WH40K: Chaos Gate

Games
#237

Their previous game was : Warhammer 40K: Drop Assault, no? If they came from a MP F2P game, it would not be surprising for them to focus on balance.

Anyway, I agree that these abilities were dominant, and toning them down a little was probably required, but they did a huge amount of collateral damage by:

  • Making Apothecary really bad
  • Nerfing poor Purgators that already struggled to compete with melee characters
  • Removing stun mechanisms entirely until end game (and it is very hard to fix: too much stun rez, as it is now, and you kill opponents before stunning them. Too litlle, and you trivialize end game enemies and can get infinite AP. The best compromise would have been to cap AP IMO).
    which created a lot of angry Steam players.

Because lack of challenge end game is a real issue. But players would probably have complained less about buffed end game opponents instead…

#238

To me, the only reason to nerf abilities in a single-player game is if they are actually bugs, that is, not working as programmed in some way, or if they make many choices irrelevant by being so far and away the best choices as to be the only sane choices. Barring that, I fail to see a downside to letting players build OP characters to stomp their way through the game.

Sure, pacing is important. You don’t want players to under-value things by giving them too much too soon, but once you are a good way into the game there is nothing wrong–and a lot right–with letting players become pretty dominant.

#239

I think that depends on the players. Some would much prefer a challenge to a stomp, and it’s well known that many players are incapable of restricting themselves for the sake of increasing the challenge. Unless it’s built into the game and comes with rewards, anyway, which is why the optional challenge for each mission is such a great feature.

So in other words, it should depend on difficulty level. It sounds easy to just add the words “WP costs are increased” and “WP rewards are decreased” to appropriate difficulty levels, but depending on how the resources are structured that might be a difficult thing to actually implement quickly. But if we’re lucky it’s scheduled for a later patch.

#240

Oh, I’d agree that difficulty levels are the way to go. Also, I’d agree it’s not as easy as it looks. But no matter how you slice it, arbitrarily making a game more frustrating is not the same as making it entertainingly challenging.

#241

So is anyone still playing this post-nerf? I’m curious as to the impact over time.

#242

I have been, but I wasn’t far enough along for it to impact much.

It’s mostly annoying. Like Apothecaries weren’t especially good before, now they get a single heal without levels and upgrades? Wow, super exciting. As I advance it gets better as more options open up, but making the already somewhat annoying early game more annoying is… probably not a great idea.

#243

And no sign of the Devs taking the complaints seriously and consider a revision of the patch? It’s always hard to judge how widespread fan dissatisfaction on something like this is and what sort of impact it will have. I’ve very dissatisfied, and the devs did notice when I posted my negative review, but my one voice is just that.

I’d be perfectly fine with them just rolling back the balance changes full stop, and then indicating they will do a future fix on the stun/AP issue for the highest difficulties (or both at once). But as it is they reduced the most fun stuff and that’s stopping me from giving the game another go.

#244

Patch 4 today with some small fixes and a little reversion of the balancing from last patch.

Still no fix for the infinite construction bug so I have not played it since. They are aware of the bug but no timeline for a fix.

#245

I have, and I find the changes not as bad as players say:
Stun has become almost unusable for me early on, but I could pull it out by casting stun biomancy on someone else then my interceptor, because he kills things too fast, and using a +stun on psybolt bolter and the justicar charge, but it ended up not being very efficient.

The poor apothecary jar been benched since, but now that I have a Paladin, maybe he’ll be able to do it.

My issue is that I’d rather have them cap the AP gains through execution than make it so unwieldly (you cannot stun early, and late game, because opponents will drop before getting stun, and you kind of have too after because opponents have too many HP otherwise).

I still don’t get why they nerfed the Apothecary, which was arguably the weakest of the starting classes. Maybe he can now team with the Paladin to stun buff him, but his issue is that he has no easy way to replenish willpower, and most of his tree does nothing.

Psilencers purgators are still good, but I benched the Psi cannon one, and didn’t miss him after he was gone for good in an event.

#246

I launched this on a whim this morning, I picked it up from Fanatical a few days ago for $38 because every bit of footage I’ve seen (plus @ShivaX is into it and he’s a good barometer for games I’ll enjoy) is very cool. I really like the look. Though I was going to hold off until I got closer to my second Wrath of the Righteous play through wrapping up, I just hit Act 4 there and thought “this might be a good game to bounce back and forth between with” so we’ll see.

