Why Nerf weapons? It removes the fun

[Neppo]

I am genuinely confused by the outcry to nerf weapons in games like these. It is constantly just removing the fun element from particular set ups. Find something you like that works well? Enjoy it while you can because the community will cry that it is too strong and then Fatshark will take a hammer to it and poof; gone. Fun removed. On to the next set up.

Nerfing is removing of the fun factor of a particular weapon. The idea of these games is to feel strong and capable. Think of how awful it is to get your favorite set up nerfed into oblivion because “our game became too easy with it.” Not my problem. Fix the game and increase the hazards rather than take a cheap shot at a weapon Fatshark made. Crafting and weapon rolls make it even more frustrating with the amount of RNG that is in place to be able to get a weapon you are happy about. Then the ‘no-fun-allowed police’ show up and take that away from the player.

Why not instead buff other weapons to pull them out of the garbage rather than push other weapons down. Why not try to increase enemy spawns and create new types? There are so many enemies that are just the exact same but with a different skin model. Try balancing with damage of enemies and health pool of enemies. There are other solutions outside of nerf the fun out of a weapon and making it useless.

Nerfing weapons is a fun killer.

[Yeblyat_Slayer]

Say it louder my friend, we have to take a stand or it will only get worse.

[Fingeris]

@Neppo

Nerfing weapons is a fun killer.

Based on Helldivers 2, I am starting to believe it’s some sort of Sweden fetish.

But at least Arrowhead did understand the problem.

[Ragnarok101]

To play Devil’s Advocate… sometimes you really do need to nerf. We already have a problem with the game breaking down due to the sheer number of enemies added in an effort to keep pace with player power. Adding more won’t help.

[souI23]

@Neppo

Nerfing weapons is a fun killer.

I’m with you

[aethelwulf]

Overall, I do believe that studios should prioritize buffs over nerfs, especially for co-op games. Nobody likes nerfs, but realistically, sometimes nerfs are needed for the health of a game. Two big factors to this are:

1. Power creep. If you don’t ever nerf, there will be significant player power creep which can cause many issues from game balance to engine performance. It’s hard enough to balance a game like this without having a constantly shifting base level of power for players.
2. Outliers. Let’s say (in our deliberately hyperbolic example) that a single weapon is overperforming by a large margin. It’s not practical or an efficient use of dev time to balance every other weapon in the game around this new power level. It’s far more practical to nerf the one thing that isn’t working.

[Ragnarok101]

Basically we should see:

1. Nerfs to weapons hogging the spotlight like the Zarona, which is way too heavily geared into eliminating everything that it makes other weapons that have more tradeoffs useless.
2. Buffs to things that aren’t performing up to spec, like the Thunder Hammer, Flamer, Autopistol, some of the Brunt clubs, etc.

[Ralendil]

Because the other option is to buff all others weapons
Then you ruin the difficulty. Then you would need to up the HP of the enemies or create a new difficulty.

We need balancing between weapons. Especially cause when you use what several called meta (= OP weapons) you ruin the fun of others that don’t use it and also you lower a lot the difficulty.
And if the guys think that it ruins their fun cause a weapon was nerfed then:

1. It means that they did not even see how OP was a weapon… This is really disturbing
2. Maybe they should lower the difficulty if they need OP weapons to clear a difficulty
3. After the nerf the weapon is more balanced. Then others will be able to play cause an OP weapon can ruin the fun of others. As you won’t be able to kill a lot more enemies than your teammates…your teammates will be allowed to play

For me what ruins me the fun is

1. Plasma turrets on legs (named also veteran with plasma gun)
2. One shot killer (called revolver on a veteran)

For now, this is the 2 that are ruining my fun.

About buffing weapons, it can be made when a weapon is under the average power of all weapons.
By example, I would not be against something done for Thunderhammer. Maybe I am wrong, but I feel that this weapon is bad against horde, not good against common enemies / low hp elites and good for single high hp target. There is really too few situations where this weapon is good.

[SlenderBarracuda]

If I had control, I’d buff all the weapons up to lore specs, then I’d buff the enemy until you needed that much power to deal with them.

Chainsword needs work, thunderhammer isn’t a thunderhammer, powermaul is just sad, kantreal should have a ton of multi-pen, Ogryn should ragdoll like a cannon, Psyker should be a glass cannon (but a dang siege cannon,) and so on.

Game has felt like the ranged and melee game are fighting each other since launch. Like they are trying to make COD and VT2 into the same game but punishing you on the swaps. It’s gotten better, but still.

Not a whole lot of patience for 'but muh balance!" when so many things are just bad. Meta emerges for a reason. Make everything good to start with AND THEN AND ONLY THEN can you balance, but just taking away the good (which is what nerfs are) isn’t a recipe for a fun game.

[Ralendil]

@SlenderBarracuda

If I had control, I’d buff all the weapons up to lore specs, then I’d buff the enemy until you needed that much power to deal with them.

and? if you buff both, you simply change the balance by increasing everything. You could even end with a weapon nerfed even if you buffed the damages cause it would be less efficient after you buffed also all hp…
Increasing everything does not make a better balance… and buffing is not only increasing damages.

[SlenderBarracuda]

@Ralendil

if you buff both, you simply change the balance by increasing everything.

It’s warhammer, you are suppose to keep increasing everything.

But no, I said make everything pretty powerful, and only then adjust the enemy. And I didn’t actually say HP, I said the enemy. As in make them smarter, or faster, or need to be hit in specific ways. Bullet sponges are boring and lazy difficulty increases.

