and players have been gaslit to the point of experiencing vet guilt for when pinning fire was bugged and ps didn’t have damage falloff after first target
and now they think its fair vet is on a short leash because two years ago was so strong oh my gosh please nerf
and while vet mains plays havoc with their 98 hp trying to avoid danger, while also learning how to melee, everyone else is just playing a different game
Only thing I can think of is something like making Marksman’s Focus reduce your threat to -100% so that enemies never target you once you stack enough headshots. That’s what it would take in the current spawn environment.
EDIT: This would be a bad thing. People hated camo expert for a reason.
Being a range playstyle leaning class, isn’t the same “we need a range only option”. Meanwhile FS themselves said DT was never supposed to have melee or range only gameplay.
And when someone is saying about “zealot can melee only” this is just straight up theory or non-organic gameplay i should say, same as testing things in psykanium. Cause first of all it’s a pure griefing and trolling if you will play pure melee zealot in H40 pub. And that’s not what’s happening, what we see on high level havocs is range, aoe, flames, explosion spam.
And second it was critisied already, that slide spam is too strong, that giving high mobility weapon like DS to a somewhat tanky class like zealot is questionable softly saying. That golden toughness is OP.
People who are bringing broken unhealthy things to promote another unhealthy thing just because they like that another one more they are either dumb or malicious, or both.
“Uh oh his toy is so OP, i want my to be OP aswell”, tf is this 9 year olds logic. It’s like they are operating with envy and spite. You are a filthy zealot enjoyer! No you are a vet peasant!
Learn melee, make guns have a proper recoil, learn to control it. Nuke cdr and slide spam. Reduce density and make sharpshooter style viable again like it was pre 13 patch. That what undo game back to not being braindead spam. But bozos want to make the game even more braindead with infinite ammo. Let’s just also remove stamina, and make all enemies to have 1 hp. So any comatose, mentally handicapped or 10 children 5 works dad can enjoy the game. FFS.
This, krak is now a laughable shadow of a single rumbler shot.
The game’s premise? What? And can you please answer my question? You keep dodging it. This is now the 2nd time and you keep avoiding telling me at all cost why it is such a bad thing for people wanting the Ranged Specialist class to be viable as a Ranged specialist and not being forces into a melee centric role with occassional potshots taken from the hip.
And who said anything about not liking melee combat? You are absolutely projecting statements into what i said and asked.
I have every class in this game, i play every class in this game. I am quite content with playing my Zealot, Ogryn and now Arbites in melee… even my Psyker I can play as Psyker… the only one that I can’t play as what its supposed to be… is the Veteran. With the Veteran, i am forced into a melee playstyle for which the Class base stats weren’t designed at the beginning of the game, and that were never changed since. You still take obscene amount of damage when you should dare to press the sprint button.
They never changed the Veteran’s base stats (to my knowledge), just gave them utterly broken copies of the Zealot abilities. And the sad thing is, even with those objectively better abilities than the Zealot’s it’s still a worse melee option, because the entire class isn’t build for it, the way the Zealot is inherently.
So, I’ll ask you a 3rd time… why is it so much of an issue to you that people want to play their Ranged Specialist as Ranged specialist, especially when they can play every other Class in the game as it is advertised.
No you cannot. Since the executioner Stance Abilites does not regain Toughness, you cannot actually play the way it was at release and focus on the ranged threats as the rest of the team mows through the enemy. You do not have the inherent speed bonus to catch up to the team either. You still take more damage to the back than any other class. You still have the worst Dodge bar the Ogryn.
The entire class is not build for melee. And you are not given tools to play in Ranged. On release, you could use “executioniers stance” and keep sniping the enemy, keeping the aura rolling. And then turn around and dispatch the few pox walkers that might have come to you, and clean up after the team, as you ran after them.
But then the game changed. More enemies are spawning all around you. You can’t be standing still, a little further back and just snipe the enemy anymore, once you leave “Damnation” difficulty. When you go into Auric, its all melee with frantic shots out of melee at some rare specials. Or the very rare situation where you have to deal with a room full of gunners. And the higher in difficulty we go after that (trials, malstrom and havoc) the less viable ranged weapons become, until you are always firing point blank as threats immerging out of the sea of bodies.
So no, i am playing those difficulties and i can tell you for a fact, the amount of effort it requires to be ranged focused compared to the “reward” of doing so, is just non existent. You are way safer and better off playing your Veteran as discount Zealot with shout and a Revolver or a Plasma Gun, shooting from the hip. Than you are playing as an “executioner” that is meant to take care of all those nice highlighted targets.
