We need to have a serious discussion about balance

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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The talent rework was just the beginning of the not-so-creep powercreep. With Unlocked and Loaded, the not-so-creep is now barreling through the heretics at the speed of the new train in the new mission.

“It’s just a PVE game” is a very bad argument on why they shouldn’t nerf anything, and this patch is really exposing it now. Fact is, you need balance in a PVE game like Darktide, you cant just endlessly buff. If balance doesn’t matter because it is only a PVE game, why have difficulty options at all? Why not have just one difficulty setting? Why not have every weapon in the game one shot all enemies? Why have ability cooldowns? Why even have a health system instead of being in godmode? Why have a fleshed out talent tree system meant to fine tune your desired build and playstyle? Why shouldn’t you be able to use cheats while you are at it? After all, it is only PVE. The folks who say this haven’t really thought about this saying past a surface level. It sounds good because sure, why shouldn’t you be powerful against mindless AI. That is where it ends though, because anything past that level of thinking exposes all the potential issues that come with it. Take the Souls series for example, this series is primarily a PVE game that is known for its difficulty. In the same way players enjoy those PVE games for its challenges, so do we enjoy Tide for its own difficulty.
So those who say that, really dont actually know what they want. What they want is a gameplay loop that is satisfying and rewarding when they know their skill and game knowledge is what accomplished victory. I’m willing to bet most of us on here play for the difficulty challenge. The adrenaline rush of not knowing if you will make it out of an encounter. The dopamine hit of rescuing your allies in the middle of a chaotic fight. Filling in a role in a team. Well, now it seems that every class can counter every scenario.
I saw a post on here saying they cater to the hardcore players, to which i say you are just wrong. Fatshark is very light handed when it comes to nerfing players because every time they do it the outcry is absolutely insane. They cater to noobs much more than the hardcore crowd.

Duelling swords on all human classes is just 1 example of bad balance. You can’t just give such a powerful weapon to a highly mobile, melee centric class like Zealot without making some sort of changes to it. This sword alone is frankly ridiculous, especially being able to just simply slap on the rending blessing. So now this highly agile, high crit weapon can also penetrate armor. The plasma gun and revolver have been OP forever now. Does this mean they need to be absolutely gutted? Of course not. They need some kind of nerf or drawback though. Their ammo efficiency and overheating elements are a non issue, if you know how to play (survivalist aura, shooting only when necessary etc). These weapons can cleave through a ridiculous amount of enemies, where only 2-3 shots is all that is needed to destroy a patrol of gunners. That isnt even mentioning their armor penetration.

While we are talking about ranged enemies, these mobs frankly suck. They dont do anything special anymore. The gunner elite is supposed to bog you down and stop you from advancing, at least this is how i always interpreted them. They suck so bad now because of our crazy movement as just one reason. You can simply slide your way right into their face or camp their spawn and just smack them all around without a thought. Shooters were buffed, and it was such a great change because they were a deadly threat again. You had to think a little bit more about how you wanted to advance. Anti shooter vets were on a comeback. Then you listened to the noobs, and immediately reversed the buff. You didnt even give the noobs time to adjust to the changes. Why cant you be this quick with player power?

The game is losing its identity. At launch, the classes were much more specialized for specific roles. Now, every class can easily access things like rending and brittleness plus stack on crit chance to cause a ridiculous output of damage. This leads to all classes being able to counter pretty much every scenario with ease. There really isnt much thought needed to specialize a build now, since you can fairly easily fill all roles. It is a team oriented game, that doesn’t require much teamwork outside of the occasional trapper or dog pounce. A vet can refill all its equipment easily with the grenade regen nodes and endlessly spam them. They can regen shout nearly instantly by killing specials on top of the already short cooldown. This ability alone does pretty much everything. It clears space to breathe, it knocks DOWN enemies, and it even staggers monstrosities (seriously, these vets must have the loudest voice in the galaxy, it just makes zero sense but hey, suspension of disbelief, I guess). In case this wasn’t enough, it refills all toughness and can even grant overcharge to the player and teammates with a node that everyone takes. Not only can you spam this ability almost endlessly, you can take 4 of this vet so when one shout is on cooldown, another is always at the ready. This just one example.
Weapons are all starting to behave the same way, with many weapons now getting rending for instance. The plasma gun can take out entire packs of shooters but quicker and more efficently than a lasgun, where the lasguns are supposed to be an anti shooter weapon. So it makes you question why take the lasgun, which has abysmal armor penetration, when you can just take the plasma which does all of the above and then some. The bolter’s drawback is supposed to be that it is heavy and slow but powerful. Now it is just powerful. The plasma is supposed to be powerful with the risk of blowing up and poor ammo economy. It is just powerful. The revolver is supposed to have limited ammo in the cyclinder, but this is just not a problem since you can move so fast and easily reposition to reload. The survivalist aura is a whole other topic for conversation. The game is also much faster paced now, a rework or buff to shooters could potentially help with the ridiculous speed running meta.
These are just some examples on why i think the game is starting to lose its identity. Fatshark, do you want the players to feel like unstoppable gods? Or as regular men and women struggling against insurmountable odds in the imperium meat grinder? I am not saying we shouldn’t feel powerful, i just think it should be within reason.

