Why Nerf weapons? It removes the fun

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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to throw in my 2 cents on balancing as someone who’s done it for a few years now as an unpaid amateur:

Nerfs are just as necessary as buffs are for a game to be balanced, which is important (regardless of genre) because it’s how gameplay stays interesting and engaging. If we literally only ever buff things then the game can’t keep up and thus the game becomes either boring or broken (Darktide’s stability is already pushing its limit as is in the highest difficulties) or the game has to adopt cheap and likely unfun mechanics to keep challenging the player.

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We’ve all see it a million times. Players figure out what works, devs break it. Frequently to the point that the thing in question isn’t even fit for purpose anymore.

Because they can just go into the code and take the offending thing and make it bad, don’t have to think, don’t have to make a good game, don’t have to take the things that don’t work out and admit they don’t really have that much in their game, don’t have to do anything but break the good thing.

And it’s so lazy.

And what’s worse are the people screaming "My frying pan can’t keep up with his beltfed machine gun! Devs please nerf beltfed machine gun so frying pan is equal.’

Lazy. If you can’t buff the frying pan, take it out and leave the good.

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Which weapons are these 85%?

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This happens rarely. Usually the things still work, but players who insist on only playing OP setups claim they’re worthless. You also still have many other choices.

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Last time I was really active, the bolter was almost dead, so was the flamer. Thunderhammer was only used by a few for boss hunting, Power maul was crap, Power sword had only just reclaimed it’s place, chain weapons except evis were pretty bad.

Almost all ranged was overshadowed by the columnus auto, revolver, and plasma. Kantreals except the lightest were dead, so were recons except on low levels. Headhunter was liked by a few but not many, and only the big hitter. Turtolsky starting to make enroads but not many… Force sword was on it’s way out, though I still rather like it.

List not complete, nor will I say an expert can’t work with anything, because they can, just usually at lower performance.

Though if you want to go into a lot of detail, most of the time the problems weren’t damage numbers, they were things like swap time, movement speed, strike pattern, rate of fire, blessing hunting, and so on.

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Nah, it’s the people who wanted to use something so bad it shouldn’t have been in the game claiming whatever was nerfed is ‘now fine’ as it disappears into the memory hole.

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  • The bolter is not dead - swap animation can be cancelled with throwing knives, or you can use a combat ability(shout, infiltrate) to create space in dangerous situations for swap as a vet.
  • The Crucis thammer needs some work but Ironhelm is decent.
  • A power maul was buffed in the latest update.
  • Power swords are good, their only drawbacks is mobility and “Power Cycler IV” farm.
  • All chain weapons are good right now - sawing animation can be cancelled now.
  • Columnus, revolver and plasma are OP but everything else is also viable.
  • Headhunters, except Mk IX, are good on crit-focused builds.
  • Turtolsky swords are good, they only struggle against crushers but you can use special+block cancel to kill them fast enough.
  • Force swords are good, Obscurus was buffed in the latest update.

Edit: I agree that infantry lasguns are weak in comparison to autoguns. Recon lasguns were buffed in the latest update too.

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Yeah I’ve been away. The many fail and locks and grind got to me. Ended up another causalty of darktide.

One of the biggest problems when I left was relative movement speed. I’ll take a look at power maul when I get back in, but it’s hard to imagine it isn’t still hot garbage.

When you would hit the button, you would slow from a walk to a literal crawl, so slow that you’d lose your spot, the guy you wanted to hit was killed by your team, and by the time you got to the next guy, charge had worn off. It was also so slow in movement as to be ridiculous. You had to spec entirely into stamina just to keep up.

Terrible design, nerfed into the ground before it was launched. (Now I’m talking about the Ogryn maul, not the zealot crusher, just to be sure we’re on same page.)

It might have been the worst overall weapon in the game, and it should, being a super high tech magic future weapon, have been one of the best. Ogryn knife out competed it in pretty much every respect, Damage, movement, dodge, even attack pattern.

