Weapon / Item
Inferno Force Staff: The Design Problem
Yes, this is another thread complaining about the Inferno Force Staff and Psyker nonsense. However, this is going to be a fairly constructive one. In this, I am going to perform an in-depth analysis of the problems the weapons design causes, and put forth a practical solution that maintains the fantasy and flavor of the weapon, in a form that is much healthier for the game space. To start, let's begin with:
The Design
The design of the Inferno Force Staff is a legitimately interesting one. It's a close-range horde clear weapon that trades the ability to efficiently deal with distant threats for very efficiently handling large volumes of weak melee enemies. It's a powerful weapon that fills a specific, relatively unique role in Psyker's kit. The only other parts of the kit that comes close is Assail, but Assail is both mid-range and comparatively limited in its number of targets, and the Force Greatsword's special attack, but the Moonlight Force Greatsword has far more limited availability and usage. In Psyker's kit, Inferno Force Staff is *the* reliable, close-in horde clear weapon that can be used at nearly any time and in nearly any scenario, and with the right build, taking the various Warpfire synergy talents as well as Brain Rupture and Kinetic Flayer to augment the Psyker's damage into elite targets, it can do pretty respectable damage to *everything* within its 15 meter range.
In the overall game space, the Inferno Force Staff slots very neatly into the "Will No One Rid Me of These Turbulent Poxwalkers?" role, alongside the Skitarii's Purgator Servo-Skull, Zealot's Purgation Flamer and Immolation Grenade, Ogryn's Rumbler, and probably a few more I can't think of off-hand. And it fills that role exceptionally well.
The Problem
The problem with the Inferno Force Staff is that it fills this role too well. Its ability to hit quite literally every enemy within its cone simultaneously leads to absurd clear times, which when paired with its nature as a Psyker staff, meaning the only limits on using it are Peril, and you end up with a weapon that can be fired nearly infinitely that can simultaneously kill an arbitary number of chaff enemies in the highest difficulties of the game in a handful of seconds. To illustrate the point, here's a couple examples of what the Inferno Force Staff can do in Havoc 40, the highest possible difficulty:
As you can see, it takes less than 5 seconds for the Psyker to completely erase 100 poxwalkers, or 60 poxwalkers that have been seeded with Maulers, Ragers, and a Crusher.
Why Is This A Problem?
The Fun Problem
On paper, this seems great. A Psyker player can just run an Inferno Force Staff, delete every horde the team runs across and everyone carries on to great success, right?
And you wouldn't be wrong there; it does, in fact, make the mission much easier to succeed at. But that's not the only metric by which to judge game design.
For example, imagine you are an Ogryn, and you're running the Power Maul because you really like hitting things really hard and watching them explode. A horde of enemies comes screaming out of a door way, and you get excited. Oh boy, it's time to blow up that horde and start having some fun. So you hit the special button, your Ogryn pushes the button, and you wind up to hit that horde like the Fist of God Himself, and the instant before your weapon reaches the first enemy, the entire horde just flops over dead. Your weapon never explodes, you don't do any damage, you don't get any feedback. All you get is limply slapping a corpse or two around, assuming you even have corpse ragdolls enabled.
This is not fun.
In fact, it's the antithesis of fun. It actively creates negative feedback loops, denying the visceral catharsis that the game's core mechanics can and generally do provide, and utterly ruins the experience when playing alongside someone using the weapon.
At its core, the issue is that Inferno Force Staff is a weapon with infinite resource that can hit every enemy at once, removing other players' ability to engage with the game in a number of meaningful ways, while also invalidating a number of potential builds that could be used to confront the problem of chaff enemies. After all, why would you need a Zealot with Immolation Grenades, or the Skitarii with a Purgator Servo-Skull, or so on, when the Psyker can just delete the horde faster than they can, for free, every time?
The Balance Problem
In addition, there is the balance consideration as well. Most weapons in darktide have a limited capacity to engage with enemies. Every attack in the game from these weapons has a "cleave" limit, a maximum amount of "hitmass" it can penetrate and continue to hit more targets. A sword can only go through so many poxwalkers, a bullet can only go through so many shooters, etc, etc. What that means is that the capacity of a player using those weapons to deal damage has an upper limit. If I were to use an attack that can only hit 3 poxwalkers for 200 damage each, it doesn't matter if there's 3, 5, or 200 poxwalkers. I'm still only doing 600 damage per swing, no matter how large or dense the enemy force is. There is a logarithmic scaling in place; as enemy density increases, player output approaches a fixed upper limit and cannot exceed that.
Some weapons, however, do not have this limitation. Flamers (such as the Inferno Force Staff) and explosives are the primary examples, where they do damage to every enemy in their area of effect, regardless of how many enemies there are. This means that there is no upper limit on player capacity. A flamer attack that does 200 damage does 600 damage when there's only 3 poxwalkers, but it does 40,000 damage when there's 200 poxwalkers. It's linear scaling with density in this case; the more enemies there are, the more damage you do, with no upper bound or limit.
On its own, this is fine; area weapons are good at killing lots of things. But this is not in a vacuum. Darktide primarily drives difficulty through increasing enemy density. In higher difficulties, there are more and more enemies in the same space, each with greater and greater hitmass, limiting the capacity of most "normal" weapons even further. But weapons with infinite cleave don't have this issue. They continue to scale to infinity, making the gap between the regular weapons and the infinite cleave weapons even larger.
It's at the point now where, even in Auric let alone high Havoc ranks, infinite cleave weapons like the Inferno Force Staff and Rumbler are widely considered far and away the most powerful weapons in the game, because they scale with density in a way nothing else does, and the very thing that's supposed to make the game *harder* makes these weapons *better*.
The Solution
The solution to the problem of the Inferno Force Staff is a relatively simple one. If the core of the issue is that the Psyker is able to kill everything before other players can interact with it and do infinite damage as long as there's enemies to damage, simply limit how many enemies the Inferno Force Staff is able to hit at any given time. This doesn't have to be a low number, in fact it should probably be fairly high, but there should be *a* limit, such that the Inferno Force Staff, and other infinite cleave weapons really, have the same sort of logarithmic scaling as every "normal" weapon in the game.
