Veteran Class Feedback

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

The Veteran is a class that feels overall great to play, in its current state.
The available feats offer team support and a variety of synergies for multiple different playstyles.
A few of the feats could use a buff, but there are mostly two things regarding the feats, that i would like to see changed in order to make the class more balanced and more enjoyable (one nerf, one buff/fix).

1) Camo Expert (lvl 20 talent)
While standing still, enemies are significantly less likely to target you.

The talent is too strong and rewards passivity.

Click here to display full explanation of problems and solution.

Problems:

  • Using this talent basically allows players to completely drop their defense and ignore attacking enemies for the most part.
  • The effect of the talent is strong, but not earned by the player doing anything for it (actually the opposite, since it triggers when ever you just stand there, in a game where movement is highly important).
  • The effect is anti team, because it “agro dumps” enemies on teammates.

Solution:

  • Change the effect entirely.

or

  • Change to: Upon hacking progress, or ranged headshot kill, gain 3 sec of camo: While standing still within x metres of an ally, enemies are significantly less likely to target you.
    (“hacking progress” meaning to successfully land on a yellow marked symbol while hacking.)
    This way, players will no longer be able to mindlessly stand in a horde and swing away at it, or just go afk without being harmed.
    But the talent still allows to:
    → hack a terminal without requiring the allies to keep you 100% safe from enemies.
    → shoot away at enemies without having to worry about getting slapped in the back, or shot.
    → revive downed allies under pressure, by quickly headshotting an enemy and then starting the revive.

2) Counterfire (lvl 30 talent)
Volley Fire now Designates all Shooters as Priority Targets.

One of the shooting enemy types is purposely excluded from this talent for arbitrary reasons.
The dislike for this design choice seems to be quite unanimous.
Feel free to look at this thread:
Scab shooters without the gas mask not being highlighted by Veteran's Counterfire is "not-a-bug".

Click here to display full explanation of problems and solution.

Problems:

  • The enemy shoots at you and behaves virtually identical as other shooters, yet is purposely excluded from the “shooter” category for the context of this talent.
  • The decision to exclude these enemies from the “shooter” category is so incomprehensible, that there are multiple bug reports (and there will likely be more) from people who rightfully thought that this was unintended.

Solution:

  • Remove the arbitrary distinction and designate these “regular enemies that shoot” as “shooters”.

Disclaimer: This post is exclusively about the Veteran’s feats and passives.
Some of the guns could also use a buff/change to make them more useful, but feedback regarding the Plasma Gun as well as the iron sights of the Helbore Lasgun, can alrady be found elsewhere.

Edit: changes in the section regarding Camo Expert due to feedback

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That is wrong. You can not swing at enemys. Because melee attacks will brake Camo expert.
And you can also not stand in a horde and shoot or go AFK, that’ s straight up fake news. Hounds, snipers, bombers and Mutants also do not care about Camo expert and will attack anyway.

There is a certain range, that the vet needs to keep to enemies in order to being able to shoot without attracting poxwalkers to his position. And he can not loose aggro by suddenly stand still.
So it is a tool to be used pre encounter, with well thought positioning to be able to take out specials and highly dangerous enemies.

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I will test to confirm this.
The information regarding camo expert is not my own and comes from a buddy who uses it, so i apologize for not properly testing this myself before including it in my feedback.

Usually, i do all the testing myself, but i did not have the time to do it in this case.
I should have held back the post, until i found the time to thoroughly test everything myself.

However, even if the effect of camo is not as strong as i assumed, that does not disqualify the reasoning that the player should earn the camo instead of just having if when not moving.

4

So you didn’t even test a feat yet you want to nerf/fix it?

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It’s hard for me to agree with nerfing Camo Expert. I strongly dislike that feat because it feels strongly anti team play just agro dumping on your team regularly. However it’s currently competing with unwavering focus and not taking that one over Camo feels like throwing to me. Even ignoring the fact unwavering currently applies to melee damage too (seriously FS fix this) taking agro and tanking ranged fire while still being able to aim perfectly thanks to your Ult is ridiculously good.

I seriously don’t like Camo but I have no idea what you’d do about it. Probably leave it alone and just let everyone eventually realise it’s a trap.

