Fight together or die alone. Warhammer 40K: Darktide has a lot of mechanics you need to remember and utilize to ensure your best chance of survival. Alongside the standard combat mechanics such as movement, shooting, and melee, Darktide has incorporated a bunch of new mechanics to spice up its combat. One of the most important mechanics to pay attention to is Coherency in Darktide.
We have previously covered Suppression, Wounds, and Toughness, which all play a prominent role in your basic combat flow. One of the essential basics of Darktide is staying in the Coherency of your allies.
So what is Coherency in Darktide?
Coherency refers not only to how many allies are nearby but also to your Aura as well. For every ally nearby, you gain a stack of Coherency (which includes yourself). A small buff showcases this beside your character bar, which is permanently active. Whenever an ally enters your Coherency, this buff gains a stack, going up to four stacks.
It’s a good idea to keep an eye on your Coherency buff because you obtain many benefits for sticking close to your allies. Some classes can provide additional buffs for sticking with your team, but we will get to that shortly.
What are the Benefits of Staying in Coherency in Darktide?
For starters, one of the main ways of recovering your Toughness is staying in your allies’ Coherency. The amount of Toughness you regenerate increases based on the number of nearby teammates. If you are isolated, you won’t recover any Toughness, and you need to be next to one ally to start regenerating.
Coherency Auras Provide Great Benefits
Next, each class in Darktide has an Aura effect spread through their Coherency radius. For example, the Psyker’s Aura gives them bonus damage toward Elite enemies. As we previously mentioned, for the purposes of the Coherency buff, you are always included, which means this Aura is always active on you. So Psyker class builds always have bonus damage toward Elites.
If you stand next to a Psyker, you will also gain the bonus damage toward Elites as long as you are in their Coherency. As for the rest of the classes, the Veterans Aura gives them and all allies a small amount of ammo whenever an Elite enemy dies. The Ogryns Aura gives increased heavy attack melee damage, and the Zealot’s Aura grants Toughness damage reduction.
Related Article: Everything You Need to Know About Curios in Darktide
Unfortunately, Auras Don’t Stack. Diverse Teams Have More Bonuses.
Unfortunately, these Auras have a downside, and that’s that they don’t stack. If you have two Psykers in your game, their Auras currently don’t stack. This makes running full squads of Ogryn or Zealot builds less tenable, as their Auras won’t stack on top of each other.
We understand why Fatshark has done this because having a full squad of Zealots granting everyone stacking Toughness damage reduction would be difficult to balance.
So if you want the most out of these Auras, try and bring one of each class. Plus, we prefer having one of every class since they each have strengths they bring for a fight, which can help with another class’s weaknesses.
Coherency Talents in Darktide
Outside of Auras, each class likely has some additional buff they can obtain through their respective talent tree. We won’t go through every single talent that modifies your Coherency. However, we will point out a few notable options.
Psykers have a talent called Psykinetic’s Aura, which grants a 15% combat ability cooldown reduction when an Elite enemy dies. This buff not only applies to themself but all allies in their Coherency.
Veterans have a talent called Bio-Optic Targeting, which highlights all non-Ogryn Elites and Specialists as Priority Targets for allies in Coherency whenever you activate Volley Fire. This talent is extremely handy at giving your allies some extra information during your Volley Fire to prepare for oncoming threats.
Zealots can buff their Aura with the Benediction talent, making their Toughness reduction significantly stronger. Lastly, a solid Ogryn build can benefit greatly from Coherency bonuses with the Towering Presence talent, which increases their Coherency Radius by 50%.
Summary of Coherency in Darktide
That’s our detailed explanation of how Coherency works in Darktide. We highly regard Darktide’s Coherency system as a great way to encourage teamwork and slightly punish those who want to go off alone in a team-based horde killer. It’s refreshing to see a mechanic that not only encourages you to stick with your teammates but also rewards you with a plethora of buffs for doing so.
Moreover, it’s also nice to see that yet another small mechanic was adopted from the Warhammer 40K tabletop game, which goes to show how many tiny details Fatshark has put into Darktide.
If you enjoyed our short breakdown and want to learn more, check out our guides for Hit Mass or how Critical Hits work in Darktide. Good hunting, Rejects!
