One of the biggest problems in this game people keep bringing up is the utter dominance of ranged enemies. The game does include an active defense mechanic against ranged opponents in the form of suppression, but I basically never see anyone use it and I honestly have no idea if it even really works.
The only time I’ve actually seen it work is in the psykanium during the tutorial. But in the heat of battle I could not with any accuracy tell you if there is a positive effect to me just wildly spraying bullets in the general direction of my enemies.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen another player lay down suppressive fire, and just keep shooting over the heads of enemies either, even if they are equipped with weapons that should be good at it.
So I really think we need better feedback on whether or not we are successfully suppressing enemies. Especially given that ammo is scarce in this game you don’t want to just waste a whole bunch of it shooting near enemies without actually killing them if you can’t be sure that that actually does something.
It’s entirely possible that the reason we’re seeing such huge problems with ranged enemies is because we’re not suppressing them properly, but it’s also possible that the suppression mechanic is complete bunk and needs to be fixed. The issue is it’s extremely hard to figure out which it is, because in all the chaos that’s going on in the game I certainly can’t keep track of what an enemy does in situations where I can’t even take aimed shots at them but just sort of spray in their direction.
Enemies are more resistant to suppression the higher the difficulty (not counting the fearless scab gunners, bleh). As such, you would need to waste more and more ammo to obtain the same result ; but foes also take more bullets to kill on higher difficulties.
In the end, who has so much ammo to spare that they can just go Rambo on Heresy+ ? Nobody except a Veteran with the Recon Lasgun or something similar.
Suppression does work but on damnation you probably need something like bolter to really notice the effect. As pointed in the above comment, the enemies are simply way more resistant to the effect in higher difficulties.
Most of the times when the effect works it also simply means 1 dude just switching to cover few feets away so in some cases in can even be detremential if enemies decide to choose a better cover positions.
Yea, the fact that the ammo economy is so tight in this game certainly doesn’t lend itself to a system where suppression is your first line of defense against ranged attacks.
I actually really like the idea of suppression as a mechanic because it’s decently realistic.
It would probably be good if they made suppression more effective in higher difficulties, and more importantly, uncoupled it from the amount of damage a weapon does so that weapons that have cheap ammo and rapid fire capabilities have more defensive utility as suppression machines.
IMO it would be more interesting if enemies were suppressed much more easily, but instead of systematically making them paralyzed in fear or running for cover, it could instead ruin their accuracy, lower their rate of fire, or make them panic and go for their melee weapon…
There are many options to make it more noticeable and more interesting.
This is giving me some bad battlefield 3 dejavu but definitely there are options that should be explored. Simply just making enemies more susceptible to suppression might alone work.
Like if you are shooting at a simple grunt then they really should look for cover/keep their heads down.
Oh, suppression does work against enemies, it’s perfect to f*ck me up as a sharpshooter, because if I happen to miss the headshot, they instantly go into cover for what it feels like a year, and pop out of it again when I’m dealing with horde.
For the record, I really don’t like suppression as a mechanic the way it’s implemented in this game, at all.
Yea, I can see that. Hunting out every single enemy who is huddling behind something can be a pain, when what you really needed is just some way to stop them from shooting at you.