This. My commissar build is good enough to shoulder the burden of a 4 vet auric hi-shock on a new map. Focus target and weapon specialist are strong.
I mean you can do well with it and there are some builds that work however it also doesnât downplay that a lot of the tree is badly designed and you get basically no points to play with compared to other trees.
I also think itâs a signifier that even when good players are like âyeah this keystone and whole side of the tree sucks to useâ then maybe itâs a problem.
While some bits were unfamiliarity and hyperbole i do think there is a night and day difference in the flexibility of vetâs picks compared to basically any other arcatypeâs skill tree.
Off the top of my head:
-Smoke grenades still stuck and are a huge hinderance to the team with absolute minimal use
-Some of the skills like EX Takedown are bugged and donât work as advertised
-The left side of the tree has 0 sustain and you can get an equal or grater effect with the weapon spec or tagging skill
-Some skills have a bit of a ârub your head and pat your tummyâ effect where what should just be a passive or straight forward is instead awkward because we have awkward mechanics attached.
Mind you some builds work like the Catachan Plasma Gunner build i have that uses stealth and frags but i also recognize that a lot of the builds that work are basically just weaker versions from the past build with keystones barely propping it up.
A lot of issues werenât addressed with the rework which was disappointing. Itâs also weird that they did keep something like Agile Engagement after making an entire Keystone based on the same concept.
I think the talent tree definitely needs to be pruned and things that no one takes or doesnât really help any particular build much or at all needs to be removed to reduce the point deficit of reaching any of the Keystones. I genuinely expected them to do this, but they somehow decided to just keep everything and compensate by removing connector nodes, which obviously wasnât enough.
I like that Confirmed Kill was moved up and became an easy staple without having to be a 21 point investment. Itâs a particularly important thing to note given that it was nerfed and some people are upset by that.
But I think people are (or should be) upset that avenues of Toughness regeneration are holistically restricted to getting kills on Vet, where everyone else gets Toughness just from attacking or from doing their normal functions without needing to kill, or tons of new bonus sources therein. Focus Target being able to generate tons of Toughness for the entire team by constantly marking new targets is probably the only way to make sure that you arenât racing your team for Elite kills to get the Confirmed Kill uptime.
Other than that, you just have Shout, which is an entire ability investment just to get sustainable Toughness without kills.
Not that I particularly think smoke grenades are great, but they are definitely inconspicuous in the effect they bring despite being a vision blocker. However, given that smoke nades are a cornerstone of my support build, they have more often than not stopped a team from running into 10 Gunners and instantaneously going down because of their hubris.
The visual effect can be negated just by standing closer to the front of the cloud. You can see if youâre in the smokeâs effect by a yellow arrow buff icon.
Buffing their duration was nice but I think Grenade Tinkerer should increase their radius by 25% or something to make them more effective in open areas.
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I started playing veteran because everybody said he is trash now.
I ended up with an âinfinite ammoâ recon lasgun build with executioners stance and focus target.
It is the ultimate anti gunner / ranged trash enemies tool of destruction and so fun to play with. Defense wise I invested heavily into toughness curios and toughness regen. Yes, when my toughness is broken, Iâm toast. But until then, Iâm sturdy.
Iâm also about to test a revolver / melee focused build.
Personally I think a class which has a potential (near) infinite ammo pool on basically any weapon is insanely strong. I donât know what the fuzz is all about.
But then again, I didnât touch veteran at all before the class overhaul so I have no comparison.
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Before Patch 13, Vet had 75% Ranged Toughness Damage Reduction and Confirmed Kill on top of that, making them an infinite reservoir of nigh-undamageable Toughness. You could walk into rooms like Robocop and move onto the next without a scratch.
It really spoiled everyoneâs appetite for the rework, where Veteran became a much stronger melee-oriented class, which betrays the operativeâs identity, but goes more in line with how Fatshark has designed the Tide series as a whole (itâs worth noting that melee weapons are still called the Primary Weapon in Darktide).
Fatshark ended up not really addressing the actual issues Veteran has, which I outlined above, and kept a lot of bad talents that they never actually made better in the end. EX Takedown is still bugged and that completely obliterates sustainability with a ranged build right now.
Veteran is strong. Thereâs just a few things keeping them back that Fatshark dearly needs to address. A lot of the hatred is misdirected toward Keystones and not really understanding their effectiveness when they were an addition on top of everything we already had, without fixing anything that we did not like.