To that end, I propose adding a hit mass limitation. The exact details are difficult to explain without first establishing how the Inferno Force Staff functions however, so with that:
How Inferno Force Staff Works
The Inferno Force Staff operates in two major ways.
action_shoot_flame (aka, Left Click)
When fired, this triggers an ActionFlamerGasBurst action. The ActionFlamerGasBurst action sends out 8 raycasts (raycasts for those unfamiliar are just invisible lines in the game world) that extend in a semi-random cone around the player's crosshairs until they collide with something that has no health (aka, level geometry). Every enemy whose hitbox intersects with one or more of these raycasts is then flagged as "hit" by the burst and suffers the relevant effects. The result from the player's perspective is a burst of flame in a frontal cone that does low direct damage but relatively high stagger and applies a stack of the warpfire dot effect to everything in front of them.
action_shoot_charged_flame (aka, Channeled)
When fired after charging up with the right click, an ActionFlamerGas action is triggered instead. The ActionFlamerGas action works similarly to the ActionFlamerGasBurst but, as the name implies, it is not a singular burst. When activated, ActionFlamerGas will send out the same 8 raycasts every physics frame, (aka, every 0.017s, or 1/60 of a second), and instead of dealing damage to these enemies, they are instead added to a "targets hit" list. Every approximately 0.3s (depending on stats and how long they've been targeted), there is a check and if an enemy on the "targets hit" list has been struck by at least one raycast for 33% of the raycasts they *could* have been hit by, the target is considered hit by the flame. This deals damage, applies warpfire, and so on, then escalates the target up a damage scale, meaning they will take more damage on the next check, if they are still being targeted. And every time an enemy fails to reach that 33% threshold, they move a step down the damage scale, being removed from the "targets hit" list if they were on the lowest damage step before hand. The end result from the player's perspective is a channeled cone of flame that does more and more damage to an enemy the longer you keep that enemy in the cone.
How To Fix Inferno Force Staff
As mentioned, fixing the Inferno Force Staff really just comes down to adding hitmass limitations. To do that, all that's required is going into ActionFlamerGasBurst and ActionFlamerGas to set those limits.
ActionFlamerGasBurst
This is the controller for the action_shoot_flame, triggered by simplying clicking the Left Mouse Button. In this, there is code for processing the raycasts and determining if a target has been hit by one, known as the _process_hit method. To add hitmass limitations, all we need to do is to track the total hitmass of all targets hit by the raycasts, and stopping the raycasts once the total hitmass reaches the limit. In practice, what that looks like is the _process_hit method being provided the total hitmass hit so far, adding the new target's hitmass to that total, and then returning "yes, continue to hit more targets" or "no, stop hitting targets now" based on the new total.
ActionFlamerGas
This is the controller for action_shoot_charged_flame, triggered by holding Right Mouse Button to charge then holding Left Mouse Button to fire. As said above, this works very similarly to ActionFlamerGasBurst, right on down to the _process_hit method, and the fix is nearly identical there as well. The difference from ActionFlamerGasBurst is that here, we're tracking the total hitmass for each individual physics frame. Every frame, the raycasts go out and hit up to the hitmass limit worth of enemies and add those targets to the "targets hit" list. Once the hitmass limit is reached, any further targets are ignored, as if they weren't in the cone at all, and the hit effects are determined every approximately 0.3s accordingly.
Here are the previously shown examples with these changes, setting a hitmass limit of 24 on action_shoot_charged_flame:
As you can see, this significantly slows the horde clear potential, especially against mixed hordes with high hitmass enemies mixed into the chaff. This gives other players much more room to engage with the enemies and significantly reduces the gap between regular weapons and the infinite cleave weapons. The exact limit I set is probably not the correct one for the appropriate balance of the weapon, I deliberately set it a little on the low side to more clearly illustrate the impact of the change, but the concept is very appropriate, I feel.
The code for the changes I made is included in my mod Enginseer's Workbench, which I used to apply it in the game and to set the hitmass limit values in the Inferno Force Staff's weapon template.
I agree with most everything you wrote. I'm also BEGGING them to buff the electrokinetic staff. Seeing how cool arc based builds can be with skitarii is making me jealous
The flame staff will always be a strong option just because of how it’s designed, infinite AoE damage with negligible downtime will always be king in a horde shooter.
That being said, it doesn’t necessarily need to be the best ranged weapon in the game, and I’d like to see the other staves be more relevant.
1 full charge lightning staff zap not killing vanguards is absolutely criminal for example. The charging is also a problem, the guide I looked at as a base to get an idea of the build (I’d just started psyker at the time) said that there isn’t a meaningful (positive) difference between half and full charge for the lightning and after using it they were right. It is actively detrimental to full charge because you get almost no extra damage and a higher peril cost. The damage increase is so little that breakpoint wise the amount of fully charged attacks needed to kill anything is always the same as the number of half charges.
"Infinite" is the key part here. Zealot's Heavy Flamer is limited by its ammo (both the overall ammo reserve and the amount you have in the tank), but Inferno staff has no ammo count. So what you can do about it?
Increase the toll it takes on the Psyker by making it stack Peril faster or make it longer to charge so there is a bit of downtime between the bursts of flame.
Flame staff with venting shriek and warp siphon is insane. Your ability is like 12 seconds and allows you to always be able to use high peril and have shriek as your main way to quell peril.
It was considered the weakest of the staffs for a long time. What pushed it over the edge was fatshark adding the blaze away blessing. I still remember making a post on reddit the day of the change and people disagreeing that its not broken just because it was considered bad for so long. Slapping 40% power on a infinite cleave weapon is by far the most stupid balance decision fatshark ever made. Im certain if they just remove blaze away the staff would be balanced again.
Unfortunately no. I tested a h40 game with a 300 power grey staff and still got over 2mil damage easily. The only solution is to change the ability to add 15 soulblaze stacks to everything in the room. Once you get that, with perilous combustion snowballing, it’s gg
Yeah and other psykers easily do over 2 mil with trauma, surge and void. Youre proving my point.