Heck, even the Psyker with its Gun build does a better job at the Ranged damage these days than the Veteran, thanks to Scryers Gaze and how toughness regain on Psyker works.
I agree with you with the Arbiter and Psyker but i don’t agree with you about the Ogryn being better at Ranged. The Ogryn still sucks at ranged, even with the Heavy Stubber. And no i don’t count the Rumbler as Ranged 
You don’t even need the staves to make the argument for the Psyker being the better Ranged option to the Veteran. Scryer’s Gaze and Disrupt destiny makes for a great Ranged damage output with regular weapons. And the fact that crits restore toughness is so much better than the Veteran’s reliance on ranged Elite Kills (because when was the last time in an auric mission that you weren’t swamped from all sides and always had an enemy within 8 meters?)
And nobody, but you, tries to make it an argument that people are saying Veteran shouldn’t melee.
I asked you what was wrong with people wanting to rely on their ranged weapon primarily. We also went over the fact that the Zealot can rely entirely on melee (plus knife, if you need to).
So again, why is it an issue for you that (some) Veteran players want to primarily use their ranged weapons? I can play Arbites, Psyker, Ogryn and Zealot entirely melee… i can only play Psyker entirely ranged… so what is wrong with people wanting the Veteran to be able to primarily rely on their gun?
Nah, they are Hybrid Zealot/Ogryn not Vet and Ogryn.
Yes. It does make for good gameplay. It worked rather well for my Premade in the first year of the game. My friend loved his Zealot, and i was quite content with playing my Veteran as Special hunter, sniping Dogs, Trappers and Bombers before they even became a big issue.
It is strange how much more enjoyable the game was when the game was about working as a team, each to their strengths and a lot less frantic and stressful too. We’ve had a lot less cursing on the discord about that “Trapper” suddenly appearing too.
But alas, the way the game worked changed and Fatshark decided that a ranged build for the Veteran was no longer viable on the difficulties my friends and me play. And so Veteran went from my favorite class to my most loathed class.
I am quite happy with my Ogryn (and now Arbites), killing people in melee. Or slicing through people with my Zealot.. or playing my Gunpsyker. What i am absolutely loathing is having to play veteran now.
So yeah, i do think it would make for a better game if Veteran got returned from the gimped Melee position they forced him into. Even if that means all the people that crutch on that shout will be sad. Maybe they’ll actually learn playing the game as Zealot in their future, because that is absolutely where they belong.
Yep, 100% this.
Vet needs an entire rework, from its very base stats to the skill tree. One that reflects the new spawn mechanics.
You could make it work, if you gave Executioner’s stance the “shout” stagger, removed the Shout Stagger as a trade off. Then add an auto “shout stagger” into the Executioner Talent as an “offshoot” option, causing the shout stagger to happen each time the Executioner Talent refreshes. This would reward you for keeping the series of headshot kills going, while at the same time create a small area denial zone around you to keep shooting.
The area would need to be just big enough so no melee attacks can reach the veteran. That way you can actually do the Guardsman thing, while at the same time need to consider just how long you keep it up as you’d likely get swamped hard, once it runs out. Thus you’d need your teammates to help you clear that, or drop a grenade or two to clear the trash that has accumulated.
But honestly, i also would want them to look at the base stats and the fact that the Veteran still keels over from a single hit to the back. That also would make the melee experience more enjoyable and people wouldn’t need to crutch so hard on the shout.
And yet it does. I can go through entire auric matches with my ogryn and zealot, never once using my secondary weapon and dealing with everything with melee and Knife/Rock.
Yet, to do the same with Ranged, you have to be a D-bag and steal ammo from your teammates, making everyone else suffer just because you want to play ranged… in a game where every class gets ranged weapons.
And it would be an easy fix too. Just give the Vet a Node that gives ammo on ranged elite kills, only for itself.
If you read my posts here you would have had your answer. I think it’s absolutely fine for Vet to be ranged specialist. I encourage it. That does not mean 100% ranged.
I also think it breaks the game’s mold to try and change a hybrid combat game to ranged only. I already posted the reasoning for my objections to that as well.
Yeah sure on auric, after everything was buffed many times and skill tree update changed player balance side completely. So auric is like heresy nowdays or something. Again, who said it’s healthy you can just spam slide and ignore ranged? Or spam golden toughness and dome every 1 meter?
Both melee or range only makes game braindead, because it cuts half of the game and decrease the ammount of moment to moment deccisions you need to make and stuff to react on.