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I kinda understand where you come from, but at the same time, by your logic, i should not value any information that comes from anyone else than myself.
That is obviously pretty unreasonable.

Before you commented, I already explained this, apologized and said that i would test to confirm my initial statement.
Also, the reasoning i gave for the suggested change to the feat (it rewards for actively not moving), still stands even if it is not as strong as i assumed.

Anyway, here is some extra explanation for you:

I did not do proper active tests of Camo Expert myself, before posting this.
A buddy of mine tested the talent and provided me information from his perspective. Sometimes, i was in the party with him, so i could watch him and the enemies.

One time, an other friend of mine went afk in the middle of the mission and ended up standing a few meters into a horde, without being attacked (This was quite a while ago, so there might have been a nerf to Camo Expert since then. However, i try to keep up with patch notes and do not remember seeing any changes to this feat.).

I also played many matches as Veteran (without Camo Expert) with other Veterans in the party.
I noticed quite often, that enemies would walk past a Veteran player that was standing a few meters in front of me, just to attack me instead.

Now i did some testing myself.

I just did both these things (with allies nearby) and it worked just fine.

I stood nearby teammates (closer to the enemy than they did) and spammed light attacks with my melee weapon. Melee and ranged enemies did not engage or attack me.
And i stood right outside an open door, while my teammates were standing in the open door, while fighting a horde.

I pulled a horde of poxwalkers that was standing around, then i ran to my teammates and stopped moving. All enemies (except one) walked past me and attacked them instead of me.

In these cases, there was not an insane amount of enemies around at once, so I would assume, that enemies ignore me until allies within range have all their agro slots filled with active enemies. I think camo keeps you safe until the agro slots of nearby allies overflow and some enemies do not have an available target other than the veteran in active camo.

Maybe i would need further testing, but in the situations where i did test it myself, camo expert works pretty much as i initially described.
Either way, i will edit the section in the OP just in case.

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I agree that camo expert is a noob trap. It feels good until suddenly fire bomb will force you to move and a blob of gunners will punish you instantly after. But in terms of design i think different invisibility alike abilities should be class ultimate, not passive (as shade from V2). Maybe it’s even better to remove camo from sharpshooter and give it to another vet archetype in future. Like katachan commando or something.

8

If you think that way, Camo Expert should not stay the way it is right now, but should instead be changed in some way, or replaced with something else entirely, no?
Imo a “noob trab” (be it a feat or a weapon), is not a good thing to have in a game.

9

In a perfect world there are interesting feats and it’s hard to choose between them. In Darktide it’s the same situation as in V2

10

Imo pretty much every available feat for the Veteran class, has some value, depending on the weapon you like to use (going by the description of how they SHOULD work if nothing was bugged).
Although they might not all be equally viable at all difficulties.

Out of all the classes, i think the Veteran feats are the most useful bunch.
The other 3 all have at least one feat that is pretty much useless.

11

Grenade track is too powerful relative to the other skills you can take.

Getting free grenades is very much a no brainer compared to your other options with how clutch they come in and how you can effectively have 20 or so free grenades a mission depending on how long it goes. Tbh it’s really not an issue of the skill being too powerful but the other skills not being attractive.

Both Sniper and Tactical reload feel like they do too little for how niche of a skill they are. Sniper is especially a head scratcher due to how close you end up being mostly by accident with enemies coming out of side doors and passages. The 20% reload also feels negligible on most weapons where getting free grenades feels super impactful.

Frag storm is also just the better choice. Free bleed proces not only help stack damage on an already devastating (and mostly free) ability but it also helps proc both Ogryn and Zealot skills.

Dead shot would be good if the stamina drain wasn’t also per shot which makes it crap on high cap high fire rate weapons. It’s basically good on the bolter but the bolter already hits like a truck, same with the plasma gun. Any other weapon you fire far too often for it to be worth it. Maybe the hellbore but even then I don’t see it working out.

30% reload speed honestly feels like nothing due to reload speeds already being relatively quick and on things like the bolter and plasma gun it feels like there isn’t any effect. Maybe if it was 50% or did something else but you are again asking someone to give up making a relatively free skill that can be useful for hordes and large enemies alike feel even more powerful.