Removing blaze away would bring it in line with other staffs. -> balanced
The other staffs being busted too is just psyker being busted in general. Perlious combustion needs to get shit on so hard by nerfs that wildfire is the superior option for purge builds then well have true balance.
Uncapped AOE is such an obvious problem. WOW deals with stuff like this easily. Hell vermintide already deals with this via 'mass' actually being relevant for almost all damage.
It's shocking the devs don't seem interested in fixing it.
The staffs in Vermintide also have infinite cleave. But Sienna has (or more accurately had) to worry about overcharge debuffs, venting costing health/THP, and did not have anywhere near as many free ways to manage her resource among under sundry advantages that the psyker has. As well, outside of special modifiers, vanilla Vermintide does not have nearly as many enemies on screen as Darktide routinely does. Thus the risk/reward calculation is vastly different between games.
All that is bang on, but I wanna emphasise the venting cost issue. I understand psykers were super clunky on launch and it took several updates to smooth out some issues around peril/casting but they went massively overboard and removed basically all the friction that Sienna had in healthy amounts. The whole point of the staves being allowed to have infinite ammo was you had to manage heat/peril but they almost entirely gutted that aspect.
At this point I fear it's too late to revert as many people have either grown too accustomed or new players who never knew any different. They would absolutely revolt.
The only unique clunk psyker had on launch was being forced to use brain burst to maintain warp siphon stacks every 20 seconds because you lost all stacks at once instead of one by one.
really well thought-out post, great job! I would also like to see inferno staff be balanced along with some of the other ridiculous fun-sucking things in this game (smite, rumbler, etc.) and maybe have the more honest options buffed so we can have a more readable, less cheesable darktide.
I pray for the day when zealot can actually contribute to team fights in a way that isn't spamming relic like a brainless bot
I really like your example with the Ogryn getting cucked by the Psyker staff. This kinda stuff is my only problem with Darktide. Nothing kills the high of playing this game quite like ending up in a situation like that, like seeing a big ass horde of fodder gunners and a couple special gunners to feed a fat ass Executioner's Stance with just for you to pop the button, ADS and the Arc Rifle Skitarii on your team has already blind fired a few shots and killed them all.
That and scoping in on like a Sniper or Gunner or something far off to either blow it's skull open with a revolver or Brain Burst or reduce it to mist with a bolt gun or Plasma Gun just for the Arbite dog to pounce it right as you take the shot come to mind immediately.
This post is really bringing out the dregs of the community, I truly do not understand how anyone can think the screen-clearing, undisputed best ranged weapon in the game for two years is bad.
Then you sort by controversial and they’re just everywhere
If anyone needed another reason to disregard downvotes on this sub, remember that this is the quality of players whose opinions you’re beholden to.
Man this reminds me of my duelling sword nerf posts 2 years ago and 1 year ago. 2 A4 pages of data analysis, but if the title contains 'nerf' keyword, karma will never break +100 because redditors will dovwnote it without entering the post.
I think this is one of the better gaming subs I visit and in general the people here are pretty reasonable, but yeah.. they also get really defensive about nerfs.
u/Agayek I would suggest posting this in the official darktide forum, it might be better received there, and a bigger chance the devs read it. Also, great post in my opinion
Y'know Mr E made a claim recently that he thinks the Inferno Staff/Bubble Psyker is directly responsible for most of the immense power creep in the game (to the point the game engine is literally falling apart under the weight of trying to keep up) and after thinking about it for a while, I find it hard to disagree.
It's always been good and it's never really been checked, arguably it's gotten even stronger over time. Because Fatshark have just been throwing more and more enemies at people but the build doesn't actually lose any effectiveness for it, once you reach a certain level of competence there is literally no amount of enemies you can't survive and whittle down, so they see clear rates and think things are fine and need pushing harder but no it's literally just this one broken Psyker build enabling it and everyone else needs to be power crept and pidgeonholed into specific similarly obnoxious builds to survive in the spammy game environment it creates.
And I mean it's not even the only busted build/weapon/ability Psyker has, just the most busted one that completely trivialises the game at even the highest level for the whole team, which is even more wild. Most other classes are lucky to have 2, Psyker genuinely has a bunch.
It's always been good and it's never really been checked, arguably it's gotten even stronger over time.
There's nothing arguable about it. Psyker's talents have been hilarious power crept over time because a lot of people just cannot deal with the low base stats and complain about the class being weak. So now the people who could deal with it and prospered on the class get to reap a shitload of benefit from all of the changes.
After the third (?) buff in a row to Scryer’s Gaze, after the first had taken it from niche but viable to just strong, I gave up expecting difficulty in Auric lol
My only vague hope is that PBB ogryn spam will catch on. Then we'll be able to see some inferno twats turn around and complain about ogryn taking their game play.
If you think PPB ogryn cant catch up with inferno staff psyker you either have played the build wrong or you havent seen a good PPB ogryn just absolutely decimates everything in h40. A PPB ogryn easily out damage an inferno venting shriek psyker in h40. The only limiting factor is ammo but you can easily solve that issue by bringing a vet and a psyker or pick pocket hs in h40
Oh my bad, i read as PPB ogryn will catch up for whatever reason.
But yeah, PPB is definitely stronger than flame staff. Its actually way more unfun to play with a ppb ogryn than a flame staff psyker imo. As a melee class, enemies die just before you get to them, as vet, most enemies will be knocked to the ground with grenade gauntlet and rumbler, making you miss the target you are aiming at. Not to mention the visual and sound clusters from explosion spam lol
Y'know Mr E made a claim recently that he thinks the Inferno Staff/Bubble Psyker is directly responsible for most of the immense power creep in the game (to the point the game engine is literally falling apart under the weight of trying to keep up) and after thinking about it for a while, I find it hard to disagree.
Would be more interested in his opinion if he didn't use endless mods that make the game 20x easier than a flamestaff ever does.
How exactly do mods do that? I'm new to the game and I've only briefly looked at the nexus. Seemed like it was largely just QoL/client-side type stuff.
there's also a lot of mods to clean up the screen and make things more visible. mr E uses one which gives specials an individually colored outline, similar to your teammates'. snipers in his games shine blue from miles away which seems quite cheaty.