And more important it doesn’t work and breaks the game. You will have either “i’m tired of rushing zealots” and “plasma/bolter vet destroying everything before i can melee”
Games work because they have rules, and rules also means restrictions. Being free to ignore mechanics can be fun for a short period of time, it will not make the game better on a longer distance.
What are you even talking about, you have drastically different weapons like bolter and lasgun.
You can’t shoot 90% of the run time with bolter, becuase it means you barely deal any damage or you just destroying everything with magdumping.
And you can’t shoot only 50% of the run with lasgun, because it means you are playing with bolter reskin or it’s not killing anything and you are being swarmed and forced to melee.
Vet problem is he has no playstyle specific talents. Sharpooter branch has nothing for survivability. There is nothing for shotgunnner/breacher hyperaggressive frontline vanguard, or being a heavy weapon specialist that alternate your playstyle vastly, there are some universal swap and reload speed talents and that is your “range leaning” stuff.
Nuanced stuff like “shotguns have a % chance not to consume ammo on kills in close range” or “autoguns deal % more damage against bleeding enemies”, “hipfire with infantry lasguns has no spread, infantry las also have + cleave”, etc. That will make vet a proper gun guy that is better with guns since so many of them are shared between other classes. Not a universal “just give him more ammo”.
Because if you want to shoot with shotguns in close range more without being forced to swap on melee everytime, you need a specific talent that allows you to ignore low mag size restriction, not just more ammo.
The only original Exec Stance talent that gave toughness on usage was arguably the the worst talent to select from the the bunch, i.e. 60% toughness regenned when activating. In his current tree, he has a node that gives 15% on weakspot kill, one that gives 5% on any ranged kill, 10% instantly and 2%/sec for 10 sec on elite kill, one that gives %5/sec if you haven’t been targeted for melee attack in 5 seconds, and toughness regen exists as a node in every keystone. Like he’s got ways of keeping his toughness up with an Exec Stance build. And it’s likely that a simple tree restructure alone will make it much less of a problem. Avoiding toughness damage all together is always a strategy too.
But I’ll agree that the playstyle to make highly ranged builds viable has changed. There are really only a few areas where you can set up like a turret and just shoot without moving. But you can continuously shoot while moving around cover with your squad. A Lasgun + Shock Trooper means you can do it while maybe picking up just a handful of resources, though you can afford to run a greedier ammo build if you’re actually taking out all the ranged threats. It depends on squad comp to some degree but rarely do you not have some character who does some frontlining, ime.
My experience with playing with a regular squad in the original tree era of the game was that I was killing substantially more enemies than my squadmates because I could just shoot them from distance. They were left the poxwalkers and groaners which doesn’t make for compelling gameplay for them though I was having fun. Making the same version of that but tuned for the game with how Aurics are now probably makes the lobby feel like it does with a Rumbler Ogryn or Exterminator MK3 Arbites which is why I don’t think Vet really needs an extensive rework. Regardless you can still absolutely be the dedicated specialist and elite sniper with the class. That aspect of Vet hasn’t changed. You can do it with exclusive class weapons, with ranged builds, with melee hybrid builds, with playstyle etc. They will be on average better at it than other classes. I think just a better tree makes that advantage significant enough.
Don’t forget 5% toughness per grenade kill as well.
Well, actually i kinda said that.
Game supposed to be “hybrid”(Which suggests 50-05 melee-ranged ratio) and by the statement of people i’ve argued with it is ‘hybrid’ at the moment. But if in the current “hybrid” state game allows you to go melee only, so, by this logic, ranged only should be an option as well.
They could start by adding agro level reduce when Executioner’s Stance is active, as somebody already suggested before. Like, there is a similar sub-talent under Infiltrate, it’s just for ES it would be much less potent, and only will make random stranded chaffers ignore you until it lasts. Elites and Specialists would still go after you, as well as dense hoard. But if it’s just a few groaners or stalkers, they “won’t see you”, allowing you to shoot things freely, as you should.
By doing just that you would immensely improve veteran’s shooting play without actually changing balance that much. Because currently it just feels horrible, you need to fight for every opportunity to use the Ability without being dead by some random mob suddenly approaching you from behind while you’re focused on your targets (probably how half of my deaths on ES Vet happen)
Basically you need to return what vet once had xD
i used to but the devs turned out to be horrible people so it’s on the shun list.