[Ralendil]

@SlenderBarracuda

But no, I said make everything pretty powerful,

Everything is powerful. Start a mission at sedition and you will see. They adjusted the enemies at higher diff.

Maybe players think they can jump to the higher diff too fast… If you knew how much time I have spent on heresy… you can find my first thread opened here that show how I suffered when I have jumped to heresy.

Every days I met guys that must:

• or have made a mistake when they picked the difficulty
• or think they are better than they are
• or don’t care that they are just a dead weight for their teammates

[SlenderBarracuda]

@Ralendil

Everything is powerful.

No.

[Ralendil]

what do you think is weak at sedition?

[SlenderBarracuda]

The shilling. It’s insanely weak.

[Manacraft]

@Neppo

I am genuinely confused by the outcry to nerf weapons in games like these.

An underpowered option eliminates only itself. An overpowered option eliminates all other options.

That’s why you nerf. And I’m sorry, but no, you don’t just buff everything else to meet the newly established baseline every time a weapon becomes too powerful. That would constitute an immense workload compared to the alternative, and it in turn destroys game difficulty which then also needs to be rebalanced, and then you’re back where you started. The “no-fun police”, as you call them, needs to nerf things every once in a while, and probably more often than you would like.

The goal of the game is not to make you feel powerful - unless you’re playing on sedition, maybe. The purpose of damnation, the game’s highest difficulty, is to be difficult. Also, if you think Fatshark is too liberal with the nerfhammer, I really don’t know what to tell you. They are notoriously shy about using it, even when the need is obvious.

[SlenderBarracuda]

@Manacraft

I really don’t know what to tell you. They are notoriously shy about using it, even when the need is obvious.

So how long have you worked at Fat Shark?

I’ll tell you how to rework this game.

1. All power weapons and chain weapons, are changed to ON 100% of the time.

Powersword doesn’t need charging. It’s just on.
Chainsword doesn’t need revving, it’s jsut on. (And it never gets stuck, total redesign.)
Thunderhammer? Just ON.

Kantreal XII? Linear AOE.

@Manacraft

An underpowered option eliminates only itself. An overpowered option eliminates all other options.

“But my shovel and dagger!”

Should be removed from the game. Sorry not sorry. Also all the hatchets, unless you give them a chain edge or a power generator. These are only in the game to recycle vt2’s feel, and it’s out of place in a w40k game.

Shotgun becomes mag fed or gets a speed loader, autoguns have animations streamlined, Ogryn shield can be used with ranged weapons, ogryn shotgun can select ammo as needed, not switch from grenade to shot by weapon itself, blessings can be purchased, locks go byebye, and then just churn out the maps.

“Oh no you’ll be op!”

Make the enemies shoot, block, and dodge and we won’t. Their AI was over nerfed. Used to be pretty good at launch, but at launch the ranged was fighting the melee so hard with speed bump animations and toughness regen in ranged being non-existant for Og and limited to ‘charge into wall’ for zealot.

It was a mess. It’s still a mess, but it’s a nerfed and rebalanced and nerfed again mess.

Most would be happy if they just got rid of the locks, but even without the locks we’re missing out on so much potential for really imaginative gameplay hiding behind lazy scripting.

We have the dagger meta over the chainsword and thunderhammer, and the revolvers are outperforming main battle rifles.

“oh no you’ll be op if we make ABC actually good!” or “They are really good at that thing we never ever need to actually do…” are both dead arguments.

[fbolduc]

@Ralendil

By example, I would not be against something done for Thunderhammer. Maybe I am wrong, but I feel that this weapon is bad against horde, not good against common enemies / low hp elites and good for single high hp target. There is really too few situations where this weapon is good.

Agreed.

Thunder Hammer does full damage on first target, then almost nothing to all the others. So enemies fall down, making them harder to hit, and then they get back up at random interval, making it impossible to clump them together.

What should happen instead is that if an enemy is hit by a Thunder Hammer, they go down and don’t get back up. So either reduce the number of targets to 1, or increase damage to all targets.

[Manacraft]

TBH I’m having a hard time finding an actual argument in your post. It reads more like an incoherent rant. There’s one thing I’ll address though:

@SlenderBarracuda

We have the dagger meta over the chainsword and thunderhammer, and the revolvers are outperforming main battle rifles.

You could, in theory, build darktide the way you seem to suggest here. That is, some weapons (mainly the 40k themed ones) are just more powerful than others, and you gain access to more powerful weapons as you level, discarding things like daggers, hand axes and pistols along the way. It’s not necessarily better or worse, it’s just not what was done here.

That said, regardless of whether you approve of that choice or not, Darktide wasn’t deep enough in terms of weapon selection upon release to support that format, and I would argue probably still isn’t. You’d need a vastly expanded arsenal of weapons to choose from for replayability to not become an issue. There’s nothing wrong with wishing for that of course, but at the pace Fatshark works, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

[SlenderBarracuda]

@Manacraft

There’s nothing wrong with wishing for that of course, but at the pace Fatshark works, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Which is why Darktide is a failed game.

Low player numbers, people come in, like it at first, get frustrated, come here to complain, and finally figure out Fatshark isn’t able to handle w40k, and then they leave. Usually after being added to the crafting memorial.

Hell, half the people here haven’t played the game in six months, will play for a week since there’s new content, and will be gone again after.

Sure, Darktide soldiers on and will for another decade with low numbers and shills running interference on the forums to try to divert every valid complaint, but it’ll still be a shell of what the hopes for it were.

And it might even turn a small profit from cosmetics bought by the most loyal few and from being included in ‘subscription services’ where a player’s choice to buy the game isn’t actually a factor.