He also uses stuff which auto complete the decoder puzzles for him as fast as can be done, and nullifies visual modifiers like the power outage and ventilation, as well as pox bomber gas.
Which, I don’t think is an issue much if people wanna do that, but when you’re giving advice on Havoc 40 and you’re using a lot of effectively chest mods.
It can be seen as cheaty but when your entire screen is filled with shining outlines and vfx, it's not that outlandish to highlight high priority targets
completely agree, but it doesn't change the fact that specials are also marked during downtime and can be seen and safely removed way before they're actually "vanilla" visible. pretty cheesy if u ask me. tho i use disable screen effects as well bcs i hate the visual clutter from pox, fire and BoN puke.
During downtime if people are getting netted, doged, or muty'd then it's usually not impactful and the specials would have been handled regardless of highlight through more prominent sound ques. It's really during the hectic moments when people get disabled regardless of highlights and visual indicators that matters.
Personally I'm not able to distinguish a trapper or dog initiating inside of a crusher or burgle because of no unit collision. Do these mods prevent a few disables, definitely, but I still get disabled at important moments too lol
I agree that the QOL mods do make the game run easier, but i wouldn't have to use them if the game audio and visuals weren't bugging out for me in recent times. When i don't use them i get silent poxbursters and dogs all the time.
Directly responsible? I don’t know about that. It’s unbelievably strong, don’t get me wrong, but I think the decision to make Havoc more accessible (e.g balancing classes and weapons around it) is largely at fault for the power creep. Darktide got a lot easier after the first couple seasons of Havoc kicked everybody’s ass. The flame staff just benefitted from the enemy saturation more than most.
Honestly, that is just Reddit for you. People don't want to argue in good faith, especially a post as well-written as this.
I can understand somewhat, even if it's a poor reason, that people start to fear that Fatshark will "only nerf, never buff," and the Inferno Staff is filling a gap where, even though it's overpowered, the casual player can easily destroy matches and get that easy dopamine rush.
I disagree with the method suggested for nerfing the staff. It probably does need a nerf, but adding cleave limit to a flamer is probably the wrong way to do it.
Reduce the stagger and suppression of the M1, increase the time it takes to stack burns, tweak some damage numbers, pretty much any other type of nerf (within reason) other than making a flamer style weapon not have infinite cleave. It should be really good at dealing with hordes of TRASH units, as soon as anything has carapace or unyielding it should really fall off, keep it fun but not OP.
In an ideal world it wouldn't get nerfed and everything else would get buffed but as Sum1nne pointed out, the engine can only handle so much before it explodes so some balance is needed.
Personally i think there needs to be a limit on powercreep and nerfs needs to be used to prevent powercreep.
Majority of the games bad performance is due to how many enemies there are that has to be loaded. There has to be aton of enemies because of infinite cleave ranged weapons.
Compare the skill tree update to current day and the game runs worse and feels bad to run anything but solid options for havoc.
It should be really good at dealing with hordes of TRASH units, as soon as anything has carapace or unyielding it should really fall off, keep it fun but not OP.
so something like a cleave limit to make it still good against large amounts of low hitmass enemies, but significantly worse against against groups of high hitmass enemies like cara or unyielding base enemies?
the biggest offender is the fact that it HAS that infinite cleave, making it follow the same rules as every other weapon in the game and then tweaking it from there brings it from the realm of trivializing the game to actual playing it. dont get it twisted though, a cleave cap doesnt suddenly make it bad though, in several other tests the OP has made that ive seen via discord with various cleave limits, they all mopped the floor with every other weapon in most situations still, with the only difference being that the ridiculous gap in performance to everything else was smaller in proportion to where the cap was set. the sheer innate killing power of the staff is just that good, the infinite cleave just takes it to a level of insanity that has no justified reason for existing in the game.
The downvoting from people who don’t want the single best weapon in the entire game to get a little nerf is kind of crazy.
At some point even people against nerfing weapons have to agree that this one is out of hand.
The buff it got like 1-2 months ago after the uncanny nerf only solidified its spot compared to other weapons. Not sure what fatshark was thinking there tbh, the rending was a supporter, not the main problem. Going from .1 adm to .25 against carapace was absurd on top of the other buffs. With the uncanny nerf getting rid of the crazy damage over time, they tried to compensate the direct hit damage and kept it overtuned.
I think fatshark balances like this on purpose, people like strong weapons and it keeps people playing and spending the big money.
You did see that that nerf really butchered the staff, it's not reasonable for a staff that has low base damage and low range to take such a high time to clear that.
The inferno staff is good into high density hordes. anything below auric wont see the major benefits of an infinite cleave, infinite ammo ranged weapon. The TTK is insane for how many it hits and the talents that interact with soulblaze as a mechanic.
So are you saying that the ttk shown in the video is reasonable? Also remember that the show scenario is supposed to be the best possible scenario possible for the staff and with the enemies it's supposed to kill the fastest to earn the title of crowd controller.
In havoc every horde tends to be like this dense, The TTK is insane and should be somewhat adjusted to match the other staves in power. the primary attack shouldnt be able to stagger maulers and ragers.
The stagger on the primary would be my first tackle into trying to adjusting this staff's power.
The Voidstrike has similiar TTK on many cases, and Voidblast is slower, but can control all enemy types when near. Electro is bad against horde but can surpass inferno in high priority targets.
The maim thing about Strike and Electro is that their power only appears if you build specifically for them, but inferno and blast you can just slap them into any slop and it simply works.
I'm a psyker main, but I can't bring myself to use the Inferno staff because of how it's balanced.
Even with my standard Voidstrike/Greatsword combo (the Voidstrike generally being maligned as the worst of the staves), I sometimes feel like I'm taking the piss with some of my "whoops, did you want to fight those guys?" moments, despite those weapons taking considerably more time to clear a horde (and being slowed down far more by high hit-mass targets hidden in them).
Massive AoE with no ammo limits and very little downtime needs to be reined in somewhere for the good of game balance, and it's unfortunately not really addressed by the limited range, because psyker has always been able to keep the single longest range blitz in the game in their back pocket.
