Late to the party, but I don’t agree with the back of the head unless they massively scale down the spawns. It is hard to outmanoeuvre a pack of 12 Crushers and get behind them.
The point is to keep them challenging. To remove the loadout bottleneck without making them easier to fight. Some weapons/abilities already perform well against carapace but for loadouts that don’t, flanking and kiting would make it possible. They move so slowly compared to players that this is not that difficult even when they spawn in numbers.
The head is the only part of the body worth aiming at for most enemies, the enemy hitboxes in this game are shaped like lollipops and the crusher noggin is already huge. If you make the whole head flak then they become easier to kill than maulers and, in open spaces, less dangerous than scab ragers due to their slow movement.
It is not that I disagree with your reasoning, I disagree with how you think it will work in game. It will not solve the problem 100% under current conditions.
There are enemies where it is better to hit the torso, but that would not work on this enemy for balance reasons.
Why not both?
Heads, nah. I say legs.
Heads? Legs? In any case that would make them just like Scab Ragers. They would die even quicker that they do now. Almost every weapon one-shots Scab Ragers, so to be able to give Crushers weakspots AND to reduce their spawns they would need to get a buff to their health again.
Remove Uncanny Strikes
Increase weakspot damage taken on Crushers
Problem solved
Sounds good, awesome even. That would make every weapon both ranged and melee viable against Crushers.
Unfortunately it would mean that they would have to apply changes to every single weapon. And I just don’t trust them to do a good job with it. Not to mention that they always take half-measures so they would probably keep Uncanny Strike in the game as to not anger the minority of Havoc players and still get themselves review-bombed.
I think FatShark knows that whatever they do, these people will always be enraged by the changes they make. That’s probably why every nerf is so miniscule. To make every tantrum they throw, to be as small as possible and to minimize the hurtful consequences of every review-bombing.
It’s like peeling off tape from your skin with hair on it. They make a very small pull as to not experience as much pain as they would if they’d just rip it all right off. They can do it, but they won’t to because the devs (or the shareholders) don’t believe the game will be able to take it.
Do they? they already have a similar system here for specific enemies
Most specialist take x2 or x3 melee damage
Can’t they just do like Crushers take x2 dmg weakspot and that’s it?
Good idea, were it not the fact that, once again, they’ll take half-measures and do that while not nerfing the outliers, making Crushers a non-threat, causing the AI director to spam them even more.
I’m of the mindset that players should have to spec against certain armor types, by creating different builds and using different weapons/mks. We need to reinforce and normalize the notion that there’s no ‘one size fits all’ weapon/build, and that you should optimize based on which types you disdain the most.
The easiest start to untangling this knot is to nerf or rework Uncanny Strike (Such as by making it activate only on weakspot crits, or reducing the total amount of rending, even 20% a stack is better than what we have now, or 4 stacks of 25% if you reworked it to run off crits).
This should be accompanied by some general decrease in the number of armored enemies that can spawn at once. Even a slight decrease would show that FS understands the underlying complexity at the root of this problem (That being the presence of things like Uncanny Strikes has necessitated an increase in heavy armor spawns, which just makes uncanny strike more essential.)
But that is only a start, there are 3 other things I think they could do to improve long-term balance. Presented in order of feasibility.
1.) Add more armor variety to the existing roster. I can understand not wanting to mess too much with normal-sized elites due to readability, but Ogryns should have more patchwork armor! Occasionally having bulwarks without shields and crushers without helmets could really lessen the impact of getting an Oops All Ogryns moment. Which even when not a threat, is still FBC: Firebreak levels of enemy copy-pasta.
They proved this was possible, they just need to do it.
2.) Add more infested armor types, and ‘simple’ unyielding types. Ogryn beserkers, big glowing cysts on the backs of bulwarks, dreg maulers, and a proper dreg equivalent to Ogryns are all possible ways to fill this hole . Scab is lopsided in terms of enemy variety. This has been a problem since launch, which was highlighted by the ‘dreg only’ modifier. Not only would fixing this provide more challenge without needing more enemies, but it would also be a shadow buff to underused weapons with high infested damage.
Making new enemies is obviously a slow and tedious process, but essential! They need to prioritize filling these gaps.
3.) The change in power with the talent trees has created a lot of additional ‘balance complexity’ that makes adding new weapons and rebalancing existing weapons harder overall. I think this is most felt in weapons that should be good against a specific armor type, but feel too weak without its associated % damage perk.
To this end, I think they should get rid of the 25% damage perks entirely, and buff base damage values if necessary. Not only would this reduce complexity, but it’d also be an opportunity to further differentiate marks, by increasing certain base armor damage values, and adding a way to tell which mk excels at which types from the mk select screen. This way you can have the anti-armor, anti-monstrosity mks alongside flakiac generalist mks and infested/unarmored anti-horde mks, which also allows the developers to better balance these capabilities with other weapon aspects, such as movesets, finesse modifiers and sprint speed. So you can roll with an anti-armor DS, but you’ll be less effective against common enemy types, and be generally a bit slower. And complicated movesets could be rewarded with better values against common types.
