Warhammer 40K Darktide Tips & Tricks [Top 15]

Warhammer 40K Darktide might seem familiar to those who have played Vermintide 2, with many improvements and additions to combat and new-level designs. However, if you’re new to the game, then certain tips and tricks can greatly improve your experience in Warhammer 40K Darktide.

Defeating the hordes of enemies isn’t quite simple in the game; it requires you to know all sorts of little details so that you’re clearing out rooms as efficiently as possible. Not only that, but it’s also useful to know which weapons and damage types are the most useful during combat.

Best Tips For Warhammer Darktide

Here’s a summary of important Tips and Tricks that you should keep in mind:

Tips and Tricks	Description
Allies	Stay close to your teammates to benefit from buffs and faster Toughness regeneration.
Melee Attacks And Toughness	Understand the impact of melee attacks on your Toughness and real health.
Beware Of Surprise Attacks	Be cautious of surprise enemy attacks from locked doors or cleared-out rooms.
Difficulty Levels	Choose mission difficulty levels appropriate to your progress and skill level.
Replaying Missions	Replay missions for XP and experience different scenarios to keep the gameplay fresh.
Weapons	Experiment with various weapons to find your preferred playstyle.
Weapon Ratings	Consider individual weapon stats rather than overall ratings for a more accurate evaluation.
Enemy Types	Learn about different enemy types and their unique behaviors and threats.
The Meat Grinder	Use the Meat Grinder training area to practice with different enemies and weapons.
Understand Corruption	Understand how corruption affects your health and how to manage it.
Healing Methods	Utilize healing terminals and medkits effectively to heal yourself and your team.
Pinging System	Communicate with your team by marking enemies, items, and resources using the pinging system.
Crafting Materials	Save precious crafting materials for late-game weapon upgrades rather than using them early.
Hordes Of Enemies	Deal with hordes of enemies efficiently, using melee weapons and grenades strategically.
Kicking AFK Players	Learn how to initiate a vote to kick AFK players from your strike team to maintain a productive team.

Stick With Your Allies

It’s no secret that Warhammer Darktide is a co-op game, which is why it goes out of its way to ensure you’re actually playing it as a co-op game. That’s why there are certain advantages to sticking with your entire squad.

1. Coherency Buffs: Staying close to your teammates grants you the “Coherency” buff, which varies based on your class. This buff provides benefits like free ammo, increased melee speed, or enhanced elite damage. These buffs can significantly boost your effectiveness in combat.
2. Faster Toughness Regeneration: Proximity to your allies allows your “Toughness” (shield) to regenerate more quickly. This shield is vital for absorbing damage and keeping you in the fight.
3. Safety in Numbers: Moving away from your squad should be reserved for specific tasks like looting or collecting items. Otherwise, staying together ensures that you can support each other and respond to threats more effectively.

Melee Attacks And Toughness

In Darktide, your Toughness acts as a shield that absorbs damage before affecting your actual health.

However, there’s a unique aspect to consider:

• Toughness blocks all types of damage until it’s depleted.
• Ranged attacks won’t affect your health until Toughness is depleted.
• Melee attacks can deplete your Toughness and directly damage your health.

Therefore, it’s essential to either avoid melee damage whenever possible or keep a close watch on your actual health, as it can become dangerously low even if your Toughness is still intact.

Beware Of Surprise Attacks

Enemies love to get a sneaky hit on you in games to reduce your health bit by bit. That is quite common in Darktide, and knowing when to expect them is quite important.

• As mentioned, melee damage cannot just reduce your Toughness but also your health, so it is important that you avoid melee flanks from your enemies.
• The most obvious solution is to check your six constantly. But the game also loves throwing enemies at you from locked doors, bunk beds, or an already cleared-out room.
• Remaining cautious around such areas will ensure that you don’t needlessly lose your health.

Difficulty Levels

Warhammer Darktide offers five mission difficulty levels to choose from, and here’s when to consider advancing to the next difficulty:

1. Level One (Starting Point): Begin with these missions to learn the game’s mechanics, looting system, and gear upgrading. Most enemies are relatively weak.
2. Level Two (Uprising, Around Levels 10-13): Move to this difficulty tier when you have a solid grasp of your character’s Feats and gear.
3. Level Three (Malice, Level 20 or Higher): Transition to Malice difficulty for missions once you’ve reached level 20 or above. These missions yield more XP and gold rewards.
4. Level Four (Heresy) and Level Five (Damnation): These levels are challenging, with enemies capable of killing you quickly. Reserve them for when you and your squad are at max level and have mastered the game’s combat system.

Replaying Missions

Besides just knowing which mission difficulty you should tackle, you need to consider the replayability of certain missions as well to make grinding much easier.

• Replaying missions is a great way to grind for XP, especially if you’re not ready to tackle the higher-level missions yet.
• If you’re the type of player who gets bored of repetition and grinding, then worry not, as Darktide tends to come up with different scenarios when you replay a mission so that it feels fresh and not repetitive.

Try Out Different Weapons

There are many weapons in the game, and trying out as many of them as possible will give you a great idea of what suits your playstyle better.

• Don’t stick to weapons that might seem specific or complimentary to your operative class, as sometimes some random weapon can surprisingly be quite powerful.
• The Armory refreshes every hour with new gear, which is why you should check it out almost every time in-between missions.

