Does anyone here remember when the highest difficulty was T5 and it appeared that the player community was more neatly stratified? Pre-class overhaul, I remember people seemed to stay in the difficulties they were best at. I felt T5 was more unified skill wise when compared to current Havoc 25-40. The Auric update seemed kind of like that as well. It might just be me though haha.
back then a lot unsatisfied players jumped ship and the remaining “core” shared a common sentiment as to not be perceived as “dead weight”
for quite some time, after starting at beta, i stuck to malice until i was comfortable with my ability to control the character and learn the pattern of certain enemies.
i then took on pushing dogs/poxbursters, dodging nets and overheads etc etc
this took time but fast forward to today and i carry HISTG and auric maelstroms.
the difference is, i daily seek to optimize my performance and compare to week old, month old, year old replays to see faults and evolution.
if i should take a guess i’d say less then 5% of the playerbase is as motivated.
personally i started loving the game from the very start and when i love a game, i live it.
but equally fast forward to today, lots of people just hung around and eventually accumulated the hours but never the skill or experience.
out of sheer timesink they deem themselves overdue for the “big league” even if they’re out of it by leaps and bounds.
add havoc having the entry level of finishing an auric mael or at least auric damnation, you ring the dinner bell for less sophisticated participants so to speak.
the irony on top being some havoc constallations actually easier than the odd HISTG or auric mael, cause they stay under each others bubble and book skirt, whereas the very same people run along in HISTG dying like always 
Yep. Right now the new player (especially console) meta is to get their first class to level 30, get baby’s first orange gun (optional) and then jump to T5 Auric HISTG, because their ego does not allow them to play anything than the “hardest” difficulty.
The fact that shield heavies and hammer heavies dont work like youd think they would 
It’s not about the Russians. You were just a weak link in the team.
Darktide desperately needs severe gatekeeping. Let accounts complete x amount of missions on Heresy before allowing Damnation. Same for the jump to Auric and then to Havoc.
Anyway, relevant experience. Some Zealot was running fastest and topping up 2% ammo on every box while rest of us started running low.
Made a comment in the chat. I had a ammo crate on me but was afraid to drop it. I see an ammo bag. I’m okay, but a Vet was running real low. The other player below 50% as well. I ping it. The Zealot comes running in and picks up the ammo bag to get two bullets.
I initiate vote kick. And the others had seen it happening so the Zealot was booted. Near end if the mission. Felt so good.
I dropped the crate then and there. One of the other players also has one and planted it right during end event. We all dumped ammo like in 'nam and followed proper crate etiquette. Sometimes there really are happy endings.
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/
Worst experience is when your three teammates leave you behind to fight the horde alone. They run ahead without looting any crates. Then they each get killed in a different corner of the map at around the same time and leave you to play with bots.
In that same thread someone says this:
I had to explain to someone how blessings and modification works so there’s definitely knowledge gaps the game doesn’t go into detail explaining.
And that actually mirrors what I had to do. They thought they were getting ALL the blessings they were unlocking but were confused because they felt like some of them just werent applying at all.
This wasnt from some new gamer. This is from a guy who regularly aces games 100% within weeks of buying and moves on to the next, an old-school gamer, smarter than me, faster than me, literal veteran of games, chews them up and moves on (too fast for my liking actually) picks up games faster than me and Im no slouch! He has played TT WH40K, WHF, D&D, Pathfinder, Cyberpunk, Vampyre the Masquerade, is a legendary GM and thats only what I know of his experience personally. I want to get it across that the dude is a fkin beast.
I suspect not wanting to seem ignorant was why he didnt ask straight away, but I think he got so frustrated with why it wasnt working that he mentioned how he felt the blessings werent always applying, so I told him these are just unlocks to put on your weapon.
One might think “how could one possibly mistake this when the blessings even go on the weapon?” but consider… go on a grey or green weapon? It doesnt explain and doesnt show. You dont see a weapon with blessings on it for a while.
