I play DWONSC3 and up (I don’t even use breakpoint ranged weapons on it). I haven’t worked with breakpoints in a long, long time. Even when I played base Cata, I never went for melee or ranged breakpoints on WHC (like full charged 1 shotting SV). Always preferred multi-hit weapons. I do like speed though, and if anything don’t want to have breakpoints randomly forced on me for no reason, and I definitely don’t want useless traits like Parry when I could at least have opportunist. DWONSC3 does the same thing without being random or making things feel arbitrarily different, like by having variable attack speeds due to random properties. The hits to kill are variable due to the sheer number of factors involved, but it’s not random and is in ways that I can control in the moment like by tagging and in ways the team can collectively control, not just ‘influence’. Definitely not going to be as skill based. Getting crit power and push block angle sounds cool.
The adapting on the fly thing is nonsense. What’s going to happen is your going to kill enemies in more or less hits sometimes and change literally nothing about the way you play (unless you were all seriously putting yourselves in spots like where you would heavy attack a CW knowing that the hit will kill it and cause its attack to not hit you, which almost no one ever does and instead makes sure they can’t get hit anyway in case they’ve miscalculated or missed any threats), and likely make weapons that don’t rely on breakpoints better for it then ones that do anyway.
You could instead have variable gameplay by having even more varied enemies instead of making a player’s equipment variable for that cod zombies experience. I’d rather have to adapt to what I’m fighting than to what I’m using. It’s like saying WHC has to adapt on the fly because of Killing Shot, when that too is clearly another minimum skill mechanic in the form of a perk that averages out exceedingly well even at low skill levels.
All in all, no, there won’t be much git gud to be found here. I highly doubt I’ll see any, like usual. There’s nothing wrong with being bad though. There is with someone being bad and acting like they’re better than they are, spreading misinformation and then acting like things should be balanced a certain way when they don’t understand any of the detailed nuances of a given weapon for example. Many modded players are guilty of this, though I won’t name them. Of course not all players will do this (I hope most won’t). To the ones that will - admit you’re bad and stay out of the balance threads.
A lot of the new effects sound pretty busted. They won’t take much learning.
There will be even more ways ways to get extremely lucky and unlucky, like pre-pseudo crits, that will let players feel very good about themselves because it won’t be their ‘fault’ when they lose and they get that gambling experience of winning. Considering how addictive Fatshark’s sound design is, they should make slot machines. The crit sound effect is fantastic for that kind of thing. Probably won’t be my cup of tea, which is fine. I’ll stick to modded, where there’s more to learn on a core mechanical level because of the importance of animation reading. It’s a free update so I’m not negatively impacted by this, so I wish everyone looking forward to it a good experience with the Chaos Wastes.