Warhammer 40,000: Darktide – Ultimate Melee Combat Guide

This is a good guide for beginners and mildly seasoned players of Darktide looking to really understand exactly what is going on in melee so they can master those systems and stop crumpling immediately under any pressure.

A Field Guide to Proper Melee Combat

All credit goes to Error302!

Dodge

Dodging is the single most important skill to master in tide games.

The in-game tutorial really does not go over all of the things dodging does for you or how to really get the most out of it. all weapons have a “dodge limit” usually governed by the mobility or defences statistic. more dodges is always better. maximizing dodge count should always be a high priority.

Dodges take a second of not dodging to recharge, and dodging also halts your stamina regen for a second. when you run out of dodges you can still dodge, but they will be substantially less effective at actually moving you out of the way of danger, and will have considerably longer delay between each dodge. Consider getting “NumericUI” as this will show you your current dodge count so you can really see the difference when you’re out of dodges and dodging into the negatives. At 100% +2 (so if you have 4 dodges, then at -6, or your 10th consecutive dodge) you cap out and your dodges just don’t get any worse.

When you dodge enemy tracking is broken, and for many attacks you are effectively unhittable for a fraction of a second. This is called “dodge state”. Enemies track you with their attacks. If an enemy has initiated any kind of attack directed at you, it WILL hit you, unless you initiate a dodge sometime between when the enemy commits to the attack “telegraphs it,” and when the attack arrives. You cannot simply “step out of the way” of any enemy attack, it must be a dodge, or otherwise put you in dodge state.

You can extend dodges by crouching during the dodge, this will convert your dodge into a slide, and sliding makes you immune to ranged, but not melee. Slide dodging can also be used to “launch” yourself off of higher ground to go fast. Extending dodges this way costs and additional dodge. Slide dodging is also extremely useful for closing the distance to shooters of all kinds, turn yourself sideways to your target, and slide dodge towards them, evading their volley and getting you much closer to melee range.

“Spot dodging” occurs when you dodge into geometry (like a wall). the game considers you moving for the purposes of dodge state when this happens, even though you don’t go anywhere, however some attacks can still catch you in this state (mauler/crusher overheads). Consider using the mod “keep dodging” so you can just hold down the dodge button to dodge as soon as the game will let you as fast as it will let you.

Staggering

Most human size enemies are vulnerable to stagger from normal hits from any melee and especially being pushed, however bruisers have more hit mass and you may have trouble staggering a lot of them at once with a sweep and may need to push to reliably stagger them. Nurgle blessed (stinky) enemies have a green aura and will not stagger unless you have stagger boosting blessings or talents, or hit them with something special.

Hordes tend to file in as a trickle before they turn into a wall. This can be a problem since as you start hacking away at the first ones, stagger locking them with each strike, new ones can file in with their lunging attacks and interrupt your combo, causing you to suffer hit stuns, lose toughness, get hit by additional attacks because yours didn’t go through to continue the stagger lock, and generally just eat ****. It is important to keep an eye and an ear out for new additions to the pile of enemies, and make sure you hit them before they hit you, or push them with the rest of the crowd to get everyone on the same page again.

Pay attention to the sound cues of incoming attacks and consider getting the mod “spidey sense” so you can have reliable visual indications of the alert sounds the game is SUPPOSED TO (but very frequently fails to) play to alert you to incoming attacks. Hordes want to surround you. Enemies to the left and right will happily go right around you and start hitting you in the back if you let them, it is therefore important to “manage” the horde by keeping it in a somewhat tidy shape through sweeps and pushes, making sure none of them slip by you to start hitting you in the side or back. this is extremely important as enemies to your side can physically block you, and if you suddenly need to dodge a trapper net and there’s a poxie in your way, you are in for a bad time.

Pushing is incredibly important for everyone. it’s not just for dogs and bursters, although it is absolutely vital for that. Pushing a group of enemies will cause all of them to stagger, and give you time to wind up a nice heavy to cleave through them, initiating your good stagger locking/horde management combo. please note that while most human size enemies are extremely vulnerable to pushes and heavy hits, muties, ragers, maulers, ogryns, and bosses will not really give a **** and you will need to dodge their attacks, maybe block, or potentially, use something special.

