YMMV / Warhammer 40,000: Darktide

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Psykers!
  • Who is "My Beloved" that the Seers are referring to in their dialogue? Is it the God-Emperor? Is it their gun? Is it one of the Ruinous Powers? It's pretty vague in-game. According to the Dev Blog, they're referring to the God-Emperor.
  • The Loner may occasionally have a short speech about "foreshortened lifespans", as it can be misheard as "four shortened lifespans" (as in, predicting that the squad is doomed). Are they yelling at the squad for misinterpreting them, or arguing with the subtitles?
  • The Professional, on the surface, comes off as the Only Sane Man of the Rejects. As a distinguished soldier who seems to have had a long and respectable tenure in the Astra Militarum, this makes sense, but there are times where the Professional's calm attitude can make them seem like they're either a complete sociopath or an unusually subdued Death Seeker. While other Rejects will panic while bleeding out, the Professional just seems mildly aggravated that they're not being helped up, and their kill-streak lines are eerily serene to be coming from somebody who's just killed a minimum of thirty people in about ten seconds. Are they really a hardened soldier with a plan for every situation, or are they Determined Defeatists who have already resigned themselves to their fate in Grendyl's service?
  • Is the Seer as crazy as they act, or are they at least partially invoking Obfuscating Insanity? There's no doubt that they genuinely believe they have a direct line to the Emperor himself, but their insistence that their reality is just a mildly-frustrating dream they'll soon wake up from can come off as insincere in several places. Notably, they make a few very waspish jabs about the Imperium's self-destructive nature that don't gel with their otherwise-immovable belief that they're dreaming everything up as they go.
  • For that matter, who is the Seer's Beloved? Some of the knowledge the Seer has access to^*The Seer's Beloved knows that the Emperor never wanted the Imperium to be a theocracy, that he didn't build the Golden Throne, and several other top-level state secrets of the Imperium of Man strongly suggest that either it really is the Emperor, or a Greater Daemon of Tzeentch. Lending more credence to the latter is a line where the Seer describes seeing what is clearly the Impossible Fortress in his dreams, from which a voice calls to him. On the other hand, he says that the voice almost sounds like his Beloved, suggesting that it might be an imposter.
• Awesome Moments: After reaching the maximum trust level, the player and another character are called forth to earn a formal place in the warband... except one of them will be executed for treason. At first, Interrogator Rannick points a revolver towards the player, who is unfazed, then towards the other, who completely panics. Rannick then mocks the traitor for thinking she could hide from him before shooting the fleeing heretic.
• Awesome Music:
  • The haunting and thrilling Main Theme of the game, composed by Jesper Kyd. It also plays during the victory cutscene, helping the player feel a very grand sense of accomplishment and relief after the hell they had to go through.
  • "Disposal Unit", the boss theme in Assassination missions. It's a hard-hitting track with a fast, pumping beat that motivates players to purge the heretic, with Ominous Latin Chanting thrown in near the end for good measure. The Imperium Mix throws in an Imperial chant that makes it even more adrenaline-inducing. Perfect music to purge heretics to.
  • "Data Interference", typically reserved for system interrogation objectives, is also a great banger in the same vein as "Disposal Unit", especially if you're trying to roleplay as the Zealot from the class spotlight trailer.
  • "Imperial Advance", used at times when the strike team is staring down a horde of foes, may be enough on its own to convince you that you're doing the Emperor's work with its Ominous Latin Chanting and steady tempo bringing to mind the Imperial Guard quite easily - it's not for nothing it was used for the Veteran class' trailer.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • High-level Veterans will almost always be using Munitorum Mk III Power Swords due to their insanely good cleave and damage when powered up, whether versus armor or flesh, and it still remains consistently high on the class' melee tier list, much to FatShark's frustration (and players' delight). After the release of Patch 9, the Power Cycler blessing is also all but mandatory to have, as it directly nullifies the "one powered hit" nerf made to the weapon with the update. That said, FatShark seems content with the trade-off of having to take up a blessing slot to achieve this effect.
  • Zealots will almost always pick the Until Death & Holy Revenant perks as soon as they become available and never look back, due to the immense survivability value granted by the damage-to-health recovery whenever the feat triggers that rewards the player for being aggressive, while also alleviating much of the stress of finding and rationing restorative items on higher difficulties.
  • It's become an unspoken rule for Psykers to have the Deflector blessing on their Force Swords, should they be using any of the three models, owing to its ability to deflect both melee attacks and gunfire, while also reducing the stamina cost and Peril generation of doing so.
  • After the Talents rework in Autumn 2023, the Psyker's Assail became far and away the best skill for them. Assail throws shards of psychic energy that home in on enemies, and with only 2 upgrades it will pierce multiple opponents per cast and replenish quicker than you can fire them. Spamming Assail will let a Psyker easily clear hordes by themselves with no need for ammo, little risk of overusing the Warp gage, and removes the need for precision aiming. In theory, it was counterbalanced by having Assail lose much of its effectiveness against Carapace-armored foes, but in practice this flaw could be easily circumvented by having an anti-armor weapon, like a Surge or Voidstrike staff, which most Psykers would be running already to cover all of their bases, making the nerf virtually meaningless. It later got its base cooldown nerfed from 2 to 3 seconds to prevent spamming it as much.
  • Unlike the other options, Medical Stimms are invaluable finds on higher difficulties due to the scarcity of health restoratives, and corresponding buff to enemy damage and Corruption output. If given the option, 9 out of 10 players will always go for Medical Stimms instead of the other types on Heresy+. That's not to say the other three aren't useful, but the sheer utility of being able to immediately cleanse a Wound from yourself or a teammate is considerably more advantageous, especially if either of you are at death's door and there's no Medicae station nearby.
• Demonic Spiders: Several Elites and Specials can easily take out members of the team or tear the team apart:
  • Ragers are Elite enemies that can dish out a lot of damage and take quite a beating. They're essentially this game's equivalent of Vermintide's Plague Monks and Berserkers, where they will bumrush the players and cut them down in a frenzy, wearing down stamina fast or ending you quickly, while their high endurance makes them difficult to stun out of their combos. While reacting to their presence is quite simple, the game's Conflict Director does love to shunt them out of Monster Closets or have them blending in with trash mobs to hide them from sight, meaning that if the group doesn't have a Veteran to highlight them, or the players are all distracted by something else, someone's gonna lose a lot of health very quickly. Making this worse is the sheer number of both types that will naturally spawn on Heresy+, making them an especially dangerous enemy type.