Weapon Ratings Can Be Deceiving

Speaking of trying out different weapons, one way to know whether a weapon is great or not is by looking at its overall rating. Ideally, a weapon with a higher rating might be great, but that doesn’t seem to be set in stone. Here are a few tips and tricks regarding weapon ratings in Warhammer 40K Darktide to ensure you’re choosing the right weapons.

• Sometimes, a weapon with a higher rating might not be better than a weapon with a lower rating because the rating is a culmination of all of the stats.
• A weapon could have higher points on a stat that you might not often use, such as mobility, which could make it rate higher than a weapon with relatively more damage.
• Therefore, while choosing a weapon, look at its individual stats in order to determine whether you should swap it out for your current weapon or completely ditch it. Certain stats might complement your feats which is also something worth considering.

Know Your Enemy Types

Understanding enemy types is crucial for success in the game. Here are some notable enemy types to be aware of:

1. Pox Hound: This enemy targets isolated party members and traps them until another member comes to help. Dodge its pounce or eliminate it quickly when you hear its howling.
2. Scab Sniper: A challenging enemy that maintains distance and can snipe you within seconds once it has you in its sights. Consider sniping it or using cover to close the distance rapidly.
3. Ogryn: A recurring boss that can absorb many attacks. Play strategically by focusing on defense when it targets you and on offense when it’s distracted by your party members.

The Meat Grinder

Knowing about the enemies and different weapons is great. But sometimes, you need a place to actually practice properly without worrying about the consequences of failure. That’s where the Meat Grinder comes in handy.

• The Meat Grinder is a training area where you can equip and try out all sorts of enemies.
• You can also test your weapons on different enemy types to determine the best tactic to deal with those specific enemies.
• The Meat Grinder gets unlocked after you reach Trust Level 2, and you can unlock more enemies there as you level up.

Understand Corruption

Understanding certain fundamental mechanics of the game is important so that you don’t have difficulty later on. Corruption is one of those mechanics that can be quite tricky if you don’t properly understand it.

• Corruption is essentially the purple damage on your health bar, which locks away that part of your health, reducing overall health.
• You can only regain that portion of your health by visiting health terminals; med kits will have no effect on them.
• One thing you must be careful about is that corruption can spread and block off more of your health if you get downed during combat.
• Therefore, try to remain on the defense until you reach a medical terminal to ensure the corruption doesn’t spread further.

Different Healing Methods

In the last tip and trick for Warhammer 40K Darktide, we mentioned corruption and how it can only be healed through a healing terminal. Well, it is important to actually understand the different methods of healing in the game so you can make the most out of them.

• The most efficient method of healing in Darktide is by using medical terminals that you’ll find throughout the levels.
• Unfortunately, healing is finite, and you cannot keep using the terminals, so it is important to prioritize who should get healed first in your party, such as someone with corruption.
• You can make the healing from a terminal more effective by inserting a power source in it.
• Another method of healing is through the use of medkits which heals anyone in its vicinity, which is another great reason why you should stick close to your teammates.

Use The Pinging System

Communication is vital in co-op games, especially Darktide, where the items that you come across are scarce, and your own inventory can be quite limiting.

1. Enemy Awareness: Use pings to mark enemies, making them visible and highlighted for your teammates. This helps everyone concentrate their fire on a single threat, making encounters more manageable.
2. Resource Sharing: In situations where your inventory is full or limited, mark resources like health packs or ammo. Teammates with available slots can then carry these items for later use. This ensures that valuable resources don’t go to waste and keeps your team well-prepared.
3. Item Identification: Pinging can also be handy for identifying items of interest, such as weapons, equipment, or objectives. Sharing information about important items helps your team stay organized and make informed decisions.

Save Your Crafting Materials

Crafting is a huge part of Darktide, especially if you want to ensure that your gear is upgraded and ready to take on the higher leveled threats. But knowing when to use and when to save your materials is quite important.

• Using your crafting materials on a weapon, specifically Plasteel and Diamantine early on can be quite wasteful because you’ll eventually find a weapon that might be overall better than your current weapon.
• Instead, you should hold on to such materials till you reach at least level 25 or 30, as by then, you’ll have a weapon that you can take all the way to the endgame by upgrading it with the precious materials.

Hordes Of Enemies

Co-op games are never about taking out specific enemies or just a small group of enemies. You eventually run into a huge horde of enemies that require you to be smart and tackle them as efficiently as possible.

• Try not to use your ranged weapons when the hordes of enemies are close distance to you, as you’ll just be wasting your ammo trying to take them all out.
• Instead, try relying on your melee weapons to perform sweeps and target multiple enemies with one attack.
• If you find yourself getting surrounded, you can use a high-stamina melee weapon to shove enemies aside or use dodge to get out of the way. Dodging works slightly more efficiently if you have your melee weapon out instead.
• Additionally, grenades can take out a huge portion of the horde.

Kicking AFK Players

When you’re playing with strangers online, there is bound to be a player that goes AFK. Sometimes it is all right to wait for them as they might have something to tend to. But if they remain AFK for too long and you can’t wait long enough for the idle timer to kick them out, there is an alternative way to get rid of them.

• By going into the social tab in the menu, you can find your strike team on the left side.
• From there, select the player that you’d like to kick and vote to kick them from the Strike Team.
• All other members also have to vote to kick until the player actually gets kicked out.

With that, you know some of the best tips and tricks related to Warhammer 40K Darktide in order to make the most out of your gameplay and defeat enemies more effectively. If you keep the basics in mind and play the game as intended through co-op, then you won’t have any difficulties reaching the high ranks of Darktide! 

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