tbh it’s easier to check 6 boxes than to pick the essential and synergic skills on a tree. most players were rather inexperienced and the power level was overall lower.
also, i had not played vermintide before, so i was not familiar with fatshark’s combat system, and although i was an fps veteran, that didn’t translate so well into darktide.
strafing for example is continuous in classic fps, but in darktide it’s a limited number of discrete dodges, and this didn’t get into my head so easily. i held down strafe, ran out of dodges, got bonked or trapped despite strafing (or attempting to do so, actually) and wondered what went wrong.
running in arena shooters works backwards at the same speed as forward, but in darktide moving backwards is only at walking speed, and this gave me much headache when attempting to dodge overheads as i would with the movement i was used to.
blocking and stamina? that was something new to me. spamming light attacks and not dodging and blocking was not as effective as i thought.
i created my 4 characters the day i installed the beta, not knowing anything about them and how they play (and they stayed basically the same since). first to get to 30 was ogryn, who is rather forgiving. next one was psyker, i walked into the first map of refinery and got my teeth kicked in by 4 bucketheads. could barely brainburst anything before some vet shot it, died at a sneeze, blew myself up plenty, so i played only gunker until level 16, and it took me a long time to be useful in any way with that class.
and there are so many things an experienced player sees right away in a game that are not as obvious to someone with less play time. drop down? do it with your team. hear a net gun winding up? don’t wait, dodge perpendicularly to your moving direction. hear the whistle of an incoming bomb? start running already. tox bomber? hunt him down right away, before he makes everyone’s life miserable. teammate down in a bad position? better move on with 3 people and pick him up later (or he leaves and nothing of value is lost). and you don’t have to wait in front of an elevator just because you enter it later. and so on.
but however, i didn’t want to look like a fool by jumping straight into damnation. the maps were long, confusingly named, and looked often similar (there are the copied / joined sections after all). the jump from malice to heresy seemed a bit daring, and damnation was for the best i guess. i remember how we got our butts kicked on the scaffolding at the start of silo cluster and thought the solution was to have a shield ogryn to protect us from the shooties below (there were no books, shouts and warp shields back then)
contrast that with these new players who go straight after their inquisitorial “graduation” at level 30 to maelstrom and then to havoc, often even with incomplete gear, like one gentleman in december carrying 2 blue curios and one laspistol with tier 1 blessings and random perks.
and reddit, being the fountain of wisdom we love, had this gem:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkTide/comments/1hvufd5/a_friend_just_got_the_game_and_i_asked_them_what/