So what can be done? Well, nerfing the ridiculous things like rending stacks and some of the known OP weapons are a start. Again, I’m not saying they need to be gutted but brought back to a balanced state. With weapons as powerful as some of the ones listed, it makes you feel like you are gimping yourself for taking anything else (why take a kantreal lasgun if a plasma can do the same thing plus way more). We can also buff some of the underperformers. They can buff the enemies like they did with shooters before they were immediately nerfed. As for one of the biggest hot takes you will hear? I think they should introduce class locks. This will never happen, but i think they should. It would probably help them a lot on their end for balancing and would prevent scenarios like 4 shouty vets like i mentioned, or having multiple of the same non stacking auras. It could also help ensure all roles are filled.

Anyway, there is more i could say but i am quite franky tired of typing. But, this is something i feel strongly about with this game. It is still early post update, i get it. However, give it a week and then you will really start to see what i mean when more and more people start to catch on to some of the ridiculous things you can do now. Something needs to be done.

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That skill tree shuffle for Ogryn was a very, very serious nerf for me. It’s made a huge impact not having that extra 10% toughness resistance.

I’m having to work much harder to stay alive despite having slightly more buffed weapons/curios.

I wish they’d revert it tbh but that’s just me I guess.

Btw play the new special Unrelenting condition on auric damnation for a real challenge. I’ve not had so much fun in ages. It’s amazing and a true test of skill/teamwork. Absolutely intense.

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I already had a guy with what I would imagine was Blaze Away & Everlasting Flame flamethrower. He was so excited about standing there and holding 2 buttons whilst any larger horde was oh so skilfully deleted from the game. I had no heart to tell me him no.

I’m looking forward to those games with 2 power sword / plasma veterans and 2 flamethrower zealots. Maybe from time to time we should mix it up with Purgatus staff psykers. Such amazing gameplay. :face_with_head_bandage:

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I think you’re missing a key concept in all of your post here.

There are different levels of skill, different desires of difficulty and different peoples willingness to work at getting better at the game.

While I agree with some of what you’re saying, it should all be prefaced with “At the highest difficulties”

On lower difficulties, people should be able to breeze through missions, right? They should be able to use any weapons and builds and just enjoy. So why is the highest difficulty being nerfed??? (hint: because any old idiot can play Auric Damnation, and they want a free win too)

The only solution is to make a difficulty that caters purely to masochists and try-hards, and communicate that the game mode is supposed to be extra challenging. Any attempts to make that mode easier should be immediately disregarded. (unless the safeword is given).

I just want to add: Seems to me, most of us thought that Auric difficulty would be that sort of “extra hard” mode, but instead it ended up just being “wacky modifier mode”. Its also possible that Maelstrom could have been the hard mode, but instead it ended up being “even wackier modifiers than usual, wacky mode”. Might have missed a chance there? Idk. Probably too late to change. Oops?

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duelol sword on Veteran is so beyond what I thought Zealot would be able to pull with it I think we all need to bow to the new king of raw melee killing. having something to sit in the ring besides power sword 6 was an accomplishment by the power creep. just casually dropping crushers without even using the tag keystone.

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Bro wrote a whole essay just to say “balance the Buffs and Nerfs.”

Also, make Maelstrom a little less accessible.

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The overwhelmingly vast majority of the playerbase is not playing the game at the highest levels, and they’re not looking for a crushing Darksouls-esque experience. The bulk of players are running Malice and Heresy. For most players, that really actually is plenty of challenge. Most people play an hour or two a week, with only double or low triple digits worth of hours invested in the title after a couple years.

They want to e-cosplay and ride the Hab Dreyko and Archivum Sycorax rides with their friends and chop up heretics having fun, and the 40k license is probably a bigger player draw than the fundamental gameplay itself (as I’ve noted before, if this were instead a unique IP called “BattleSmasher 50 Million: Blackwave” very few of us would still be here)

That’s why Fatshark is catering more to that sort of thing than tuning a perfect hardcore experience.

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You’re probably right here and with everything else you said. I’m guessing they havent done anything like that yet for fears of splitting the playerbase between “hardcore” and “casual.”

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Let’s call it my Darktide master thesis.

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Respect.

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Well theres only one way we’re actually gonna get a new difficulty, and thats by discussing these things so heres hoping dude.

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It’s the way it usually goes, here, and in VT 2, and even in ARPGs and most games with lots of itemization and a long service life.
People like buffs, so there’s more buffs than nerfs, then at some point, a new difficulty is added because the top 10% aren’t feeling challenged anymore (often increasing the amount of enemies).
The game on average gets slightly faster.
Repeat steps 1 to 3 until the servers shut down.

