Veteran is my main, but other careers offer far more flexibility.
The rework was necessary, but poorly implemented and has received little follow-up. There are a few powerful passives to go for and about 50% Of the others can be ignored or are simply stepping stones to a good passive. I refuse to play the silly vaporizing plasma meta, and that leaves me with mainly the weapon swap melee/ranged builds and the Brittleness and/or Infernus stacking autoguns (my favorite).
However, the melee/ranged weapon swap passives feels as clunky rather than synergistic. The shout that restores health remains the safest and most effective Ability talent for team play.
Most Keystone bonuses are underwhelming and tedious to manage. I often skip them entirely in favor of stronger passives.
The real appeal of playing Veteran is capturing that guardsman soldier feel. Many popular builds aim for this, even if they’re not always optimal. Unfortunately, the final Keystones and Abilities seem center on tedious awkward mechanics like tagging, getting consistent weak spot shots, and weapon swapping. But, the core fun of Veteran in Darktide comes down to guns, grenades, and glory. The rest just gets in the way of that.
There’s some good stuff in there, but this crap is annoying, and I don’t ever want to pick a talent wit triggers like these:, the “successful” dodge triggers, requiring toughness to be broken, weapon swap, tagging, “avoiding” ranged/melee attacks, and meager “other teammate only” buffs like the team getting 15% of the toughness I generate, and bonuses that last for only 5 seconds.
in this quote there is the reason I dislike veteran, and why I hope Arbites will be good enough.
I really hope that dogs will be one of the options for the class…
Must say… the keystones ruined my fun with the veteran.
Not cause of the idea of the keystones, but how they have designed them.
Personally, I think vet’s the only fun class in the game right now, as zealot is too generalized, ogryn can do everything, and psyker snowballs through longer games. Vet is the only class where you even get the option to make builds that are specialized towards certain threats, with the more generalized builds feeling most lackluster. VoC can be built into an excellent support dps build using Marksman’s focus for extra ranged damage, Exe Weapon’s specialist is surprisingly useful, as Exe gives hitstun immunity and resets even on melee kills, allowing for great uptime on the extra ranged damage bonus and crit farming.
Every other class has this problem where keystones kinda just buff them, whereas vet is a class that requires you to do things to keep buffs. I like that part of the class and I’d prefer if more classes have that. Making keystone conditions very easy and accessible just means they’re a no-brainer take, but vet has plenty reasons to not take a keystone and save like 2-3 points as much as they do to take a keystone and play specialized.
I’d like if the small passive nodes throughout the tree were removed or more concentrated to allow for more build freedom (currently, it takes 15 points to path from shredders to close and kill, back to exe stance, and same for smokes to survivalist to infiltrate. This should be like 10 points). I’d also like if all of the grenade related nodes were removed and instead replace focus target as a grenade focused keystone (separate the grenade upgrade from field improv and make that a specific node as well). Allow more cross-path progression at the bottom of the tree for additional freedom and a few extra nodes and the class would feel much better.
Bonus points if Exploit Weakness and Onslaught are removed or actually tied into weapon’s specialist as additional nodes that lock each other off.
Having guns doesn’t equal good gunplay. The issue is that Vet’s talents and keystones often don’t complement ranged combat well. Many triggers such as weapon swapping, toughness break, or dodging; these feel forced, they’re not reliable, and interrupt the flow, rather than enhancing it just to eek out the bonuses they give. That’s why I rarely or almost never see certain talents being picked.
Saying “that’s just playing the game” ignores how clunky or situational these mechanics can be as core talent triggers. It’s not about having tools, it’s about how well those tools work together to support the game play.
The grenade talents and gunplay are why Vet is my favorite, and the most fun, but when I play other classes, I feel I have more build variety and more use out of the talents available.
It’s hard to clarify the issue with the keystone passives further or maybe you missed it:
Oh, now you’re on board? These responses come off as dismissive and deflective. I hope you’re not suggesting that if someone proposing a problem doesn’t also provide solutions, then their critique isn’t valid. I don’t make the game, but…
If you’re sincere, I don’t have a full breakdown of the talent tree, and even if I did, I doubt Fatshark would just drop everything and implement it. But I do think they should re-evaluate the talent triggers and effects based on what actually complements Veteran’s gameplay. I made a New Topic for ideas here: Ideas for a new Veteran Rework
its really sad, how veteran & ranged gameplay was much better before the class rework back in End of 2023, after that everything kept going downhill in nonstop.
i know many might not like this, but i wish they never did the skill tree update, or just not included the veteran into it, just made it a mess.
However, the melee/ranged weapon swap passives feels as clunky rather than synergistic. The shout that restores health remains the safest and most effective Ability talent for team play. Most Keystone bonuses are underwhelming and tedious to manage. I often skip them entirely in favor of stronger passives.
True.
mechanics like tagging,
Speaking of which, many people spam yellow tag ability, but in it’s nature it is not spammable talent, it has stacks, which give damage, by spamming they get minimal amount of damage, overall i more or less agree with this part and next parts, except maybe appeal stuff.
And left keystone, uff, deserves whole forum topic on it’s own.
I play all classes more or less equally, but veteran turn out to be most played class still ,and only one i did all penances for.
