You're a FS dev handling the enemies - What do you change?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
1

But let’s make it a tad complex; here is the rule:

The suits up top are greedy and refuse to give you the resources to make entirely new attack animations, visuals, sounds, etc. You have to make do with what already exists in the game, like the animations (their speed, the delay between each animation, etc.), statistics (speed, health, damage, armor value, damage modifiers, etc.), AI behavior, spawn rates, that sort of thing.

Everything that already exists on the heretics you can use and alter to your liking. How do you utilize what you can work with to change Darktide’s enemies for the better?

Just a fun little exercise I thought of.

2

place of employment at that point to be honest, if you put it that way it sounds like the company is about to go under lol

3

Change the plasma gunner. Their AI is basically just a shotgunner c/p, I would add something like sniper AI where they have a chance to run away and reposition to keep shooting if you get in their grill. I’d also reduce their damage falloff and slightly increase their spawn frequency. Plasma gunner patrol? idk maybe that’s too much.

4

hire
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to renegotiate “conditions”

resources be flowin’ again :man_shrugging:

aint that deep man :joy:

5

I think everything is mostly fine, beyond vanguards needing to be considered elites.

Edit: allow arbitor’s dog to stay glued to bosses and chew on them. Allow serrated maw to keep proccing while chewing!

6

Because I really have nothing better to do atm:

Carapace - now also stops explosion/flame cleave

Find a way to stop enemies from stacking on top of each other

Certain attacks now have a cooldown (i.e. ragers will not spam their combo indefinitely, Crushers/Maulers will not spam overheads)

Bosses - shrink collosion box so weapons with shorter reach have an easier time fighting

Crushers - arms changed to Unyielding, horizontal hammer swing will knock enemies and players back

Bulwark - Plasma/explosions/flame no longer cleave through shield. If hit by plasma/flame Bulwark stops and guards for several seconds. Hitting the shield for prolonged period will “stance break” the Bulwark

Reaper - fix how they can fire sideways

Dreg Ragers - increased movement speed, can only do their combo for a certain amount of time after which their attacks slow down and they become easily staggerable

Scab Ragers - base armor changed to Carapace, slow down overall combo speed

Vanguard - head DR removed, 50% dot/explosion DR added

Trapper - constant cackling, need bigger than pixel LoS to fire, will keep circling to find valid shot

Bombers - shortened max distance at which they can throw, gas cloud timer lowered, can ping thru gas cloud, use different fire/gas sfx for more clarity

Mutants - will throw players away from team and into the closest enemy density

Poxbursters - looking at them will cause it to teleport to random teammate and explode

Dreg Gunner - decrease accuracy, increase fire rate, will keep spraying at player’s last seen location, will reload after X seconds of firing

Scab Gunner - change targets more often, fires repeated accurate volleys

7

Vanguards:

  • Both Vanguards should have 50% DoT DR while their shield is active
  • Both Vanguards should be 10% bigger (ideally to match max human reject height)
  • Dreg Vanguards should move 10% Faster
  • Scab Vanguards should take 20% more backstab and flanking damage with the exception to the head
  • Vanguard shields should be destroyed by Crusher and Thunderhammer explosion radius (so not only the direct charged hit)
8

Their base armor already is Carapace, btw (unless you meant to turn their Flak head into Carapace so they are fully covered in it).

9

I’ll bite. This is basically all old ideas I had from like 2 years ago but why not do a little wish listing.

Monster:

  1. Sprayer Ogryn
    give it a two hit melee combo on its grabbler hand. Just repurpose the 3 hit combo from plogryn but without the stretchy overhead finger bit. Give it a goop spray that works like burgle but there’s no EAT PLAYER option so it just makes the floor annoying to walk around. Make its usage of this have extra range but fire much less often. Give it the charge. Give it the stomp. Yipee new enemy. Uninspired but something to fill out the roster.

Specials:
Add a new breed to the game called Rares or something. They take up 4 specialist spawns and have a very low spawn rate. Effectively the same replacement rate as a Weakened Monstrosity.

  1. PoxBoomer
    Take the plogryn model. Downsize it substantially. Replace its head with a poxwalker head and its funny arm with a more normal arm. Give it poxwalker animations or poxburster animation. Give it basic melee attacks. If shot it explodes in a shower of gore that summons a horde if any allied player is hit. Melee attacks do not cause this effect.
    (l4D boomer but no vomit attack)

  2. Ritual of 3
    Spawn 3 cultists surrounding a 4th (central figure). Same general rules and models as Heinous Rituals but can happen randomly in any mission with low frequency. If they finish the ritual a chaos spawn or beast of nurgle is spawned (full health).