You know something is wrong when the humble knife is outcompeting super future tech lore wise purpose designed to be amazing at melee at a (theoretically) high production cost.

And you had largely the same problem as psyker. If you went as Psyker, AND your brought your lore weapons, say a staff and a force sword, you’d be way, way in the back, and forget checking side paths for plasteel, because your lore weapons needed to be nerfed somehow, and the how was to slow you down.

Then, and this really bugged me, still salty about it… in beta, the psyker had the best ult. It was a push that would knock down the whole horde, which was cool, fun, and fine considering what the vet had with grenades.

But by launch, it was nerfed hard. Then it was nerfed again… and then they come out with the update… and it’s back in the game except it’s not psyker anymore. It’s vet’s shout!

It was “?too strong?” so they nerfed and nerfed and nerfed it, only to give it back as strong or stronger to another character.

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It’s to the point where i just leave the match and block good plasma users. You can hardly even play the game with a really good plasma user.

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Some weapons may need better mobility though high mobility is a huge problem. Just look at knives - the fact that you can run away from enemies with them and infinitely kite to solo clutch is not good.

Psyker’s Venting Shriek is still powerful AoE stagger + damage with Creeping Flames. And it’s only 30 seconds cooldown. But if you want to be fast - Scrier’s Gaze + Disrupt Destiny give a giant boost to movement speed.

Even with low movement speed you can easily check spots for plasteel. I usually collect the most plasteel in the team even as an ogryn with low mobility.

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It’s not what it used to be and it’s not what it should be. There’s really no excuse for the nerf. IT was really strong in beta, but not any stronger then vet’s voice later on. The fact vet’s voice is in the game now is plenty of proof it was fine.

And yet, it was nerfed to the point it can’t knock down a pox walker. For awhile (did they fix this?) Psykers literally couldn’t complete the ‘push guys off a ledge’ penance because of how little push it had.

Here’s a video from closed beta cut to the moment the ult is used. It would have done more if they backed up, but they get most of the right hand side. If it links bad go to 2:21 (EDIT, there’s another at 9:16)

And here is a topic I made last December when I gave the game a try again and compared the two in a video.

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Venting Shriek push force is based on peril - the higher peril the stronger a push


And now Venting Shriek is even more powerful as you can kill enemies with soulblaze stacks besides staggering them.

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I mean I don’t mind if that’s what most ppl feel. I don’t use those and I don’t care much. I just feel bad for people who using them as they are not the best clutch setup. They are powerful but only if the difficulty does not throw too much stuff at them. In the hardest content (and possibly future content), if players don’t know how to kite and reposition (always all-in players), they’re gonna die no matter the setup.

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Sounds like they finally fixed it. GOOD. But the place it was in for a long, long time has proven they aren’t mature enough to be trusted with easy access to nerfs.

And the fact they put it back proves it didn’t need nerfing in the first place.

(Maybe the personnel has changed? That’s a pleasant thought.)

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How is it - why nerf? We have serious e-sports here.
Jokes aside, most likely their game designers work according to guidelines for mobile game developers. Their vision is not for us to have fun, but to create (rather sloppily) problems for players to fight against.
This is a disastrous approach and should be reconsidered. To begin with, LISTEN, finally, to your testers.

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You seem to overestimate this mythical “community” here. It’s a factor, but Fatshark has other data points gathered from our games.

Coming back to the “why nerf weapons?”, its good for gameplay variety when not everyone runs the same tired few “meta” builds and when the game posses a certain level of challenge, at least at higher difficulty settings. Some weapons are clearly overtuned, luckily P13 made 99% of weapons servicable.

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The fun part is that the most op weapons/blessings (Uncanny Strike for instance) remain untouched.
Meanwhile the new bolt pistol feels like a BB/airsoft gun when it comes to damage and the double barreld shotgun shoots confetti when enemies are more than 1m away…

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