Starting a new game on the PSN showed me very clearly that the new player experience is dog 
. Nothing is explained. It doesnt tell you how health works, how stamina or dodging works (it skims over it) that there are push attacks that have headshots, it doesnt warn you exactly how much you are gonna get stabbed in the bum, the importance of marking, just how important staying in proximity to youre team is or that the DT GM will spawn stuff, it doesnt explain sound ques (arguably the MOST important aspect of the game for staying alive), that hits bypass toughness the less toughness you have or that backstabs can destroy you, to top it all off it starts you with a really bad anti-horde weapon.
There are many things I forget that it doesnt explain that I have either learned from thousands of hours of previous tide games or from being on these forums which remember, most people who play DT are NOT on the forums.
People dont really pay attention to tutorials, they want to get to killing with their friends and once they DO have some experience in DT 100 hours later, they have likely forgotten all about the few scraps of info the tutorial does give.
Lack of Information.
THIS is the worst experience in DT, then people wonder why they play with clueless players. Doesnt help that people have no patience with new players or that players, new and old, hate being criticised.
This is why DT is and will always be pretty niche and turns new players away. They would rather go play HD2 or SM2, which clearly explains its mechanics (of which there are far less or are similar to other games already)
sigh
Sorry Im tired, lack of sleep leads to building walls 
Totally fair re: lack of info, but I don’t think it’s lack of patience with new player necessarily, it’s lack of patience with new player who cut the line and skip the natural progression that’s the problem and a theme in this thread.
To quote:
is at the hearts of the issues. I would have been terribly embarrassed and ashamed to jump straight into damnation before I was ready, ofc i would never have done so, and this is after thousands of hours in VT. You can button mash and facetank your way just fine up to and including regular damnation, beyond that you’re going to get punished for your simplistic approach and it should be obvious that you are when you fall flat on your face every other minute.
The lower diffs exist for a reason, people should use them. You can opt-out of the more “advanced” mechanics at these lower diffs if you choose to do so, it’s expected and there’s zero shame in it.
It should be noted that pre #13 the game was not only balanced differently, there was only PC.
Just like most things on Reddit that’s completely made up for upvotes.
If you have a friend, you don’t refer to them as if you don’t know anything about them.
I am over 40 years old, been avidly playing video games since I was 8. I played Vermintide 1 and 2 extensively. I only bought Darktide after Unlocked and Loaded.
When I was levelling up my weapon mastery I honestly thought the blessings were the reward for mastering your weapon of choice until I realized none of those things seemed to have an impact.
It’s very unintuitive.
personal pride and ego would have struck me down on the spot jumping in there being a liability rather than a pillar of success.
didnt have true level mod then but must have well been in my 250-300 to make the jump from malice to damnation (skipped heresy basically), later on HISTG and auric maelstrom as kinda of a reward came “easy” due to the dilligence put into the patterns, audio cues, enemy attributes, map knowledge etc.
learn to walk before starting to run
ironic bonus part:
the anticipation to finally being “damnation worthy” and “so much content” undiscovered, was actually feeling better than hearding 2 clueless dudes through smelter complex while donning the 100yard stare of having seen every human depravity and sub 0 iq values so often its not even worth getting angry over.
I feel like a player’s melee proficiency is what determines their skill more so than their True Level.
Level 100+ players who are bad at melee will still go down a lot on Damnation+. You need to use those blocks, counterattacks, dodges, pushes, slides in a rhythmic dance. You need to pay attention to what the enemies are doing while being quick on your feet. Once you have that mastered, Damnation+ is a breeze.
well, basically that the amount of time/levels i invested to make sure i was on top of my game when stepping up to damnation.
900 videos later :“it worked” 
First of all, I apologise, idkw but sometimes I just have to build walls of text.
So I think this is a problem, because what IS the natural progression?
Starting a new game on PSN showed me that malice open up really quite early, and Heresy is available somewhere between level 10 or 15, which is waaaay before a new player has the weapons and skill points to handle it, simply with a lack of health, damage and other tools further down the skill tree. Also consider this is the first character, so no levelled weapons or curios, no currency, no sour milk tokens.
Be Me, a several thousand hour VT player and 900 hour DT player. I was having issues at lvl 10 on Malice. I know Im not incredible or anything but I found that being paired with bad teammates was essentially a lost game. I cant solo the Tide games. I can hold a bad team together but thats immesurably more complex and difficult without any tools at lvl 5-10.
