Darktide basics and breakdowns
Definitions
Coherency - Each party member has an aura, it is in a circular shape and typically each class has a buff if you are within it. This is also how you regenerate toughness. If you are not near your teammates you will not regen at all and just small amounts based on talent choices.
Wounds - This equals the number of health bars your character has, which also equals how many times you can be knocked down. Once these run out and you get knocked down you just die. Especially if you have corruption (Purple on health bars).
Toughness - This is your shield and it is the line shown above your health bar. The best way it is regenerated is through coherency, if you are out on your own and away from your party you are likely going to take a lot of damage quickly unless you are king shit. Some perks/blessings/talents can help regenerate this but it's not as effective as staying with your party.
Stamina - This is pretty much what it says. This affects your sprint speed, dodging, ability to block and ability to block-push. This value changes based on the weapons you are using (how heavy or large they are) and more can be gained with curios. This is especially important if you run up to push a pox-burster away and you are completely out of stamina, you gonna die.
There are many more but I don't have time to look them up right now and get the explanation just right (Finesse, Rending, Brittleness, etc.) but these are your basics. Fatshark doesn't do a good job explaining anything in this game to you, people have taken it upon themselves to figure it out with testing.
Leveling
Difficulties
Leveling up is kind of shit, but the point is to teach you the combat basics and how to deal with specific enemy types. Start on a lower value until you feel confident to move up to the next tier. If you're bored step it up but I wouldn't go over a level 4 (Heresy I think) until you hit higher levels. I do not recommend going into a damnation until 25+. At lower levels you are a guaranteed 1 hit kill and it will take 10+ swings to kill basic enemies. You're doing nothing but dragging your team down.
Weapons and crafting as you level
As you level you want to always equip the highest level item you can. This will help you tremendously in combat, the higher level the item the more damage it does and the more blessings and perks you get on the weapon. As well as how much the blessings and perks add to damage or defenses.
The basic weapon/gear colors are as follows.
Grey - Base level (No perks or blessings).
Green - 1 perk 0 blessings.
Blue - 1 perk 1 blessing.
Purple - 2 perks 1 blessing.
Orange - 2 perks 2 blessings.
Weapon Selling and Crafting
You basically want to sell any items with no blessings on them as you level (Greys/Greens). Once you start getting to a point where you are getting weapons that need to be removed from inventory with blessings you will want to start ripping the blessings off the items. You can achieve this by going over to Hadron and using the "Earn Blessing" option. This will destroy the item but you now have that blessing in your crafting station for that weapon type (More on this later).
Well how do I know if I have already earned that blessing or not? Look at the blessings on the weapon, if they have a magnifying glass on the icon, then you do not own that blessing yet. Sometimes you will have to make hard decisions on which blessing to keep if it's an orange item. Best bet here is search the net for which you should take, most are trash at the moment. Below is an image of the magnifying glass on a blessing.
If you sell everything you will be out blessings which will affect your ability to roll good weapons in end game, this really screwed us early adopters because crafting wasn't in at launch so we are having to play a lot to try and find blessings. You can go months without getting a blessing you need.
Do note that blessings are only saved in your crafting bank for that character, it is not cross progression.
Weapon/Curio Levels
Each item has a item level, there is a max these levels can be so be on the look out for items in the shop with these base levels. They do pop up quite frequently and I will show an image of both below with where the item level is located.
You will also notice there are different levels to the perks and blessings (1 through 4), 4 is obviously the best and it will affect the final level of your weapon or curio.
Weapon Max Base - 380
Curio Max Base - 80
Crafting Breakdown
First and foremost you should not be spending any of your crafting materials until you are max level. The difficulty in getting the mats is so time consuming and depends on the win rate of your games. If you're pugging this can be a frustrating experience so you want to bank them as much as you can. I wouldn't recommend spending any crafting supplies until you are getting 360+ weapons and 65+ curious.
Items that drop are often based on the difficulty of the game mode and your overall weapon/curio rating. Often it's shit items but you may get a good blessing off them or something you wanted to try out.
There are two types of crafting materials, one is used more than the other and of course the one that isn't used as much rains from the sky. It's best to pick all of these up, Fat Shark will likely make it where you can convert Diamantine to Plasteel in the future. These materials can be found throughout the maps in boxes, corners, hidden nooks etc.
