Veteran has some useless talents (Suggestions)

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
1

Hi Fatshark.

This is my first feedback post as I believe this game deserves proper critique for improvements.
I love the new changes made and it’s a step in the right direction; however, I feel as though some talent points, especially in the Veteran Class are under-baked

I will get straight to the point.

Veteran has 3 unusable Talents in this game that should be overhauled in the next update

The first is:
Smoke Grenade - Blitz
Not only is the smoke grenade unable stop Flamers, Hounds, Mutants, Ragers, Crushers. Poxbursters… pretty much all specialists except say Gunners and Snipers; but it also blinds your team mates’ Line Of Sight as well. Team-mates also would opt to run from the smoke than towards it.

I understand the Devs want a utility option for Veteran, yet as it stands, the smoke blitz doesn’t do that either. A shove from a melee weapon is more useful utility than these grenades; and you can do them in succession, whilst these have limited usage.

Potential Changes:
Implement actual utility for Smoke Blitz

  • Healing Smoke Grenade
  • Highlight and Stagger/Stun enemies for 3 secs in the smoke
  • Get a “Care-package” Random Ammo/Grenade/Toughness recovery drop

Make it fun, make it… Warhammer. Instead of just generic smoke grenade.

The second is:
Killzone - Passive
15% Ranged Damage when there are no enemies within 8m.
On paper, this may seem completely fine. Veteran is a ranged focus class so why not give a buff to their ranged right? Unfortunately in practice, this talent will never see the light of day.

This is Darktide.
This game is abundant with tight corridors, and packed linear hallways with enemies spawning everywhere around you
Enemies and Specialists run at you and in most cases will not leave you alone for a second.
Mission require you to defend an outpost, run into enemy spawns and fight chaos beasts.

The chance for an enemy to be 8m (Precisely) for a ranged buff is so minimal that it warrants a re-structure. This also goes for the passive “Catch a Breath” which recovers 5% when there are no enemies within 8m (Precisely). Both of these passives are counter-intuitive designs to Darktide’s gameplay and in all honesty should just be re-worked entirely

Potential Changes

  • Rework Passives “Catch and breath” and “Kill zone” in the game
  • Kill Zone recovers in-clip ammo when killing a Specialist
  • Catch a Breath recovers toughness on reload

The third is:
Twinned Blast - Passive
10% chance to throw an extra grenade… or in other words 90% chance NOT to throw an extra grenade.

Once again, I feel the Devs have made these talent changes sound good on paper. However, in game, it makes no sense. One Grenade is enough to clear a big swarm… so why would one need to have an extra one. Having double smoke grenades wear off at the same times, also doesn’t do jack either.

Potential Changes

  • Remove this perk from the game
  • Give the dmg buff to Reloading Veterans

Once again thank you for keeping this game alive and providing us fans with a fantastic product, Please consider what I’ve said and hope to see you beautiful people online soon

For the Emperor!!

7 Likes
2

Not sure what you are talking about.
No enemy needs to be within precisely 8 m range.

If there is an enemy within 8m of you (8m or closer), the buff is not active.
If there is no enemy within 8m of you, the buff is active.

Both buffs are not incredibly powerful, but pretty easy to keep up, when shooting enemies from behind your teammates, while moving through the mission.

3

Best way to handle this imo is putting it on a timer similar to the grenade refresh and having it so you tap a key to que a second grenade. In theory it would be useful but only a 10% random chance per throw makes it next to useless since there is no control over when you need it.

This would be nice for frags with big hordes or double Krak for bosses / monstrosities but often it just throws a 2nd one when you least need it.

1 Like
4

T4 and below, maybe, but in T5s and Auric? Spawn patterns will make sure you’re rarely able to get them to proc during fights if at all. They only work as openers in the noted diffs at best, and good luck getting them to proc at all on auric maelstrom. Regardless of how religiously you try to manage your spacing, even if you’re running a low profile infiltrate build, most fights will quickly go into and stay CQ. Especially considering that the ai director in higher diffs loves to harass vets by consistently spawning clusters of 2 to 4 melee mobs (if not 1 or 2 ragers outright) within 8 to 15m from blindspots. If it’s not a rager spawn you will often just be forced to dance around them while trying to focus high threat targets like disablers and grenadiers.

2 Likes
5

Yes.
I exclusively play damnation hi+stg and a few of the maelstrom options (unless a lowie friend wants to do a chill heresy run or something).
I use both of these feats.

Of course they are not always active, but i still get quite a bit of use out of them.

I guess mileage can vary quite a lot, depending on how useful the teammates are.

6

Same, but only on a infiltrate + low profile build in my case, it’s the only way I manage to get any decent uptime out of them and it’s still an uphill battle. Honestly at a minimum I feel like the distance threshold needs to be at least cut down to something like 4 to 5m for them to be competitive options.

That’s kinda the catch, at least in my experience, even when the planets align, and you get a zealot/ogryn that actually knows how to play support/defensively it still can be a pretty tall ask to get any decent uptime on either.

