Weapon suppression is unintuitive

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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I’ve seen a lot of threads lately, here and on reddit, complaining about the effects of enemy suppression.

While I think these complaints are valid, I think a lot of players miss the solution built into Darktide’s mechanics. There are several weapons that are designed to suppress shooter and gunner enemies, and its trivially easy to do so just by firing a few rounds in their direction. Sounds easy right?

There’s a catch, several in fact. Although suppression is a functional mechanic, actually making use of it is easier said than done. Here, in order of significance, are some problems I’ve identified trying to use suppression in Darktide games:

- Suppressing enemies behind cover consumes ammo with no guaranteed benefit.

-The duration of the suppression effect is ambiguous.

-Openings created with suppression often go unnoticed by teammates.

-Investing in suppression has nebulous benefits due to unknown mechanics.

-Suppression can make hitting enemies more difficult. (Perfectly justified from an in-universe perspective.)

Adding/altering feats and blessings to give more extrinsic rewards to players who suppress enemies could help to make suppression-focused builds more worthwhile, and give a better-defined niche to many of the weapons with powerful suppression.

Specifically, a feat that highlights suppressed enemies for allies in coherency, similar to the red glow of Ogryn’s taunt effects, could serve as an intuitive way for players to gauge when enemies are safe to approach, while also encouraging trigger-happy players to focus said enemies.

EDIT: Terrifying barrage is considered useless for every weapon on which it appears. A rework of terrifying barrage could also improve the usefulness of suppression dramatically. I’d love to hear what ideas other people have for a TB rework.

8 Likes
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Yup, suppression works fine. It just usually doesn’t help.
I’d love for Vet to get a choice between " recover some ammo from suppressing enemies/teammates killing them" and “if you kill a special/elite at range, get refunded 33% of the ammo you hit them with”, in return for tuning their ammo aura down slightly so it isn’t always the best choice for the team.

As for TB:
Making suppressed enemies take more and deal less damage for a duration that is longer than the suppression lasts would make it a suddenly really nice blessing.
And yes, give at least a short notice when elites are suppressed, so players can make decisions based on that.

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Refunding ammo cost for suppressing is a really neat idea. What if there were a “% chance to not consume ammo based on the number of enemies suppressed” feat, or a “% damage for teammates based on number of suppressed enemies”. It could make weapons like the autopistol and recon lasgun really effective.

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I think it’s pretty straightforward, really. Think of it like the ranged equivalent of impact/stagger and it all falls into place pretty neatly.

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except ranged also has a stagger value that’s distinct from suppression

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I mean conceptually. They’re both mechanisms that put an enemy into a state where they won’t attack.

People overcomplicate things for themselves by getting hung up on how the underlying mechanics work when, for the vast majority of them, the practical reality is really quite straightforward.

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My main problem with suppression is that instead of wasting 40 bullets for effect that may or may not work is that you could use those same 40 bullets to just … you know kill the stuff that’s shooting at you?
For suppression to work and to be useful, the effect should always just proc whenever you are shooting at something. Stats on added suppression should just increase the duration/aoe of the effect and every ranged weapon should have base suppression stats on the stat card in some way.

Now i guess from dev point of view, making suppression too easy to apply could potentially make ranged enemies kind of irrelevant, so other alternative is just making suppression reduce enemy ranged attack rate or something similar instead of just instantly negating their will to shoot back.

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Its the same issue with all force multipliers in games. In order to be worthwhile, they can’t just be as good as the direct alternative, they need to be better.

Typically the way this is done is by making the force multiplier items significantly less resource intensive than the direct option (Think of how Psyker’s surge staff has infinite ammo). High suppression weapons in Darktide tend to be too resource intensive to be worth using as such, and are often outperformed by their direct-damage alternatives when it comes to damage output.

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That is what you’re doing. Suppression is for controlling the stuff around the thing you’re shooting at or for temporarily neutralising groups of shooters. Like, if there’s a ball of shooters, you pick out the juiciest target to kill first, or the one that’s going to attack first, and the enemies near them all get suppressed.

All ranged weapons have suppression stats, many of them are just so low that they’re not worth considering. Increased suppression stats generally translates to less time needed to suppress an enemy. I don’t think it also increases the aoe, but that’s definitely an interesting idea.

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In my experience this only works with weapons like say bolter, shoot with any other weapon like lasgun and you either see those 10 other enemies instantly shooting you back or scattering to the best heavy cover spot there is.
In those sitsuations you are arguably better off just trying to get into melee.

I’m aware the stats exist and are different, but there realistically is no way to know what the actual numbers are other than, bolter big = big suppression i guess.
I just want them visible somewhere so you can make some informed decisions about it.

Like different marks of autoguns, do we really know if their suppression stats are different at a glance other than datamining that information?

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Yeah, this is exactly what I was referring to when I spoke about the mechanics of suppression. What is the functional dofference between 50% and 80% suppression? Nobody knows.

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It’s weapon dependent for sure, but that’s not unique to suppression. Try it with an aggressive brauto build. It’s night and day compared to lasguns or bolters.

My general rule is that if the attribute doesn’t appear in the detailed weapon stats, it’s not high enough to be a consideration.

The number of shots it takes to suppress an enemy.

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I think you’ve nailed it with most of the problems you’ve identified, primarily the ambiguous duration and a lack of clarity. I think blessings and feats incentivizing suppression would be pretty fun too.

In regard to one problem you pointed out:

Shooter voice lines (complaining about not enough cover, etc.) should be adjusted to only play when they’re being suppressed so you can hear when you have a gap to close in. I would believe it if someone said that’s how it’s intended to function and it’s just bugged like a lot of other audio, honestly.

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Are you sure it isn’t the radius of your suppression effect? Or the duration? Maybe there are multiple levels of suppression severity like there is with stagger?

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I’m reasonably certain there are multiple levels of suppression.
In the Psykanium, if I shoot a nearby gunner, the other one will usually just cower a bit, then, if I keep hosing the area, turn tail and move a few meters. Or maybe it’s just the duration they count as suppressed, who knows.

Braced Autos actually have quite good suppression.
Granted, this is the only case I know of where it matters, but even then, teammates tend to ignore it because it happens so rarely.
Unless they are trying to hit weakspots, in which case they are probably annoyed.
Having suppression be more visible, a bit harder to do consistently, and longer-lasting when it happens would help there, giving players an extra second to act on the opportunity.
It’s also kind of telling that the only weapons where suppression kind of matters are the ones that have low damage output at the same ranges.
I don’t think even removing the mechanic would make a big difference for most players.
At least Terrifying Barrage should have an extra effect.

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Best case suppression does nothing.

Worst case the shooter pack repositions and wipes your whole team

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idk if this is the case, but i swear that being suppressed makes your iron sights mean jack-f***ing-s#!+ lol like, they’ll still still be locked on to an enemy the entire time i’m being suppressed, but my bullets will be missing.

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I’m fairly certain that’s a deliberate thing. You need to hipfire to suppress the enemy then go for the aimed shots.

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My biggest problem with suppression is that the suppressed enemies are harder to hit. I’ve tried it with plasma and infantry lasgun so maybe it’s just not great for those weapons. Anyway the fact that enemies runs behind the cover to shoot you is actually a disadvantage more often than not.

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Yeah, it makes sense that they would do that, considering that’s what any sane person would do when being shot at, but it can make high-suppression weapons into a liability at longer ranges.