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have you actually tried it? is that your experience of it or are you just relying on what you heard?
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I super strongly agree with this. We did a 4 vet run with different builds in auric maelstrom. We cleared it with only one death. I ran my support vet but the real winner on scoreboard was marskmanâs focus vet running a lasgun who did this:
It was a tough mission and ran 38 minutes but it at least proves the case that vet doesnât âsuckâ what vet has is low flexibility on the tree which constantly feels bad and very poor toughness regeneration (which my VoCommand build handled).
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I donât even think that Weapon Specialist is âstrongâ. It feels like a worse version of Inexorable Judgement while being an active mechanic instead of a passive one.
Completing a mission is a very low bar for saying something doesnât âsuckâ. Maybe I would even agree in a vacuum, but in comparison to basically everything else it does suck. It feels like I have to sweat extra hard for both survivability and to have a comparable offensive impact.
I just switched to playing Zealot yesterday (had kinda enough of Vet honestly) to try the buffed Crushers (many bonks), and it was a super stark contrast with melee Vet instantly feeling like a power fantasy in compersion.
@Padds I tried MF a lot with MGXII and Helbore and both were horrible experiences. Iâm not good at sniper playstyle, but was always able to do okay with it, but currently, itâs an extremely weak setup (or at least, way harder to play) and Iâm not feeling like MF has a high enough impact.
I also tried it with infantry autogun as you suggested and itâs actually very strong. The fact that the âMarksmenâ keystone works 10x better with a bullet-spitting weapon where I can just hip-fire constantly and gain max stack almost feels like an exploit.
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well only with accurate guns! i get what your saying the way rof isnt factored into the buff does make it somewhat easier for fast rof it does work with single shots i started off using the mk7 hh and that had be lips out witht he fun of popping heads to . im just more of a front not back line guy 
Itâs actually downright stupid, itâs like a pre-patch 13 auto pistol that can shoot long-range. Iâm just miffed about the supposed âMarkmenâ keystone giving the largest boost to fast-shooting weapons with middling accuracy.
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If youâre all having fun, mission accomplished, but generally a dedicated DPS build should have a damage gap a lot larger than 10% as compared to a support build. Marksmanâs Focus does very little if youâre not getting a lot of headshots, and 11% on a precision weapon means it wasnât proccing very often.
This is the criticism Iâve been making of precision veteran. Itâs hard to get a lot of out of it. DPS builds on other classes are easier and safer without sacrificing any notable amount of raw DPS.
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Wow, way to whitewash with âcompleting a missionâ. He did specify it was an auric damnation mission with 4 veterans and only one death. Sounds like the Veteran class doesnât suck in this patch.
yeah, it fully deserved those nerfs, now finally other classes have some space on the board, the keystons aint that bad after all, always critting on headshot make some weapons busted, like vraks7, maybe vet is still overtuned after all
@Reginald is a very good player, especially with Zealot who constantly played/plays non-meta and underperforming weapons. He was playing ChAxe, Lawbringer, and similar weapons on STG pre-patch 13.
Him completing an Auric STG mission with a (probably) pre-made team in no way means âVet doesnât suckâ in comparison to other classes.
Me, who plays Vet twice as much as everything else, can also complete Auric STG with a few to no deaths, that doesnât mean I donât have an easier time with basically anything else.
Thatâs why I said that in a vacuum I could even agree. If that was the balance of the game, the current performance of Vet, but thatâs not the case.
Again a player with skill I would consider the upper 0.1% (or even rarer) of the player base, completing some content says nothing about the overall game balance.
Iâve seen Jsat destroy VT2 âcurrent highest difficultyâ with the Bolt staff playing True Solo after a huge nerf. Guess what? Nobody was using bolt staff after the nerf, because other weapons were just better.
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Iâm aware of who Reginald is. Weâre in a thread titled âVeteran isnât as bad as people say it is.â His thesis was âVet doesnât suckâ. I agree with him. You disagreed because he completed âa missionâ rather than note it was the highest difficulty with a full, varied vet squad. Grasping at straws bud. You would agree âin a vacuumâ - so you agree. Objectively, this patch, the vet tree and class doesnât suck. Lots of us would like tweaks or reworks to it - but it does not suck.
So much pearl clutching and whining in this forum (âNERFED INTO THE GROUNDâ âSUCKS NOWâ âFATSHARK HATES VETSâ) without any merit.