If you can dodge far enough back you can absolutely disengage the enemy from melee, turn and sprint away to potentially gain more ground, or use something special to knock them down and retreat to a better position, but actually engaging melee elites in melee is going to require some very well timed dodging, and some moderately special equipment or talents or combos to hit them hard enough to get them staggered and under control. crushers especially have stagger immunity after being staggered, so try not to be out of dodges when they start winding up their overhead, wait for it to start coming down and dodge!

Maulers, ragers, and crushers are the big ticket melee threats and are pretty tough to engage with in honorable melee combat. Ragers are especially difficult to stun and will just combo you down, quickly eating through your block, stunning you and taking huge chunks out of your health. Maulers and crushers have powerful overhead attacks that cannot be blocked and can crush your entire health bar in one hit. It can be very tempting to just spam dodge when these guys are walking towards you, menacingly, but unless you have something you can pull out and nuke them down with from range before they get back within melee distance, you’re just going to end up having to engage them in melee with no dodges or stamina.

To be honest the best strategy for maulers, and ragers especially, is to just shoot them. I would not engage ragers in melee without knowing exactly how to use that weapon to stagger them, and even then only if i can fight them one at the time… or if i’m an ogryn.

Blocking

Generally speaking you don’t want to block. Blocking takes stamina, and blocking an attack with insufficient stamina will cause a hit stun. Pushing is generally preferred, but if the enemy cannot be pushed (maulers, ragers, crushers, bosses) and you’re not able to get to a safe distance, blocking while you move can save your life. Reflect on the minor error that got you into that situation and move on with surviving.

If you cannot confidently dodge every attack, and you cannot reliably stagger the enemy, you should absolutely block them, even if that means eating the stun.

Blocking is omnidirectional but costs much more stamina to block attacks behind you, so try not to turn your back on things you need to block like ragers and bosses. Blocking also resets your combo. So if for example, you just wanted to throw heavy 1 on a weapon all day long, you can heavy attack, block for just a moment, repeat.

Push Attacks

Holding the attack button after pushing does a push attack, push attacks are very often very good and worth doing, often even above a weapons normal moveset. You’ll have to learn what each individual weapon’s push attack is and when best to use it, different marks within the same category usually have different push attacks. Consider these a way to burn off excess stamina to get more value out of each moment of melee combat.

Special Attacks

Special attacks on weapons are very unique and very situational, some offer a low damage attack that can be used in place of a push at 0 stamina, some offer exceptional stagger on headshot, some are activations that make your next attack much stronger, some are a special kind of hit that can make your combos more deadly, and devil’s claws can parry.

Special attacks on a few weapons can stagger usually unstaggerable enemies. the default shovel special can stop a mutie in his tracks if you hit him in the head, ogryn bully club slaps can even stagger bosses to the weakpoint (sometimes, its complicated).

Combos

The way weapon combos choose which attack to use as you switch between lights, heavies, specials, and push attacks, is not always immediately clear or intuitive. So take the time to experiment and learn which light attack follows a special, which light or heavy follows a push attack, ect. For example, using the combat blades, a light attack after weapon special performs a downward stab with the same damage as a heavy.

With ogryn’s bully club mk 2, a light attack following a special performs a unique punch with good maniac damage, which is useless but kind of cool. Dueling sword’s special comes out lightning quick and can be used immediately after a heavy to greatly increase your single target burst. With the chainsword, push attack chains to light 4. heavy sword specials greatly increase the speed of the heavy you follow it up with. The list goes on and on.

Using the best attack for the target(s) in front of you will greatly increase your combat effectiveness, so learning how combos work will be a strong component of mastering any weapon.

Movetech

You are allowed to move and even sprint while charging a heavy, for most weapons this slows you down, but with a few weapons this actually speeds you up (daggers, dueling sords), charging a heavy with these to get the movement speed boost can then be extended by sliding, significantly improving your overall movespeed. Sliding a lot also helps conserve stamina, as sprinting only consumes stamina when you’re actually sprinting, not sliding, and sprinting with stamina is significantly faster than sprinting without.

Armor Types

It is worth knowing what “kind” of armor each enemy has as this will affect your ability to kill them efficiently in melee (or at range). many enemies have several armor types (reapers and bulwarks are unyielding with a few carapace bits), but in general the breakdown goes like this:

• Unarmored: groaners, snipers, bombers, dregs (yellow dudes)
• Flak: scab (black dudes), maulers, shotgunners, bruisers, gunners
• Maniac: muties, flamers, trappers
• Infested: poxwalkers, dogs, bursters
• Carapace: crushers, and mauler helmets
• Unyielding: bulwarks, reapers, bosses

Weapon Types and Outstanding Blessings

Typically there are a few blessings that are either completely transformative (brutal momentum/deathblow) or just better than the other blessings for any given weapon type, keep an eye out for these so you can always have them available.

