The problem I see is that increasing the effective hitpoints of an enemy affects the interesting-ness of the combat situations it is involved in waaaay less than how it affects the duration / slog of a fight. Fighting a mixed combination of enemies on varying terrain tests your reaction, improvosation, and situational awareness skills. Which direction do I go to get a tactical advantage? Can I hold them here or will I get overwhelmed? Can I go for a counter attack or should I play more defensive until I get an opening? Which target do I prioritise? How do I create space to handle the disabler that is around somewhere? Can I use the monster or AoE special to my advantage here? Does my mate need help or can I count on him to have my back here? Should I shoot that one now to relieve pressure or won’t I be able to reload before I might really need to shoot something else?
That - to me at least - is very fun gameplay and the reason Vermintide is awesome like no other game. And the number of hitpoints the enemies have doesn’t affect those things by a lot, or at least with greatly diminishing returns after a certain point. And after some point upping hitpoints just devolves into the situation becoming a DPS-check before you get overwhelmed by new spawns, where even if you played perfectly there was no way you could even have won.
And exactly that scenario is my fear what will happen if CW’s (or other enemies’) hitpoints just get upped to balance them to last around high DPS classes / weapons. Then low DPS classes just stop being viable. No Shade or GK in the team? Tough luck, die against an impenetrable wall of enemies because they spawned faster than you can kill them no matter what you do. Lame. the discrepancy between DPS output needs to be adressed before you up enemy hitpoints even more, but that requires a total rebalance of all the classes.
That issue gets even more exacerbated if you mess with stagger resist as well, which would also create similar issues if done by itself. Messing with stagger resist is a meta shift more than it is a difficulty increase, favoring classes that bypass the stagger system like Assassin talented Elves / Saltz, or GK and such, over classes like FK and slower staggering weapons. Right now, every setup in this game has its own way of dealing with enemies, creating playstyle diversity. That will be hurt by making enemies more stagger resistant. And on the topic of CWs: The main offenders in this game that trivialize CWs do not give a hoot about staggering them anyways, so that will not solve much either.
Simply spawning moar enemies also doesn’t improve things. Fighting 100 instead of 30 Fanatics is exactly the same thing, it just takes longer. Fighting 20 Fanatics, 2 Maulers, 4 Bulwarks, a Leech, a Chaos Warrior, and 2 Berserkers is a completely different experience from fighting 30 Fanatics, however, even if the total number of enemies is the same. (Just to give an exaggerated example.)
Not numbers, not enemy hitpoints, not stagger resistance; but diversity and combinations are what increases difficulty in an interesting & meaningful way. A CW doesn’t get more interesting to fight if you have to him 30 instead of 20 times. A CW does get more interesting to fight if he brings friends, however. And yes, there is a huge difference between having to hit him 3 (or just 1) times instead of 20, but that is an argument for decreasing damage outliers more than it is to create a situation in which one class / weapon needs to hit a CW 10 times instead of 2 but another class / weapon now needs 40.
Monsters illustrate my point as good as anything. Monsters create tactically exceptional situations. A monster in the mix makes you have to take a lot of quick decisions and tests your combat skills. But the monster doesn’t really do that by just being a damage sponge. It does do that by having unique and attack patterns, and the fact that it can hurt or displace other enemies adds another tactical layer as well. Sure, if the monster could be killed in a few hits it wouldn’t be as dangerous. But at some point its damage-spongyness doesn’t add anything to the intricacy of the fight anymore, and the fight just gets dragged out unnescessarily. This is very appearant on some party compositions, where you just can’t whittle down the monster before the next enemy spawns just overwhelm you with numbers in the meantime. And on the other hand, some classes can just trivialize a monster, taking the fun out of the fight as well. If you come across a monster only once per run, the Shade, GK, and BH saved up their potions and delete it in 30 seconds tops. Monsters are super fun, but not if they soak all the damage, and neither if they die too fast.
So, if:
- The disparity in damage output to monsters gets reduced without making DPS classes useless, like could be done with a damage cap to monsters,
- Monsters can’t damage soak beyond the point of it being not fun anymore,
- And monsters appear more often, thereby enriching the diversity in combat situations,
The game might be better and more difficult in the right way.
My idea is to do something like making monsters only about 3-4 times as hard to kill as CWs are currently, but giving them protection against super high damage attacks through a damage cap of sorts, and letting them appear more often. That means more interesting combat across the run, every team can still fight them without it being a slog, and DPS classes still have a use without trivializing them. It might take some expirimenting and number tweaking, but I’m very hopeful a good balace could be achieved.
CWs, as far as I’m concerned, aren’t a very big problem and don’t need much changes, rather than enemy composition around the CWs needs some tweaks.
