Recent reviews by Apple-Tarts

Joining the bandwagon to say that tanner is mostly wrong about the class but the game's current state is very bad. The things he's correct about are the bugs and weaknesses, but the class is second in damage only to psyker. It should be the highest, but not because hive scum dps is too low, but psyker's dps potential is way too high across the board with far greater flexibility than any other class in the game aside from zealot.

The game's balance is dictated by psyker, unfortunately, and this class is just a worse psyker. They both need nerfs, scum in particular needs like 3 or so talents adjusted and psyker needs a ton of changes to become a reasonable class. I can understand wanting to buff scum, though, because you play vet and barely do anything your team will probably win, and if you play psyker and do everything, your team will certainly win. Hive scum hasn't been figured out, but it's more effort than both to win just as often as vet.

We need these types of skill ceilings in this game, and we're never going to get them if the only time we want and call for change is for more things to be stronger. We need nerfs.

Aside from that, darktide's a really buggy game right now. Just avoid it until next year, and even then it may not be fixed entirely.

The Apple-Tarts-Hong Kong Coalition has been formed! BEWARE!!!
The devs have foolishly decided to release another gamemode that sucks and doesn't have the content to support itself, and, to top it off, are making very mid changes and very safe buff/nerf decisions. HOWEVER! NOTHING IS GOLD!
For some reason the asian community in particular is enflamed by the subtle changes being made to the meta options, saying things like they're unviable. That's not true. The nerfs aren't strong enough to really matter in the long run, as there's just a ton of methods you can utilize to mitigate them, from proper ability management to more team coordinated builds. I don't believe they change meta, it will just slightly hurt players who pub havoc or play with people who are off-meta, and that's about it.

I am mostly putting my negative review up because this isn't the direction that I want for the game in terms of content and I am highly dissatisfied with it. Darktide was a lot of fun, and after I take a month or two off from it and come back for maybe an update or two, I do tend to have fun for about a week or so, and then I get back into the usual mood.

There are a ton of problems with this game that the devs refuse to address, and have often chosen to streamline those problems rather than fix them. The talent trees, from a use case perspective, are exactly the same every single build for every single character. There are only 2 actual builds for psyker, one is bubble shield, and the other is scrier's gaze. This is the only choice in that skill tree that influences what is brought to a game. Every class has this issue. There are talents so obviously good that you will never skip out on them, and some trees are designed so that, in a linear fashion, you pick up literally everything you would ever want for the class. You won't get crazy and insane builds that utilize more of one side of a tree quite often. It's all the same for everyone in the end.

The actual combat balance is terrible. The biggest source of damage is not players in melee destroying enemies left and right, nor is it players sitting in the back and shooting, but it's high-damage high-stacking aoe dot effects combined with talents and blessings that when applied even on havoc 40 will annihilate the most complex and divine horde in less than a minute. The melee combat, althought fun to perform, is heavily carried by the fact that for every class (except ogryn) you get a huge dodge linger window that prevents you from taking damage, only shortened by being out of dodges and dodging into terrain. The terrain in this game varies from a nice clean walk to random jolting metal bits that scour about the field, presenting just enough a problem that occasionally you make a dodge and you either go airborne or you bump into it in a way that it prevents your dodge linger from working, and thus you die.

Then the actual enemy balance. On auric, it's chill, you can fight anything in anyway you want and come out on top, minus ping issues and rollback moments. On havoc, it becomes slightly different, in that you can't really fight ragers because they have swings that have such oddly designed hitboxes as well as double swings with slightly different timings that you will just occasionally get clipped, stunned in place, and killed.

For the most part, the safest way to play the game is just walking away from enemies and killing them one by one. This is not really fun nor that engaging, so often you may think above and beyond yourself that you can just fight in the horde. The problems with this is that how aggro and their animations work, if you're not the only person alive then sometimes they just walk straight through you, ignoring the damage you're dealing to them, realize you hit them, then, once they're fully right behind you or sometimes even inside you, they then turn and stand still, swinging at you.

