I just had an incredibly fun run on Excise Vault Spireside-13 - D-I-IV-IX-G
(Waves of specialists, Snipers, Extra Poxbursters, Extra Barrels, Enhanced Blitz)
Whatever that stealth change or accidental code revert did, Maelstrom finally feels like a challenge again. Massive special spawns with great horde timers putting up constant pressure. I don’t think we had a single moment of downtime except for the elevator ride.
I don’t have a detailed scoreboard breakdown since my game keeps crashing with mods since the last patch, so I’m modless, but the total kills were 3002 at 40 minutes. Which still indicates to me that horde size/spawns could be further increased.
The finale was a bit tame in comparison but all in all very fun. Please keep this state for Auric Maelstrom at least. It’s a great change of pace compared to the past months where it was simply a cakewalk as long as you had 2 decent players total.
Kinda feels like they increased the wrong enemies imo. I think there should be more hordes and melee enemies, crushers, ragers, mauler’s etc. Instead they seem to have gone total bonkers for specialists and ranged… So it has just turned every match into ‘Darktide on Ice’ as everyone is doing nothing but sliding and dodging non-stop.
I actually love sliding and dodging as it’s my playstyle but it would be nice to have a bit of time for actual combat too lol.
If there is a never ending stream of 360 gunners, trappers, snipers and tox flamer’s (now with entire-map-reaching flames) then it means you can’t actually have much combat and just constantly in hit’n’run mode.
I’m all for more challenge but it feels a bit unbalanced in terms of enemy type atm.
Yeah finally someone sane and not a crying redditor that want auric malestroms to be an easy breeze.
It should be hard and a challenge
Some maps still seem to have the old broken spawnrate if u check kills so don’t know if it’s fixed everywhere but it’s much better.
I had that experience on Enclavum Baross, but Mercantile is still VERY tame. The final arena event is a total snooze fest. So what you can no longer use the entry tunnel for easier defence?
All those enemy types yet the director just spams some trash horde enemies, few ranged light elites and specials.
As much as I hate this difficulty through density, I have to give it to FS, they did make the game more difficult. It’s no longer complete easymode on STG+.
I saw telepots on his most recent stream say that certain maps have broken horde spawns so it might be that. His maelstrom run on Comms-Plex 154/2f was pretty much empty in the final. It was honestly a joke.
I do hope they fix the horde timer on all maps, maybe even increase it on some, and keep the special rate.
It might be among the maps with broken horde spawns as mentioned above. I hope they fix that. It’s incredibly boring otherwise.