I love Darktide and the new hive scum class, but I do not like many of the new abilities that just add on to making the game feel low skill and easy to walk through on auric. I like higher difficulties and modifiers because there is a challenge to overcome, many abilities remove this difficulty, but hive scum is easy to criticize for this compared to other classes.
Having more than 1 hive scum in your squad can be insufferable if they all use the boom bringer. Sure, the chem grenade kind of does the same thing, but there is at least some strategy to that option. Many hive scum have messed up the chem grenade placement in my matches. It really is just way more annoying when any time a mixed horde or any sort of difficulty or challenge, it’s just instantly deleted by a boom bringer.
Like I said I do like playing hive scum, but I cannot use those two blitz abilities, especially the missile, because they are not fun. I don’t understand why other people find it fun either. Why would I want to press 1 button and make the difficulty irrelevant, I may as well just play malice. Is it really fun to press 1 button and everything is instantly dead? I may as well close the game and play a telltale game because I just walk through and press 1 button to make progress.
If I were going to make a balance change right now, I’d start with the Ogryn frag grenade. I’d double the blast radius so it actually feels as devastating as it’s meant to, something that can genuinely clear the screen. I think getting 1 is a good idea, but it is definitely too weak and feels bad.
For the boom bringer, I’d reduce the damage on the blast radius but significantly increase its size and give it massive stagger - enough to send enemies flying. Then I’d buff the direct projectile impact damage so whatever you hit gets outright deleted.
You would fire the boom bringer at a crusher - it would instakill the crusher, but whatever enemies around literally get thrown meters away by the blast instead of being instantly obliterated.
I feel like this would be more skillful for the player and more fun for the rest of the team. currently the tradeoff is you take the launcher out slowly; it really isn’t an issue though since you just instakill an entire crowd. Having to take the launcher out and then actually aim at what you want to kill? That would be a more interesting interaction. It would take more thought, and instead of just brainlessly wiping everything you would instakill a large target and give your team a chance to attack with the massive amount of crowd control from the missile.
