Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Clem's Cleave Clownhouse

Clownhouse Introduction

Darktide blasts dudes good and with understanding the mechanics the game does not document for you, you can blast even better.

Enemies have hit points (HP), and weapons deal damage to those hit points, and when the HP goes to zero, the enemy is dead. This guide isn't worried about that part.

When a shot or stab hits an enemy, a setting on each weapon for the attack's cleave is compared to the target's hit mass in a function to see if the shot keeps going: this is the guide's major concern. More bullet cleave means more blasting per bullet, and melee weapon cleave means bigger knifery.

Similarly, shots have an Impact rating separate from their damage. If the impact is bigger than the target's stagger resistance by enough of a threshold defined by enemy, you can get one of many types of stagger and knock folks around. This part of the guide is a work in process.

Strength increases increase weapon power which increases damage, cleave, and impact. Blessings and talents can increase strength and other guides cover what those do.

Cleave, The Basics

Short version is weapons have cleave values built in and enemies have hit mass values and your attacks go through dudes with hit mass reducing your cleave until the cleave value hits zero. E.g. if you have 11.7 cleave on a Power Sword charged attack and enemies have 1.5 hit mass you can get 8 dudes in one swing (7 * 1.5 = 10.5 leaving 1.2 left and so the 8th guy brings it to 0)

Melee Weapons have a separate cleave damage distribution (ranged just does full damage) and so different attacks distribute damage across targets different - even if you have a bunch of cleave you might only damage 2-3 targets on a big heavy strikedown attack with the main target having 100% damage and the second/third targets getting 25% while a sweeping vanguard attack might go 100/75/50/33/25 with the remainder getting 25% - eviscerators are notable because they have huge cleave but can only damage 4 targets per swing - the rest get stagger. These can be found in the weapons damage settings profiles in the source code.

Brutal Momentum ignores the step down in damage and you do full damage to the next guy because the step down gets ignored because of the weak spot kill and that's why it does great clear because all the dudes are getting first hit damage.

Carapace armor stops cleave cold unless you have a source of ignoring the attack stopping property of super_armor. Those are rarer - see Sunder, Plasma Gun, Perfect Strike, Unstoppable Force blessings.

Staggering a dude will reduce hit mass by 25% to 50% and you can cleave harder so Impact blessings can indirectly help cleave.

If you're curious what the hit masses are for dudes it's in the source code here and varies by difficulty on the mooks (the mooks also have a special setting for if they're in the pox gas which increases their hit mass):

scripts/settings/difficulty/minion_difficulty_settings.lua

If you're curious what the cleave values are for different gun functions it's also in the code for each weapon profile, and it's messy to list them all, so we'll get to that part in a later section.

Cleave, The Manyfold Kinds

Cleave is a property assigned to a weapon damage profile. Cleave can be a weapon stat too and the percentage roll of it will determine where on the spectrum it lands - 80% roll on a single_cleave weapon would be 1.6 cleave while a 70% roll would be 1.4.

Damage cleave and impact/stagger cleave are separate values on each weapon - a weapon can damage less people than it staggers, for example.

The base type can be found in the source code at:

scripts/settings/damage/damage_profile_settings.lua

A weapon's particular cleave settings will be found at their damage profile settings. For an autogun, it'd look like this:

scripts/settings/equipment/weapon_templates/autoguns/settings_templates/autogun_damage_profile_templates.lua

The different base cleave types look like this:

damage_profile_settings.no_cleave=

{attack={0.001,0.001},impact={0.001,0.001},}

damage_profile_settings.single_cleave=

{attack={1,2},impact={1,2},}

damage_profile_settings.single_plus_cleave=

{attack={1,3},impact={1,3},}

damage_profile_settings.double_cleave=

{attack={2,4},impact={2,4},}

damage_profile_settings.light_cleave=

{attack={3,6},impact={3,6},}

damage_profile_settings.medium_cleave=

{attack={4,9},impact={4,9},}

damage_profile_settings.large_cleave=

{attack={5.5,10.5},impact={5.5,10.5},}

damage_profile_settings.big_cleave=

{attack={8.5,12.5},impact={8.5,12.5},}

damage_profile_settings.fold_cleave=

{attack={2.5,2.5},impact={2.5,2.5},}

Hit Mass, The Basics

Each enemy has a hit mass value that affects your stabbery, and what that hit mass is is affected by the difficulty setting and whether or not there's the Tox Bomber gas in play.

These values can be found in the source code under the file scripts/settings/difficulty/minion_difficulty_settings.lua.

chaos_beast_of_nurgle = 20

chaos_daemonhost = 20

chaos_hound = 4

chaos_hound_mutator = 2

chaos_ogryn_bulwark = 12.5

chaos_ogryn_executor = 12.5

chaos_ogryn_gunner = 12.5

chaos_plague_ogryn = 20

chaos_poxwalker_bomber = 2.5

chaos_spawn = 20 cultist_berzerker = 4

cultist_captain = 20

cultist_flamer = 2

cultist_grenadier = 2

cultist_gunner = 4

cultist_mutant = 10

cultist_mutant_mutator = 8

cultist_shocktrooper = 2 renegade_berzerker = 10

renegade_captain = 20

renegade_executor = 10

renegade_flamer = 2

renegade_flamer_mutator = 2

renegade_grenadier = 2

renegade_netgunner = 3

renegade_plasma_shocktrooper = 4

renegade_sniper = 2

renegade_twin_captain = 4

renegade_twin_captain_two = 4

Mook NameThreat 1Threat 2Threat 3Threat 4Threat 5Pox Gaschaos_newly_infected 1111.251.251.25chaos_poxwalker1.251.251.251.51.51.5chaos_armored_infected 1.51.51.51.51.52.5cultist_assault1.751.751.751.751.752.5cultist_melee2.52.52.52.52.53renegade_assault1.51.51.51.51.52.5renegade_gunner444448renegade_melee3.53.53.53.53.54renegade_rifleman1.51.51.51.51.52renegade_shocktrooper222226