Plasteel (Used the most, hardest to find)
Diamantine (Used the least, easiest to find)
Crafting basics
You can roll up a grey item to an orange and get random blessings and perks, however, this costs a lot of materials and I don't recommend it unless you are just swimming in mats. Sometimes you have to, but best is to wait for something already orange and use your mats to swap out blessings and perks. Leveling up weapons is very basic and I will not go over it. Spend mats, go to next tier until orange is reached.
Lets say you have a really good orange but you're not happy with the blessings or perks. You are allowed to swap out 2 items, however, once these items are swapped out they other two items become locked in and cannot be changed. This means you can either change both blessings, both perks or one of each. Choose wisely. If you look above on the revolver I posted you can see the two locked symbols signifying what has been locked into place. Do keep in my I am still free to change the other 2 unlocked blessings/perks as I see fit for a crafting material cost.
The blessings you are able to choose from are the ones you have ripped off other weapons of the same type when you destroyed them. This is why it is important to bank as many as you can as you level up or get them from rewards or the contract vendor. You will sometimes get cockblocked on a level 4 blessings for months or years depending on your luck in the RNG.
Weapon stats, Loadouts and Weapon variance
Weapon variance
Many weapons may have several variants, these variants will typically have different attributes to how they work and their effectiveness in combat as well as your playtsyle and loadout. Do not think that these are all the same. They will typically have variances in swing pattern, what they are best at (specialists, horde clear, anti-armor, etc.). If you find a weapon you like write it down or if you're memory is good enough remember it. We getting old and they use some annoying Mk variants that may get confusing as the catalog grows.
Many weapons will have different sprint speed costs, stamina costs, dodge costs, etc. This can greatly affect your loadout and your ability to play the way you like. If you're getting screwed running out of stamina you better start stacking stamina regen or + stamina on your curious.
Loadouts
Your loadout should always be able to solve at least two problems in a basic sense.
1. Horde Clear
2. Specialist Killer
If you do not have these two basics covered you are going to drag your team down and make it difficult for the overall win wasting 30-40 mins of your time and getting almost nothing for it. The game is punishing on loses so it encourages you to bring your best in order to succeed and makes the win that much more satisfying.
You typically need one weapon for horde clear and one weapon for taking out specials or killing bosses (Boss killer is niche unless you are running assassin build zealot which takes care of specials or you are doing a specific mission with tons of boss spawns). Figure this out and you're already a step closer to victory.
Weapon Stats
Weapon stats are very important on some weapons. Fat Shark is still balancing a lot of items that feel lackluster and doing a pretty good job, but there are still several that just bad unless you have specific blessings and perks. If you get a new weapon and you're not sure what to do with it just start searching on the internet to find your answer. Some still just suck and may have to be shelved until a future patch.
Weapon Testing
Behind Hadron there is a room that allows you to enter the Psycharium (Spelling). This will allow you to test your weapons and builds on every enemy type and you will be able to see damage numbers to see what is working and what doesn't. For instance, the MK V Axe does triple the damage on regular hits versus heavy attacks, I would not have known this had I not gone to test things out. This is a great place to test out weapons before you spend crafting mats on them as well to see if it's something you even like.
There are tons of youtube build guides out there as well as build guides
HERE, they also have a talent calc for you to play with and experiment with.
Contracts and The vendors
Contracts will be something you unlock around 15 I think. These are weekly tasks that give you a currency to buy things off of the store. It's really good for getting starting base orange items as well as blessings you are missing. This store resets on Daily at 7 CST and contracts reset weekly on Sunday at 7 CST. The items in this store are purchased with the currency earned from the contracts.
The rotating Armory store resets at the top of the hour. You can use a webstore plugin to see what's on this store to see if you need to login to buy that sweet 380 that popped up. It can be found
HERE. If the link doesn't work it's called "armoury exchange" on chrome webstore. The items in this store are purchased with money earned from missions.
Lastly, do not attack demonhosts, they sit on the ground and they will fuck your shit up and you need a coordinated group to take one out. If you pull it on accident it will kill 2 people and vanish unless you can kill it and they are quite tanky. The only two classes that I know that can tank them are the Ogryn with it's shield and a zealot with the combat blade. During this fight your health will constantly be corrupted until the demonhost is disposed of.
it will ruin your run so steer clear until you have a competent group to kill it. Note that getting too close to the DH will pull it, shooting it once is okay and will anger it but not pull it. Flashlights will also pull it if you shine it on the DH. If you have to walk near it due to placement, crouch and stay as far away as you can.
Otherwise have fun, keep practicing and kill heretics. I wrote this in haste so it's likely filled with spelling errors and grammar issues, deal with it lol.
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