach needs to be very very minor and calculated buffs to under performing weapons and then buff the challenge at the higher difficulties across the board in ways that we’re talking about here.

I honestly think a big part of the game’s lack of challenge is in some of the nuances we’re taking about here. The timing of dodge and slide windows. The timing for pushing dogs or dodging mutants. The tracking speed of enemy shooters. AI director stuff like horde size and compositions. I think there are subtle but impactful ways the challenge can be ramped back up on Auric.

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Fatshark’s solution in the past was to apply drastic changes to the meta. See dodge nerfs and stagger mechanics with the release of winds of magic.

A lot of people hated it at first due to how slow and different it was, but with time they settled in and carried on…

… only to get back to square one. Looking at the current vermintide 2 powercreep, going full circle is inevitable for them it seems.

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slowly shadow nerf things
average player doesnt notice

but jokes aside just slowly nerf the outliers, not the fatshark way where weapons are put into the ground
having biweekly balance patches would probably help, but fatshark doesnt comprehend this

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Unfortunate reality, and I agree with the second point as well. There’s a lot of things they could rebalance that don’t involve nerfing a weapon. Although I do think some weapons can hardly get away from that fate. I just don’t see any way Bulwarks would ever provide a challenge in a game where a plasma gun is present, no matter WHAT balance changes you make to bulwarks or surrounding mechanics. Just as an example. My main point being that when you have weapons capable of just ridding the playing board of every threat before it becomes a relevant threat, it becomes impossible to actually create a threat.

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My suggestion would be to remove a blessing slot on every weapon.

Arguably also a perk slot.

Have-it-all weapons are why we are where we are. I think forcing players more into an enemy armour role would help, however unpopular it might at first be.

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Joking / not-joking: We need a “reject run” mode where you’re only allowed to use lower tech and/or trash tier weapons.

Imagine a run where everyone only had:

  • Tac/Combat axe
  • Devil claw sword
  • Heavy sword
  • Headhunter autoguns (or whatever they’re called now)
  • Infantry las guns
  • Autopistol
  • Paul + Grenadier gauntlet
  • No VoC

Granted, many of these are still perfectly capable weapons in the hands of good players, but would nevertheless require a bit more sweating for all involved.

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