Specific Penances and their associated achievements can be a real pain to unlock even in a tight crew, because many of them require counterintuitive or even counterproductive play to achieve. Many of the class-related Penances were eventually changed in Patch #9, replacing them with much more achievable goals, relaxing most of the old Penances' requirements, and shuffled them to their own "Redacted" category (mainly due to them still being incredibly annoying and requiring a team effort).
Mission-related
- The Bell Tolls for Thee requires beating the Superboss version of the Karnak Twins. The annoying factor has more to do with the nature of missions in Darktide more than the actual fight itself, however, as to even attempt the challenge run, at least one player in the party must have completed the Profane Bells secret beforehand, which is never a guarantee given the game's random matchmaking. The challenge bell must then be hit right as the mission begins, which many players either won't know about to do, or won't bother with hard mode, and there's little one can do about it if they're queued into a session already in progress, other than leaving the match and hoping to get lucky in another lobby. As a result, while it is technically possible to finish such a run without a premade group via quick matching, it's virtually impossible in practice, given the many hurdles in the player's way.
- Any penance that specifically demands the player to complete them in a full mission. Unlike its predecessors, Darktide doesn't have a dedicated lobby browser, meaning that short of gathering a group of friends together to tackle those penances, the only other option is to queue into a mission or use quick match, and pray that it plops you into a session that's yet to start.
- Flawless Execution at tier 3 requires the player to finish fifteen full matches in a row on Heresy or harder without going into bleedout once. If you made a mistake, or one of the game's many Demonic Spiders catch you out in a bad spot, your streak will most likely be wiped. Thankfully, quitting out of missions after being incapacitated doesn't impact the streak, but doing so means abandoning your former teammates to their fates and can be considered borderline Griefing.
Class-specific
- Literally anything as the Psyker can be a huge pain in the ass to unlock for a multitude of reasons:
- Malleus Monstronum (briefly renamed as Head Honcho) requires you to burn at least 90% of a monster's health by yourself on Heresy and up, using only damage from Brain Burst and nothing else. That means using a relatively slow ability that requires frequent venting to avoid killing yourself, no damage from your allies, your other abilities and weapons, or even stray hits from enemies that leave AoEs on the ground like Bombers and Flamers, until the very last 10% of its health bar. The pre-release iteration used to be even more crazy, since it used to demand that you solo the monster in its entirety using only Brain Burst, and if someone so much as looked at it funny, the penance would fail, though the introduction of the daemonhost monster inadvertently provided an Easy Level Trick to this penance, due to its scripted focus on only the player who triggered it, meaning that you could theoretically have an Ogryn teammate with a shield tank all of the damage while you get to whittle it down in relative peace. The Path of Redemption update finally relaxed the threshold significantly such that it can be feasibly done without setting up, now only requiring the Psyker to do half of a monstrosity's worth of HP in Brain Burst damage.
- Going Out With A Bang demands that you blow yourself up from overcharging your Peril meter and kill three Elites in the explosion on Malice and above. This forces the Psyker player to actively ignore the most important mechanic of their class and deliberately play badly/hamper their group by removing themselves from the fight for a chance at killing three Elite enemies who can just move out of the way, or survive with a bit of health left, since the explosion alone cannot kill most "common" target types that aren't Gunners or Shotgunners on Malice, and pre-emptive damage can make things worse if they happen to die too early. Naturally, it quickly proves to be the most hated class penance of all, despite the relative simplicity of setting it up with a coordinated group, as even well after the game was officially released, Going Out With A Bang is still the one achievement with the lowest global unlock rate on Steam at less than one percent of players at the time of writing. It was later altered to only need one Elite killed by suicidal explosion.