  • Scab Snipers have attacks so powerful they destroy your Toughness from full and leave a huge dent in your health (and likely one-shot you if your Toughness has been depleted). Unlike every other Specialist, they don't make a sound cue until right before they fire and upon firing, and the only visual cue is the Laser Sight from their guns that can often be mistaken for lasgun fire. You only have a split second to dodge the shot once the laser tracking stops, and they fire rather often. While Scab Snipers may have a pathetic amount of health, they're usually positioned extremely far from the group while actively trying to hide and thus require very good aim and reflexes to hit before they can fire a shot. The sheer number of trash mooks screening for them and distracting the long-ranged fighters in your groups also doesn't help. There's even a mission modifier called Sniper Gauntlet that makes squads of these guys spawn, and it happens with Ventilation Purge to make spotting them even harder.
  • A Scab Bomber throwing his fire grenades at the wrong spot in the wrong moment can very quickly result in instantly-depleted Toughness and a lot of health. Worse still is his tendency to run away once spotted, before popping back up elsewhere and resuming his firebombing, making it all the more annoying to track and neutralize him before he instantly wipes out all of the group's vitality. Even if the entire team dodges his grenade, it would still force them to scramble out of formation and away from an objective or defensible area and complicating survival, on top of being shot at by gun enemies and/or dealing with the hordes of commons. If somebody goes down while a Bomber is lurking around, you can bet that the next grenade(s) will be thrown right next to them and denying any attempt to save the poor sod until they die or the fire goes out, the former of which is incredibly more likely to happen given the Bomber's spam-happy nature. And to make things even worse, Scab Bombers usually spawn in twos or even threes on Malice and upwards (or with "High-intensity Engagement Zone" active), even alongside other types of Specials that can disable you inside of the flame patch where nobody can help you without also taking a lot of damage themselves.
  • Scab Trappers are a first-priority enemy to take out whenever they appear, as unlike their Vermintide Packmaster counterparts, their incapacitation move can be done multiple times from a longer distance, with the Trapper attempting to run during reloads so she can survive for another go. A netted player is at the complete mercy of enemies and can only be saved by ally action (that can be disrupted by enemy attack) instead of simply killing the Trapper, and trying to rescue during the Trapper's reload time runs the risk of the rescuer being netted as well. Trappers get more than twice as dangerous if the "High-intensity Engagement Zone" modifier is active or on harder difficulties where more than one can spawn, as they can potentially get half or even all your team in one fell swoop if not quickly taken care of - especially if they spawn alongside other disablers like Poxhounds.
  • Flamer-type enemies are the Scab Bomber's close-ranged cousins and are equally as frustrating to deal with, since they also push a hit player backwards while constantly staggering them, on top of the instant Toughness depletion and health damage they're already taking. Also unlike the Scab Bomber, being hit by the Tox Flamer variant also causes Corruption that reduces your maximum HP. Even if you do finish them off, their flames still linger for a few seconds as Dangerous Terrain to block you off, or risk having to lose all your Toughness by running through it.
  • Pox Hounds are very fast enemies that will make a beeline for you then pounce at you. If they connect, they incapacitate you and start causing Corruption that tears away at your max health, requiring an ally to knock them off. It doesn't help that their fast, erratic movements make them hard to hit, compounded by their odd physics interactions with characters, terrain and knockback. They're at least more manageable than Vermintide's Gutter Runners, as all players have ranged abilities, the Hounds make a howl that alerts the entire team on spawning and their targeting causes them to focus onto a player regardless of the others to their detriment...in theory, as their erratic movements combined with latency issues can quickly lead to the players being quite confused about the sequence of events leading up to the Hound tearing at them. Like with the trapper, harder difficulties means double the dogs to hound you, greatly increasing their threat, and they no longer go down in a single Brain Burst on harder difficulties, turning them from Fragile Speedster into Lightning Bruiser. If that's not hair-tearing enough, the Hunting Grounds condition makes them spawn in huge numbers, but these variants are much weaker and will eventually let players go without needing to be attacked.
  • In a similar vein to the Pox Hound, the Mutants also exist to be a constant nuisance to your group until taken out due to their tendency to pinball between players and buggy behavior. While it's possible to sidestep their charge if one knows where a Mutant is coming from, latency and Hitbox Dissonance may still allow them to connect and deal cheap damage that could have been avoided. Although they do let go of their victims after a quick bashing or a throw check, often times there will not be enough time to react to their follow-up dashes, even more so if there's a horde event going on and players are limited in what they can be paying attention to, where they can stand, and where to dodge to. Anyone being grabbed is also susceptible to damage from other sources, like the horde and Sniper shots. Even worse than the Pox Hound is their tendency to just throw players off of the map for an instant kill, especially if said players happen to be carrying books or vital supplies that the group is sorely needing... or worse yet, through parts of the map where they aren't supposed to get in (and then probably can't get out). There's even a "Waves of Mutants" Maelstrom modifier that sends waves of these after you, turning missions into Super Bowls where the players get to be the ball. The only silver lining is that if they catch a player that's cornered at a wall/pit/obstacle, they don't thrash them for damage and go straight to the throwing.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Guardsmen squad from the teaser trailer had some fans, although sadly it's revealed they didn't make it out alive in the World Intro trailer.
  • The tech-priest Hadron has also become surprisingly popular among the playerbase, even those who aren't normally fans of the AdMech, due to her deadpan sassiness, even affectionately nicknaming her "Mommy Hadron" among other things.
