The Darktide Corruption system is a new health-based system that will punish players, or add risk and reward to their gameplay. As players progress through the levels, players will find purple bars creeping up through their health bar, which effectively caps how much max health your character has through the game. We will go into more detail on the Darktide corruption system so new, and veteran players alike can learn more about the new challenges ahead.

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The Darktide corruption system represents purple bars that lower your max HP.

Darktide Corruption System Explained¶

The Darktide corruption system is essentially a system that will lower your total max HP for various reasons. Taking excessive damage will begin to creep the purple bar on your character. After so much sustained trauma, that purple bar can take off quite a lot of health, especially when you lose an HP bar. You will typically see the purple bar overtake a whole white bar when a player goes down and is then revived. Moreso, some enemies also apply corruption fastre, such as specific Nurgle pox-themed enemies, and some of the missing affixes can also affect it from time to time.

It sadly means you will not be able to heal past this point by getting your HP back through medical equipment allies place down. For an Ogryn, that’s manageable thanks to its toughness, but for a low hp and toughness Psyker, that’s a death sentence. The only way you can eliminate the corruption to your health bar caused by this damage is by healing at a med station. These med stations will then offer players the opportunity to restore their HP to full and remove the corruption at the same time.

The system is somewhat similar to the corruption in Back for Blood, and the corruption system in Conan Exiles.

Grimoire Corruption Explained¶

You can also get corruption from the Grimoires at applicable levels. Grimoires make their return from Vermentide 2. Players can get increased and better rewards from their missions, depending on how many grimoires players carry with them to the end of the level. However, picking one up will cause all player members to lose 25% of their max HP. Unlike the sustained health bar corruption, this cannot be removed using the med stations. This is part of the risk and reward gameplay incentives for parties looking to collect grimoires. Once a grimoire is picked up, you will have that 25% corruption penalty until the mission ends.

This is the general gist of what to expect from Darktide’s corruption system. Hopefully, that helps you get more familiar with the game.