Introduction:
At current Lucky Bullet is bugged. I won’t tell how, if you know you know. At the same time, bug usage withstanding, it is a rather underwhelming ability. It’s impact on the moment to moment gameplay is barely existent.
The issue detailled:
Summary
At first glance a 5% / 8% chance of occuring doesn’t seem too bad. However,…
Having played a few rounds with an autoclick script that would trigger the left click at 1 ms (which means 1000 clicks a second), I made an “interesting” experience.
At times, I would end up triggering 3-5 shots at a time in a row, creating a hailstorm of Rumbler grenades. Other times, I wound up not triggering the effect for 5 or 6 seconds at a time. At a click rate of 1 ms that is beyond insanity.
In essence: You can play a full round of Darktide and over the entire game not trigger this ability even once. Or you can have a lucky seed and get many free shots. For a cornerstone ability that requires deep investment and takes 4 skill points to fully level, that is way too unreliable.
We all know that random chance is a comfortable but flawed way to add new elements to a game. Random chance hampers skill expression and creates unpredictability where predictability might be warranted.
At the same time, the bug must be fixed.
A possible solution:
Here my idea to creatively fix the current issues surrounding Lucky Bullet, both the bug as well as it’s negligible impact during gameplay (when used properly).
→ Lucky Bullet no longer has a random chance and it no longer causes shots to be free of charge
Instead:
Lucky Bullet fires a second shot when it triggers. This secondary bullet is free of charge, but the original shot fired is not impacted.
The secondary shot fired has only 77% power. (penalty of -23% to dmg, cleave, knockback, penetration, blast damage).
Lucky Bullet always triggers when either the total ammo counter of the Rumbler / Kickback or the loaded ammo counter of any other Ogryn ranged weapon hits one of the following numbers. These numbers are either a prime number or considered a lucky number across many cultures around the world:
3, 7, 8, 13, 31, 37, 43, 67, 73, 77, 79, 127, 151, 163, 193, 211, 223, 241, 283, 307, 331, 349, 367, 409, 421, 433, 463, 487, 541, 577, 601, 613, 619, 631, 643, 673, 727, 739, 769, 787, 823, 883, 937, 991, 997
Advantages to these change:
This immediately fixes the bug, since it can no longer proc under the condition it currently does.
Every weapon benefits from this change more proportional than at current. A Twin-Linked Heavy stubber’s secondary bullet might be not as effective as a second Rumbler grenade, but it also gets more shots every clip.
The Kickback and The Rumbler both will never have more than 1 bullet in the chamber. Lucky Bullet has to use the total ammo counter to trigger.
Weapons with much higher ammo reserves such as the Twin-Linked Heavy Stubbers or the Ripperguns could land with a lucky ammo roll on one of these lucky numbers and always trigger the effect. To avoid this, they must use the loaded ammo in the chambers.
The reduced effectiveness of the secondary shot fired means strong single fire weapons like the Rumbler or the Kickback don’t become too monstrous in their damage, while still remaining useful.
Ammo constraints aren’t lessoned like they are by the current design. Householding with the ammo given remains important.
I’m not getting a recording setup to prove something, that is obvious and experienced by ranged Ogryn players commonly.
Not getting any or very few procs on Lucky Bullet is a common occurance, especially when running single shot weapons like the Rumbler or the Kickback.
How does having a few bullets refunded and be critical throughout an entire match worth of shots fired justify spending a whopping 4 talent points?
That’s just as meh as Veteran’s Marksman Focus. You’re better off putting those points elsewhere.
This effect would be okay if it was a 1-2 talent point investment and somewhere in the middle of the talent tree.
But as a keystone with 4 point investment? The talents leading up to “Lucky Bullet” right before it make more of an impact.
Lucky Bullet needs more reliability to be worth noticing. At current it’s a funny gimmick.
Wouldn’t guaranteed lucky bullet triggers effectively mean no reloading for dakkagryns? Since Charmed Reload exists on the stubbers, it could actually be powerful as hell and allow you to trigger LB over and over and over, for what is effectively an at least doubled damage boost, factoring guaranteed crits… and on top of that, the level 1 blessing would be better, since you would need to fire less shots before triggering LB again.
Or, even better, if your max magazine size happens to be equal to these lucky numbers, then you just always have crits all the time. Now you have a reason to not want an 80% base on top of extremely specific ranges to get this insane damage.
I already adressed this.
It would no longer refund ammo. So whenever Lucky Hit triggers, a secondary bullet is generated while the cost is still applied as usual.
Also, weapons that have more than 1 chamber in the bullet use the loaded clip as reference, not the maximum ammo.
That’s not what I’m saying. Charmed Reload automatically reloads 2-5 ammo whenever you get a critical hit, this includes from Lucky Bullet. It doesn’t matter if the bullet fired was free or not.
Ah now I get it. So you say, if for instance 13 is a lucky number and it’s always a guaranteed crit, with charmed reload on the weapon you’d never get your magazine empty because 13 would trigger charmed reload consistently.
Yeah that makes sense.
In that case it would probably be wise for Lucky Bullet to no longer have a guaranteed crit, but instead for the bullet to just have more base damage.
Nah you’re not proving it because it’s hogwash, nothing to do with your recording setup. You might aswell claim you can’t record yourself winning the lottery because your phone is out of batteries. The odds that you would go through a mission and never proc lucky bullet are astronomically low. Balancing a skill around a 0.0000000001% freak occurence that probably never happened in an actual game to any of the tens of thousands of players is crazy to say the least.
If your point was that 8% is just too low to be statistically viable, then sure, I agree. But the whole thing about going through missions without proccing it once is made up unless you just dont really use your ranged weapon and use a rumbler and fire like 15 shots total tops, at which point why run lucky bullet?
You can try it for yourself if you know how the bug works. Or alternatively try Lucky Bullet out the normal way.
Random chance in Darktide is true random and 8% (full skill point investment mind you) is abysmally low for a keystone ability. It isn’t even that impactful when it procs. It may proc somewhat frequent or barely at all. It will be wildly inconsistent from run to run, which is my point.
Autoclicker. 1ms click intervals. Several seconds of not a single proc occuring. I don’t know what the maximum attacks registered are before input is drupped, but assuming something more than generous like 50ms, we still talk about +100 hundred attempts without a Lucky Bullet proc. Possibly more.
lol, you’re going off the bug to try and measure how much 8% is and extrapolating from it that you go entire missions without proccing it once normally? Absolutely not
It works exactly like it normally does, which is the bug.
If my 8% chance is triggered three times in a row within some 120 ms time frame or so and then not triggered at all for the next +200 clicks, that absolutely is indicative for the wild RNG applied here.
I don’t even know why you’re debating this. 8% chance means statistically speaking 8 in 100, but also 80 in 1000. But that’s the average. It can be more or less than that. That’s how chance works, depending on each individual roll.
I don’t like the idea of it triggering at specific numbers. That would mean to maximize it, you have to keep an eye on the ammo counter. I think the % chance is fine, but they need to change the chance based on the Rate of Fire of the weapon so it benefits both fast and slow weapons. Just like Ogryn melee needs to have some benefits of doing light attacks vs heavy attacks.