• Fridge Horror: Regular Monstrosities usually charge you head-on and are almost inevitably killed, in a way equal to giving the people who they once were some sort of Mercy Kill. Daemonhosts, on the other hand, are ideally ignored, meaning that the possessed individuals are usually left to continue stewing in their suffering until the next group of hapless fools stumbled upon them, thus posing a prolonged threat to both themselves and those operating in the sector.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Bolters are guns that both the Veteran and Zealot can equip and they're extremely damaging, can be fired quickly or with precision via aiming down sights, and pierce armor. A bunch of rapid shots will melt elites and even minibosses and bosses, and a precision shot to the head offs most Specials quickly. Finally, unlike the extremely powerful Plasma Gun with an overheat mechanic, it lacks any devastating drawbacks for its power, though it reloads very slowly (and has to reload often due to its relatively minimal magazine): it's not uncommon to fire off the entire magazine and then spent half again as long to reload it, meaning that a Bolter user is going to be picking shots very carefully, or spending a lot of their time not shooting.
  • The Power Sword. Unlike other melee weapons, which specialize in either single-target damage or crowd control, the Power Sword can effortlessly do both (with some micromanagement for power cycling). It can cleave through an entire horde like butter, then casually cut down a Rager or a Mutant in two or three charged swings. Prior to a Nerf, it had unlimited cleave on its charged attack. Chainswords were buffed fairly heavily in response with the class rework, with their base damage almost doubling; now they can carve through hordes almost as competently as a Power Sword, and still have all of their saw & rip power against heavier foes as well.
  • The Kantrael Mark XII lasgun is frequently considered the best gun in the game for surprisingly simple reasons — while it does essentially nothing against the uncommon carapace armor on enemies, its ability to hip-fire is almost only useful on a technicality and it's far from the flashiest weapon, it has a lot of benefits over even the aforementioned devastating bolters — its damage caused isn't much worse, its recoil is practically nonexistent due to its fire-rate (especially with a good stability stat), it will have a much deeper magazine, its ammunition reserves just might mean it won't even be necessary for a user of it to pick up ammunition so long as they don't shoot at basic close-combat enemies and there's a Veteran's coherency bonus for them to replenish off of, and it both reloads and is readied far faster than a bolter. While a team would certainly be better off mixing up their weapons a bit more to best handle anything the game could throw at them, everyone using nothing but Kantrael Mark XII lasguns for their ranged weapons would probably be one of the more tolerable mono-ranged compositions since their sole weakness (carapace armored enemies and crowds up close) can be handled by the team's melee weapons and blitz abilities. This model of lasgun is just supremely practical in all regards and can serve in almost every situation a player can find themselves in.
  • The Illisi force sword is what happens when the Psyker received their own power sword. Due to its wide sweeps and high damage, even more so when warp charged, the Illisi works wonderfully as a crowd-controlling weapon and addresses one of the Psyker's common weaknesses in melee. About the only drawback of the Illisi is that warp charging it only empowers a single attack, thus necessitating many consecutive activations that quickly increases your charge meter, but even that quickly becomes a non-issue in the long run due to its kill efficiency reliably triggering the Psyker's Battle Meditation passive, which automatically quells 10% of built-up Peril on kill and opens up more avenues for an extremely rewarding but high-risk build that constantly teeters on critical overcharge, turning the class from a Squishy Wizard into a surprisingly sturdy tank and melee damage powerhouse.
  • For the reasons mentioned in Complacent Gaming Syndrome, Assail on Psykers outshines the other two options. It's no exaggeration to say that two Psykers with Assail will clear out most of the map entirely on their own. The "weakness" of Assail is that it isn't very effective on Carapace Armored targets, but that's mediated by the fact that you can easily spam multiple shots to chip away at their health, switch to a different weapon, or finally let your teammates contribute to the fight. It got subsequently nerfed in the next patch, now dealing 20% less damage when spammed and making it require more hits to kill certain targets, and further nerfed again by having its base cooldown go from 2 to 3 seconds.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Poxwalkers and Groaners are very easy to dispatch on their own. However, during a horde attack, they'll come from all sides in huge numbers and their damage while weak can still wear you down if they manage to sneak hits in. They are also very prone to appearing behind or sneaking past players and attacking from behind, causing inattentive players to take unexpected chip damage. Finally, their huge numbers often makes them act as ablative shields for the more dangerous elites and specialists.
  • On harder difficulties, Dreg/Scab Bruisers also get spawned in large numbers to perform a similar ablative and chip damage role to Groaners/Poxwalkers, except with more health and Flak armor to spare.
  • Both types of Gunners can be especially frustrating to deal with if they caught you off-guard. Despite being relatively easy to kill, Gunners with a bead on an exposed player will be constantly staggering them with volleys of shots that can shred through health and Toughness in short order, while making it nigh-impossible to accurately return fire to disrupt their attacks. Without a teammate to bail you out, getting caught out by a Gunner usually means getting shot into submission, and they also rarely come alone on higher difficulties.
  • Bulwarks. They can hit hard but they attack rather slowly, making them easy to avoid. What makes them irritating is their shield, which blocks almost all attacks aimed at it (and even several that aren't), their large amount of health that makes them take a bit to grind down, and their tendency to charge into the front to shield other more threatening enemies from damage.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • There's a bug that causes Pox Hounds to suddenly shoot straight into the air and take a good while to come down. Besides looking hilarious, it also removes the threat from the hound until it hits the ground again, allowing the players to off it once it lands.
    • Hounds also have a hilarious interaction with stairs - if killed in one hit when running up the stairs, the game's physics system interprets it as them going far faster than they actually were, causing the corpse to accelerate instantly and hurl itself right off the map in Team-Rocket-esque fashion.
  • A bug causes the helmet given to players of the pre-order beta to be twice as high and three times as wide as it's intended to be, which led to a multitude of Dark Helmet jokes.
  • A glitch allowed players to be equip a "top" which would just make them Walking Shirtless Scenes. This was removed at Games Workshop's behest, to the bemoaning of plenty of players.
  • A glitch in how the game handles accuracy tracking makes the Make Every Shot Count penance incredibly easy via emptying one's weapon of all but one shot, deliberately disconnecting one's internet near the end of the match, and reconnecting before hitting the one shot they need. Due to the penance's requirements (under That One Sidequest below) this exploit is well-regarded as the most team-friendly way to get the achievement.