I run the rangefinder mod because of these (and a few other abilities), it’s surprising how little uptime you actually get out of them if you go out of your way to track it, at least in my experience anyways.

2 Likes
7

There is an argument to be made about Kill Zone being situationally useful mainly because Opening Salvo is downright useless on some weapons so if you have to take one you might as well go for Kill Zone, but there is no saving Catch a Breath.

Apart from what @Overlord said the nail in the coffin is that both of them are more-or-less automatically disabled in any event scenario which is the hardest part of the map in Pugs.

3 Likes
8

For smoke grenade, I propose stim-smoke grenade.
It makes a large area of smoke. You and allies in the smoke cloud gain 25% bonus toughness regen and enemies in the smoke cloud have a 25% chance to “miss” attacks/ do no damage. Grenade Last 10 seconds and the buff last 5 seconds. You have 2 grenades.

For twinned blast
Have a buff when throwing a grenade, make it not consume a grenade.
Buff refreshes when combat ability is used.

For some keystones,
left tree; training aim: Weak spot hits give one stack of aiming. Aiming stacks give 5% weak-spot damage. Stack limit: 20. missing removes all stacks.
nodes: missing only removes half of aiming stacks.
aiming stacks give 2% critical chance
activating combat skill grants 5 stacks of aiming.
Aiming stacks benefit allies as well.

Middle tree; optimized override: greatly improve grenades.
Shredder frag grenade: also applies 6 stacks of fire damage.
Krak grenade: if it kills a orgyn or monster, sends out a cluster of 10 grenades, doing a quarter of the original.
Smoke or stim grenade: throwing this grenade grants invisible for 4 seconds.
Nodes: Grenades thrown grant 20% toughness damage reduction for 5 seconds
Grenades have a 25% chance to explode twice.
Activating combat skill increases grenade damage by 25% for 6 seconds

1 Like
9

Regarding Twinned Blast, I’d also like to point out that a percentage chance makes the most sense when you have a lot of something. Like for example taking the increased crit chance when you’ve got a rapid fire weapon means you will have many opportunities to proc that tallent. But how many grenades do you use in the average mission? 4-10? The chances of actually proc’ing Twinned Blast at all are pretty bad. Should probably be like 50%.

1 Like
10

On the smoke grenade a while ago I saw somebody suggesting it should be able to turn out fires which could be handy I think.

Also I think the smoke should disorient the enemies way more, in my basic training when we had to move through smoke we could hardly see anything and you could get lost and move in the wrong direction easily. you had to move really slow and stay together.

If you can slow down enemies and disorient them it could make the smoke grenade more useful imo.

Plus it should hide you from the sniper, I mean that’s what is smoke for right?

2 Likes
11

or maybe one of these instead of a smokenade?

https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Booby_Traps

proximity mines

https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Haywire_Mine

cluster mines

https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Cluster_Mines

1 Like
12

i just really hope they give a substantial buff to smoke nades and make the entire tree less of a scattered mess.

2 Likes
13

yeah they’re pretty easy to keep up, if nothing is on the screen.

14

Also, if you shoot the things on your screen, before they are close.

15

Yeah so pretty much useless and should be reworked into something else. No point having it up when you don’t need it up.

16

You don‘t need it when you are free to shoot at enemies?
You only need ranged damage, when enemies are in melee range?
Ok.

17

Smoke is just a liability as-is. It needs (at least) the impact to player visibility dialled WAY back.

Killzone is pretty meh, but Catch a Breath has a niche as a self-preservation tool when you’re the last one up. Kind of like Zealot’s “Loner”. Probably needs to be more than 5% per second to be considered more than a talent tax by most, though. The nerfed ‘close range’ qualifier on some blessings show that 8M is almost melee range, so it’s not that hard to keep enemies at that distance for a good portion of the time.

Twinned blast is a waste of a node and needs massive buffs or replacement.

18

The point of catch a breath is to let you shoot gunners without as much fear of toughness breaks when you keep your distance and lets you shoot without forcing you to constantly dodge. The only thing worth changing would be lowering the range condition.

1 Like
19

Yeah I need it all the time. I am NEVER in a situation where there isn’t something within 8m of me. I play solo/duo queues and stick to my team like a parasite and that STILL happens. So why would I take such a garbage low-effective uptime talent? Competitive urge has better usage throughout an entire run. Seems ridiculous, outright stupid even to take those 8m talents considering what type of game darktide is and how spawning is.

If your argument is that it is good for killing targets unaware when you’re map progressing to stat pad on the way then idek where to begin here. If it works for you cool, clearly not working for me.

edit: Honestly just make the dmg bonus 7.5% if something is within 8m of you instead of full benefits.

1 Like
20

Well, then do not pick the talent.
You personally not getting much use out of it, does not mean that nobody gets any use out of it, or that it should be changed entirely.

2 Likes