Wounds, Toughness and Health - game needs to communicate how these work better

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

I can’t help but feel that Darktide has completely failed at communicating to the average player, how the defensive stats work.

Been doing regular Damnation missions a lot lately, and it’s concerning the amount of times I encounter players who run with 5 (!) wounds, and they’re not a wanna-be wound zealot. Seen it with veterans and psykers, and Ogryns, who unsurprisingly struggle hard to keep their HP and toughness up the moment anything happens.

Why? Because the lack of information makes them think that wound curios make their HP bar bigger, or some other reason - who knows. If I ask, I usually don’t get a good answer.
Not to mention the amount of people who doesn’t understand the importance of having sufficient toughness, so you don’t constantly take chip damage.

It’s not even “freshly 30” players who make this blunder. Thanks to me finally using the mod that lets me see “true levels”, I noticed that several of these 5 wound ogryns have +100 levels beyond the standard 30. So clearly they have lots of game time & experience, yet run around with all these extra wounds for no good reason. If not for the inherently beefy HP pool and decent toughness that ogryns have, they’d be a complete liability on these difficulties.

beefy ogryns

I don’t know what a good solution would be, but maybe when you’re looking at your Curio there could be a blurb somewhere empty that says a concise and clear informative sentence about what you get from using that particular curio - be it Health, Toughness, Wound or even Stamina.

2

depends on what you consider “a lot”

lvl 100, lets say 100-120 matches, give or take, 120x30min av. 60 hours in real combat(not counting mourningstar or menu)

none, for most are in for an easy carry and as long as the other dudes do a good enough job, there’s no need for them to put in any effort, thought or work.

more likely its a failsafe, not only do they know they’ll die often, the enter a team fully knowing they will.

health, toughness, wounds(yuck) aint hard to figure out IF you got a healthy mindest striving to learn the ropes and improve.

come malice anyone with half a thought about it would have ditched wounds by then.
if not, they’re not salvageable no matter the library of information.

you can offer intel, sure, but sadly you cant force the lazy “its just a game bro” folk to use that info to better themselves.

hit their breaking point at malice or stick their noses where they’re outmatched.

those that stick around for 300hrs+ usually elevate themselves out of that pool, but “average” fires up one or two matches after work to unwind.

ironically winding up their mates with their underperformance in the process :rofl:

ps: having a build that regenerates toughness in almost 3 swings, i’m going for health on my ogryn to have as much of the non-replenish-able(not by my own actions if you count out stims,stations and packs) currency at my disposal at any given time.

3

I’m sorry, but i do not think you understand how the game works as much as you think you do.

You can play with “wrong” curios even on damnation auric all you like, and still play well or at the very least pull your weight.

Reason being: In-the-moment decision making, reflexes, aim and positioning is much more important than stats gained from items like curios.

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4

Among them are also hardcore players that pickup 3 curios like below:

+ 1 wound

8-10% dockets
8-10% exp
20% curio reward.

… and grey equipment.

In some cases it could be lack of info, but some are just there for Slaanesh worship.

Bad
Darktide
Slap
Me (or My Cheeks)

Weirdos I tell ya…

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image1080×1350 142 KB

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5

Corrrrrrection!

Everyone one knows the real hardcore players run full stamina curios.

6

Yeah, I think these players run more wounds because that lets them get dragged back on their feet more times. Their thinking is “how many times can someone else pick me up” and it is not “how can I minimize the chance of going down in the first place.”

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7

There are not very intuituve mechanics in the game. However if they can’t find in a few hours of gameplay what wounds do and make a binary conclusion “i’m being knocked every 5 meters - need to boost base stats” and “being knocked means -2 players, cause someone will need to revive” they are ogryns irl. Like, there is no any hidden knowledge or complex math in that.

They are probably don’t even read ingame tooltips. Such players should just be gated from the higher difficulty, you can’t heal the stupidity.

Plus what @Index said, it’s just an arrogant laziness. They care enough to jump on the higher difficulties and gather juicy rewards, but don’t care at all to put some effort.

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8

I have over 200 hours in the game and I still don’t know what wounds or coherency are. Same thing for finesse and other weapon stats. The game is very lacking of explanations. They could at least add popup windows to explain what is what while hovering our mouse/joystick on the words.

9

You’re not wrong, for almost all stats and mechanics across the board there’s just not much for players to go on. There’s a lot out there, and very little to inform a player what’s going on. Wounds vs HP? Toughness vs Toughness Repleneshment? +Power vs +Strength? Rending vs Brittleness? Etc ad nauseum.

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10

I always thought that people(besides zealot) who ran Wound curios are basicly screaming:
“I WILL DIE A LOT KEEP AN EYE ON ME” - and I respect that they admit that.

No info dump would make a difference - only experience

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11

Feel this topic has been very revealing on several aspects.

Darktide needs to be less obfuscating, if players need to leave the game and access third-party websites or discord servers to able to learn what talents or blessings actually do, the game has failed on a fundamental level. I know there’s even mods that try to fix this lack of information.

Also for those that it concerns, please leave your elitism out of this, already by posting on this forum you are in a very small minority of players who actively seek out information.

12

I am not 100% certain, but quite certain that the tutorial teaches about toughness, hp, wounds and stamina.

Will confirm later.

Once again, a sign that there should be mandatory training missions, before players are allowed to queue for certain difficulties.

People tend to turn their brains off during tutorials at the start of the game, because they are „too smart for that“ and because they want to play their new game.

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13

It does teach the surface level things. So you can infer that toughness protects your health, if you go down you get 1 corruption point, that can be healed with a medic station.

But it doesn’t go into any detail how well your toughness will handle being hit in melee by enemies stronger than poxwalkers, or being shot by a sniper.
Mechanics like bleedthrough on toughness are really obtuse.

I don’t think it’s much to ask, that we try to increase the competency level of the average player by having some simple information available when interacting with curios and such.