Vet/common

• Combat axes: brutal momentum, headtaker, thrust
• Tac axes: brutal momentum, headtaker, decimator
• Chainaxe: rev it up, slaughterer, headtaker
• Chainsword: rev it up, bloodletter, rampage, shred
• Combat blade: flesh tearer, uncanny strike, mercy killer (requires bleed), haymaker (mk 6 only)
• Shovel: hammerblow, decimator, thrust (mk7, mk3)
• Devil claw: rampage, shred
• Power sord: brutal momentum, power cycler, slaughterer

Zealot only

• Crusher: hammerblow, skullcrusher
• Thammer: headtaker, thrust
• Heavy sord: deathblow, headtaker, rampage

Psyker only

• Dueling sord: uncanny strike, shred, precognition
• Force sord: deflector, slaughterer, unstable power, uncanny strike

Ogryn

• Cleavers: slaughterer, confident strike, thrust
• Bully club: haymaker, thrust, skullcrusher
• Shovel: brutal momentum, confident strike, thrust (mk5, 19)
• Power maul: brutal momentum, skullcrusher
• Shield: brutal momentum, skullcrusher

You may notice a few blessings show up a lot on this list, for good reason.

To review: brutal momentum, slaughterer, uncanny strike, headtaker, and thrust are almost always must picks.

Deathblow and Brutal Momentum (Bromentum) are worth singling out because their effect of not only decent weakspot damage, but hit mass reduction has a MASSIVE effect on how many enemies you can cleave through and kill with each swing. more than any other blessing always try to have these blessings on weapons that can use them.

For perks, generally you should lean into whatever your weapon is already good at rather than trying to boost things it’s always going to be bad at, e.g. carapace damage on devils claw is worthless. If you’re not sure, flak is ALWAYS a good choice, maniac and crit chance are also usually good, but typically getting the right blessings is much more important than getting the right perks, but having both is definitely worth it.

Smite Explained

In shorts

It’s not supposed to kill fast. The strength is that it’s staggers any type of enemy immediately upon usage, including mutants, crushers, maulers and many more.

Most of these enemies are very difficult to stagger, so Smite is the one ability allowing you to save teammates and yourself with the click of a button.

• You can interrupt crusher overheads mid-swing.
• You can force muties to immediately drop an ally.
• You can immediately break the defense of a Bulwark.

That is it’s value.

In details

It’s a pure CC ability, and in that role it’s completely on a level of its own compared to anything else in the whole game. Even with Empowered Psionics it barely even kills horde. But EP combined with Vent & Creeping Flames can let it temporarily wipe horde & specialists as required.

Use fully charged secondaries only, and use it when you need to stop any and all non-boss enemy offense in their tracks. You can dodge & dodge+slide while charging or channeling it, which lets you easily reposition from incredibly dangerous spots and buy valuable time for yourself and your team. Even releasing a full secondary charge has a strong stagger / knockback effect, so you can use it in small doses too depending on enemy types. It’s most effective for situations such as:

• Tons of dangerous elites like oggies, ragers etc. that you can’t quickly take down with your weapons.
• Huge enemy masses especially if there’s busters or disablers coming in behind them that weapons can’t reach but Smite can.
• Pre-emptively on corners and doorways when you can hear bursters, disablers or other dangerous stuff approaching too close for comfort.

In general if you get surprised with too many strong enemies too close, or see your team getting overwhelmed by the same, something like a Force Sword push > dodge+slide backwards > equip Smite & charge it > Smite > keep moving backwards and pick distance to reset > switch to ranged > go back on offense

While its aiming seems finnicky, it basically attempts to lock on to anything in front of you, and then spreads from there. You can intentionally spread it in multiple directions and target specific enemies for maximum effect, but it takes some practice to do it right. Similarly, it’s not going to control everything 360 degrees around you ofc. So you still need to mind your positioning and do your best to funnel the enemies into narrow zones for maximum efficiency. But once you learn to use it, it’s by far one of the best overall backup abilities there are even with no extra talent investment, especially for staves that don’t need Assail or BB (basically nothing ‘needs’ BB tho).