Anyway, I just wanted to stop by to talk about the incredible tutorial - I really was blown away by the visuals and sound design, but the gameplay seems really, really good so far. The combat and enemies in just the tutorial were interesting and fun. I am also one that normally turns action cams off completely, but on a whim I set them to “sometimes” and I really am glad I did - they hit really well when they trigger (I don’t think Always would be a good idea though). Great tutorial, cool set piece and a fun way to set up the campaign while quickly teaching the basics.

I also noticed there is a codex/rulebook in the game menu which I really appreciate, as well. I’m excited to dive into this over the weekend and see where it takes me.

#247

I’ll be very interested to see what your arc of play is like. This is a game I really wanted to like but which didn’t click with me at first. I want to get back to it one day when it’s on sale and they’ve finished tweaking it.

#248

Finished my campaign today (on Relentless difficulty).

It’s not usually my preference for games to balance a severely OP player team by throwing loads and loads of enemies at them, but it works well enough here. And it’s nice not to have the XCOM early game where one lucky shot can kill one of your soldiers.

The decreased number of dice rolls (crit chance and power activation are still rolls, and can be very significant) helps to bring the tactics to the fore. Acting against that, it’s still optimal to kill everything on the same turn it activates / spawns if you possibly can. Setting yourself up to do that, a lot of the battles become pretty easy and can feel samey. And then along comes a set-piece story mission and shakes things up significantly. Sometimes that can feel a bit cheap due to effectively changing the rules, but overall the set-pieces are a lot of fun. The final battle in particular is something to be experienced.

I have a number of quibbles with the game (some balance complaints, some irritating bugs, some things not explained particularly well). I’m definitely in the “it should be more difficult” camp, but if it poses interesting tactical questions, I don’t mind too much if there’s little risk of failure. If I play again, I’ll go up to top difficulty and remove all the pre-order / free bonus stuff.

Overall I’m pretty impressed and I’m glad it’s doing well for itself and its relatively small studio. (Full disclosure: received the game for free due to links to the publisher, but I don’t feel under any pressure to write positively about my experience.)

#249

I like this so far. I got this after the balance changes, so I don’t know how the game used to play, but the rarity of the +AP special move seems fine. WH40K: Mechanicus made it too easy to optimize your soldiers into perpetual murder machines and it made the game boring.

Good point, I didn’t miss this at all.

Yeah. I gotta wonder why we’re still doing enemy pod management in 2022. The game has great quality of life features for this – showing you the location of every pod, reloading your weapons and actions after a wipe – but it feels so gamey. I hate leapfrogging my guys closer to a group so I’m in a good position if I accidentally trigger them.

If the developer’s intention is for us to have a series of small battles, why not automate away the crawling across the map? Give me a tactical overworld, reduce the number of rote actions I need to take.

#250

Yeah, that’s something that Chimera Squad did really well.

I guess the real reasons are so you can accidentally trigger another pod when two battles are quite close together, and so the destructible terrain can potentially carry over sensibly from one pod to the next.
It does lead to a lot of gamey moments though.

#251

I presume this is why enemies don’t immediately attack when discovered (it’s not like you have to be in cover for safety). I suppose it might be nice if you could move as a unit, but that would limit your ability to take multiple approaches before a battle starts.

#252

Yeah, but the optimal position is always to have your guys 1 square outside of the line of sight, so they don’t have to waste actions moving up to the fight. Getting them there is busywork.

Like @rho21 said, Chimera Squad’s great about this. One fight is over, here’s your new fight, here are the places you can place your guys, go go go.

#253

I want more Chimera Squad! That was a cool game.

#254

Fairly substantial patch today. They un-nerfed the primary Apothecary healing ability, Battlefield Medicine, which is good. At least on reading the changes, it looks like some steps in a better direction. It’s only steps, maybe undoing 10% to 15% of the harm of the big nerf patch, but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

I’m curious as to impressions following this patch.

#255

Leapfrogging makes sense though, as it is also how soldiers do sometimes progress.

Even after the balance patch, execution chains become a thing again late game, and the second half of the game is way too easy, even in legendary with some luck on the requisitionned items.
With the apothecary stun biomancy and the halberd of AoE force strike, my paladin can AoE stun most pods in two hits.
The pre-order hammer had also been unnerfed to its stun version, and you can find bolters that add stun.

I can destroy all pods in one turn, and the only the threats are the non willpower deeds.

The librarian mass teleport and AoE stun also help a lot on the action economy department.

#256

They should let us select and move all as a unit or click to select and move individual units as needed. Also, let me tab over to a unit after I issue a move order, like I can in Xcom, so I don’t have to watch each character move into place one at a time, is one thing I miss.