OP makes compelling arguments, imo. Personally never had a problem with chip damage. It wasn’t explained properly in the game, certainly, but I’m not struggling to finish a game either, so it’s not a detriment to my enjoyment of the game in any way. Most of the time, I probably wouldn’t even need to use a health station, which would just make me feel like there is too many healing opportunities in the game.
It’s a niche issue (that also happens to break a zealot playstyle/feats). Most of the damage any player takes is likely not from chip damage, it just happens to matter when you get low.
I don’t believe it plays a key role in wearing down people’s resources currently as it actually does very little damage.
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Greater use of corruption might be more sensible than chip damage.
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Yea its honestly really sad when i think about that and how many hours i put into modded difficulties or glitching the deeds onto cata maps. I dont really understand why fatshark is not allowing for modded realms or some way to increase difficulty ourself with modifiers and such but this is why im fighting so hard for the game to not get nerfed i just love the game and its combat and would hate to see it ruined by constant nerfs.
Main question is:
What do you want your difficulty to primarily come from?
-Attrition?
-High intensity situations?
Hp damage through toughness is the former, death by a 1000 cuts where every mistake is being punished.
The latter is more like Vt2 where you generally do not die from attrition but get overwhelmed in a difficulty spike.
Anyone who claims that the latter requires no or less skill is free to post high difficulty content in Vt2 - true solo, Deathwish Onslaught tiers, whatever.
Attrition difficulty requires more defensive play - not taking damage is the main goal.
High intensity difficulty requires more offensive play - expend your resources (hp among them) to survive the difficulty spike.
It is less about not taking damage and more about “how aggressively can I play to win while not overextending too much so I won’t die?”.
It is a false assumption to think this balance is any less skillful than the “do not take damage” mantra as you are forced to walk a fine line between actively using your hp as a resource and carefully assessing when to go back to a defensive playstyle to stop dying from spending too much hp.
This switch between offensive and defensive playstyles is usually more dynamic and thus “fun”.
Why? Because by making hp an active resource to use rather than a passive one you have to hold onto, you allow for more player agency - you are free to use this resource to a greater degree and far more frequently as well, the game becomes faster and more dynamic.
Sure, you can also trade hp as a resource when it is scarce like with the attrition focus yet that severely limits the aforementioned interaction and the agency of the player - you can only trade so much of a limited resource.
Temp hp in Vt2 was unlimited but required aggressive play to make use of - it was a risk reward design:
Play aggressively => more dps => lose more hp due to aggression => bank on being able to regain that hp => express skill by doing exactly that while on low hp => repeat the loop, therefore creating more player agency.
Whereas hp being limited means: “Do not lose hp” => lose hp regardless => use limited meds => the end.
Other pve games use recharging shields to absorb full damage with no bleed through - PayDay, Deep Rock Galactic, Destiny, Halo - because it makes games more dynamic with a back and forth.
Generally, games are more interactive and enjoyable if players are given more resources to use / more ways they can use their resources, with hp being one of them.
None of that makes games easier per se. It simply changes the main focus of the game’s difficulty.
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I like this explanation a lot. I think i can finally see where the anti chip damage idea comes from. That said currently the game is in the attrition portion and to make it more like the aggro risk reward like you mentioned they woulf need to scale up enemies significantly and maybe rework toughness to have a smaller amount but faster regen.
can we like remove all health and toughness?
i mean i never got hit in any game ever and always play 1000 times better than anyone else?
health his useless if everyone were one hit and instantly died that way only people with skill can win
and to all who can’t do it? pah just git gud as your clearly not exalted as i the most awesome and infact humble person.
Dont be ridiculous Its not about making 0 mistakes through the whole run its about making less mistakes then it takes to lose all your health and choosing what hits to take in those situations that call for it.
Best post in this thread by a mile.
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Yes, numbers might probably have to be tweaked somewhat in that case. Eating a stray hit on cata from a single enemy in Vt2 is still dangerous even if you can regain that temp hp.
Potentially sth. along the lines of increasing enemy melee damage in Dt to make individual enemies still matter? Basically a way to ensure players don’t just wade through everything but have to actually engage with the risk - reward / back and forth / offensive - defensive/ whatever you want to call it interaction.
