Hey Everyone,
One of our favourite times of year: releasing a new update for Warhammer 40,000: Darktide…
Nightmares & Visions has already begun to roll out across our platforms. Keep reading to see what’s waiting for you on the Mourningstar.
We are trying something new with patch notes.
From now on, we’ll be listing the patch notes in FULL on our website ONLY. This is because as the game grows, it’s often between 40-50 pages each major update. When trying to format these across three platforms (each with their own formatting)...please think of our poor CM. (Yes, I wrote this. - Straw)
Mortis Trials
Sefoni has a new challenge for you, rejects. The Theatres of Mortification contain the Mortis Trials. A fiendish new addition to Sefoni's training regime. Enter the Psykhanium and Sefoni will pit you against waves of enemies, but she'll also provide what she calls Indulgences (ability enhancements well beyond the powers of an average fighter) to help you in your endeavour. You can begin the trials in the usual way, by visiting the Psykhanium, but for a quicker entry, check out the new terminal near the mission board.
There is a lot to unpack in Mortis Trials, but we don’t want to spoil the fun that awaits. You can read our latest dev blog to learn more about it, or dive right into it once you’ve downloaded the update.
New In-Game Event: A Day At The Theatre!
Sefoni's new training protocols whisk you off to the Theatres of Mortification. Unleash carnage in the Mortis Trials.
To make progress in the event, complete 4 consecutive waves in the Mortis Trials. Each set of 4 waves completed grants 1 event progress point. It is possible to earn up to a total of 3 progress points per completed Mortis Trial run.
This event will start on Tuesday, March 25. The rewards will be Ordo dockets, Plasteel and Diamantine. Those who complete the last tier of the event will receive a cosmetic insignia.
Reminder of Havoc Maintenance Announcement
With Havoc Campaigns, we’ll be introducing new balancing to the game mode. Ahead of Nightmares & Visions, Havoc has been “off-campaign” and unavailable to play from Sunday, March 23 until today, the day of release on March 25.
During this off-time and to reflect the balance changes made, we’ve reset everyone to their nearest threshold depending on the highest they reached the previous Havoc Campaign period. (Please see the chart below.)
Updates to Havoc
As we previewed in our earlier dev blog on Updates to Havoc, there are some structural changes and more coming to Havoc with this release.
Rank Overhaul
Starting with Nightmares & Visions, ranking in Havoc will change. All players who participated in the mission will rank up their order (up to three ranks) depending on eligibility. To be eligible you need to have an order of equal or lower rank.
- A gap greater than or equal to 10 gives an increase of (3) Clearance Levels.
- A gap between 6 and 9 gives an increase of (2) Clearance Levels.
- A gap of less than or equal to 5 gives an increase of (1) Clearance Levels.
Based on feedback received, players' new order next week will no longer be equivalent to the highest played the previous week, rather we’ve opted to roll over the current order rank.
Dev note: The inactivity decay is still active and it only triggers upon no interaction with the Havoc system.
Havoc Campaigns
With this update, we’re introducing Campaigns to Havoc. Our intention is to release a new Campaign with different mutators and a rotating mission pool, alongside our major updates to Darktide.
Havoc Campaigns is what we’ve opted to call the rotation of the mission pool and mutators within Havoc. We want players to be able to learn and adapt to these combinations, while also changing things up over the period of the current Havoc Campaign. We will share more information on our plans for this in a few weeks.
New Mission Pool
The previous missions from Havoc have been rotated out with the start of this new Campaign. The following missions are a part of this latest Campaign:
- Enclavum Baross
- Clandestium Gloriana
- Dark Communion
- Vigil Station Oblivium
- Hab Dreyko
- Power Matrix HL-17-36
- Magistrati Oubliette TM8-707
- Ascension Riser 31
- Relay Station TRS-150
- Comms-Plex 154/2f
New Mutators
Heinous Rituals
- Reports indicate that the Admonition has begun creating more Daemonhosts in this area, stop these rituals before it's too late.
- Based on the mission length X amount of rituals will spawn. These rituals are composed of 8 Dreg ritualists trying to summon forth a new Daemonhost. Kill them all before time runs out or face the wrath of the newly created Daemonhost.
The Encroaching Garden
- Marked Enemies, blessed by the Lord of Pestilence, will heal affected allies in proximity.
- If these enemies are not dealt with quickly, they will rapidly regenerate the enemy forces.
- Select enemies will be marked, and while these enemies are alive they will heal allies at a rate of 1200HP/s within a 5 meter radius.
Enraging Elites
- Elite enemies fall into rage when under 50% HP left, increasing their attack speed, damage caused and rendering them immune to crowd control.