  • Due to spaghetti code related to secondary fire collision check of certain weapons, the Kantrael combat shotgun was able to ignite enemies through solid walls and map geometry for a while before being fixed in Patch #9. As FatShark have discovered, while the collision check did work for the shot itself, the incendiary function of the special shell disregarded all forms of geometry and will ignite anything and everything within range when fired in a given direction, allowing players to pre-aim and burn unsuspecting enemies before they could react to the team's presence.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • The Bolter is regarded as one of the strongest weapons available due to its high burst damage both when hipfiring or aiming, and its armor piercing properties, which lets it melt specials and bosses alarmingly quickly, whilst also lacking the dangerous heat mechanics of the plasma gun and still permitting players to aim down sights for precise single shots. This drew the ire of many players who see it as a way of cheesing the game and trivializing its challenges by using an overtuned weapon. It suffers from painfully low maximum ammo (especially if you're not a Veteran) and achingly slow handling, but is still a devastating weapon.
  • The Munitorum Mk III Power Sword is generally seen by players as the Veteran's best melee weapon to the point where it overshadows all the others (no, not the Veteran's melee weapons, all the melee weapons). For a rather short charge time, the weapon becomes charged for a few attacks and can cleave through hordes like butter with infinite cleave while dealing good amounts of damage to Elites and Specials. If that's not enough, there's a possible blessing that doubles the number of swings it can do before it runs out of charge. It's still good after it received a few nerfs that made its charged attack no longer capable of hitting unlimited amounts of targets in one swing, as well as limiting it to one powered-up swing per activation, due to its inherently fast animations that lends well to attack cancelling that enables a very spam-happy playstyle.
  • Post class-overhaul, the Psyker went from a Low-Tier Letdown into this trope thanks to the addition of many new capabilities, including alternate Blitzes besides Brain Burst, and a few Good Bad Bugs:
    • The Psyker's Assail Blitz is frequently derided by several for being too overpowered. For a relatively low peril cost and zero ammunition, the player can spam a Magic Missile Flechette Storm of projectiles that make very quick work of horde enemies and Specialists, hitting multiple targets at a go. The projectiles also regenerate rather quickly for the Psyker to unleash another go, and while they have an Achilles' Heel of being ineffective against Carapace Armor, that can be solved by equipping a Voidstrike or Surge Staff. This often makes the attack an easy wave clear as long as the Psyker manages their Peril well, outclassing several weapons in the game. The subsequent patch nerfed the damage on Assail's spam-fire, making spamming it less effective.
    • The Psyker's Empowered Psionics has a Good Bad Bug where if it triggers, the next casting and channeling of the Smite Blitz generate absolutely no peril. This means they can hold the blitz button down and watch as almost all nearby enemies spasm out without being able to do anything, turning them all into sitting ducks. While the damage is pathetic, being able to permanently lock down an entire group allows the team invaluable time. This was patched out as well, instead having Empowered Psionics give a substantial damage increase and rate of spread.
    • A Good Bad Bug allows Telekine Shield to be cast with no cooldown time as long as the Psyker has at least one Warp Charge. This can allow the deployment of several stacking shields that block gunfire and depending on the talents, can either stun Elites/Specials that move through, or act as a dome that protects a huge area and regenerates Toughness within. This bug was patched out.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A considerable part of Warhammer fans didn't very much appreciate the fact that it's yet another game that pits the players against Nurgle's cultists, in a long string of similar titles where said Chaos God is the Greater-Scope Villain, while ignoring the other three almost entirely. In the case of Darktide, it's even more noteworthy given what its immediate predecessor was about, thus making the claim of "Vermintide in Space!" Right for the Wrong Reasons.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Pre-class overhaul, the Psyker was significantly overshadowed by the other three for a multitude of reasons. As a supposed specialist and Elite killer class, its main Brain Burst gimmick is both slow to fire and clunky to use, due to each shot taking several seconds to build up and the "must have looked at the target" mechanic, the fact that it didn't scale at all with equipment and hence became far less effective on higher difficulties, and the Peril mechanic limiting the amount of consecutive hits that can be made in addition to Force Staff attacks, whereas a Veteran can simply blow away anything in front of them with a volley of lasgun or bolter shots and not be burdened by the same restrictions. Even in trash fights, they would still find themselves lacking compared to a Zealot's flamer, the Ogryn's arsenal of crowd-control weapons, or the Veteran's power sword, meaning that short of being significantly buffed, Psykers tend to be vastly outdone by just about anyone else. The class overhaul gave Psykers some seriously powerful options and abilities instead of relying on Brain Burst, increasing their capability and lethality to the point where they can be considered the opposite trope.
  • The Crucis Thunder Hammer tends to be disliked by Zealot players who tried it even once. While its single-target burst damage is monstrous, even more so when powered, it struggles to clear hordes due to its low cleave and cumbersome animations, and the special attack does nothing to aid in crowd-controlling despite the impressive audio and visual report of the hit. Making it even less appealing to use is the significant flinching the Zealot suffers after banging it into an enemy, which can leave them vulnerable to retaliation from all of the other hostiles who weren't affected by the single-target attack and causing them to take damage that by all means should have been avoidable. Its slightly more viable cousin, the Ironhelm hammer, also suffers from some of the same weaknesses, but its improved cleaving means that at the very least swinging a charged attack into a crowd will not waste its full damage on the very first thing it hits and leaving the user stunned from the recoil.
  • After the class overhaul, Veteran has entered the territory once occupied by Psyker, due to the design of their new skill tree removing many of their more useful pre-rework abilities and spreading others across the tree in a difficult-to-reach manner. This was made worse by Patch 15, which turned their skill tree into one with poorly implemented 'keystone' mechanics in comparison to other classes and forced Vet players to invest too many of their limited skill points into Crippling Overspecialization rather than being a Jack of All Stats or Master of All like other classes were capable of being.
  • The Headhunter Autoguns have always occupied a rather uncomfortable spot in the meta despite their good stats on paper. While boasting relatively high firepower, they lack the precision optics of Infantry Lasguns, the sheer volume of fire of Recon Lasguns or Infantry/Braced Autoguns, and the raw damage (plus armor penetration) of Bolters, Plasma Guns, and Revolvers, especially on higher difficulties where these traits matter most in the face of greater Elite presence, larger enemy health pools, and bigger mob sizes, making this a case of So Okay, It's Average and causing them to be significantly overshadowed by the sheer amount of much better options one can be using.