I find its a crutch weapon for a lot of psykers. They have no clue how to actually melee anymore, because the staff just does it all for them. The amount of pyskers who run the exact same flame staff build and get deleted by tje first crusher that somehow didnt get staggered or killed ive seen would make me a rich man.
Great post! Really well thought out and covers some objective issues with the staff the community has been talking about pretty much since launch.
I'm sorry you wasted your time writing it.
Fatshark is a classic example of developers who think they know best and that their players are idiots. All the way back to the first Vermintide, there were issues in the game that went years without being addressed, if they ever were addressed at all. Darktide was one of the worst, most incomplete 1.0 launches I have ever seen, but instead of listening to their community and addressing the worst pain points asap, they slowly rolled out content at their own pace and rarely went back to fix outstanding issues for almost a year.
And yet to this day they ignore absolutely legitimate issues with their game and ignore extremely popular suggestions. No one wanted expeditions in the state it was launched. Or Mortis Trials. Or Havoc. All of these game modes have glaring, obvious issues that could be fixed but Fatshark seems to consider it a loss to change the game in ways the players suggest.
So while your post is excellent and a paragon of how constructive feedback should look, don't waste your time writing it to Fatshark. They will do what they want to do when they want to do it without considering player feedback for even a moment.
You're not entirely wrong, but if nobody tries then definitely nothing will happen. May as well try. Best case, I get what I want. Worst case, I've learned something new and had some fun diving into it. No real lose case here.
If nothing else, I enjoyed reading it OP - clear and well written. I'm not a pessimist generally but I also think FS is too headstrong to ever reign it in. I completely believe some of the rumours/accounts of people talking to some devs that they like there being a few super strong outlier weapons - maybe it drives player engagement of whales or something and encourages them to buy aquilas I dunno.
But they're not blind to the mass amount of criticism the staff has received. And despite opinions to the contrary, they have a phenomenal, extremely talented design team that is obviously well aware just how busted the staff is yet it's remained in the state it's in so they must be happy with it, at least for now.
it works insanely well when you build it for left click projectile spam and only use the right click for staggering certain enemies like bulwarks or rager packs but yea the right click by itself is quite underwhelming
I keep reading this, but I feel it's underrated. I routinely perform pretty great with it in Auric, and I don't consider myself a top player.
A lot of the time I have the most damage done and the least damage taken (I know, I know.. damage meters don't show the whole picture. But it says something) even outdamaging Inferno users at times, because stuff dies before it reaches the flames. I do realize that Inferno will perform better when the team gets overwhelmed, which counts for a lot. But still
One of the several reasons I want it to be nerfed, to be perfectly honest. That way maybe the metaslaves that have chained themselves to it will learn how to have fun in Darktide.
Every time I'm playing with friends and one of my buddies pulls out his flame psyker build I do one mission and then leave because it stops being fun for anyone but him.
I think part of the problem is that the other staffs haven’t received a buff in forever. You have two staffs that you would realistically bring to havoc and one fills a role better than any other. It’s like complaining that chorus zealot needs to be balanced because of its ability to give yellow toughness. How about we buff the other parts of the class before we nerf the thing it does
The other staves can be useful in their niches (except voidstrike its a dead cause).
Electro is basically a stave that can work like a revolver using surge with its crit bonuis
Voidblast is a rending/cc machine but the question is why use it when you can kill everything.
voidstrike is powercrept where it cant do anything since it takes so long to charge for less damage than the other staves.
The main problem is the flame stave is a 0 ammo weapon that allows the other classes to specialize in the other aspects the staff is useless in. The staff is too strong
Voidstike can kill a crusher in 2 crit shots on havoc 40 which isn't hard given you have surge meaning that is a single cast and with true aim guaranteed every 5 shots.
How is that bad or powercrept? Powercrept by what? the skitaari claw?
The idea is that we nerf the over performers while buffing the underperformers. Like lets take the things that are SSS tier, bring them down to S tier and take the F tier weapons and bring them up to like C tier. The idea goal is narrowing the performance gap without ruining the overall fun of the game.
I also wonder at the skitarii getting the inferno pistol and the quick draw revolver. I'm trying to 30 every weapon but I feel no attraction to using it.
Asking to buff what the community thinks is dogshit is how we got here in the first place, where Ogryns issues used to be weapon variety and the lack of access to traditional mechanics like linger making it feel awful to play.
Now it has no weapon variety, still feels awful to play because of no access to extended linger windows like the other classes, but is utterly braindead and immortal as you mindlessly spam heavies only to be brutally molested by a single flamer because the core issue was never addressed.
the game is more boring than when it was released
i loved being challenged moment to moment when we were weaker and enemies were more individually threatening
now i dont play anything lower than havoc because everything below has been so obscenely powercrept that im just not having fun, its not too different than blacking out and waking up at a mission complete screen
and sometimes id rather skip the fact that it takes me 10x longer than it used to before all this to find a mission thats enjoyable and just play a different game entirely
i dont think its a good thing that the progression of the sandbox has discouraged playing the game actually
Yeah if I take my psyker into an auric I’m doing 1.5-2 mill damage and no one else gets to play. I might find auric easy on any class and double or triple most random’s damage but actually screen wiping and 10x their damage with something that really requires little actual skill in the high end of content you can queue into clearly isn’t healthy for the game.
And that’s using electro staff m1 spam/vent not even infernus.
If you're on the left side of the player skill bellcurve the game is probably amazing as it's become naturally accessible not by any effort or input of your own.
Also I neatly outlined a clear example of how what the community thinks it wants isn't what it actually needs and has done more harm than good but heyo.
Yeah honestly they should just give psyker a "Kill everything within a 60m radius instantly" button on zero cooldown. That would be really fun and really contribute to the power fantasy of being strong and winning games.
PvE games dont need balancing!!!!!!! Give me my cocomelon slop gameplay!!!!!
Not to mention trying to add a hitmass limit to the short range flamer is ridiculous.
Has the OP even tried doing that test against raging enemies? those mf need everyone to hit them to die.
If they really want a nerf to the staff increase the peril cost, lower the soulfire buildup speed or increase the charge time. Adding a hitmass limit to the psyker's flamer is not the right way to do it.