Yeah, yeah if any other class would ânot suckâ as much as Vet now, the forum would be engulfed in flames.
The patch 13 Vet was more-or-less the same case as now. âVet is balanced lmao it just that everything else is OPâ.
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My whole group has been playing since launch and we all play all the classes.
In our view of things, the crux of the Vets problem is that he is just too squishy for what he brings to the table.
Going far down to get the keystones severely limits your ability to pick up redundant toughness talents along the way. But then if you go wider to pick up more mid-level talents those same talents are now weaker than they were pre patch 15. So your sustaining power is worse regardless of what you do.
The only build line that Iâve felt strong with is double infiltrate, rending, weapon specialists with krak grenades. You can mostly go straight down the tree and this leaves you with a few points left to pick up some other talents here and there. Itâs a high mobility build and infiltrate gives you the best survivability toolset (restores your toughness, can sneak around to escape or clutch, etc).
Other builds can crank out some DPS, and plasma feels really strong right now. But if you lean hard into plasma and damage dealing youâre the biggest glass cannon. Psyker is far tougher with almost any of their builds in my experience.
The result is that when it comes to survivability of the course of a match, vet feels like they are in the worst spot of any of the classes by a noticeable margin - even with the infiltrate build.
When exhilarating takedown gets fixed we will reevaluate, as that would reflect a 60% swing in toughness damage resistance, in addition to restoring toughness. Of course, stacking that with other vet toughness skills will make it even more difficulty to get down to the keystones.
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Iâd personally describe veteran as âbad for what it wasâ.
My main beef is the reduced survivability and talent point stinginess that other archetypes donât have or feel as much.
A good chunk of features have been pruned and apart from a very few, the replacements donât really feel like decent replacements, upgrades or address why veteran has been chopped up the last 3 patches.
Itâs not to say I canât have fun or have decent builds with the veteran, but I canât shake the feeling of being second fiddle to the rest of the archetypes or the sense of continuous make-do I have building builds⌠just like âcraftingâ.
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Case in Point: You can build the Psyker to be tougher than the Ogryn what Toughness is concerned.
If you get all Toughness curios and Toughness related notes on the board that arenât locked by going down a path, you end up with 6 x 15 Toughness nodes and 4 x 5% Toughness Damage reduction. Meaning you get some odd +220 Toughness and this toughness takes only 80% of the original damage at minimum. Some abilities increase the toughness damage reduction further and thatâs all on top of blocking nigh everything with your Force Sword.
Iâm not saying itâs too strong. But compared to that, the Veteran is now way too squishy.
There is some meta joke here how the supposedly toughest of the human characters in-lore ends up being the weakest, with a crazed zealot and a fragile, schizophrenic Psyker being more enduring.
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I think mains feel the nerfs more than the others, good players or not, you grow accostumed to your abilities, and if something change you notice immediatly that something that you always counted on is just not there anymore
its the same as the surge staff fallacy, it was bugged for 20 days and psyker mains had this honeymoon, after the bug was fixed off it went to the dumpster bin
i tried surge in patch 14, with the wrong keystone, warp charges instead of empowered (expecting it was going to get fixed soon), and i did well with it, iâve still topped damage without the bug, i felt just like reginald now with vet, but i rarely play psyker, and i use voidstrike (i was a gun psyker but after patch 13 staves got so better than guns that iâve dropped it)
from my main prospective i will keep subcribing it to the end of times, the veteran was nerfed to the ground
in patch 13 he lost his main thing, the free reload on F, i used to play full games without ever reloading my bolter, never bothered to do the 30 shot thing cause it wasnât really worth it, the first 15 shots were imprecise and had less damage so it was never this OP exploit in the first place for me
thanks goodness fatshark decided to copypaste Kruber Mercenaryâs ability in there so at least i would survive this awful patch and be usefull to the team
then patch 14 came, and suddenly i could stagger bosses with my F, so i could use it in conjunction with the Marksman Perk 50% power on headshot perk (that i wasnât even using before cause when do i ever get an headshot with bolter without volley fire) to blast bosses faces
i got used it, i adapted and survived succesfully, and now patch 15 should have been the redeeming patch that would give veteran his keystones, and finally some joy, but every vet main expectations came short when they decided to compensate with huge nerfs, while leaving there the botched skills that we had to get accustomed as taxes, i donât want to see these anymore
get these out of here
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