Veteran's Voice of Command is a Broken Ability That Hurts The Game

When people go full meta builds? Yeah. I play all 4 classes, most recent being veteran, I jumped right back into auric right at 30. (I was actually getting bored again of regular damnation in the mid 20s, part of it being that VoC is silly, I’ve since switched off because it’s boring, despite typically enjoying support playstyles) I was someone who wanted HI5SG permanently within the first month or so, I took a break around patch 12 and came back recently. I went into auric within a day.

VoC turns a fairly normal run with some basic threat trivial relatively quickly.

It’s not a matter of wanting a game balanced around solely the top percentage, but it’s exactly what you say, some people simply won’t be great at the game even with full meta load outs. That doesn’t mean you leave blatantly overpowered stuff in just because some people are bad.

People can always get better. Players at the higher end can’t exactly lobotomize themselves and suddenly go back to struggling on malice.

A bit of a boring take probably but I’d start by changing tactical awareness from 6s → 10%

That’s giving half as much cooldown for VoC and ES while giving the same amount as it does currently for double charge infiltrate, which should be fine I think?

Could slap like a 2 second cooldown on it as well to be safe.

Then reevaluate from there now a single Vet can’t keep nearly the gold toughness uptime they can now.

Though protecting your HP 100% from poxbursters is probably still a bit silly, just reducing HP damage from them would still be very helpful.

Alternatively keeping it as powerful as it is now but doing the Tactical Awareness change AND nerfing Duty and Honour duration down to 10 seconds would have a drastic enough effect on uptime to probably be enough.

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i do get ur point but there is smth worse than this ability ITS SMITE smit is literally all u said but without the thoughness this game is made to be challenging and no ability or blitz should make it way too ez but voice of command isnt that broken it just needs a massive cooldown nerf or that it doesnt give as much toughness as it does now but else its pretty valid

I think this is funny considering VoC used to give double the gold toughness IIRC…

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It’s honestly just better to tweak VoC directly and leave Tac Awareness intact, or a very light -1 as Ogryn got, I don’t think punsihing the other 2 ults, greener players and lower diff with less CDR should pay for VoC’s needing balance.

Even something like reducing overshield to 10s and not having it stack between vets might be enough without completely crippling it.

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VoC aside a flat cooldown feels odd to me. My suggestion hardly punishes other ults. Exe does not lack for uptime whatsoever but whatever they could lower its cooldown if it actually affects it. Infiltrate would only lose out a little when you don’t take double charge. Fair enough if you like tactical awareness as is but 6s flat cooldown doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

If they don’t touch Tactical Awareness I agree that’s the most sensible first step, then as always reevaluate and hopefully that’s enough on its own.

Yes, isn’t it?

Kinna like smite innit?

Admittedly, I’ve made the comparison. I’ve even suggested that if one were to look at smite, other abilities should be looked into how they can be cheaply played.

Wow, we agree on something.

I think the point being made is that these abilities are only so overturned if they’re placed in skilled hands who know how to manipulate the system and do well at it.

Only superficially, pal, smite and VoC are very, very different beasts. You’re part of the group that think smite is good and strong, I’m in the other camp because that’s what I mostly see.
VoC is just plain strong AF, unless you do something stupid like take revive node and/or “save it”.

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I feel like this is already an understatement but regardless only applies to having a single VoC Vet in your party.

When you have two that are halfway competent it’s more akin to having a helicopter mum guardian angel frantically wrapping everything in bubble wrap. The amount of free hit trading the team can do is pretty game changing. While turning potentially run ending poxbursters and snipers into more of an inconvenience.

I’ve started seriously considering forcing charismatic into every VoC build I have it’s just so valuable to coat more of your team in that golden shield.

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When you say “Only superficially” we agree that I mean of course, in principle.

I can assure you Ogyrns are much tankier than a vet.

You can see damage taken break down.

2nd Icon from the left, is the ogyrn, was pickaxe ogyrn, and highest damage dealt.

Ironwill Kind of do the opposite been bugged for past 4 months, when combined with over toughness it breaks, also confirmed kill is broken for past 4 months.

https://forums.fatsharkgames.com/t/over-toughness-disables-ironwill/96430/5

I can assure you Zealot is a better spammer in horde or out of horde


This was the zealot build


This is how many times i was tagged by VoC (28), and tagged by Benediction (notice that each pulse is 1 tag)


The difference between me and the zealot is 3.


Incase need proof of me actually killing heretical specialist , here is a photo too.

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Yeah, taking the user out of combat to use it really makes players reconsider spamming it.

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Yeah but it penalizes the zealot while Chorus is active. Can’t deal any damage while teammates kill everything.

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But you’re also pumping everyone full of overshields… So there’s that.

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People still arguing about which golden toughness source is the worst offender, when both should be removed entirely…

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you could say that to any class especially the class psyker who clears whole rooms alone… alas veteran having 1 ulti which is actually good is a nice change considering the 3 or 4? reworks we endured. and still have 1 botched ult and 1 just useless/ boring stealth ult instead of someting unique

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you are nearly immune to everything, including pox gas, even ground flame (require jumping) can throw monsters out of the map too!

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And why should the Veteran have to be the “team player” guy? Why not make Zealots Shroudfield the “team stealth” ability? After all preachers from the Ecclesiacry they are SUPPOSED to be all about inspiring fervor and zeal in others.

Oh and if VoC is bad, then why aren’t all of you screaming about Chorus? Same stuff plus instead of just knocking the enemy down for a few seconds it effectively roots them in place. Kind of like that Smite you people oh so love to whine about. Oh AND you can give everyone extra damage or mitigation without having to reduce the range and increase the cooldown. Pretty much the closest Darktide comes to an “I Win” button.

Now if this one of those “every Veteran takes VoC and its boring!” threads. Well then how about you whiny little brats who were dancing in joy when Volley Fire got utterly gutted push to have the Veterans other abilities made actually useful? Instead of telling Veterans to “git gud” while screaming the moment someone even suggests the developers actually look at the most-abused abilities in the game.

Freaking hypocrites.

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Already addressed, multiple times e.g. Veteran's Voice of Command is a Broken Ability That Hurts The Game - #72 by IGN_Vera

And OFC CDR mentioned all over the place too…

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Stop the director spamming elites and specials to “increase difficulty” would be a good start. If every map after Malice wasn’t an endless chain of ragers, orgyn/ maulers, plus trappers/hounds/bombers/ etc just maybe having cooldown reduction (of which Veteran gets exactly ONE node compared to Zealots THREE) tied to elite & specialist kills wouldn’t result in constant uptime.

Of course that would require actually designing maps and scripting mobs so that even “trash” mobs would be dangerous. Something certain people clearly aren’t capable off just based on the maps we have. I mean I sure as heck would never have ranged NPCs standing on an overpass with an accessable stair facing the players almost in plain sight. Nope that stair would either have been cut down days ago or mined and trapped to hell and back. Nope, if my players wanted to take out the archers whittling away at them they had to either weather the gauntlet then swing back to clear them, bring their own ranged firepower, or send in the rogues to sneakily assinate a few. Just charging up the staircase was at best impossible if not a quick road to a TPK.

Of course that is probably too much work for ObeseTuna. Why invest in good map design coupled with sound NPC scripting when you can just change a single value in a spreadsheet up one tick and go back to creating more FOMO ways to collect whale milk.