There's also the problem that one faction is completely not finished, while the other is, so to compensate for this, the devs have designed modifiers that solely add the primary most finished faction in the game to a majority of the map. This means that, in havoc 40, the majority of your enemies are heavily armored carapace enemies with very high stagger thresholds. Bulwarks love to walk through you. So do crushers and maulers.

If you happen to not get this seed, you get introduced to the other problem with an unfinished faction. Dregs are complete on the ranged shooter side, while missing melee elites. This means that, for the most part, dreg seeds are gunner seeds. This means that, instead of infinite bulwarks blocking your swings, 100 crusher overheads being dodged per second, you are now dodging 1 billion tiny little shooters, where a single one can 0 your entire toughness bar if you do a terrible dodge, gunners that are constantly chipping you through horde, and reapers that are very resistant to being staggered as well as having stagger immunity for a brief period of time based on stagger state. There are a lot of them, and they do not play melee whatsoever.

You may think that you should just shoot them all dead, but there's another problem with that. Only one class has built-in suppression immunity. If you're not using a weapon that also has this effect, it is practically meaningless for you to shoot at armored/carapace enemies as you can't guarantee a headshot, and bodyshot damage is terrible. Some weapons are good enough to suppress them back, but now you're choosing to bring a shooter for its suppression effects rather than for its damage, and that's frowned upon. So, inevitably, this devolves the meta for ranged weapons from precise instruments that can easily dwindle a ton of these threats to extremely fast high damage hipfire weapons that don't need to ADS to be good.

This game is also filled with bugs. You have a billion disconnection errors, you have your entire team's games crashing because one person brought un-updated mods, you have lobbies crashing because of certain interactions between players and the map, you have people unable to join because the map is too full of entities, you have games where you win but the game refuses to load to the win screen, or, even worse, it loads there but refuses to stop the game state, allowing you to die during the ending cinematic and it counts the game as a loss.

These are just a few common bugs. There are a ton more you can experience. There's memory leak issues where if you use the inventory a lot the game will eventually hit its limit and crash, there's nonfunctional hub menus like the social menu, where it will take a billion years to load the players of the very lobby you are standing in and able to communicate and see, and even longer for players who are actively in games or other server hubs. The havoc menu, for whatever reason, takes somewhere around 10 attempts for me to open it for the first time I open it even between every crash, and I don't even know if other players have this bug. It just bothers me.

The player balance has been the same since like patch 13 nearly 3 years ago, only getting big reworks that look like a lot on paper but largely nothing has moved, nothing has changed, good things are easier to acquire in a straight line while bad things have been removed so the good things can stay where they are. This would be fine if the balance was at least good. But one psyker on your team is worth your entire team. Psyker is why havoc 40 was made, and every balance decision taken in havoc 40, including the making of modifiers, has been designed to make aspects of this class seem not as blatantly broken as they are. Having a class that has potentially unlimited damage potential due to having the strongest forms of aoe dot and infinite cleave so that the numbers in front of them do not matter is ruining this game.

fun game. Lots of cool characters. Doesn't deserve to be review bombed for not showing upskirts of children imo.

Definitely the best Warhammer Fantasy game made to this date. Extremely fun game that has just got arguably one of the best updates so far.

Watch out for any chaos faction, they kinda suck right now, except for Beastmen. They just got an update that created the most powerful lord in the game so far, and essentially no longer have an instant lose state when defeated. They're still relatively weak, but once your legendary lords are leveled up, you're god tier, especially when playing as Taurox. I just completed a 60 turn campaign where I razed every single settlement down to the ground. OVER THE COURSE OF 3 TURNS. Warriors and Norsca have problems related to not being able to take settlements, so they still suffer indefinitely. Everyone else is an alright factions with strengths and weaknesses.

The strongest factions in the game from start to finish are High Elves and Dark Elves, as they have the most options in terms of most effectiveness and versatility, the strongest lords in the game, as well as having extremely powerful mechanics. Entrepreneur traits for High Elves literally gives you money for free, and Dark Elves can break their slave economy with income heroes and such in cities to make a lot of money as well. A close third belongs to Skaven, who have some of the most powerful units and armies in the game, and their lords are pretty decent in combat through and through.