This by itself would probably also allow for an additional decrease in spawn density.
(Which I remind you, should be an end goal here. It’s clear the engine is struggling with so many enemies at once. Also perks are generally an afterthought for most players, with the answer being ‘flakiac’ most of the time, which I suppose also highlights the fact that these armor types are perhaps over-abundant)
TLDR: There’s many ways Fatshark could start fixing this issue, but they’re draggin’ their feet here so I remain doubtful this will ever get fixed. Still, I persist, even in vain, mostly because I’m bored.
The crushers significantly limit the number of viable weapons and builds. That’s a fact.
I kind of like the idea of different weapons specializing in different types of enemies. However, the gap is just too big. Instead of being more or less efficient, weapons either work against carapace or do not work at all. There is nothing in between.
However, changing Uncanny Strike would solve nothing. It would further limit viable options against carapace. Is Krak grenade spam, for example, any better?
I can think of 3 solutions:
- Give crushers a weak spot for players to play around.
- If crushers are supposed to have no weakness, I would suggest reducing damage mitigation to something more reasonable. For example, 60% damage reduction instead of 95%.
- Or, as an alternative, improve armor penetration across the board to make it more impactful.
The idea is to simply reduce the gap in weapon effectiveness against carapace to provide players with more options.
It is not just crushers. Maulers, armoured ragers and plasma gunners add to the problem. At this point in the game there exists only one Armor Type: carapace. Flak has been trivialised. Anything that shall be hard to kill gets a carapace head…
I would say reduce flak adm across all weapons by 10% and increase carapace adm across all weapons by 5%. Additionally unify all uncanny strike blessing to stack up to a maximum of 40% and delete the Overpenetration into damage increase conversion.
If I had to guess it would have something to do with the original design intention of not having Carapace-clad enemies be sent the party’s way so frequently, so in its original intention Brittleness may have been a measure for players to handle individual Carapace/Unyielding/Flak/Maniac targets more easily. What certainly didn’t help with the increase in numbers of melee elites with these numbers is that weapons applying Brittleness are often single-target weapons - it doesn’t matter much if you debuff a Crusher with a chainaxe that has Thunderous for a blessing, if you will have to debuff three more individually. And then there’s weapons that just apply brittleness in area, like flamers, which are also problematic in terms of trying to find a justification for bringing in another source of brittleness, say on a melee weapon. It’s not needed/necessary - why bother?
Most sources of brittleness these days don’t go below 4 stacks per application, though - with the only exceptions I can think of being Onslaught skill for Veteran (applying 1 brittleness stack (2.5%) per hit with any weapon), and weapon blessings not at level 4; but the amount of enemies that can suffer from Brittleness and their effective health numbers typically don’t justify bringing in Brittleness - it’s a team-wide effect, sure, but strategy-wise more often than not it’s just better to have weapons individually be strong into these armour types in the first place. Some weapons are strong into all of them while also being the strongest contenders that do not have to compromise one pro for a con, which is a shame.
There likely won’t be a new system - what is currently in the game is orphaned from Vermintide, and reworking that is a huge effort that’s not worth spending resources on. There can be band-aids applied to make it less egregious than it is, and among those would be reducing enemy numbers and making Carapace enemies have more explicit weaknesses in melee (and Plasma Gunners having Carapace heads is largely inconsequential, but I’d much rather they have Carapace on arms and their body/head be Flak with damage reduction).
And on the note of damage multipliers - there aren’t a whole bunch of those used in game. The most explicit ones are most specials suffering more melee damage - because they typically attack at range and players engaging them in melee should be rewarded for the risk it infers, but other examples are mainly just:
- Different boss parts receiving less damage (some less than others - it varies), which seems very arbitrary and elaborate on merit alone that these are enemies that one will be whacking for a long time and the intention is that they also shouldn’t be suffering too much burst damage from ranged weapons,
- Arms and legs of humanoid enemies suffering less damage from specifically ranged attacks - melee is likely not subjected to that, since it would feel bad to deal 50% damage on hitting a certain body part that got in the way of a cleaving swing.
I think more damage multipliers on particularly armoured body parts of individual enemies (mainly melee elites) could be made for melee weapons - and it would be more realistic than expecting a full overhaul of the armour/health system for entities - but still not without its share of risks.
Yes to the carapace on plasma gunner thoughts! I do not think one has to band aid the current system, it works and with proper care it could become perfect.
im ok with crushers being fully carapace, but some people asked to have their heads as flak and if they keep the hp they have it should be ok
even in vt2 chaos warriors which are the counter part of crushers, had a weakness being their unarmored head
if keeping crushers fully carapace id make that if you deal damage on their head they take more dmg at least
The only problem is they are spawned in groups that desync.
Not only would the time to kill the whole group increase to build up stacks on each of them, once they desync you can only kill them with ranged or an ogryn or an arbite that can’t take more than 50 damage at a time.
I wouldn’t mind this solution if they nerfed the amount that spawn and rebalance weapon damage to match the spawn rate instead of meta or nothing weapons