Honestly, the more I play the more this one aspect of the game irritates me. It’s both the sheer quantity of this stuff on maps, and the fact it pushes you so hard you half of the time fly over some rails. It adds close to nill fun, imo, while being endless source of frustration for players, interrupting their fights in nonsensical, random manner. I’m not even exaggerating, on average on any mission there will be 5-10 incidents of players either disabled by them, or thrown into abyss with instakill even.
One may say it’s a “skill issue”, “just don’t hit barrels, or get away of them”, but there are few problems here:
Doesn’t work in PUGs (which is still majority of games played, if not absolute majority), where you may not even be the one that hit it, just a random dude on your team you don’t control
The game literally throws tons of targets at you from all directions in endless waves, you can’t see crap in endless hurricane of bodies and people running around swinging melee weapons blindly. People simply don’t look what they hit, there is no time for that, and as those barrels are literally everywhere, they constantly hit them at random times, interrupting game process for all teammateas around them (really feels infuriating every time, not fun at all)
You often don’t have option to get away of them due to being locked in a fight, or not even being able to see where is the barrel that is about to blow, or not even hearing the sound cue in a massive sound mess of big fight.
Suggestion:
Amount of barrels should be reduced to 1/2 - 1/3 of its current amount on all maps
Missions that has maps with the current amount of exploding barrels will then be occasionally re-added to the pool, with extra barrels being a new mutator, creating a more challenging environment for those who love more random explosions
May be not make them go off on melee hits at all?
Honestly, I would go even further and also reduced the pushing force of those, making sure it will be very rare enough to send players flying from some platform. Then would make two mutators, one for barrels’ quantity, and one for the explosion’s strength. So only if both of those are present, there would be the current situation recreated. That could be in some event’s missions, or in some havoc or auric missions, i.e. it needs to be moved up to appropriate difficulty, and always be optional, same as other irritating mutators are (like the Blackout).
There is no such thing as “pathing” here. When you can care about “pathing around them” they are not an issues. Most of the time though you are in a fight in this game, running in circles, swinging melee weapons aimlessly, fending a hoard; with your teammates doing the same nearby. You don’t see much in the chaos of dozens of bodies at that moment. This is how game is played 99% of time, and it results in constant random explosions that toss you around, disorient and disable you, it’s super-frustrating, you can’t really avoid it with barrels being literally everywhere, someone just ought to hit one soon.
I don’t know if it’s a bug really, it was like that when I started playing the game 3 months ago already at least. Tbh, it just feels like bad game design move, like something a dude who don’t play the game, or don’t play it at a sufficient difficulty, would add to the game because he was asked to “do something to refresh experience”. On paper it seems like a good idea adding challenge - but it doesn’t align at all with how the game actually is played these days, with levels covered in endless wiggling mass of heretics during a wave with everybody switching to melee and just starting running in circles swinging weapons constantly - just to survive. You can’t see much in this mess, nor you can plan much. And you can’t coordinate with random people in PUGs too, it doesn’t work this way, nobody cares beyond some helpful tagging. And it takes just one out of 4 to trigger explosion, so it WILL happen, you can’t do a thing about it.
Do the Situational Awareness 2.5k barrel kills penance. It will rewire your salience processing. Your barrel awareness will border on supernatural after that, you will also notice whether they are armed or inert as soon as you enter the room.
Tbh it’s a shame they changed that penance to allow group contribution because it makes you much better at this one aspect of the game.
You are missing the point - I can do it, other guys won’t do it, they issue still will happen, it takes just one hit from one of the players and everybody nearby will suffer. Nobody cares that much, it’s just easier to drop the game that irritates you than to “learn levels, train to recognize any barrel” etc. It’s a level of top players’ play at that point, so irrelevant to 95% of players’ experience.
That kind of logic isn’t compatible with online gaming in PUGs, that’s why I said it needs to be a mutator and should only be mandatory in high Havoc may be where people actually start to play with voice and in static squads. For lower difficulties it can be present - but must be optional, as even in low lv Havoc people mostly play in random squads still.
The amount of barrels would be fine if they didn’t ignore Toughness and didn’t throw you so ludicrously far. The fact that one mistake can just kill you outright is far, far too harsh.
As it stands, I think one of the FS devs has a thing for barrels.
I agreed earlier in game life but at the moment barrels(sometimes DH) are only thing keeping players from swinging/shooting anywhere…and even then not always…