  • The Veteran's Smoke Grenades are considered this for the most part. Their accuracy debuff for enemies is inconsistent at best, and does nothing to deter the larger, high-health units hassling your team in melee that are more often than not the run enders on Heresy+. The same ranged enemies who are actually affected by the smokescreen can also just be shot, which Veterans should naturally do anyway. Compare this to the Frag Grenade's crowd-clearing capabilities, or the Krak's power to instantly delete one or several Executors in one blow even on Auric Damnation, and Smokes really start to not seem like a fair trade.
  • The Psyker's baseline Obscurus force swords have always been rather niche, but the introduction of the vastly superior Deimos and Illisi models shunted them squarely into this category. On paper, the Obscurus was designed with balance in mind, with a moveset that gives it both crowd cleaving and single-target damage options, however in practice this turns it into a Master of None that excels at neither. Its damage is modest at best, made even more unwieldy by its lack of sweeping attack patterns and short combo strings, both of which make it inferior to either of its competitors in every way. While it's definitely workable with the right blessings and high enough stat rolls, most players won't bother with the Obscurus beyond treating it as an early game stepping stone, as the Psyker has access to so many other melee weapon options down the line that are much better at their jobs without nearly as many hoops to jump through to make them worth using.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The squad of guardsmen in the teaser and World Intro trailers are often joked to be the All Guardsmen Party, with similar jokes made about full teams of Veteran Sharpshooters.
  • To express their disdain towards the locking of perks and blessings when rerolling equipment at the Shrine of the Omnissiah, many players have adopted the #BreakTheLocks hashtag as a means of protesting this design choice on the official FatShark forums and Reddit.
  • "Pearls" and "Pearl Clutching" get thrown around sarcastically whenever any complaints are made about the game, thanks to a particularly tone-deaf community manager.
  • Stimm shaking became a universal joke after their introduction in the Traitor Curse part 2, where players would rapidly spam the aim button while holding a stimm shot. This results in the player character making a repeated shaking motion with one hand in third-person, which looks a lot like one's having a date with good ol' Rosie Palms. Rather obviously, this doesn't work on Ogryns due to them having a different animation for this, but that hasn't stopped players from trying anyway.
  • Exploding Barrels, being a lot more likely to knock players off them the map and instantly kill them than in The End Times: Vermintide, are frequently joked as being the most deadliest enemy in the game.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • As with Vermintide before it, the meaty "schwick" sound effect that plays when a Special or Elite enemy is killed, even more so if one shoots blindly into a big mob and then a cacophony of these noises fire off at once. Doubly so if you're packing something capable of dishing out a Herd-Hitting Attack - for instance, the Psyker's Voidstrike staff barreling through an entire line of mooks, the Stub Revolver drilling holes through an entire deluxe order of Shotgunners, or the Veteran's Plasma Gun vaporizing a whole pack of Ragers.
  • Given the playerbase's animosity towards Pox Hounds, the pained yelping they emit when slain is a major Catharsis Factor.
  • Bulwarks are a major annoyance that block damage for Demonic Spiders, and the loud, distinct bellow they emit on dying means that there's no more irritating shield protecting your foes.
  • Similar to the Special/Elite kill sound, the metallic "schlunk" of picking up a large diamantine stash is quite satisfying.
  • Darktide's sound design is superlative, and so it's no surprise that just about every gun in the game qualifies. The Plasma Gun, Stub Revolver, Combat Shotgun, and pretty much all of the Ogryn's primary weapons are standouts
• Nausea Fuel: With the forces of the Chaos God of disease and decay as the enemies, there's bound to be intentionally stomach-churning stuff:
  • Most of the heavily-infected enemies are unpleasant to look at due to the sheer Body Horror, such as the Poxwalkers and especially the Plague Ogryn with pustules, open gaping sores, and rotting flesh sloughing off it. Just hitting them will probably cause a bunch of maggots to come out of them along with their blighted blood.
  • Beasts of Nurgle have an attack where they vomit out a disgusting, thick yellow substance that covers your vision with the stuff for a good while. If that still didn't gross you out enough, one of the Beasts' more dangerous attacks is swallowing your character whole and then running around while digesting them alive, dealing high Corruption damage in the process.
• Obvious Beta: Darktide was not ready for release even after the first delay, to put it mildly. To the extent that, shortly before the game was released on PC, it was announced that the console version of the game was delayed indefinitely. The PC launch has been rather rocky, with extremely inconsistent performance across computers (such as bringing high-spec machines to their knees, but running fairly smoothly on lower-spec ones) and serious bugs that required the raytracing rendering be forcibly disabled for all users due to the performance hits. The Item Crafting system was also lacking most of its features at launch, and despite the massively improved weapon stats display screen the stats themselves can be rather opaque and unintuitive. Whilst post-launch patches have gradually tackled some of the worst crashing issues and improved performance, a lot of work still needs to be done both to flesh out the game itself and restore damaged trust. It took up to Patch 13 (which overhauled the class feat system into a skill tree and finally brought the game to consoles, among other improvements) to win back a fair bit of the crowd, but a number of issues still remain.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: To say that Darktide's story is threadbare is putting it mildly. Every few levels there's a cutscene where NPCs talk at your player character and that's the extent of it. At one point, a high-ranking officer shoots an unnamed NPC with the explanation that they were a traitor working with Nurgle's cultists and sabotaging the operations. While we do get cutscenes of that NPC and cutscenes mentioning a traitor, they are rather short and don't convey much information or plot. Luckily, the combat and core gameplay is so strong that many players are willing to overlook the virtually nonexistent story.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • The Plasma Gun, while suffering from a low ammo pool and initially a Low-Tier Letdown, eventually received a Balance Buff, making it a monstrous weapon capable of one-shotting most enemies, firing through cover, and ignoring Bulwark shields as well as most forms of armor. While still somewhat clunky, it's still an extremely powerful weapon, and unlike the Bolter, does not require specific blessings to reach its peak, avoiding most of the grind.