Some of my thoughts about it.
I think vet has a weapons problem:
Plasma is not as strong as people make it out to be, i think it’s balances out by overheat, long reaload and slow charge even on light attacks, i can’t count amount of times i press left mouse button to shoot and by the time it does, enemy moved from line of shot. That’s basically why i don’t play with it, like out of more than 20 games latest games, i used it only once.
Bolter is better on zealot, thanks to knife cancel it can be put to use faster, but that aside, bolter is great for killing bosess or bunch of high priority targets, so zealot can do that and kill literally everything else in melee, can vet without weapon specialist do the same as effective? Nope.
Out of 4 lasguns, 2 types mediocre at best even in aurics. Las pistol in terms of damage output is better on both gun psyker and zealot, thanks to increased crit chance from their abilities and talents, only thing that goes for it on veteran is increased ammo capacity and oveall if you take right talents, then it is ammo effective like any other las weapon. Recon lasgun is also better on psyker when it comes to damage, i didn’t play with it on zealot, so nothing to say.
Total lack of good melee, without weapons specialist, both zealot and gun psyker, can put more damage than veteran, aside from knife and dueling sword, good weapons for vet is chainsword, but again on zealot it is better and power sword, which is basically only weapon aside from knife and dueling, that i use on veteranm, if i don’t play weapon specialist.
I don’t lead with suggestions, often because I have a tendency to get too verbose as it is. First, I like to bring attention to the issue, see if people have suggestions. Also, Fatshark sometimes seems to ignore suggestions unless the problem gets traction.
However, in Vermintide 2, many of the suggestions that came from the Tourney Mod and some of the popular balance ideas did get implemented. Rather than crafting specific talents, I did go into some details about what kind of talent effects/triggers I think are more fun and flexible.
Biggest thing that stands out to me are roles and play-styles the talent tree is going for seem to revolve around mediocre effects and triggers, mainly for the keystones. My solution in a nutshell would be to focus on more fun ways to have stack-able buffs that with effects that compliment a well defined soldier archetype like precision sniping, gunner, or a more flexible hybrid melee/ranged and a support/explosives leader.
I know Veteran is a popular career, and there are a lot of powerful fun passives, mainly outside the keystones, but there’s also a good chunk of them which mostly get ignored; and he seems the most in need of a rework.
I felt this way too for a long time just ignoring them.
But then I tried out this build when going for Havoc 40. And I use it on my quick plays for auric and such now too. And it works well with plasma. The toughness, swap speed, ammo, etc. pairs well with a gun that’s as heavy as the plasma.
I respect that you get fun with your own perception… but we clearly differ about what we each expect from this game.
I don’t play Havoc because I dislike the game mode. And I don’t care if it looks so “cool” to play havoc 40.
And I don’t play OP weapons because I feel that they are simply broken. PG is clearly one of them.
And I will add that, no I don’t play with weak weapons either. Just because, we cannot play with them also.
About your build… PG + DS. One broken ranged weapon + one broken melee weapon. Sure it works…
Plasma Gun is indeed strong, but it scale badly over multiple players due to how it eats ammo, as chaos thirst never quench, I need to take around 90% of all ammo that exists.
Example:
1 player using Plasma = 100% Efficiency
2 players using Plasma = 160% Efficiency
3 players using Plasma = 210% Efficiency
etc.
Especially at Havoc, where ammo is scare and as Scavenger is really bad, and with how ammo is counted with Scavenger and Scavenger Nerf, good luck.
Veterans aren’t as fun anymore in my opinion they have some builds that are powerful and they have weapons that are powerful, but you are kind of limited to those builds on higher difficulties.
However if you don’t really care about meta-gaming and being a bit of a burden to your team (not playing as other people think you “should” play), you might come up with some builds that work fine.
My issues with Veterans:
Talents, many choices are the objectively better to take making some Blitzes, Auras and Abilities non choices. (most of my builds doesn’t even include Keystones)
Some ranged weapons is just frustrating to play in higher difficulties due to animations like the Helbore, sure the plasma gun is very powerful but i can only play a couple of matches and suddenly I am playing Tamagochi Plasmagun Edition.
Many of the faster shooting weapons eats much ammo to kill even weaker enemies and creates a problem for other players because you become a bit of an ammo hog (involuntarily i would say).
Acknowledging that problems exist is the first step to fix them.
So some suggestions then.
Make talents an actual choice, why not make Survivalist Aura a keystone for the veteran or something and remove the aura effect so that it becomes actually something you can pick?
I’m not talking an “overhaul” but just move some stuff around and i get Survivalist was broken on higher difficulties but now it’s just “Meh”.
Please make some animations shorter, like swapping weapons on Helbore, if i for some reason wanna play with the “ranger” Lasgun can i please not be punished every time i swap weapon? I get it its some kind of balance but, with some weapons it’s just silly and this even affects other classes.
Veteran has been my favorite class since day one because of the range weapon specialist they were when Darktide came out somewhere Fatshark kind of changed that design approach and went for a more jack of all trades and there in Veteran lost it’s role identity in my opinion and Veterans hasn’t been as fun since then.
Veterans doesn’t need to break the game with oppressive abilities to they just have to become fun again.