The calculation for how hit mass is consumed in an attack can be found in this part of the source code:

scripts/utilities/attack/hit_mass.lua

Impact And Stagger, The Basics

Impact is a function of the gun power. It has different multipliers based on the armor type it's hitting, bonuses from blessings and talents, and strength bonuses. Each enemy type has a stagger resistance rating which is a multiple on how hard you need to impact them to hit a stagger threshold. Each type of weapon impact can do different categories of stagger, some of which are easier to hit the big stagger animations. If an enemy has stagger reduction, it'll be baked into an animation or state of being. This is in their "breed" settings.

To find the stagger categories by weapon type, they're in this chunk of the source code:

scripts/settings/damage/stagger_settings.lua

The stagger calculation is performed in:

scripts/utilities/attack/stagger_calculation.lua

To look at a enemy's settings for stagger thresholds and their stagger reduction, the folder to look in is this:

scripts/settings/breed/breeds

For example, ragers are easy to stagger normally and when they're attacking they have 50 stagger reduction and ranged attacks have to stagger 20 harder - this is in their breed LUA. Instead of flinching at 1 stagger you'd need to hit them with 71 ranged stagger or 51 melee stagger to get them to sit down.

Many weapon special attacks ignore enemy stagger reduction so they're good for busting through stagger resistance.

Default Stagger Thresholds look like this:

stagger_settings.default_stagger_thresholds = {

[stagger_types.light] = 1,

[stagger_types.medium] = 10,

[stagger_types.heavy] = 20,

[stagger_types.explosion] = 40,

[stagger_types.light_ranged] = 5,

[stagger_types.sticky] = 0.25,

[stagger_types.electrocuted] = 0.25,

[stagger_types.killshot] = 2,

[stagger_types.shield_block] = 0.25,

[stagger_types.shield_heavy_block] = 5,

[stagger_types.shield_broken] = 10,

[stagger_types.wall_collision] = 0.25,

[stagger_types.blinding] = 0.25,

Staggered enemies consume less hit mass when you blast them so you can cleave crowds better. I don't have a source code cite for the amount and testing in the Psykhanium shows it's about 50% less hit mass consumed.

Weapon Notes: Ranged Weapons

Ranged weapon cleave is the fun kind: the more it goes through people the better because it keeps all the damage.

Weapons that cleave then explode like the Bolter bolts will do full damage until they stop cleaving at which point they explode. Bolt pistol used to have no cleave and now it goes through 2.0 hit mass.

Plasma Guns can stagger Mutants on headshot critical hit which is neat. Light shots have 3 cleave and charged heavies do 100.

Most ranged weapons don't have a Cleave Targets stat so they default to 50% of the cleave for their damage profile.

Most hitscan guns are single_cleave so they go through 1.5 hit mass (50% between 1 and 2) and thus 2 groaners or 1 poxwalker on Damnation.

The Heavy Accatran Recon Lasgun and the Heavy Infantry and Braced Autoguns (Agripinaa pattern) have better cleave (double_cleave) so they blast folks better.

Psyker 100% cleave on peril talent does affect ranged weaponry which is enough to get a Zarona revolver to blast through Maulers and Bulwarks though Crusher carapace still stops the attack.

Weapon Notes: Melee Weapons

Weapon blessings and talents and strength that boost cleave will affect both the damage and impact cleave amounts. The amount of damage that passes through is based on each weapon's damage profile setting which hooks into the lerp tables for the damage stepdown.

Weapon damage profile settings can be found:

scripts/settings/equipment/weapon_templates/

Lerp tables for stepdown can be found:

scripts/settings/damage/damage_profile_settings.lua

It's easier to use a damage calculator to see how much damage passes through on a given melee attack than to look at the individual moves and their attack and stagger step downs because it's long - a community damage calculator is linked at the end of the guide.

In general, if you boost cleave super high, your impact will be more notable than the damage because of the step downs. Strikedown attacks tend to only damage 2-3 targets, while vanguard attacks can attack many. Test in the Psykhanium how your favorite feels!

Sources And Methods

While much time was spent in the Psykhanium punching dudes to confirm cleave data, it's important to cite sources, like the Darktide Source Code repository here:

https://github.com/Aussiemon/Darktide-Source-Code

This repository is regularly updated with each patch and if you ever need the latest numbers, this is where to go diving.

There's a community damage calculator that pulls from the source code where you can easily see your cleave values by attack type and how they're affected by strength. As of Oct. 2024 it's still on patch 1.4.0 (game is on patch 1.5.3 as of guide writing time) so check the version of the calculator on the top left to confirm which version of the data is being worked with.

https://dt.wartide.net/calc/

The Darktide page on GamesLantern has a lot of nifty data, builds and pictures, so if you want basic enemy stats (not modified by difficulty) this page is a good starter:

https://darktide.gameslantern.com/enemies

Bonus Content: Damnation Builds

In case you were wanting to run builds similar to what I do on threat 5 and Auric, they can be found on the GamesLantern community builds section here for all 5 classes.

https://darktide.gameslantern.com/user/clemcuddlecakes

What's Next

As Darktide continues to get patched by Fatshark, this guide will be updated with the latest and greatest in clowning around. Past Unlocked and Loaded update in October 2024, the sky's the limit!

If people want to see a particular topic that isn't covered and want more detail, leave comments!

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3350231553

Clem's Cleave Clownhouse