The biggest issues that people are having with expeditions right now is how repetitive it is right now, so here are some ideas to help break up the monotone a bit.
First, two new enemies. Considering the open environment of expeditions, this would be the perfect chance to reintroduce the radio operator enemy that was present in the live event a while back. His abilities? He would either be able to call for reinforcements or call in some sort of artillery/air strike if you don’t kill him fast enough.
The other enemy that I can think of is some sort of variant of VT2s sackrat. Since extra supplies are only available at deadsider sanctuaries at the moment, this would provide something of relief for players in field, if you can kill him before runs away of course. What he drops would be randomized.
Second idea is to swap out the mid and/or end zones of each expedition run with either some sort of risk-reward puzzle/survival event, or with a boss fight. Not sure what kind of puzzles we could have, but on the boss fight, I think we can go for something extra. Since we are out in a open environment, it is only natural that we get bosses that suit this. Who’s up for fighting a traitor sentinel or valkery?
I’m sure they will fix him eventually. Balancing is the most requested feature after all. The hard is having to do it again after new content gets added.
I also think psykers should have some way to spend all of their salvage in the sanctuary if they are using a force staff, so that they can complete the Salvage Lord penance too (without being forced to use a gun).
Tech remnants and salvage drops should increase in higher difficulties as well, OR there should only be one difficulty. Either incentivize playing on harder difficulties or consolidate the queues so that people can play together more easily. It really sucks to be stuck with 3 bots for entire runs.
I think the main issue is that the gamemode has no replayability
Like, you play normal missions cuz it’s the base game after all
You play Havoc cuz you want the challenge it offers
You play Mortis Trials cuz of the indulgences and randomness
There’s no real reason to play Expeditions however. All games will be the same, and you can’t exactly “progress” on it either
Best solution in my opinion? Allow people to use Tech Remnants they obtained to upgrade their character on future Expedition runs
You could even have 1 major and 1 minor indulgence slot, equipment, offerings (that could make the game easier for everyone)
On the other hand, you could add more difficulties to expeditions so people can use these benefits without the game becoming a snooze
Tech Remnants gained should also scale with difficulty, as higher diff = more remnants on the map
This is how progression should work for the Extraction Shooter gamemode, allowing you to upgrade your character to get more money to get more powerful to get more money and so and so
Except that Expeditions doesn’t have the ability to unlock things for your future Expedition runs, this is why I propose this
mortis trials is really bad designed, i don’t think it does really offer that much of randomness, it gets so stale and the same after few games, but it does not matter what indulgences you get, you will just oneshot everything anyway, the boons just make it trivial in the first place, even if boons didn’t exist in that game mode would been easy either way
mortis trials should had been fortunes of war in vt2 which is way much better and well structured, but devs wasted an opportunity to recreate a fortunes of war in dt.
that’s craziness about the only mix up you get nowadays in high difficulty is the flavor of gunner spam and which computer terminals crash on the few objectives with some RNG flavor to their events. seed generation, objective placement, which objectives are used and minor points of interest provide more variables than that, along with sanctuary items not being set outside certain grids. there’s also a boss cap of 4, which I’m hoping for a grid point with more monsters to take advantage of…
I’d like to see some big changes, but nothing along the lines of running around with stupid buffs that make no sense, that isn’t even remotely on tangent with what I like about the game. I haven’t even finished the mortis assignments because that uber buff gameplay is so dull. I do think the store should be expanded, but it should be done in a way that makes the objective play more feasible under the time limit. And especially addresses the vulnerabilities with detpacks and servo skulls. Detpacks take 5 seconds to arm, this feels terrible for the pacing. Similarly the 1X capture speed is obnoxiously bad - its like 90 seconds. If the game mode is about racing it shouldn’t be encouraging everyone to dash off in 4 separate directions. Make it 20 minutes default, 30 minutes on low rad zones and 15 on the 5 salvage zone ones.
I’d address this by adding another store to interact with, a traveling deadsider merchant. have one of the sanctuary spawns that goes unused be a fortified storefront where you can buy mid-round effects.
Outer Hive Merchant items:
-reduce detpack/servo skull interact time by 75%
-capture at the rate of 2 players
-more damage resistance and less threat when holding carry items
-sprint efficiency + speed (50% max and knife speed should be globally achievable here, knife shivs and dueling are already broken as hell)
-non-healing stims
-extra time (again, there isn’t nearly enough, let me buy like 3m top ups mid-round for more money)
-small ammo pack
-increased enemy boss spawns
-refresh and randomize barrels on the map
but I do like the mode, I just wish it were harder by including more ways to challenge you genuinely and not just going lol here’s a trashy timer mechanic. I want to explore and be rewarded for doing so, but the lack of incentive to play beyond just liking the mode isn’t there. the objective play is so tedious when you’re just rolling assy captures. like on the grid point with 2 objectives and reduced time, if you get sit n wait for your 2 objectives and you only had 5 minutes, you don’t even have time to do one and the gate. you’re gonna be going several minutes into corrupted territory. which could also use a look, can we have more than like 90s of walking around when the timer runs out before you’re taking 30 corruption/s? it makes corruption-clearing things borderline useless to run besides the corruption-blocking effect of scum crate.
Bosses should be more prevelant because there’s a streak system for boss kills, but it resets every time you visit a sanctuary. every boss you kill in one sector adds 50 remnants to their kill drops until it maxes out at 250. bosses quickly overtake the objectives for scoring potential, but you need lucky seeds to see many. and champions are still not dropping anything which is annoying but at least he’s extremely rare.
I do think the extract should have bosses too, I wanna feel forced to use the power held items. As it is now I just prefer shock mine since a) it has 9 charges because each mine detonates 3 times and b) it disables huge chunks of enemies before killing them. The mortar and explosive screen clears usually trigger replacement spawns because you cleared up a ton of slots for the AI. I’ve been hit with 2 bosses face spawning me with crusher mobs from tossing a mortar before…I am leery of it solo.