The only veteran perks that need nerfs are
Voc gold toughness
And getting the perks that give you ultimate cooldown for specialist kills in aura and grenade regeneration in aura.
This trifecta just completely trumps the everything vet has by far and it’s just ridiculously strong.
The rest of the vet’s tree needs reworks and buffs. Maybe one day the marksman branch will actually buff using marksman weapons to be actually good and specialise in marksman weapons rather than automatics.
Regardless of buffing or nerfing I think that at this point vet is also seen as the “grenade guy class” so something that was suggested on the Darktide discord should be done to promote that
That suggestion was basically switching these two around
This and his other 2 grenades need buffs especially smokes.
Shredders are fine as is it’s just grenade every minute + 5% chance on every in coherency specialist kills is just insane. Grenade a minute is already a strong enough perk for the ‘grenade class’. Missions can go from like 20-30+ minutes and even longer that’s already a lot of grenades.
Place them somewhere else on the tree, too. Smoke+Ex Stance has a huge use case hindered only by the fact that it currently sucks to play around randoms using that.
For the normal “actual” game modes, I don’t think there’s anything to nerf with Veteran. It’s only when you get into the “harder than hard” modes that issues arise with things like VoC and Plasma.
If you’re playing Heresy/Damnation, modes where the bulk of the playerbase is at, these things don’t feel overpowered.
FS decided that for the sweatymodes, they were going to accomplish that by just spiking the raw volume of enemies and their HP instead of doing stuff like having them come from multiple different directions and acting more intelligently.
That means stuff like CDR and Cleave are substantially more powerful than they are in “normal” game modes. If you’re playing Damnation, you’re just not given 12 shotgunners all standing on top of each other to blap at once with a Plasma gun that then basically immediately refreshes your VoC the way you might see in Havoc, nor are you so limited on ammo that the PG’s cleave shines so much more than it does elsewhere.
I think rebalancing the sweatmodes around some different parameters would help a lot of things, not just weapon/talent balance.
if it makes you feel better, every class, especially ogryn and psyker, needs to be nerfed. Psyker needs a complete rebalancing of their entire kit especially staves, blitz, and peril, ogryn needs numbers to go down, zealot needs to be anything but a crit farm machine that prints toughness, and vet needs to not be an elite/special sniping yellow toughness stagger generator.
Plasma Gun just needs a cost/consequence for all the power it offers - similar to how psykers have a lot of power with Warp attacks, but need to be careful to not overload their peril gauge.
The keystones for veteran are not great, in particular Marksman’s Focus which works best on autoguns of all weapons - feel you really missed the mark when that’s the case.
The game’s hectic increase in spamming units have outpaced Marksman’s Focus long ago, which rewards standing still or moving slowly.
Probably the operative who thrives the best without picking a keystone, because their normal talents are generally more rewarding than the keystones.
I think another thing is that a lot of weapons need a new look at, because once you leave malice behind, they fall off hard - and bad blessings are too common.
Hopefully the paid DLC will fix the shotguns, because while they sound impressive and animations are nice - they are so disappointing to use.
Vet was pretty much reduced to a paraplegic in the aftermath of the class overhaul, and only un-crippled after months of inaction. Even then you had certain loudmouths saying it was fine that it was so handicapped because they said so. This, incidentally is why people are often so resistant to further nerfs. Because nerfs require a scalpel, and FatShark uses a jackhammer in the operating theater.
A lot of this comes down to the veteran being (I think) the most populous among the playerbase, and there’s always somebody who conflates his own subjective preferences with need.
Speaking for myself, I’d really rather see FatShark focus on new content. Or hell, how about even just a cosmetic that DOESN’T look like it was pulled out of one of Satan’s most cavernous echo-y orifices.