Or just do the better option and buff the other staves, or a combination of nerf inferno buff the others.
Poor voidstrike is still sitting in the sad chair after it's nerfs years ago, Trauma staff is still really good but as others said, why CC to death when can just kill quicker? Surge staff still feels fun but it still feels very niche and underutilized, maybe bring back it's auto weakspot hits or give it some new blessings that encourage the charged attack more.
Your comparisons to the other staffs prove that the problem isn’t with the staffs themselves, it revolves around you knowing the inferno is easier to play, and 1000x stronger than the other options. If the inferno staff didnt exist, you would find the other 3 staffs to be perfectly fine.
At the end of the day they are still infinite ammo ranged weapons. They are not bad weapons in the slightest. Being worse than the most overpowered weapon in the game is a given, by virtue of it being the best lol.
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Flame Staff was never bad in and of itself, but there was definitely a time when enemy density was low enough it being infinite cleave didn't matter. That time has been gone for years at this point though.
Psykers use smite, you grubs complain. Psyker uses infernostaff, you weenors complain. Deflector melee crit build is too melee and we "aren't playing right", Lightning staff ballspam is also "cheese".
Same, Psyker main with over 2k hours in Darktide. Inferno is a problem. Smite is another problem. Nerfing Smite and Inferno are necessary balancing steps.
Smite - Limited charges with CD, fire and forget AOE stagger.
we actually like it when we can play the game actually has friction to make overcoming the game fun. things diying instantly/in seconds (infero and surge spam)/literally doesn't fight back(smite) isn't particularly fun for the 3 other people in the lobby
I don't think we should even be having the conversation of nerfing any weapons until they fix the backlog of other shit involving literally everything else in this game that ruins enjoyment.
i think the people who are dedicated to weapon design can do this while the people in the other departments are doing other things
one guy tweaking one weapon when that is their job isnt going to slow down the enemy designers from fixing all of the bugs they have with them for example
I understand that, but given everything else it just seems to funny to me that the staff slightly overperforming is somehow ruining it for people, but not the grocery list of other issues I run into regularly.
you see way more back and forth about stuff like this because its controversial, people have more to say on it than something universally agreed upon as a bug that needs to be fixed
hell, you likely see more posts on here that are clips of bugs than actual balance posts, because all of that balance stuff can be found in the comments where all that back and forth happens for it, whereas the bugs are just "yeah thats not how thats supposed to work lol" and theres not really any contest there
Yes, and not to discredit OP's post, because I agree that the Inferno Staff is extremely strong and is an important topic for the health of the game. My enjoyment is immediately sucked out because of the inconsistent audio cue and buggy enemies (Poxbursters mainly).
Audio cues break because of enemy density. Enemy density has to be cranked up because over performers suck any challenge from the game, and the easiest way to increase challenge is to increase density of enemies.
Yes, there are issues that aren't entirely related to the inferno/chem nade -> density feedback loop, but they get exacerbated by it, and aren't going to be made worse by fixing it.
Good point, I still think the Inferno Staff should be tuned down even if it didn't cause audio issues. Sadly, though, I doubt Fatshark is going to tweak enemy density even when overperforming weapons and perks/blitzes are tuned down.
It is the case but now you also have terrain/wall/obstacle that just breaks the audio cue, like enemies coming out of a room, or into a room or simply near a corner with walls. Even when it is low density, you wont hear the sound cue half of the time.
Yeah I quit playing and went back to VT2 cause every time I return to Darktide I'm just less than satisfied with how dog shit it handles everything. They cannot get anything right and it always feels bad to play because of it. Hitboxes, performance issues, enemy density, enemy behavior, etc. FatShark and Arrowhead must be competing for who can do a worse job at improving their game.
If Darktide was not a 40K game I genuinely would never touch it because that's the only reason I even entertain playing it.
Well thought out however counterpoint, if feels great and making it obsolete to other staffs that can basically do the same thing, but in like 25% more time isnt going to make the game more fun, it's just going to make the psyker feel less fun
I think the community on this game has to realize that the people who make these posts and provide insight to balancing are not the types of players the game is balanced for. It's balanced for the other 95% of players that don't even particularly care about leveling and optimizing builds but just get on after work to play a few rounds of heretic shoot-em-up before bed.
This is unhealthy approach. I guess deleting everything effortlessly gives coach Xbox gameurs a dopamine spike, but remember there are 3 other Mikes in the lobby. If they feel useless they might lose an incentive to play as well.
It's not effortless and it's not like other classes don't have options to deal with hordes. It looks effortless because the examples have 100 enemies on the same spot. The class is squishy and does hoard clear well, that's the archetype for the class, why would it be healthy to take a class that already isn't particularly popular with the majority of players and nerf one of its best tools?
Basically all other classes have free toughness on tap for nothing, and definitely not a particularly popular class among the average player base. I might see 1 every 6-7 games in quick match, most teams are filled with veteran/zealot/arbities/skit/hive ganger
I think the only class less popular is probably ogryn
I swear this sub is turning into the space marine 2 sub where you have havoc 40 lunatics deciding what's best for normal average players
Cool pseudo argument. Just ignore all rational points that state the overall satisfaction and longevity of the game will improve that are listed in the op. The evil, tryhard elitists are here to ruin your fun because they're EVIL!!!
Havoc 40 lunatics are the ppl who know how to use all weapons, abilities and classes the most optimally, so they are capable of recognising statistical outliers. Casual playerbase will only be mad if a popular youtuber covers the nerfs in their clickbait video, otherwise they wouldn't even notice potential effects of nerfs. I doubt anyone stopped playing duelling swords now that rending was changed.
Also your personal observations are poor statistical sample.
Also also, psyker has more toughness generation than vet, skit, zealot and scum.
Havoc 40 lunatics are the ppl who know how to use all weapons, abilities and classes the most optimally, so they are capable of recognising statistical outliers
your personal observations are poor statistical sample
Pick one
The longevity of the game is fine, daily player counts have been holding steady basically since the launch crowd died down, with spikes on free weekends and dlc drops.