- The Ogryn also has his own share of headscratchingly-frustrating penances to unlock:
- Friends will be Friends is so counterintuitively designed that it causes more frustration to the whole party than anything else. To wit, completing the Penance requires the Ogryn player to always be in Cohesion range of at least one other player at all times (and prior to being adjusted for the public release, the entire group at all times) while playing on Malice or above, meaning that enemies that cause the group to scatter like Flamers or Bombers will be a major pain to deal with, and Zealots and other Ogryns must never use their own class abilities if they're the only ones in cohesion with the player attempting to complete this challenge, essentially reducing them to mindless bots that can only shoot and slash. Even with the Towering Presence feat, the Ogryn's Cohesion radius is still remarkably small and easy to stray out of, doubly so when playing quick matches with randoms, or with bots, since the former often can't be persuaded to stick close, and the latter can never be told to do so at all. As if it's not mind-numbing enough, even if you've got a tightly-knit group going on, and somebody disconnects, it's usually an automatic fail, since the bot that spawns in to replace them will lag behind as it's placed into the map. This was later changed to "only" require 90% of the mission time.
- Heavyweight Champion is often talked of as the bane of Ogryn players due to the sheer amount of targets it requires. To wit, Heavyweight Champion demands that the Ogryn player in question run over at least six enemy Ogryns in one Bull Rush on Heresy or harder, while the average spawn rate of these enemies tend to hang around four or five on a good day. This means that short of suicide-diving into High-Intensity Damnation maps and hope that enough Crushers, Bulwarks, and/or Reapers spawn in a convenient location, the whole group will have to make a coordinated effort to not kill any of the ones they found, while stringing them along and avoiding all of their attacks until they've herded together at least six for the Ogryn to run over. Also keep in mind that the Reaper can shoot back and potentially kill people, especially on Heresy, thus forcing the team to find more Bulwarks and Crushers to shore up the headcount and not die in the process. As insult to injury, this is one of the few class penances that were made harder upon the game's official release for no discernible reason, as the original target count of four enemies was much more feasible without jumping through hoops and taking chances with the AI Director. Its change in Patch #9 simply reverted the required target count back down to 4 as it originally was.
- Introduced in Patch #9, Keep Your Friends Close is Friends will be Friends but arguably worse. While it lacks the Cohesion requirement of the former, this penance instead tasks the Ogryn player with beating three full missions on at least Heresy difficulty with no team deaths, and nobody being downed or pinned for more than ten seconds, meaning that getting caught by a Specialist enemy is also a no-no. While the no deaths part can be handled relatively easily, it's a headache and a half to keep tabs on the other three members of the team such that they don't get jumped by a Pox Hound or Mutant where you can't get to them in time before the ten-second timer runs out, which is made worse by the tendency of quickplay groups to scatter, whether during combat or to take care of multiple objectives at a time. Making things even worse are the disabler or area denier Specialists that will do their absolute best to bar the Ogryn from coming to an incapacitated ally's rescue, if they weren't already the original cause of somebody going down to begin with. And as the cherry on top, all of these requirements apply to yourself as well, so if your teammates tarried or were prevented from saving you by enemies, the rest of the mission is a bust for the purpose of the penance.
- Bring The Hurt was one of the handful of new penances added in Patch 9. While the unlock criteria is simple in itself, being that one must hit (not kill) four Elite or Specials in a row in any combination without missing using the Big Box of Hurt, and repeat that four more times while playing on Heresy or Damnation, actually unlocking it has been a thorn in the sides of many Ogryn players for several patches. This is due to the fact that it's requirement is very damn specific due to a programming oversight, in that only the Big Box of Hurt's hits actually count for the purpose of the penance, while those of its augmented version via the Bombs Away keystone will not. This also has the knock-on effect of forcing the Ogryn to attempt this penance on Heresy without the rest of his skill tree, as unlocking any of his Blitz keystones will prevent progression, effectively turning the player into a liability for their team on a difficulty that heavily punishes inadequate stat distribution. This was eventually patched with the release of Traitor Curse part II.
