Warhammer 40K: Darktide is a shooter with deep RPG mechanics. Rending is a key status effect that plays an important role in the game, especially at higher difficulties. It refers to an effect that can be inflicted by certain weapons and items in Darktide.
This basically refers to the ability of a weapon to penetrate an enemy’s armor, but what exactly does it mean? We’ll explain all you need to know about rending in Darktide.
How Does Rending Affect Damage in Warhammer 40K Darktide
Rending represents a weapon’s armor penetration percentage. When a perk provides a rending bonus, such as “10% Rending on crits”, the weapon will ignore that percentage of the target’s armor when calculating damage. For example, if an enemy has 100 armor and you deal a critical hit with 10% rending, the game will treat them as having 90 armor for that hit.
This can make a big difference in combat, allowing weapons to take down heavily armored foes like Crushers much faster. Where it may take 3-4 normal hits to damage these tough enemies, a weapon with a high rending stat can easily break through their protection.
The term “rending” is used instead of “armor penetration” for flavor reasons. It evokes the image of tears or rips being made in an opponent’s defenses. If your attacks are rending armor, you are tearing it apart piece by piece.
Rending vs Brittleness in Darktide
Rending and Brittleness serve a similar purpose of reducing an enemy’s armor, but are applied differently. Rending adds flat stacks to an enemy through weapon perks, causing them to take more damage from all sources. Brittleness also adds stacks, but through specific weapon damage over time.
The key difference is that Rending percentage bonuses on critical hits only apply to the wielder’s damage. Other sources of Rending affect the entire team equally.
This is all about Rending in Warhammer 40K Darktide. If you are getting errors in the game, check out the fix for the Darktide Crashing On Startup Issue.