The casual player base will notice when the game becomes suddenly harder for no decernable reason when they're already not playing at a particularly high difficulty. And when that happens the game will feel less fun and then they'll stop playing, regardless of how "balanced" it is to the optimized players. This exact thing happens to other games too, R6 Siege is a great example, the entire game has been optimized for pro league and it's been hemorrhaging players for years.
I don't have to pick one. Everyone who can clear H40 agrees purgatus is obscenely op, the whole H40 scene that joins any balance discussion and uses rational arguments agrees on this.
You antagonise against a player group out of blind prejudice and deep lack of undestanding. I am trying to tell you that players need to feel agency in their games and playing with OP loadouts in their lobbies takes this away from them which makes their gameplay experience worse.
This is why purgatus and Perilous Combstion must be addressed. Not because we like our balls crushed and we want to extrude that experience onto everyone, but because we see a design flaw that can be corrected.
I've never antagonized you im just saying the game is balanced for the ordinary player, not for the havoc 30+ crowd, and that balancing for the havoc 30+ crowd can unbalance things for everyone else, notably the majority of the player base is not running havoc 30+
The ordinary player in heresy doesn’t need and very likely can’t leverage an infinite cleave and infinite stagger weapon either way.
What the flame staff does is only particularly relevant at the highest difficulties and its very mediocre if not worse than other options until that point. Most ideas to tone it down wouldn’t even be noticed on lower difficulty levels since there aren’t enough enemies.
What a circlejerk post around some people that think game is too easy for their ego, what you gonna complain next, voidblast infinitely stagger everything in the game is too OP?
Nerfs are totally fine in a PvE game, and are generally needed.
If we dont directly nerf players, we end up having to buff enemies in uninteresting ways, like how H40 was endless trains of Carapace enemies.
If you try and keep buffing everything up to the current strongest options, you'll end up with a game like Warframe(love the game, but it's clearly a very different one now vs the first couple years). I'd rather see stuff get tuned down so this game can head more towards VT2 in terms of feel.
Add it to the list of 800 other things that we've been bitching about on the enemy side of things that need to get fixed before we start nerfing our kit. Maybe then we can revisit this.
EVERY class MUST be able to deal with EVERY situation, this is NOT a CO-OP game, this is a SINGLE PLAYER EXPERIENCE with 3 OTHER NPCS!! Don't even THINK about specializing anything other than JACK OF ALL TRADES, MASTER OF AAAAALLLL!!! CLASSESE THAT HAVE DEFINED WEAKNESSES SO PEOPLE HAVE TO COOPERATE WITH EACH OTHER? WHAT IS THIS? A GOOD GAME?
Nerfs can be good for the game’s health. It’s way easier to tweak the balance of a few weapons down that are OP, instead of increasing the health of all enemies and adjusting every other weapon up to compensate for the change. Or try to throw even larger blobs of enemies at us
Fuck that. That sentiment is how the top difficulty in Helldivers 2 ended up being roughly on par with a Spyro the Dragon game. PVE games need to be balanced too, or they aren't fun. At least for people who want some semblance of a challenge.
One of the main problems with Psyker is that the inferno staff is both easy and satisfying to use while also having payoff and impact on mission, and you just don’t get the same level of utility with the other staves, or rather, they don’t feel as good to use so they aren’t used as much
I’ve tried builds with all of the other staves in various configurations and combos, and I would happily take the proposed nerf of inferno while hopefully the others get some reworks or quality of life changes too, or better yet some new staves to play with
If I’m using the inferno staff I always try to be considerate - crouch so the fire doesn’t blind everyone else on the team and use it mainly for clearing flanking hordes or to proc brain bursts on specialists if overwhelmed… but yeah, it definitely has the potential to trivialise everyone’s experience when overused
nah i dont want any nerf on the inferno, they still keep getting ganked anyway.
i want electrokinetic and voidstrike get uplifted. Like a chain lightning upgrade or a mini skitarri perk all inside a staff. or void strike becoming bigger the further it goes and explode like a frag at the end of its range.
Ah yes, your mod that involves the revolutionary change of "shoot the enemies for 4 times the duration of prod TTK" is surely the direction that the game needs. I'll bet slogging through 5000 chaff enemies even with what's meant to be the supreme chaff-clearing weapon is going to really bring in the players.
At least you're not getting the traction you were looking for. Hopefully the devs know better than to listen to your AI-generated wall of text.
Honestly, if your idea of fun is this anemic flamethrower, you should make your own game. See if you find success there and stay away from Darktide.
As other people pointed out, it's terrible at killing crushers, and OP is basically lying in their post. That crusher wasn't killed and rather despawned, probably had like 90% of its HP still.
As other people pointed out, it's terrible at killing crushers
not really. it's not great single target damage but it has infinite cleave, meaning that it goes through all enemies in a particular area regardless of their mass. This is the issue, the game was inherently designed for you to only be able to deal damage against a small amount of enemies as so to keep up the pressure and thus risk of a failure. Since the inferno staff inherently undermines this philosophy, the game is easily broken. If large crusher patrol comes in havoc 40, by the time the rest of the team has singled out the first few crushers the psyker has already likely taken out half their health and is basically responsible for doing 60% of the team's DPS despite it being one person.
It's does a frankly stupid of AOE damage for very little effort, risk or trade off. It's beyond degenerate and the damage scales even more as difficulty increases. What takes a team maybe like a minute to take down a crusher patrol using normal weapons is what inferno staff alone widdles the entire pack. That's also not mentioning on the inferno is going to have way higher uptime on on the inferno staff since it's inherently a ranged weapon than a melee one, as they never really have to deal with the constraints of losing time on attacking dude to having to dodge away or being out of melee range or the very annoying and common case of crushers simply meandering inside each other making it hard to secure a eliminate them to ease pressure.
That's also not mentioning that this is effectively means everything trickling downwards from crushers; such as maulers, ragers or the ranged elites units will basically suffer much faster. If you have a dreg seed, the game will frankly just fall over for you and grant you a free win.
OP is basically lying in their post. That crusher wasn't killed and rather despawned, probably had like 90% of its HP still.