- Zealots have some that can be headache-inducing:
- Just A Flesh Wound requires you to beat a level on Heresy and above in under 20 minutes, with one Wound's worth of health remaining for 75% of the time. While the "one wound's worth of health" bit is actually relatively easy with the right curio setupnote and carrying grimoires to deliberately reduce your wound count further, the 20-minute time limit is ridiculously strict especially on Heresy+, and only a few missions can be reasonably completed in this time limit, even with the Low-Intensity Engagement Zone condition. If the Zealot's allies get stuck or interrupted too much by enemies, tough luck. This used to be theoretically even more difficult, requiring an absurd and basically impossible completion timer of 10 minutes or less, but it could be cheesed by failing the mission before 10 minutes were up. This was changed to requiring a private game. With the release of The Orthus Offensive, this penance has become significantly more doable by taking the mission's shortcut to the boss room, where the "one Wound" condition will also take care of itself due to the frequent Pox gas clouds pumped into the arena.
- Buying Time asks you to hit a Sniper with the Stumm grenade from more than 40 meters away. The distance requirement on its own turns this into a special kind of hell, since you have no way of determining how far 40 meters is in-game and your flash grenade is meant to be used in close quarters, to the point that you can't even aim it properly for long distance throws (all you can do is look up into the sky and pray). Most places in the game won't give you the space necessary to even halfway qualify for the achievement, and this is all putting aside the fact you're doing this to a Sniper that can blow you away if you give them the chance... and most players know that Snipers are a priority target and will naturally just shoot them instead of letting you waste your Stumms trying to stun a Sniper. This was unchanged in Patch #9.
- Veterans don't get it easier either:
- Long Bomb is also a confusing one to get. As the Penance requires, one must throw a grenade in such a way that it does not bang into anything, enemy or otherwise, blow up, and hit five targets with the explosion. The problem is that the Veteran's frag grenades run on a very long five-second fuse that can't be cooked, meaning that the throw must be achieved over long distances and the explosion must hit the targets in mid-air. There are only a fair handful of places in the game where one can even achieve remotely high air time with a grenade and not have it bump into a wall or the ceiling, let alone teeming with enough enemies for it to blow up. One will most likely achieve this by accident, since even by consulting guides on the internet, it still takes a combination of skillful timing, the location having enough enemies to throw at, and luck so that it doesn't hit anything else along the way. This was also unchanged in Patch #9.
- On Overwatch entails beating a mission on Malice+ difficulty without taking any melee damage, and is a doozy for early-game players due to the tendency for stragglers to spawn behind the group as a way to discourage people from hanging back and snipe, not to mention the sheer amount of enemies that can shred through Toughness and deal health damage to you in a few hits on Malice+. Unless the Veteran player has a teammate specifically to babysit them and/or using the Camo Expert feat, and regularly checking behind them even then, it's very liable for a lone Poxwalker to get a cheeky poke in and ruin the whole run. Doing this together with Untouchable can easily result in Rage Quitting, though thankfully Corruption and damage done to your Toughness won't immediately lock out either penance so long as your health meter remains unchanged. This Penance was unchanged in Patch #9.
- Make Every Shot Count can give players an aneurysm trying to complete it legitimately due to a combination of conditions that actively work against the class' philosophy. Basically, one has to complete a full mission on Heresy or harder, while maintaining perfect accuracy and having no ammo left by the end of the match, while using a specialist killer class that actively generates ammo whenever you or a teammate in Cohesion eliminates an Elite. As such, you are basically screwed if you so much as miss a single shot, which is much easier than it sounds due to how much the enemies move around, and if a teammate happens to kill a target you're trying to shoot, it can cost you the entire run. And no, killing multiple enemies with one shot does not compensate for misses. Likewise, you need to kill as few Specials and Elites as possible to avoid generating too much ammo, while actively staying out of Cohesion range so that teammates can't also do it to you, and also using a weapon with poor ammo economy like the Plasma Gun or Revolver, thus enforcing a kind of playstyle that runs counter to how your class is supposed to function and being a massive detriment to the party on a difficulty where teamwork is vital. The only consolation is that ammo generated via your class aura will not count against the penance if you've already exhausted your supply beforehand without missing, but only so long as you don't switch to your gun again afterwards, on a class that has to actively look out for and shoot Specials. This was changed to only require 90% mission accuracy, and after the class reworks, became a lot easier to manage just by selecting a different Aura keystone to avoid accidental ammo generation from kills.