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Yea exactly and the whole reason im so against removing chip damage atm is i dont want this to become a mindless wade through enemies fest. If they plan to remove or rework it i would like to see big changes to a lot of the numbers in the system. Removing just chip damage is just not the solution right now.
This is a false dichotomy.
Both games get difficulty from high intensity situations.
Would you die in DT if the game director would send you a 1000 trash mobs 3 at a time? No, because there is no attrition.
You may feel like there is attrition because of how healing differs in these games, but I’ll get to that.
You also take most, if not all, chip damage in those high intensity situations with large mobs and specials in the mix, not when you have multiple random small group of mobs you can stagger with a fart in their general direction.
It’s the same in DT.
The big difference is in the ways you can heal.
In DT, healing is at breakpoints (med stations) and group healing with med packs. This means that your HP is a resource that needs to be conserved between those points while healing in VT2 is more dynamic, but personal and situational. It seems like this, along with coherency/toughness is a very deliberate, good or bad, design choice to make players work together more then they had to in VT2.
DT also has this super-fun-because-its-dynamic resource called toughness.
Having melee bleed-through doesn’t change that. Overly oppressive ranged enemies are what prevents you from having fun managing fun toughness as a fun mechanic, not bleed-through damage.
Bleed-through damage just emphasizes HP as a resource that needs to be conserved between break points in the map with med packs being more situational and strategic, but not nearly individualistic and dynamic as in VT2. Whether heal pots would be a good fit for DT is a different and complicated topic separate from this one about chip damage
Maybe you mean something else by chip damage? It’s the small mobs almost exclusively that are dealing chip damage, though sometimes as part of a horde. It also doesn’t matter in most circumstances as toughness really does block most of that damage.
It’s not a good attrition mechanic because it really doesn’t meaningfully wear players down, but it does seem like it’s intended to be an attrition mechanic. Chip damage is primarily impactful when a player is low on hp, which is primarily caused by some other high intensity event.
Taking a lot of damage in a short period of time isn’t chip damage, and moreover if your toughness has gone to 0, bleedthrough is entirely irrelevant, it doesn’t matter in which order the damage was taken to hp or toughness.
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“Primarily” indicates that there is no dichtonomy as you suggest. Bleed through damage serves no purpose other than increasing attrition.
Without it, (melee) attrition would be significantly lower across the board.
As you pointed out, Vt2 is more dynamic with its resource management.
I think that less conserving and more actively making use of hp would lead to a more engaging experience.
Toughness does not prevent you from going dow, hp does. Seperating the two might have been good change for ranged combat, for melee however, it lessens the impact of player agency regarding health management.
I do agree that adding a stronger emphasis on ranged combat while still keeping melee combat relevant has created an interesting problem here.
If I understood correctly, you also think that the toughness - hp mechanic can be awkward at times, which is due to ranged combat being poorly balanced.
Different approaches I suppose; the release version of the game seems to have changed it a bit anyway.
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dont listen to this sore-loser, his is literally just salty that the devs thankfully listened to the majority of the community and made a proper adjustment that will be tested and determined if it was the right choice, which judging by the huge amount of people that were in favor of it, seems like it was.
Look at how needlessly rude this guy was in other threads and shouldnt be taken seriously in any discussion
the embodiment of the “git good” player mindset and just has outright horrible game design ideas, thank god he doesnt work at the studio
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Yeah I didn’t want to say it, but this guy has been extremely inflammatory in other discussions so I didn’t really care to listen to anything he has to say.
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Are you forgetting that it completely kills the core essence of the Zealot as a class? How are you meant to stay at low HP to get buffs (which are STILL bugged lol) when taking just one hit can kill you because toughness doesn’t actually protect you?
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I main zealot. I can tell you the core of zealot is not martydom stacks. Those are just an added benefit for fighting in melee all the time. Besides you should be using the talent that restores your health during your lethal immunity. A full health zealot is very strong there is absolutely no reason to always be playing at low hp. Its not the same as vermintide zealot.
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this basically translates to - “They should balance around this talent instead because it’s the one I use”
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Just wanted to say, the way chip damage was increased massively from beta to live feels bad. Really bad. Combined with dodges being janky still, and shooters seeming to do way more damage, toughness feels like paper. I would rather have the beta numbers than whatever they decided for live.
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