To make it clear. I’m not here to complain about gold toughness a being removed.
Vet Shout caught two nerfs before they removed gold toughness. These nerfs were targeted at reducing gold toughness uptime.
They reduce gold toughness, lasting from 15s to 10s. They also and increased the cool down on shout from 30s to 40s.
With gold toughness being completely removed, it make zero sense to keep the 40s cooldown. Also, the longer you make cooldowns, the more of a requirement it is to have ability cooldown reduction.
Even if the do give shout the 30s cooldown, I’m not entirely convinced the ability is gonna be even a fraction of how strong it used to. So maybe making it more of a team centered buff would be nice. Giving your teammates faster stamina regeneration, and melee attack speed. Those could potentially make it better without make the ability completely busted.
Altogether, though, I think we need to wait and see how shout is going to be handled and played after the update. Maybe the additional passive nodes, you can pick up on the tree will offset this issue. But the 40s cooldown has got to be changed.
TLDR; Vet Shout has a 40s cooldown, because of Gold Toughness. But Gold Toughness is getting removed. Bring shout back to a 30s cooldown.
I think it will be fine. Guaranteed AOE stagger and 75 extra toughness is still quite useful with a subnode to revive as well and CD is never exactly 40s with Tactical Awareness and CDR on curios. That seems quite reasonable for an ability. On the whole, the class is much stronger with the new tree, I don’t anticipate a WR drop or anything though we’ll surely see a pickrate drop on Shout but that’s good given it was quite dominant.
I kind of wish the old For The Emperor talent would come back in some fashion. For reference used to give 20% base damage to you and everyone in coherency on ability usage. Perhaps they will find more interesting ways to contribute to the Squad Leader archetype of the middle tree other than provide your team an immunity safety blanket.
Its pick rate is going to drop because of the loss of gold toughness. In fact I’d argue for the last 2 years at least people have been playing vet for Plasma Gun, Power Sword, and Shout.
But the walls have closed in on Shout. Shouts pick rates are gonna be much lower and losses are gonna be much higher I presume.
I actually think Shout in this state is good. Its utility is already extremely high, as Veteran can be pretty squishy for a class – he’s supposed to excel at range, after all. And this ability basically gives the Vet some breathing room by throwing all enemies on the ground for a few seconds.
So even without Golden Toughness, Shout is just fundamentally good for a ranged class. I’d compare this ability now to Mercenary Kruber from Vermintide 2. His shout had a cooldown of 90 seconds and gave everyone temp health. It served as a panic button of sorts, and I think Darktide’s Shout has become that ability now. To me, that change is good.
If anything, I’d say I’ll be happy if people choose Shout less and go for different abilities, as every game I go to only has Shout Veterans. Playing with Vets that’ll use different playstyles will definitely refresh the pallette and I can’t wait for that to happen.
Edit: Another thing for me is that if people will start dying left and right, they’ll probably start to slow down and not push so hard every mission. That means the AI director won’t freak out every game and thus won’t spam enemies at us. I don’t like enemy spam so anything that could reduce it I welcome with open arms.
Eh, I’m not so sure. I’ve tinkered on Darklantern with some potential future builds, and thanks to the 3 (or so) points that have been freed up, I’m definitely picking up the Revive subnode in addition. Current patch, doing so feels like a rather painful sacrifice either in terms of damage or self-sustain.
Which ultimately is good, if that means that Exec Stance and Infiltrate are picked more often? Only…vet is also getting a new passive 25% range damage buff. Exec Stance always felt a bit unnecessary for a lot of weapons it should synergise with. I suppose highlighting targets is nice? Infiltrate can be “useful” , but it can also screw over your teammates, if you use it in a wrong moment, and as a result dump all the aggro on less players.
Vet has constantly naded his way out of issues if shout couldn’t do it. While yes he’s ment to be the range class, most of his ranged weapons are trash with the exception of the selected few, that have always been strong on him in some capacity.
Shout isn’t meant to be used as a tool to get enemies off of you. It’s to be able to rally your squad. The ability is quite literally called “Voice of Command” its ment to be a support ability.
Funny, because that’s primarily how it’s been used for years. Benefit to the team has largely been incidental or of secondary importance.
It’s not even going to really affect the pick rate because shout is still going to be the easy option with the lowest cooldown for the fewest amount of talent points.
This isn’t Vermintide 2. Its Darktide with ranged enemys and more enemy spawns. The boss stagger is a complete non factor in most cases. That’s not even the strongest thing that veteran can do to a boss.
The only reason it would have a high pick rate is because it slots in the most builds the easiest. Infiltrate is a highly specialized ability.
Execution stance, while actually a pretty solid ability, it’s pretty much relegated to a select few weapons when being used.
How is infiltrate specialized? It makes you invisible for a long ass time and restores all of your toughness at the press of a button. It just has historically also been shout-lite if you weren’t speedrunning.
Exe stance’s issue has always been the combination of being damage focused ability, on a class that does just fine getting all of its damage from talents and grenades, while not providing the simple on demand safety of the other two options.
It’s not the number that’s the problem. It was the fact that it was gold, which means you couldn’t take health damage while it was active and anything that could one shot you physically cannot while it is active. That’s why it was so strong.
Okay, but Gold Toughness you could regenerate. Being overcapped isn’t really the issue, especially when you can get whittled down by poxwalkers hypothetically. So you basically had 10-15s of immunity to death more or less. This is what they were getting rid of.
This isn’t targeted towards you, but while I’m thinking about it, I find it very strange that people pretend that veteran is just a “ranged” class when he is arguably top two tanky classes in the game. He provides the most team buffs in the game outside of chem supply Hive Scums, He has plenty of melee nodes, just because he’s not the best melee character doesn’t mean anything really when he can easily hit break points.