I’m less saying they should swing the nerf bat but I am saying they should make the other options actually attractive if they want people to switch up what skills they are using.

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12

I see your point. Maybe a few of the other feats should indeed also be looked at.

  • A free grenade every 60s is very useful. However, many players sadly (almost) never use grenades. For them, the feat is of no value (i say this, hoping that these people have the capacity to be reasonable enough to notice, that this feat would do nothing for them).

  • The 20% ranged damage increase could be made independent of distance to the target in order to make it less confusing, more reliable and overall more useful.
    I think the feat in general (bonus damage) is not a bad idea, since it can help to reach certain breakpoints. This is especially useful in early to mid game, when the player uses a weapon that could reach the breakpoint by itself, but does not have high enough stats and perk bonuses.

  • The “increased reload speed by x%” feat could be changed to “reduced reload time by x%” as well as increasing the number. Same could be done to the reload feat on lvl 25 (If the two reload feats were to stack additively, they would be especially useful, when used together.).

  • The bleed procs are kinda ok, but not that great. Unless you throw multiple grenades, the bleed dot does not do all that much.

  • Deadshot could have the cost per shot removed. That would especially help Recon Lasguns with Infernus Blessing (Recon Lasguns are underperformers anyway).
    Alternatively it could drain toughness instead of stamina (flat 10/s and 5 per shot instead of being % based). This would make it synergize with all three of the lvl 5 feats that regenerate toughness, and also make it useful in combination with pretty much any gun.
    Although that would leave the stamina regen feat on lvl 20 to be in a very lonely place.

  • The “reloadspeed on elite kill” feat would work well in combination with the other reload feat, if the previously mentioned changes were made. If the two feats together would reduce reload time by something like 70%, it would definitely be worth considering.

I might add these to the OP later. The goal of the thread is to sum up all underperforming feats, and to provide possible solutions to fix them.

14

I have tried it.

Please enlighten me then.
What did i miss, when doing this:

16

Stacking both reload talents as a combo is very strong for weapons with longer reloads, as using skill and ammo awareness allows some guns to get into the perma-ult (volley fire) territory. Plasma gun also gets a huge amount of use out of this talent, in addition to revolver/shotgun. Example - using let’s say a headhunter variation and reloading when you have a few shots left in your magazine gives you enough time to shoot a ranged enemy after reloading, effectively chaining your ultimate provided there’s enough qualified volley-fire targets. Without this talent, some guns don’t have fast enough reloads to chain the ultimate. Therefore, this completely negates the value of the grenade talent for me with those guns, making it a competitive option for many guns. I think these two talents are competitive enough on that column to be kept as is. If anything, the 20% ranged damage talent on that row should just be a flat +20% damage at all times or something to that effect, to become a strong third contender.

Camo talent can be useful on highly coordinated teams, and on missions that involve hacking terminals, and perhaps more useful on sniping weapons like Helbores and Revolver. It starts out as OP in lower levels, becomes a noob trap, and then becomes useful again at super-specific high tier levels of play. I personally have no reason to go back to it, as I think counter-fire is overall stronger and more fun to use with a more active and rewarding playstyle, but Camo does add flavor in a viable way for a lot of players, and in its own way has a combined skill ceiling if you consider the Vet & their teammates at the same time. After thinking of a lot of ways to change how this talent works, I think the best idea might be to just effectively copy Huntsman’s ult from VT2. Make it to where the talent gives you full invisibility for like 10 seconds whenever you ult. You can still chain your ultimates together with ranged kills for Volley Fire bonuses, but if you want the invis portion, you have to activate your ult again. Your team would see you as slightly transparent with a green outline, and you would have a buff icon in your lower GUI tray. And for the love of the emperor, if something like this was implemented, please don’t make the player’s screen go insanely black-and-white with weird ult effects like VT2 :melting_face:

Edit: and yes, Scab Stalkers absolutely should be highlighted as shooters during Vet’s ult. They do insane amounts of damage up to like 20 yards away. They should absolutely qualify for the ult to be highlighted.

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