1 terribad curio, green weapons at power 60-100, no resources to upgrade them, no mastery, no blessings, no perks. The event was actually a karking godsend, but dealing with droves of ogryns on malice required I had a team that didnt completely suck, so half the games were a total write off.
Im gonna post this video of me playing a Malice Maelstrom again because I was just getting in to some good gear by this point and was able to actually hold a bad team together. The guys on the team werent exactly terrible, but were consistantly going down. I feel like its safe for me to say I held this team together, especially in the last 10 mins iirc.
I could NOT have done this without them, they were essential, Im not true-solo worthy yet, if ever. But my point in posting this is, if I didnt have some weapons that I KNEW I liked from 900 hours on PC, a vast Tide game knowledge and my freshly aquired yellow health pump, I would absolutely have failed hard too.
So now consider this from a new players experience, which I would argue with the best of intentions, that most vets in this forum simply cannot do, being too deep in knowledge and understanding of the games mechanics to have any real perspective on a fresh experience. You guys and gals are generally too good! 
100,000% !!
One bit of advice I kept drumming in to my friends heads was:
Get a weapon you like AND that can deal with hordes e.g. has easy to access wide sweeps, learn to dodge and listen for the sound (“what sound?” they would say), stop trying to shoot everything, because thataway lies pain.
Melee seperates the empras faithful from the heretic pondscum!
Can’t argue with that, for a first character the level gating is too low, I always thought 20 for heresy and 30 for damnation, again for firsts chars in pubs. People always downplay the contribution gear and talents have, especially to newer players.
I always said there should be more gatekeeping, not less, and people tore mew a new one. That mindset has shifted over the last year, but the damage was done and you can see the justified gripes in this thread.
People in this game seem particularly terrible at self-policing, it’s a curious thing.
Level 1 to 30. That is like 2-3hrs a day for 4-5 days at most. So really one week. This was 2 years ago when at most I would stick to T4. Then touch T5 at level 30 only.
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No native scoreboard. So impossible for them to do any self reflection and self feedback.
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Notice how that autogun Vet always sits in the back thinking they’re good and expect you to do all the tanking so they can play duck shoot. I invite anyone to let them make first contact during missions.
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Play defensively because they’ll be the ones using heals whilst your health is all you got until reaching a full 4 charge medstation which is rare. Top up anyway because they’ll use your charge to top up as well.
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They’ll run away from crushers or try to kite them onto you. That’s why you run a fast build like dash zealot, stack stamina curios to outpace and leave them to it. The hostage rescue makes death so forgiving in this game. Maybe if that wasn’t the case people would simply stick to lower difficulty than relying on a system where death isn’t really death. It invites risk knowing you will be the one to pull them up on next mission segment. Sounds like I am asking for hardcore mode - death is death…
I know it sounds selfish to play defensively this way. There is only so much courtesy you can give game after game and feel it is not reciprocated. You’re giving up your own enjoyment to accommodate others, once a while OK but frequent makes you start to feel indifferent.
Crossplay should be a toggle for starters. All FS achieved by forcing it is making people re-match make wasting time.
I saw a thread about wanting escort mission - Already feels that way.
I admit idk what the solution is.
Maybe preventing people from increasing the difficulty is a good solution?
Maybe there should be a dialog bos that pops up before you are lvl 30 on your first character saying “you are not appropriately leveled or geared for this difficulty, its likely you would be a detriment to your team”?
Maybe there should be a training level or test you are required to pass or at the very least try at heresy before being allowed to select it?
Maybe it doesnt matter and they should concentrate on informing people about the mechanics that are literally required to survive on any difficulty?
idk.
While I agree that its unfair PC players cannot opt out of crossplay, what does this have to do with crossplay? Why are people forced to re-matchmake? I dont understand.
I think sticking with my team is the best option. Im not really ok with running off because Im annoyed at sub-par teammates. Its my job, imo, as an experienced player to help them. I joined a pub after all. Most games with sub-par teammates are with people that are really trying despite lack of knowledge. I think lack of information is the biggest problem in DT.