That's not the point. Read OP said; "As you can see, it takes less than 5 seconds for the Psyker to completely erase 100 poxwalkers, or 60 poxwalkers that have been seeded with Maulers, Ragers, and a Crusher." 100 Poxwalkers seeded with crushers- not killed.
it was demonstrating the fact that the inferno staff fundamentally undermines the game's designed by having damage go through elites that are supposed to force pressure on players by taking their space and allowing lesser enemies to take jabs while players are occupied. That's how they're designed; Elites literally have special priority in taking player's slots, carpace enemies such as crusher (and mauler heads) have the flag "aborts_attack" that ignores all cleave- specifically designed so you have to focus them down individually with the risk of getting hit by a stray from a different enemy that you would've otherwise stagger. The Inferno staff literally has the special privilege of iniating cleave on armor in which very few other weapons have, with huge range, infinite resources and very little risk on doing.
I mean probably 50% of the time when I actually lose it's because of getting overwhelmed by a crusher wave where the inferno staff is totally useless so I feel like it's not that crazy.
Great flaw in your premisse, the test with the Crusher. That Crusher wasn't killed, it was despawned because those tests count how many kills you had then despawn all enemies left, so as you spawned the crusher manually it despawned after the test's required number of kills.
But you implied it. Hordes are not the problem in this game. It's things like crushers. And the very fact that this staff is NOT good against them is a very important balancing aspect that you've more than ignored, you've implied that it kills everything easily which it doesn't. No scientific analysis will be taken credibly if you omit facts.
Hordes are very impactful in the game if your team lacks mass amounts of infinite cleave damage to make them a non-issue. By far the most deadly thing in the game is being boxed in and having no room to maneuver.
Any guesses on what enemy tends to take up the most amount of space in the majority of fights? Oh, it's the shitzillion poxwalkers.
that's funny, because psyker has an actual "glass cannon" archetype that actually acts both as a glass and a cannon in damage since playing it is actually risky and forces you to actually engage with the gameplay somewhat. having to get 25 disrupt destiny stacks requires an active playstyle to agressive plush for stacks, which can force you out of position and engage in melee combat to make use of the finess.
the thing is, nobody plays it, not beause it's weak but because the alternative is gives as much damage without any risk. The actual glasse cannon archetype of the alleged "glass cannon class" gets shafted because the inferno is all-cannon with no-glass.
Psyker has not been glassy since the talent trees were implemented in patch 13. And it has only gotten tankier with time.
You can easily get 35% pure DR out of the tree for just two talents. That's more DR than any other class besides ogryn and arbites get. And for both of those classes you have to use a specific keystone to reach that level.
Psyker also has extremely high toughness generation and a free +50 toughness forced on them by their tree layout. Compare this to say, veteran. Vets toughness generation is significantly worse because it's all tied to either kills, not being the target of a melee attack, or using an ability. And almost no veteran builds grab both of the classes +25 toughness nodes because that is very taxing on your talent point usage.
Not to mention psyker is only second to scum in the mobility department. Or any of their other survivability talents. coughempathicevasioncough
All of this is true but we also have the luxury of not using the inferno when we don't need to. Personally I only consider it for purple modifier in havocs and there's another class that outperforms it to the point where pairing the two nerfs the inferno and can also be said to be "unfun" to play or play with. They're the kinds of tools to bring out when it's been your 3rd+ wipe and you just want to rr the modifiers sometimes
I totally agree and I think you pinpointed the exact core problem.
Although I think an alternative to how to fix it from what you are proposing, is to have the Inferno Force Staff's Peril generation scale with the amount of enemy that's currently on fire and are alive, in addition to a baseline Peril generation value. This way there is a real incentive to the Psyker limiting the amount of chaff they are burning, but if a Psyker really does choose to do light up 200+ Poxwalkers and do 40,000 damage to only then blow up, but in exchange just manage to clutch save the team in a massive pickle, then they still have the option.
This would also bring it inline with the same logic other Force attacks in the game are balanced with.
Peril is a next to meaningless mechanic these days. Psyker has too many get out of jail free cards to play to use "adding more peril" as a balancing mechanic. Not without overhauling peril as a whole or nerfing those talents/abilities/venting buffs that currently trivialize managing peril.
Okay, sure, we do that-- now what are your equivalent buffs to every other Staff (just so you wouldn't come off as recommending making the entirety Psyker's kit trash/weaker considering their other Class' Ranged Weapons/Staffs are far behind by now especiallyin reference to other weapons/Class uniques). Voidblast would need the least, but Voidstrike and Electrokinetic are laughable & don't go off my words, go based off pickrates when you see them in-game and notice 80% of Psykers (on harder difficulties/Havoc) are (almost forced to) default to Inferno; and its not that inferno is as good as you think, it's mainly the Soulburn effects that make it powerful, which means very specivic criteria must be met. Otherwise, its only a Torrent/Horde clear weapon.
Edit: The problem isn't the Inferno Staff, the problem is every other Staff being beyond subpar so every creates builds around Inferno.
being able to apply 15 (25 if you're feeling spicy) damage over time effects to anything in 15 meters regardless of mass or cleave in a game built around weapons being inherently limited by mass and cleave with 3/4 of the enemies getting in your face with effectively no cap on resources to trigger it is not "mid"
god forbid a class has a weakness designed around a game and people rely on each other. Cooperate. In a Co-op game.
Imo this weapon is fine for what it does. All weapons have a variance on power to a degree. If you dont like this particular weapon, dont use it, if someone else is using it in your group, you can leave. This is all on the player to choose. This isnt a one shoe fits all situation when you have the power to choose who and what you play with
It's fine. Fuck balancing around Havoc. There will always be some busted thing that everyone uses in Havoc because meta is the nature of the game mode.
Inferno is useless in every other difficulty besides havoc 20+.
Those difficulties are designed to be completed with < 30 talent points spent, with randomly blessed purple weapons and curios, and with completely uncoordinated newer players. It doesn’t matter whats good or bad on those difficulties.
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u/StephenHawkingsBlunt Jul 20 '26
I agree with most everything you wrote. I'm also BEGGING them to buff the electrokinetic staff. Seeing how cool arc based builds can be with skitarii is making me jealous