Trashmobs:
4. Sergeants. Spawn as part of shooter/gunner patrols. Have a chainsword and laspistol w/ slower versions of Rinda attacks. Have OG Vanguard healthpools and headshot resistance. Can throw a frag at you if you try to take cover behind terrain. Easy to repurpose scab/dreg shooter/gunner/shotgunner models with a bit of different color patterns or whatever on these.

Elites:

  1. Ogryn Berzerkers: re-use ogryn models and cosmetics and Packmaster moveset to set up a fast moving melee elite. Entirely unyielding, odd bits of flak/carapace like Reapers. Re–use berzerker stuff.

That’s basically all I have.

10

Huh, when did this get changed? I could’ve sworn they still used Flak for DoT calcs.

Edit: just tested, they still have Flak base as dots use that to determine damage.

11

I meant it as their torso is Carapace and the head is Flak. And, to clarify, you’re suggesting to make everything on them Carapace?

12

Ragers dual wielding shields

Ok I should provide a non-joke answer. Though I maintain ragers with shields would be a funny april fools thing.

I’d like to see non-carapace armour types become more relevant, I dislike how the solve to powercreep thus far has been to just slap more carapace and hp into the game. DoTs need rebalancing as that’s one of the major pain points causing this (let’s be real, it’s mostly down to soulblaze at the minute though chem toxin was a massive problem too). Infinite cleave also needs fixing and vanguard shields haven’t solved this problem at all. Bosses/Monstrosities are in sore need of one-shot protection, it’s very neuron activating to do a juicy one hit but it’s also a bit silly watching bosses be a slight speedbump instead of an actual encounter.

Also more variety in horde compositions! This would be a flavour boost generally.

13

Scab ragers base armor type, used to determine DoT ADMs, is flak. Their “center mass hit zone,” used for explosion and arc ADMs, is carapace. As is their torso.

15

Right, thanks for the clarification.

16

Easy answer:

  1. Remove Tox Bomber from all difficulties except Havoc.
  2. Change the AI director to only spawn enemies in the front of the party, never in the back.
  3. Change the AI director to assign a much higher threat level to speedrunners so they get swarmed and die.
17

Changes:
Both bombers can only throw at half current max range with no line of sight.

Carapace armour is breakable (visually and mechanically)

Crusher has a non-carapace weakspot.

Tox bomber gas cloud radius is halved.

Additions:
Dreg Mauler that two-hands a slab shield.

Dreg special that can summon by going through a ritual and sacrificing itself to summon a group of nurglings, a plague bearer or, if boss spawn conditions are met, a herald.

18

Mutants - can’t path through bosses while charging

Bombers - remove stun on grenade direct impact and increase impact damage slightly

new melee elite - rare enemy that has a weapon that puts the same toughness regen debuff as plasma gunner

19

Pushing Vanguards once or twice (depending on weapon stagger strength) would actually open them up instead of doing nothing at all.

20

I’d add to this that boss animations should be faster.

The average darktide player would be demolished by the VT2 rat ogre/chaos spawn. We need that back.

21

First, I would add:

  • Dreg Maulers, infested armor type big burly elites with large swords that are squishier than scab maulers but much more aggressive with longer reach
  • Ogryn Ragers, Unyielding ogryn that dual wield crude hand axes and look like a Packmaster minus the armor. They would be extremely aggressive with high stagger resistance and spawn in packs of 3-4 at a time. They deal bonus stamina damage to blocks, but also have generous attack timings that are relatively easy to dodge, even with negative dodges.
  • Scab Commander, flak armored elite using the Radio Operator model that would spawn relatively rarely and never more than one in any given pack. He has a gun that works similarly to the plasma gunners, in terms of charge up and shooting, and does very little damage. But if his target doesn’t avoid the shot, they get 1 stack of the Houndmaster’s debuff that hinders stamina and dodge regen, and at the same time it taunts every enemy in the general vicinity to fixate on the player who got shot, forcing the team to react to protect them and/or the shot player to have to play like a god for the next ~10s or so.

After that, I wouldn’t really change anything else about any individual enemy. I think they’re all in about the right spot.

But then I’d go into the spawn system and get to work. Main thing I’d do is go in and dramatically lower the pace and volume of spawns, to bring the amount of stuff going on at any given time significantly lower, with fewer enemies spawning and some amount of additional minimum time between the various varieties of spawns. Bring everything down to a level where the engine is teetering on the brink of collapse and things, especially audio cues, function as they are supposed to reliably.

And then I’d go into the weapons and talents available to players with a hacksaw and just have fun. I would nerf most sources of player power significantly. Biggest thing would be to delete infinite cleave from everything that isn’t a non-regenerative blitz, spend a year rebalancing abilities and talent synergies on several levels, and just generally toning down player power to match the lowered tempo of the game.

Then I’d playtest the hell out of it and probably spend some time iterating and refining enemy behaviors and stats to find new and interesting ways to challenge players that don’t lean on ramping density and spawn volume.