As to this, the Vet needs teamplay to shine more then any other class; if you can make space for your vets to concentrate of shooting they will eat waves of elites/specials for breakfast. The wrench in the works is that it only only takes one half-smart speed running meta-slave to utterly nullify that play style and, seeing as we cannot turn off crossplay, the chances of getting a half-smart speed running meta-slave on your team are high.
Moreover, the constant ‘trickle in’ of trash mobs from the rear means a Vet will spend most of their time and ammo on cleaning up poorly thought out spawns.
I’ve tried sticking to vets playing high burst guns as a melee psyker, and the combined destruction is very gratifying.
It won’t, except for a small percentage of really good players. But you must not ever balance your game around those in the first place, as it will turn it into hellish experience for the rest (majority) of players. You balance it around “average Joe”, and then trim it somehow to not allow really good player to squeeze out too much output from some cheesy builds.
So, taking the Executioner Stance for example, it absolutely has to drop your agro enough for random chaff to ignore you, so that an average player could just enjoy playing the only shooting class in the game - but if you care that 10% of good players will just be able to kill everything on sight, you put some extra dynamic cap mechanic that ends ES preemptively if they kill too much stuff too quickly. Like, ES still lasts until you keep killing elites and specialists - but it ends when you’ve killed 10 of those, no matter what. Then you experiment with that cap and find what number works best
I appreciate the many replies to this topic, both for and against… now, responding to everyone individually is impossible, so I’ll try to summarise
The hottest topic, at least from what I understand, was: if we give to it more ammo, is it right for the Veteran to spend the entire mission shooting? In other words: if Darktide is a hybrid and there are 90% melee 10% ranged careers… is it right to have a 10% melee 90% ranged career too?
But imho the real point is actually another one. Currently, even if the Veteran had infinite ammunition, it would not be able to play the entire mission with a rifle in its hand
The proof of what I’m saying is the Psyker: heat management is permissive (fortunately)… in a nutshell, we can cast as much as we want, but there are still several situations that push us into melee combat
On higher difficulties, it really doesn’t take long to find yourself surrounded or with enemies on top of you
Now, if this happens with the Psyker, it’s even worse with the Veteran… because the Psyker’s spells, in addition to doing damage, stagger and create space. The Psyker also has several tools. The Veteran’s pure ranged build nope, is focused on pure damage (and I love this difference)
The way the gameplay is set up now, even if we had infinite ammunition, we couldn’t exploit them… the most common gameplay would still be spamming fragmentation grenades and VoC
Then, yes, I repeat, IMHO there isn’t enough ammunition, because unless you’re a vacuum cleaner for pickups, you will not even able to eliminate all the enemies highlighted by the stance (so nope, without wasting them at the hordes)…
…I’m NOT saying the Vetan must be able to spend the entire mission shooting… but should be able to shoot more… BUUUT, even before that, before we worry about how long the Veteran can spend with a rifle in his hands, we need to rework the ranged gameplay itself… because, currently, it’s not suited to high difficulty. The Veteran has to be lightning fast at switching weapons, reloading. As someone else suggested, it could have less aggro. Etc. etc., in short, something similar
I’d say that magazine mechanic alone it sometimes more than enough to push you into melee.
I’ve tried “ranged” autogun arbites and even in aurics if you will try to shoot everything - you mag will get empty pretty quickly. And while you’re reloading - advancing horde will get you and force you to melee.
Now posotion it backward. Is it healthy for the game that other are capable or murdering evrything at range, but vet, as ranged class, isn’t?
Couldn’t agree more. Game needs at least one sub-class in one class which will be about proper shooting play. Not “shoot for a few seconds then switch to melee because you’re surrounded by chaff” kind of shooting play we have now; or “need to fulfil my role by taking down priority target, but can’t because I’m surrounded by chaff”. Something that fits niche of marksman (in modern NATO terminology), so that from time to time, when a priority target appears you could just stay in one place and shoot (almost) uninterrupted for 5+ seconds, reliably.
When (not if) the Vet rework happens, I NEED to see some changes to his core stats.
I’ve been playing a lot of H40 recently, with all classes, and I noticed that when I play vet, I die the fastest to ranged damage compared to any other class and I get hit constantly while dodging ranged fire.
I don’t know the specifics anymore and I’m not going to check rn but playing any other class and then swapping to vet, you can instantly tell that vets dodges are worse than they should be.
I’d like to see something done to his dodges, particularly against ranged fire. Be that an adjustment to make them closer to zealots dodges or a new talent, like Arbis “+1 dodge and 25% duration”. Something, anything.