Rampaging Enemies
- Enemies in this sector are rampaging. They gain increased defence against attacks upon witnessing the death of an ally.
- When an afflicted enemy dies, allied enemies in a 4 meters radius around are buffed up to 5 stacks, each stack providing damage reduction.
Havoc Balance Tweaks
Emperor’s Fading Light
- Removed the increased shooting time from ranged enemies.
Dev Note: This was removed in response to the lack of build diversity where players felt forced to bring abilities like Psyker Telekine Shield or Zealot Chorus of Spiritual Fortitude.
- Added in Moebian Lieutenants that have a 80% chance to spawn throughout the mission.
Dev Note: The Lieutenants are derived from the Twins and based on players' sentiment that they were “stuck” in their special assignment. We felt it fitting to bring out enemies that feel familiar.
- Weakened Monstrosities will have a low chance of spawning throughout the mission.
Horde Pacing
- Changed horde spawn frequency from being based primarily on distance traveled through the level, to relying on timers. Please note that the amount of hordes allowed is still calculated based on main path traversal.
Dev Note: This change was made as backtracking too far turned off hordes. Also it was changed to combat being able to predict roughly where hordes show up.
New Horde Compositions
- New coordinated horde strike type: “Blockade sandwich”.
Dev Note:This strike may happen if the strike team tries to backtrack too far.
Roamers
- Removed density type “none” from Havoc. This change was made to make the mission feel more oppressive with less chances for breaks.
Dev Note: Density type decides on how many roamers we spawn in a given area during regular and Auric missions.
- Changed spawn population of roamers to be more balanced between melee and ranged, instead of being primarily one or the other.
Dev Note: This change will on average lower the spawn amount of gunner-esque enemies by 20%; this change is subject to be introduced during regular and Auric missions depending on the reception.
Specials
- Increased coordinated strike and surge frequency.
General
- Increased Havoc Challenge rating.
Dev Note: Challenge rating is a rough measure of the "challenge" the players are encountering, this value is part of defining the allowed limits of enemies spawned concurrently.
Miscellaneous
- Mission accept/reject popup for Havoc missions will now show chevrons that indicate how many rankups you will gain for your own Havoc order if successful.
Quality of Life Change for Havoc
Party Finder Notification Change
When the player is in a mission, the party finder invite popups are replaced by notifications that no longer block gameplay.
Dev Note: We wanted to give a little extra shout out to Badwindt on nexusmods.com for pointing us in the right direction! When we were looking to implement a fix for this, the mod gave us an idea of where to look.
Quality of Life Changes
DLSS 4 Support Added to Darktide
Support for DLSS 4 has been added, featuring Multi Frame Generation for GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics cards. This technology generates up to three times more frames per traditionally rendered frame, significantly boosting FPS. Additionally, DLSS 4 offers faster single Frame Generation with lower memory usage for both RTX 50 and 40 Series. Additionally users can now choose between the CNN model or the new Transformer model for DLSS Super Resolution on all GeForce RTX graphics cards.
Class Changes
Ogryn Talent Tree Rework
Our favorite Abhuman is getting his Talent Tree revamped! We had a few clear goals we wanted to achieve with the rework that all boiled down to one point: Providing more Build opportunities.
We released a dev blog about the Ogryn Talent Tree changes and since then we’ve made a few more tweaks. You can read about them in full on our website.
Don’t forget, we partnered with Games Lantern to get the new Ogryn Talent Tree up on their build simulator so players can test out their new builds.
Weapon Balance Changes & Tweaks
In this update, we are addressing some of the outliers in the Darktide arsenal, whether over or under-performing.
We approached this objective by tweaking values, but also by adding new features and attack chains, or by shifting the power budget of the weapons, with the goal of giving each of them clear strengths and weaknesses.
In all cases, we made sure that the fantasy of each weapon was maintained or even reinforced by the changes.
Blessing Description Updates
Dev Note: We have changed the underlying system which is used to present the values used in Weapon Blessings. It will now pull values directly from the data used for the Blessing, instead of these values being hard coded separately.
What this means for you as players is that nothing has changed. But there might be instances of Blessings that look like they have been rebalanced now. In reality, it means that the Blessings will be showing the values that are defined in the game code. This is purely a visual change.
Known Issue from Nightmares & Visions
- There is an issue with Psyker’s talent “Mettle” where the game client will crash if the talent reaches 31 stacks of movement speed buff.
Dev Note: This will be fixed with Hotfix #63 (1.7.1).
Thank you for reading about our latest update, Nightmares & Visions. We’ve worked hard on this update for our community. It’s exciting to finally be able to share it with all of you.
And this is only the beginning of what we’ve got in store for you this year.
We’ll see you on the Mourningstar.
– The Darktide Team