  • The Slab Shield, originally infamous as a weapon for being extremely weak offensively in exchange for superior blocking ability, and stereotyped as the signature weapon of "Corner Ogryns" who just sat in it's special defensive, "tanking" absolutely nothing contributing just as little, was redeemed by the one-two punch of improving it's offensive output significantly, and the reworked skill trees enable not only multiple ways to actually tank, but also capitalize on the Shield's unique strengths as a weapon, turning it into a cumbersome, yet highly potent Mighty Glacier with excellent crowd control and acceptable anti-boss and elite damage that's since become one of the more popular weapons for Ogryn players.
  • Following the spate of buffs rolled out in Patch 14, the Ogryn's starting Kickback received a new lease on life with a much better performance against ranged targets and armored enemies. While strange for a shotgun, the reduced pellet spread when aiming the weapon actually helps it focus damage better against targets that are further afield, which when combined with the 60% improved shot damage due to the increased hit count, allows the Ogryn to actually make potshots at Gunners and Snipers hiding behind a horde, or at the very least knock them down and momentarily remove their pressure from one's teammates. The buffed reload speed further sweetens the deal, as being cumbersome to use was one of the major criticisms of the Kickback on release. While it's still very much a short-ranged weapon, that it does significantly better at this range and can actually kill things beyond arm's reach has made it a much better shotgun than its original incarnation.
  • The Lucius-pattern Helbore lasgun variants used to be Low-Tier Letdown due to their clunky charge mechanic and cumbersome animations that rendered the user a Mighty Glacier in a horde shooter. Patches 9 to 14 took several steps to remedy these issues by giving the Helbore a much more streamlined set of animations that lend well to skipping by playing nicer with the game's netcode, while also editing the weapon model to give it actual, usable ironsights^note Trench sights, anyway, which is also lore-accurate for this weapon instead of the flat, nondescript dovetail strip it used to have, thus turning it from an unwieldy, undesirable offshoot of the lasgun into a veritable Difficult, but Awesome sniping weapon.
  • Following a Balance Buff in Patch 14, all of the chain weapons have seen a resurgence in popularity owing to the new dodge cancel mechanic and stat tweaks across the board, as well as additional weapon Marks with more diverse attack patterns, enabling a high risk-high reward playstyle that's considerably popular among Zealot players due to good synergy with bleed and critical builds that demolish armored enemies on higher difficulties.
  • Likewise, the Munitorum Mk VI power sword has seen many incremental updates to its animations and attack delays that put it on more or less equal grounds with its Mk III counterpart. The increased combo strings still run out of charge half-way through even with max-tier Power Cycler, but the much smoother activation process lends better to recharging the sword mid-fight, and the push stab does surprisingly well against singular high health targets, making it situationally superior to the Mk III in skilled hands.
• The Scrappy:
  • Saying that Commodore Alice Hallowette is not very well-liked by the playerbase is a monumental understatement. Most of the scorn targeted towards her stemmed from the fact that her very nature as an NPC is to facilitate the game's Revenue Enhancing Device, which was implemented very early on in a stroke of Skewed Priorities by the development team, while other vital systems and optimizations were put on the backburner for months despite Darktide's Obvious Beta status. That she also frequently talks down to your player characters doesn't help matters, even after her character received more plot integration and development in Patch 9.
    • Arguably Patch 9 made her reputation even worse, as now she has demonstrated a gleeful exploitation of the player characters in furthering her own station, without permission from the Inquisitor, and constantly snarks at and belittles almost every other named NPC, even threatening some of them with assassination.
  • Similarly, quite a lot of players aren't very happy to say the least about Sire Melk, who constantly condescends to them for seemingly no reason. Unlike Hallowette, interacting with him is mandatory if the player wants to do his contract, get paid in Marks, and buy high quality gear from him. As it happens, Melk's demeanor is highly dependent on the class personality of the character he's talking to, with him only being friendly and reasonable to a small handful^note Professional Veteran, Brawler Ogryn, Agitator Zealot, and Savant Psyker, while being completely demeaning of the rest despite them striving just as hard as everyone else in the name of the Inquisition. It says quite a lot about players' opinion of him that there are Game Mods made that either bypass him directly, or force him to use his "nice" voice lines regardless of one's class.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In the Beta, weapon stats were not clear at all, instead represented by partially filled bars to determine how strong its stats were, as well as symbols that were meant to be the weapon's special properties but did not clearly convey information. To the joy of players, this was rectified in the official launch, with more concrete numbers and percentages for the weapon's stats, including entire tables of damage data when viewing attack breakdowns.
  • Auspex scanning quickly became one of the more tedious and frustrating activities due to how unreliable the tracking beeps are at letting players know where a scannable item is (e.g. the beeps will still play if the target is on a different floor in the right direction). That it always happens while there is a Zerg Rush event going on and the objective will involve several separate scan stages doesn't help.
  • Suppression is a neat idea on paper, however it tends to not work as it should in actual gameplay and only serves to frustrate players more than it does add a layer of tactics to the combat. It's actually saying something when it's actually even worse in the closed beta before being toned down for the Steam early access as well.
    • While the tutorial does a very well job of teaching one how Suppression works and how to mitigate it using cover and flanking, the problem lies in the fact that it tends to only work that way against small or bunched up groups of shooters, while in actual gameplay they tend to spawn in squads and spread out around the arena to cover many angles of fire. This means that peeking out of cover will cause all of them to open fire at once from multiple directions, and because of how widely the gunners are scattered, there is absolutely no way Suppression can work against a meaningful amount of them, and that's not even getting into the intense level of screen shaking when so much as one of them manages to hit you, which they will.
    • From a gameplay standpoint, Suppression also inadvertently enforces a duck and cover kind of approach on higher difficulties due to the issues listed above, which will not work well in a game designed to flow constantly like Darktide. Even worse, the cover system doesn't even work properly half the time, due to how some of them will still expose your hitbox to the enemy even though they would appear to be large enough to hide behind, especially if you're an Ogryn. That is, if you can even get to cover in the first place with how badly the hit stun slows your movement down, and having someone going down out in the open is an occurrence that many player would cringe at, since it's equally dangerous to either let them die or stick your neck out to save them and be shot instead.
