Tl,dr: Dodge is far too strong, please find a way put some finesse back into it.
In past balance patches, the time player characters are untrackable by enemies has been drastically increased.
The reason this was done was to make the game playable for players with a bad connection, which could be both the hosts and the clients fault, or due to the network in between, and thus happened quite frequently.
Before those changes, the “dodge windows” were quite tiny, requiring proper timing to dodge the heavy attacks of elites, and due to tracking and movement also usually required the player to adapt to the incoming attack: An overhead was better dodged sideways, a horizontal swipe by jumping backwards.
And while the change was necessary, and they probably wanted to be careful with endless temp health for everyone on its way out, I believe they way overdid it. Patrols are now mostly trivial, and light weapons with a high dodge count allow moving through a horde without ever blocking - I know I usually don’t when playing slayer.
As such, I’d like Fatshark to consider changing this again - a good middleground where it doesn’t completely trivialize content while still allowing dodging as an option for those that aren’t hosting.
For the record: I don’t want ice-skating back.
A few possible ways to make dodge dancing a little more challenging:
Suggestion 1
Have clients get a slightly longer untrackable-timer just by virtue of being clients. Say, +100ms?
1b: Instead, the game could also take the highest ping of said client over the last few seconds and add to the timer based on that, within an acceptable window. (Say, 50-300ms?)
Suggestion 2
Have the dodge window for heavy attacks decrease with difficulty. Right now I believe it was about 3 seconds. That seems about fine for recruit, but Legend players should probably get along with a bit less.
Suggestion 3
Dodge Windows are smaller, but get larger the more enemies are nearby - similar to how enemies deal less damage in groups. Thus, dodging the attacks of a single stormvermin or chaos warrior takes a bit of effort (though with few enemies the player could also just block), while patrols aren’t immediately the death sentence they used to be.
Suggestion 4
The dodge window length, and possibly dodge distance, decreases slightly with repeated dodges.
Thus avoiding a stream of heavy attacks is easy at first, but can’t be sustained for the next 5 seconds without interrupting their attacks at least once to get a short break in.
Obviously, I have no idea if any of these can even be implemented. But, should it be possible, any of these might offer an approach to change. I believe I’ve also read one or two ideas regarding the subject that I didn’t think of, so if you feel like you have one of those, please add it here.