Right now every mission has a guaranteed spawn of armored enemies the problem is the only mechanic THAT DOES SOMETHING about the damage reduction is only on a few weapons and THEY ARE PITIFUL most of the time, its literal 2.5% of brittleness with having to smack an enemy so many times to actually get anything out of it
So why don’t they make armor different??? Its been years and its still hasnt been changed but we still suffer from so many effects on enemies reducing our damage. If I have to spend 1 minute fighting a single crusher I am wasting time and my effort, seriously why don’t we have higher stacks of brittleness application??
The existence of Uncanny Strike has warped armour piercing so much it makes almost all the other options either useless or feel bad. It’s not the only thing, but it’s one of the biggest.
The other sore point is the uninspired design of the crusher. Making them head to foot carapace is easily the most lazy design they could have come up with.
Definitely agree on that. Not only are Crushers weird designed to be completely in carapace, they keep spawning in groups of 12 in auric. At that point, any weapon that can’t deal with them is useless. I get the point of having weapons that are better against it, but there’s no point of having weapons that are absolute garbage against armor. Also the whole existence of Uncanny Strike is stupid to begin with.
that’s the problem:there are too many too heavy armored monster,i mean:if you want to be able to live on your own, you must deal with lot of axemen, lot of armored ogres…you can’t count on laser or bullet to knock them down!that’s why chinese like plasma,just because there are so many armored sucker
This issue is not just carapace but Crushers specifically.
Just give Crushers flak armor heads. There, just by doing that the devs would indirectly buff and make at least 70% of the actual useless sh*t weapons worth using again. Like Infantry Autoguns.
100% Carapace, as slow as a glacier, boring predictable attack patterns.
If they are ever to be a “mini boss” each of those needs to be addressed.
100% Carapace - way too restrictive, weakspot needed be it head or back.
Attack speed - ok so the OHKO overhead should be clearly telegraphed, fine. But there can be other attacks like a sweep, a charge, the push. Those could have faster attack speed.
Armor degradation is an interesting concept that slower swinging bludgeon type weapons like Thammer, Shock Maul, Crusher could be better at inherently than weapons like Combat Knife, DS, Heavy Sword etc, maybe would help to create more of a niche for them so players can have more of a reason to pick those lower mobility weapons.
Thinking about it some more, it sure seems like the devs have painted themselves into a corner with this particular enemy in high difficulties. At some point in Auric you’ll encounter big groups of Crushers which act like a filter and favor teams that employ all-rounder loadouts.
Weapons that did not already have decent armor piercing capabilities at base were given new marks with alternate modes specifically designed to take on Crushers ; foldable shovels, the new power weapons.
They’ve had to repeatedly buff Chain weapons activated specials.
Then the new Arbitrator shotguns have the special shells which are basically always reserved for Crushers.
And then the Bone Cleaver’s Brittleness coating, and the Crowbar’s alternate mode.
They still gave the shivs Uncanny Strikes albeit nerfed, and it’s pretty evident they would also nerf the better versions of this blessing if it wouldn’t bring the review-bomb hammer down on their face.
And finally, they took pity on us and gave the Heavy swords a 10% free Brittleness debuff on their special and a weaksauce Rending blessing that relies on the special follow-up attack that cleaves through Carapace, a first in the game for a normal attack…
Even though I would love it, it’s unlikely FS is ever gonna give the Crusher some kind of innate weak point or an armor-break mechanic. Because their whole weapon design philosophy revolves around this stupid enemy (and also Bulwarks, to a lesser degree).
All that would result in is that nobody is going to even bother engaging with that and just ignore the back of the neck and they’ll just keep smashing crushers directly in the face and people will keep using weapons which bypass carapace entirely. Aka dueling sword, power sword, relic blade, pickaxes, arbites maul, shock maul + shield, krak grenades, missile launcher, etc..
Also good luck trying dance around 8 crushers, 6 bulwarks, 5 maulers, 7 ragers and dozen and a half of horde trash, while trying to stab one of crusher in the back of the neck.
Answer is you won’t even try that because it’ll get you killed, so instead you go for the Ol’ Reliable method. You stab the crusher directly in the face.
Sounds good on paper, but everything sounds good on paper. In practise the change might as well not even exist because people will just straight up not engage with it and would rather brute force it anyway. Which works just as fine as a method.
We’ve already seen this happen too with the new armored pox hounds. Practically everyone just ignores the armor and smashes the hound in the face regardless.
I still think armor degradation would be best where damaging a certain limb over and over makes it more open to damage while brittleness gives the entire body less damage reduction.
Impact-based armor degradation would be a good system. It would give the blunt weapons a better niche (specifically Shock Maul and Crusher, less so the wildly powerful Arbites Shock Maul) to be very good at, while also buffing the Catachan Heavy Sword (which has a bunch of impact blessings???) while not really interacting with the laundry list of weapons that are very good at dealing with it already (Dueling Sword, Power Sword, Combat Knife, et al).
Edit: oh and the Ironhead Thunder Hammer too, since that also kinda sucks.
Or we remove uncanny from the equation. If 100% pen with 50% overpen wouldn’t be this common nobody would have a problem with running around with a 60% pen weapon. Aka Crushers, Axes, Cleavers…