I no longer have fun playing Auric High-Intensity Shock Troop Gauntlet: the mission type where we are supposed to fight more Elites than in regular High-Intensity missions.
The constant deluge non-stop avalanche infinite stream flood torrent of Specials has to stop.
They just keep spawning and spawning and spawning and spawning and spawning.
This wasn’t like that a couple of months ago. Kindly fix this regression. Thank you.
STG is a modifier which the primary effect is “more specialists”. STG only affects elites in a very minor and rng dependent way (tension modifier making the game spawn a bit more of anything at times and terror events having more points to work with).
I always understood the fluff text to mean Elite when they mention “Specialists”. Specials like Dogs, Snipers, etc. are not “Shock Troops”, but Crushers and Ragers definitely are.
The Auric board always had two difficulty levels (ignoring Maelstrom). Before the last board rework, the harder difficulty was called High-Intensity and the regular difficulty had no qualifier. In the last board rework, they simply renamed them so the harder difficulty is now called High-Intensity Shock Troop Gauntlet and the regular difficulty is called High-Intensity. But that change was cosmetic as far as I can tell.
However changes were made in the past few months so that “Shock Troops” like Crushers and Ragers now spawn in fewer numbers. And I feel like they have been replaced by this new constant stream of Specials to compensate. This is the issue I’m raising.
I guess that’s not the case. There is no “base Auric” on the mission board at all. Modifiers are always added on top of it: Lights Out, Hunting Grounds, Ventilation Purge, High Intensity (which isn’t just Auric, it’s Auric + extra elites), and HISTG (Auric + extra elites + extra specialists)
HISTG was always like this, and on top of this you’re deliberately misinterpreting the description based on what you think it should mean, and not what it actually means.
A crash course: Darktide has two categories of stronger enemies, Elites and Specialists. Elites are bigger, tankier, and more dangerous, like Ragers and Crushers. Specialists are designed to disable players or screw with your ability to navigate combat, like Trappers and Bombers. So you see, when the description of the modifier says “Specialists”, it means the latter category of enemies designed to mess with you. This is what the description means. “Shock Troop” is just fancy flavor text.
The video shows pretty clearly the intent. There are penances to kill Specialists such as Adept Assassin on Veteran, which distinguishes between Elites and Specialists, Nightmare Patrol which uses Terror Specialist to refer to both Poxburster and Pox Hound, Prioritize Target on Psyker, Unseen Assassin on Zealot, etc. etc..