  • The randomization of certain aspects is highly frowned upon by the community who consider it a huge step backwards compared to its predecessor Vermintide II. These RNG mechanics are often unfavorably compared to Gacha, Loot Boxes, and similar predatory business practices, making it a poor engagement system at its core:
    • The weapon and curio shop mechanics: the only reliable way to obtain curios (with random drops at the end of missions being rare) is to requisition them from the armoury. The problem? The shop only stocks around a dozen weapons and curios at any given time, with randomized stat rolls that aren't guaranteed to be even remotely good, and only refreshes once an hour.
    • Mission zones are rolled with random difficulty, modifiers, and secondary objectives instead of allowing players to choose their own mission parameters like its predecessor. This causes needless frustration with penances that require beating mission types at or above certain difficulty levels, and also eliminates any storyline flow that its predecessor had, giving the game an Excuse Plot in the eyes of many.
  • Exploding Barrels aren't that bad in principle, but the wildly inconsistent effects of knockback have been causing wipes and white-hot rage since the beta. Whether you're Blown Across the Room (often into a Bottomless Pit) or just briefly staggered seems to be entirely due to RNG.
  • In contrast to the RNG-based but freeform stat rerolling system found in both Vermintide titles, Darktide only allows the player to change two properties from the Blessings and Perks. On release this was entirely RNG-based but after significant reworking, players can now break down a weapon to get permanent access to one of its blessings across all their operatives. While this is a significant improvement, it introduced a new scrappy mechanic in the incredibly lopsided materials found in missions above Malice difficulty: constantly levelling weapons to search for missing blessings consumes enormous amounts of Plasteel but very little Diamantine, which is only significantly used for the final levels of a piece of equipment—leading to players having thousands of Diamantine with absolutely nothing to do with it, but no free Plasteel.
  • While the talent tree revisions of Patch 13 have been generally well-received, the layouts of the new trees have not. As they are, the talent trees generally work fine if one is simply going down one particular branch, but picking alternatives basically forces the player to commit points into counterintuitive playstyles, or ones that they would otherwise not want to in order to reach their core ability modifier nodes (e.g. a Zealot wanting to unlock incendiary grenades is forced to go down the middle tree governing ranged combat to reach said node). At best, this results in talent graphs with odd node placements and uneven stat distribution. At worst, it causes severe point shortages if one wants to cover all of their bases, or the player being forced to sacrifice certain core passives, since many of the old feats that were crucial to their build might have been displaced away from the "ideal" node path (e.g. the Psyker's Kinetic Deflection is now at the near bottom of the Scrier's Gaze branch).
    • As a knock-on effect of the talent graph's linear structure, respeccing points was also made significantly more troublesome to do, as changing anything in the beginning or middle segments of the tree forces the player to refund all of the points committed after them as they retrace their steps back to where the modification is, and then reselecting the nodes that were disabled in so doing.
  • The Immolation Grenade's flames hurt enemies but not players and are lower and more yellow compared to the Scab Bomber's/Flamer's flames, but the color similarity often confuses players in the heat of battle and cause them to instinctively avoid such. They're especially easy to confuse with the flames from Exploding Barrels, which are of a similar height to the IG's but do hurt players. Many players have been clamoring for the Immolation Grenade's flames to have a more distinctive color change so that players can tell them apart from the actually hazardous fire.
  • Grimoires, unlike in the Vermintide games, are now pure Schmuck Bait. They spawn in random places, meaning you have to spend time looking for them, and unlike scriptures you can't put one down once you pick it up. Their constant Corruption damage inflicted on the whole team is nastier in a game where your downs are determined by your wounds, which Corruption fills, and where it can also waste limited Corruption-cleansing mechanics like the Veteran's upgraded medipack or med stimms. Your reward for completing a mission with them is a fairly inconsequential increase in experience and Ordo dockets that is far exceeded by any other difficulty-increasing modifier and even the Quickplay bonus. They're only really useful for one of Sire Melk's contracts, which can be rerolled, plays relatively little, and while they can give credit towards the more rewarding "pick up a 16 books" objective, each one is worth as much as a more common and less punishing Scripture. On top of this, their high difficulty increase for minimal reward means many if not most players will get annoyed if someone picks one up.
  • Using Stimms on a teammate is made aggravatingly difficult due to Hitbox Dissonance. To wit, using a Stimm on someone else requires that person to be within basically spitting distance to the player, and ideally not moving, as the targeting tolerance is annoyingly low, such that the Stimm can fail to deploy if the recipient so much as stepping an inch to the side before you can finish. This is especially frustrating in the case of Medical Stimms if your patient is almost dead and yet lacks the good sense to stand still, as this forces you to basically chase after them with a Health Potion while they keep dancing out of your deploy range, typically resulting in eating unnecessary damage or the team suffering casualties.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The Psyker's Brain Burst Blitz deals huge damage that pierces most armor, but had a noticeable channel time, hit only a single target, and requires initial line of sight to the target to cast, during which the Psyker's allies could kill that enemy and waste the attack unless the Psyker finds a new target. Most damningly, unless you took Brain Rupture, there wasn't a way to increase its unbuffed base damage, making Brain Burst a Crutch Move where it could one-shot Elites and Specials in lower difficulties but struggled badly in higher ones, while getting overtaken by sheer firepower or melee damage by the upgradable weapons. Its poor scaling on higher difficulties was one of the contributing factors to Psykers being a Low-Tier Letdown pre-class overhaul. In contrast, the Smite Blitz makes Pskyers excellent crowd control by continuously staggering multiple enemies, and the Assail Blitz can dish out powerful enough multi-target damage for relatively low Peril Cost to the point where it's considered a High-Tier Scrappy ability.
  • Following the class rework, it has become very rare to see Ogryn using the Big Box of Hurt. It's supposed to occupy a middle ground between the high single-target damage of the Big Friendly Rock and the crowd-clearing devastation of the Frag Bomb, but in practice, it isn't good enough in either area to be competitive. The Big Friendly Rock doesn't require grenade pickups to resupply and is much faster to deploy, while the Frag Bomb outright deletes everything unfortunate enough to be near it, a contrast to the Box Of Hurt's laughably weak cluster explosion. True, it doesn't have any single-target damage, but this matters little when both your target and everything in the same postal code is guaranteed to cease bothering you permanently in short order. Not helping matters is that the Ogryn grenade-launcher weapon launches a similar explosion as a Veteran's grenade, so five normal shots would be the equivalent of one Box of Hurt.