The second tier of factions are probably Wood Elves, Empire, Lizardmen, Dwarfs and Bretonnia. Their problems mostly are in building up their power, but once they're in late game they're all extremely good, with the Wood Elves having some of the best armies in the whole game, Empire having a very effective economy that allows them to be versatile, Lizardmen having THE strongest army in the whole game and the best tech tree, and Dwarfs having some extremely powerful units but extremely weak economy. They're all very good options to play, even if Dwarfs are a bit of a slog I think their strength is getting access to their late game units, which have just been moved from tier 5 down to tier 4. Bretonnia's strength lies in the fact that they don't have supply lines, which basically means that you can make your armies incredibly strong from start to finish without worrying too much about upkeep. They are arguably the only faction in the game with good cavalry units, but I wouldn't play them currently as there are several bugs preventing cavalry from being good, and several problems relating to their mass and size of their entities that gets them stuck inside units. Still very strong, but I think they are the lowest of this bunch.

The third tier of factions would be vampire coasts, vampire counts, Greenskins and Tomb Kings. These races are incredibly strong, but have a lot of weaknesses. Vamp Coasts can be very strong as a gun faction, and the necrofex colossus is one of the best single entity units in the game, but they're pretty costly and lack that force in the frontlines. Counts have the best type of magic in the game, but their entire army roster is a series of glass cannon and cannon fodder. On the higher difficulties, you will most likely have 1 stack of vampire heroes on Isabella Von Carstein and the rest of your armies are all skeletons led by Necromancers on Mortis Engines as skeletons are FREE units for them after some research, allowing you to spam army after army of them. Greenskins are in a really tough position of not having decent late game units, but the lead up to late game is great. All of their units are on the bigger, slower side, except for your goblins, who, due to the decision to make the entire tech tree buff some kind of aspect of Gobbos, are the best units late game, being cheap, efficient, and very powerful. Tomb Kings are really fun and have some really good options for their campaign in the late game, as none of their units have an upkeep attached to them whatsoever. In the early game, you're stuck with a very limited pool of units to recruit from, and once you do get access to new armies, you have to figure out how to specialize each army for the threat you are dealing with. This is very fun from a gameplay perspective, but very weak in terms of the power creep that most of the other races bring with them.

My personal favorites, from Greatest to Least, are: Skaven; Greenskins; Lizardmen; Tomb Kings. They are all incredibly fun campaigns, especially on lower difficulties.

My favorite lord in the game is definitely Wurrzag. He loves to dance and cast spells, and in the lore he was just Grimgor's hype man. He's extremely fun since he gets access to Savage Orcs, and if you play SFO, one of the best overhaul mods for Warhammer, you can build them up to be nigh immortal in the late game, and then have like 20 stacks of them for free. It's stupid, and it's cool. A close second in the game is Ikit Claw, a rat who invents nuclear missiles, and canonically destroyed the moon over the moon. Honorable mentions to Nakai, a big dumb alligator who fights daemons, and Throt, a big fat rat who just can't stop eating rocks and giant monsters.

My personal gripes with this game. Lizardmen have been shafted in every dlc, making them a rather boring campaign, and their geomantic web mechanic still seems to be nonfunctional in this latest patch. I hope that next patch fixes that and the cavalry problems. Lizardmen dlcs have been unfinished on the campaign side, and been nerfed on the battle side of things a lot lately, which means that on higher difficulties with Nakai or Lizard Moses can be such a chore as you have to essentially build efficiently every time you begin with them, or face getting destroyed in the early game. Late game, as always, Lizardmen can just walk over every other faction that isn't Elven or a skaven ambush, so they go from really strict to a cakewalk, and it sucks. Chaos factions In this game are still a chore to playthrough, and with the beastmen finally being given some love in the game, I expect great things for them in game 3. However, their current state in this game makes them rather lackluster and weak as an endgame crisis. Game 1 factions still need some work to make them on par with game 2 factions, especially vampire counts and dwarfs. Other than that, remember that a majority of your battles will be one of like 5 different siege maps, some looking exactly the same as others.

The enemy hides in metal boxes.