Warhammer 40,000: Darktide – Tips & Tricks

Tips & Tricks

Note: Credit goes to Arani

Some of these might be obvious, others might be new.

• Combat Axe V is easily one of the best weapons in the game for any class. I even use it on my psyker. With perks light attacks kill anything except specials + in a single attack (T4-5 difficulties), and heavy attacks kill most specials too.
• Combat Axe push & attack does a massive cleave, and since you can spam that even if you have a tiny bit of stamina, you can hold off and kill a horde including a few specials indefinitely with it for no effort at all! Their special attack also staggers ragers and maniacs guaranteed!
• Speaking of Combat Axes, if you get one with the Brutal Momentum blessing, you will turn this single-target weapon into something that cleaves through everything, making it into one of the strongest anti-horde AND single-target melee weapons in the game!
• Trauma Staff is actually viable, if you maintain it with Warp Charges. It’s the one thing where the feat where you can quench peril without losing speed comes in super handy. You’re effectively firing off small grenades every second or two. Even small explosions are enough to stagger almost anything, while dealing high damage. The big ones stagger even elites and kill basically anything else. Note that the stagger will make hounds useless, and near full charge explosions guarantees a kill on pox bursters!
• The psykers first tier feat that restores toughness when you quench peril, is amazing. It doesn’t just count when you quench it manually, it counts every point that is removed. This means even passive quenching from for example doing melee, or using Psykinetic’s Wrath, will restore your shields.
• Flamer dot seems to have a decay mechanic, and build and stay up as long as you just keep refreshing it. So for example with monstrosities or elites, you can just fire continuously in the start, and then spurt a tiny flame every 5 seconds or so and it will keep burning for max damage for almost no ammo consumption, doing insane dot!
• Brainburst and staves will not explode your psyker as long as you start them at 96 peril or less. So you can just BB, quench under 97, BB again, rinse repeat.
• Ogryn bully club with a bleed toughness build is INSANE. Just spam light + heavy attack, over and over, and you will decimate any number of hordes and specials.
• You can use block to cancel out of a combo, so for example if your weapon’s 1:st heavy attack does insane single target damage, and the second is crowd control, you can just mash the first attack, tap block, repeat, for incredible damage.
• Purgatus primary attack does almost no damage. I see a lot of people spamming it. Its only use is to stagger, but its secondary fire in addition to doing good damage also staggers anything smaller than an elite, sometimes it just takes a while.
• Power Sword’s Power Cycler blessing changes the weapon completely, since it effectively recharges the energized status from every hit. With it you can keep swinging for 15-20 attacks before having to power up again!
• Infantry Autoguns are semi-secretly one of the best off-weapons in the game for melee focused builds. They can snipe from any distance, while also mowing down specials from mid-close range. They’re also quite fast to wield and reload.
• For Kantrael XII and Helbore sniper builds, as long as you’ve got a high damage base weapon, and perked for flak/unarmored dmg, the sniper feat doesn’t seem to hit any breakpoints in T4-5 difficulties. Meaning you can pick the +1 grenade / 60 sec and +8 bleed stacks per nade. These nades have insanely large AoE and popping 2 into any sticky situation will kill 90% of everything in a small delay and severely weaken the elites in there.
• Best defense against dogs is offense. When you hear one coming, position so you have time to fire, and stagger them before they reach you. Because of the server sync issues, singular staggers such as Purgatus staff primary may not work, but if you pair that with Psykinetik’s Wrath the hound will get staggered every time in my experience. Either one alone however may not be enough.
• Unlike VT2, grimoires don’t take a percentage of your health. So the best curios against it are just +hp, with 2-3 of them alone the grim will typically take a fraction of your health, and similarly the slow corruption buildup will have a much smaller effect than before.
• Almost always when a teammate gets trapped in a net, the best course of action is to free them first (it only takes less than a second), then do anything else. The trapper takes an enormous amount of time to reload their weapon. And while you’re chasing after them or killing the mobs around your teammate, everything else is attacking them while they’re defenseless.

More tips:

• Spam Sprint-Slide while carrying things like power cells.
• Throw grenades on fallen mates to revive them in hordes.
• In the contract kill mission all rush and focus the bubble shielded boss at the end and don´t scatter. Throw some heals in the area, ignore the other degenerates and stab away.
• Remember the mission objectives and shortly before entering the areas communicate who presses what with pings instead of everyone running to the same if there are multiple targets.
• Don´t waste time with killing mofos that spawn indefinitely and focus on getting fast through the checkpoints.
• You can shove doggos, suicide bombers and every other thing away but not the roided up banes.
• If you aggro a muscle bro, run around in small circles around props like chairs, chests and other garbage. He keeps running with you but can´t grab you.
• If you somehow couldn´t stay away from the “Witch” and you have at least 2 low hp people, throw them under the bus. The demon will despawn after 2 kills and it just takes 20 sec max. Ofc you can attack him, the one who aggroed can keep running away or a ogryn bro can shield the damage. Just saying.
• Zealot bleed crits are still op and tons of fun.

Lets do some more!

• As a psyker in heresy and higher, don’t just spam brainburst on the same elite 4 times to kill it, even one is enough to stagger them – opening bulwarks to attacks – and soften them significantly. Often the best thing to do when you see multiple elites is to put a BB on each of them, and your team will more than likely take care of the rest.
• Every time you spot a special/elite/monstrosity that you can’t kill yourself almost instantly, tag it. Your team will help you focus it and it will help them with awareness. More than that, it makes headshots 10x easier when you can actually see their outlines.
• Tagging for yourself is also a very good idea. I tend to just spam tag on hordes or suspicious groupings in distance just in case, since that will let me know if there’s any easy to miss specials mixed in there.
• When not immediately obvious to your team, sometimes when you see multiple specials / elites, you might even want to spam tag on all of them to let your team know to get ready for a serious fight with nades and their abilities.
• Never waste precious grenades on common hordes, unless you’ve got excess (veteran grenade regen feat, or a box of nades nearby that needs taking). They are so powerful they can turn a clear defeat into an easy victory. Always try to save at least some for those occasions.
• Counterintuitively, while the zealot charge ult can be interrupted by regular ranged fire, the sniper will miss you even if you charge head on while they’re shooting. At least this has happened to me every time.
• While this may seem obvious, whenever you and a teammate are fighting a bulwark, go to the opposite side to flank him. Many just take them on from the same side, wasting attacks on his shield instead of one of you always hitting his back.
• This might also seem obvious, but NEVER push forward when a horde or a monstrosity is incoming. You don’t need a fight on two fronts. (unless your team is super good).
• Heavy swords have an excellent push block attack snipe – line it up over the head and it kills most things instantly. You can push block attack your way through some nasty ♥.
• When using the DC for crowd control, adding a parry on the second or third attack of your combo almost instantly pays off.
• Check your angles. On many maps you can get some excellent vantage points at enemies guarding tough chokes (like Chasm’s bridge, or the stairs on Silo.
• Blocking and Parrying Traitor Captain’s attacks seem to strongly contribute to shield damage. Countering his attacks more so.
• Always check attack patterns and attack breakdowns.
• The primary damage stats displayed by a weapon are for a body hit on a Maniac – damage varies by type and location of hit.
• Parry works well against Ragers because they attack very often, just time it to the animation.
• Don’t stand next to explosive barrels. Use said barrels to help t ake down tough waves.
• Revolver is a sniper rifle with a revolver skin.