• That One Achievement: Now have their own page.
• That One Attack:
  • The Beast of Nurgle's swallow attack is its most dangerous move for a number of reasons. The first, most glaring problem is its rapid Corruption damage dealt to the player swallowed, which can leave them in very dangerous situations if not rescued quickly enough, and there aren't that many attacks that can stagger the Beast into spitting them out to begin with. The second, perhaps bigger headache, is the Beast's tendency to take them far away from the rest of the group, which can be aggravating if there's a horde going on to screen for it, and usually leads to the heavy Corruption damage as mentioned above, made infinitely worse if it spits its prey out in the middle of a wave of mobs or Elites, assuming it didn't just vomit them into a Bottomless Pit or through the map to their doom. Lastly, this move targets players covered in the Beast's vomit that it spews liberally, hits instantly, and also doesn't have any visible telegraph, unlike most Monstrosity attacks, so players in melee are constantly at risk of being drenched, gobbled up, and carried off to their doom.
  • The Scab Bomber's entire MO. Due to how fire works, both his pre and post-rework attacks are a blight to deal with, due to his habit of spamming grenades right on top of a downed player, or an objective that someone is working on, which can sow a lot of chaos resulting in lost health or team casualties, made even more frustrating by the Bomber's inflated spawn rates on higher difficulties in conjunction with map conditions.
  • Rodin Karnak's blight grenades are one of the most common causes of wipes in the Orthus Offensive, especially on Damnation with hard mode enabled. While entirely avoidable on their own, they become a significantly bigger hazard if the player is being pressured by Rinda, Elites, trash mobs, or all of the above, and getting knocked into the blight mines for obscene amounts of Corruption damage that more often than not will kill said player. That Rodin's also causing constant staggering and knockback with his Plasma Gun shots only serve to make the fight even more unbearable without proper aggro management.
• That One Boss: The Karnak Twins Dual Boss fight in The Orthus Offensive can qualify on higher difficulties, especially their Superboss version. On their own, the Twins themselves aren't too much of a problem to deal with if approached properly (Rinda's shield taking more gun damage, Rodin's taking more from melee weapons), the problem arises when their lackeys start streaming into the room to distract players, which can comprise of numerous Executors, Ragers, Maulers, as well as Hounds and Mutants, further backed up by Bombers, Snipers, and Flamers on Heresy and up. This can quickly snowball into an inescapable trap as players are pressured from all sides, made worse by Rodin's fondness for throwing down an absolute minefield of Corruption-inducing Blight grenades, making recovering from downs or deaths extremely difficult with both Twins constantly knocking them out of the reviving process (or in the case of Damnation hard mode, will not allow rescuing of respawned players at all).
• That One Disadvantage:
  • High-intensity Engagement Zone modifiers on a level not only double the number and frequency of horde enemies, but also the number of Specials — expect at least two Specials of the same type to spawn each time they do. Several Specials can do a lot of damage/disruption to you and by doubling their amount along with the size of hordes blocking them, it becomes much harder to target them before they can do their job. It gets even worse in Malice, Heresy and Damnation difficulties, where the enemy spawns including Specials are all increased — and this doubles all of that.
  • Shock Troop Gauntlet makes specialist strike teams appear often, and becomes this when paired up with High-Intensity Engagement Zone, giving you waves of doubled Specialists often.
  • Power Supply Interruption is basically daemonhost central for whatever map it's on. Daemonhosts as a whole are already a massive pain in the ass to deal with, especially so if your teammates lack the common sense and foreknowledge to just leave them alone where they are, and then this condition kicks it up a notch by dotting the whole map with them, all the while forcing your group to stumble around in total darkness that reduces visibility even more. This condition is also especially rough for Ogryns, as none of their weapons can have flashlights mounted on them.
  • Hunting Grounds significantly inflates the spawn rates of everybody's favorite special enemy, the Pox Hound, and that's all you need to know. Assuming you haven't cringed into your ribcage yet from the sound of it, the reworks done to it in Patch 4 somehow made the modifier even more cancerous to behold, where instead of spawning Pox Hounds in pairs at shortened intervals, the condition now plops down six of them in just that short of a window, making it a very real threat to have your entire party pinned at the same time even on the easier difficulties. Even assuming that the dog that's pinning you got knocked off somehow, all it will do is leaving you open to being pounced by the one next to it, and so on. The only saving grace is that the Hounds spawned have very low health, such that they are likely to die in one hit.
  • Sniper Gauntlet not only causes squads of Snipers to spawn that can quickly kill an unprepared team, but also comes with Ventilation Purge to make visibility extremely low, making it even harder to spot the Snipers who will perfectly see through the fog.
• That One Sidequest: Some of Sire Melk's weekly missions are almost always rerolled immediately upon refreshing by many players due to them being downright chores to worry about.
  • Pretty much nobody wants to do the missions that require retrieving Scriptures and Grimoires anymore. Finding the books takes time if one hasn't already remembered where they can spawn, and carrying them obviously means sacrificing valuable equipment slots that could have accommodated something vastly more practical like med kits or ammo crates instead, and many players simply don't want to have to deal with the Maximum HP Reduction penalty of Grimoires. That the retrieval side missions give out pitifully low money and XP rewards for your trouble is just the final nail in the coffin for this objective.
  • Likewise, it's rare to find a player who doesn't groan at the "Complete X missions without a player death" request, simply due to the fact that accidents can happen at any moment on any difficulty, potentially made worse by the mission's modifier, and there are three other potential dead people that you can't account for.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The combat knife weapon frequently returns to its idle position in the player's point-of-view after light attacks or blocking after preparing/using a heavy attack (causing the player to change their grip on the knife to a Reverse Grip) with a variety of beautifully-animated flourishes, like spinning and tossing it up slightly before catching it by the handle or twirling it around their hand. Almost every weapon has this kind of attention to detail with animations, having multiple draw/reload animations based on random chance and the combat situation, but the combat knife really exemplifies it.