But a new difficulty in this case won’t actually help. Part of the issue is that, with the idea that every class can beat every challenge with every weapon (except for those that aren’t used because you can’t), eventually, the itemization itself becomes somewhat meaningless.
It’s nice to think that general handling and melee combos are the differentiating factors between weapons, but then we really don’t need even half of them.

I believe it is a perfectly valid point that access to rending and brittleness should be just a little more limited, weapons that are good at that should either have horrible cleave or other noticable limitations (maybe just relevant on higher difficulties. I believe the lower ones have both more ammo lying around and lesser density hordes with lower body mass enemies),
and if gunners are more of a challenge then maybe suppression should actually become more obvious and relevant.
A new difficulty would not help the issue OP presented unless it grants enemies weird and convoluted buffs like “-10% brittleness” or others that basically just walk back player buffs on the mob side because someone doesn’t want to touch the player buffs.

Personally, I get a bit tired of it sometimes. I don’t always need a hard challenge; hell, I just came back and am working my way into it.
But if the difficult missions are almost exclusively hi-int shocktroop, I am just done with it after a mission. There must be a way to have both challenge and variety without just adding “MOAR”.

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Tbh, for casual players they should remove one of the 2 first difficulty level (uprising sedition) and add one after malice and before heresy.
The gap between malice and heresy is too big.

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My two cent is that currently different things in the game are relatively balanced, top performer options is wide, other weapons aren’t far behind and we few things under performing.

The only thing which I find unbalanced is melee being better against shooters than ranged play.

On the other hand top game difficulty is low. Players are generally too powerful, not just with offense, but defense and mobility too.

Since both design intent and a large number of the playerbase (including high skilled players) want to be able to carry I don’t think this kind of balance can be tackled by nerfs.

Auric used to be the place to challenge yourself before, now (since talent rework) it’s the only content that can actually put up resistance against overwhelming player power in skilled hands.

I personally think that FS should introduce a new difficulty which isn’t just a enemy health/damage buff, but also makes the game “harder” in targeted ways.

For example:

  • Shooter behavior/strength improved to be more difficult to engage on.
  • CDR talents work at half efficiency.
  • Player mobility reduced (sensibly).
  • Less rending effect and/or enemy armour types are more pronounced.

This would avoid the problem of kicking people out of a difficulty, nerfing thing people find fun, and could also allow for a difficulty where you don’t need to go for Shock troopers gauntlet to find challenge.

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I think you’re on the right track there.

To me, high difficulty should require the player to be on their toes, dodging, blocking, using abilities wisely. Only way to do that is to increase the enemies lethality while keeping the mob density high. (but not increase enemy resistances at all).

Feels like this could be achieved.

Agree completely.

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they decided to keep leaning towards the nonsense, it can’t be helped with executives decisions

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then i see no harm in adding one that gives the capable 1% something to perform in.

nothing is taken from those not aspiring these difficulties, yet someone´s taking the edge out of my experience by making it “easier”

i want to eat breath and sht darktide all day long and be happy to increase my potential.

if that means taking unpaid vacation so be it, but forfeiting a months salary to have my “vacation” spoiled cause casuals want a breeze isnt negatively affecting the casuals´ experience but mine.

so are they even a factor in a weekly match pool ?
or are the guys that put in 10 hours a day and are there when you “need” people for a full team ?

i don´t get “capping” an experience based on the unexperienced when nothing is lost by amping up the top bit.

40k is nice, but without that dopamine on a good C I VI carry, the games appeal is lost.

and thats totally fine, i´m on the clock, gimme some darktide content to read :rofl:

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the last thing you want to do is pull an arrowhead when you only have 3-13k players (arrowhead = nerfing everything into oblivion)

as long as what they do makes sense, I agree in principle

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This. New difficulty that applies debuffs, just like some Mael conditions has buffed blitz and reduced ability CD.

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I don’t have anything against Darktide adding more difficulties or whatever, but I was mainly responding to OP pointing out why Fatshark didn’t cater primarily to those looking for soul-crushing difficulty.

If that’s not what most of your players are looking for, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to build and balance the game around ultra-hard difficulties, or invest lots of resources into building more ultra-hard modes on the Developer end. That was my point.

If a player is putting in 10 hours a day, they’re playing this game more than most people work full time jobs. The people putting in that kind of playtime are a tiny fraction of the playerbase.

From Fatshark’s perspective, it makes way more sense to cater to 1000 people who purchase the game and play a couple times a week and buy a few cosmetics to e-cosplay with than catering to the one player who’s gonna buy a single copy of the game and never log off. Hence why we don’t see Fatshark putting as much effort into amping up the top or balancing weapons around a tight-rope of perfectly tuned high end difficulty.

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