The mission board updates are, to my pleasant surprise, basically 90% of what I and others were agitating for.
Game modes? Consolidated. Auric and the special mission have been folded into regular difficulties and the Tertium campaign. Havoc is cemented as the new ultrasweat mode with Mortis Trials as a neat diversion/sandbox.
Linear campaign with a functional story? Added. About a half hour of cutscenes, while not turning sh*t into gold, at least assembles the plot into something better than what we originally had, and vastly improves onboarding for new players who otherwise missed out on The Lore.
About the only things missing are the ability to pick and choose story missions for replay (unless thatās unlocked after a point I havenāt yet reached) and full player agency for missions and modifiers (the improvements weāve got are still fairly substantial imo).
So yeah, credit where credit is due. Gonna go update The Book.
It may not be inherently an issue with the mission board rework, but I do think Auric is still ābrokenā or at least downgraded from the before-times of pre-Arbites.
Inconsistent is the best word I can use to describe new Auric.
It could also be that Arbites is just that OP that it mutes Auric difficulty. And since you are guaranteed to get at least one per match, there is really no controlling for that variable these days.
It just feels off and, for the first time since I started playing daily at Unlocked and Loaded, I just kind of wasnāt into it last night. That worries me.
Also, I do feel for those that Iāve seen express their grief at the loss of Auric Heresy as their comfort zone. I did not feel that same as the devs did about that mode. Even though I had graduated from it many hours ago, it was definitely a great place for comfortably advancing skill. And itās loss may also have contributed to this new Auric issue.
Thereās still a really limited choice of missions 7-8 out of 21, and for some reason maps that rotate out usually rotate in the cycle after. Yay RNG.
the mission board is indeed clearer (graphically too). the splitting between standard and auric was obsolete.
also, the new skill trees (ogryn + arbites) are so much more flexible than the old ones. fatshark has clearly improved here.
This is my only gripe as well, while there are a few enjoyable games here and there, it very much seems to depend on how bad my team mates are verses the difficulty itself. Before in Auric, āeveryone would get their shareā even if the team was god tier, and while a exceptionally good team would still blow through it without ever feeling threatened, āI got to feel like I was playing the gameā.
Now it feels like āhigh intensity damnationā alright, but not Auric, and that just isnāt enough especially with the Arbite. I had a decent game last night where I had a basically comatose Psyker on the team (he was dead waiting for revive most of the match, and actually afk at one point) and that game was actually enjoyable as my other two team mates āheld their ownā but werenāt great either, and suddenly I was allowed to play the game and feel very effective in my build. I shouldnāt have to bank on that to enjoy myself, and most games devolve into everyone fighting each other for part of the wave thatās actually dense enough to feel like youāre doing something, while the rest get 2-3 enemies per person as they fight for the scraps.
Only consistency Iāve seen is my beloved Clandestine Gloriana, and even then itās mostly in Maelstromās that it shines, and there is only ever one of those up and even rarer that the modifier isnāt ācompletely unplayable garbageā. Iāve also had this feeling recently where Iām sitting there playing andā¦getting bored, because there isnāt enough to do. And while on the one hand itās slightly a good thing in the sense Iāll jump on something else to hyper fixate on and enjoy myself, on the other itās like āthis was my comfort game and now itās almost as boring as the comfort game I left for it (Destiny 2)ā. I can barely even get myself to try and buildcraft with Arbite as they arenāt āinterestingā in any way, just broken stat sticks with all the best free talents that make you win regardless of how well you play, itās deeply depressing (as even the Ogryn, despite being similarly broken, had me giddy to experiment with him for months, where as Arbite I felt I ādid everythingā after 3 days).
Why I made this post about it, and hope at least the feeling is addressed even if my proposed solution isnāt, as I feel youāre gonna see a continual decline in the āconsistent player baseā if this isnāt ironed out.
Beyond this though, I will agree with everything else said, I overall think the new mission board is an improvement, and while aesthetically I can understand people not liking it, I think it makes sense āimmersionā wise, though I could see adding an accessibility feature that reverts the portrates to being clear again.
yeah, itās only one data point (and who knows how many I can get), but I had a regular Hi-Int Auric earlier with no cops! and it was really fun. I had things to kill! Enemies to dodge!
I donāt know how to empirically collect data for this, but I am pretty firmly leaning that Arbites is the problem with Auric (as well as campaign QP).
Iāve played about 20 games of the new Auric, and itās definitely clear that the intensity has increased and the overall difficulty has gone up.
That said, as Iāve been saying for a long time, there are some blatantly harmful elements in the game that drastically reduce its difficulty.
Here are the top 3 I personally feel are the most problematic
Gold Toughness
Thereās both Chorus and VoC, but the worst offender by far is Chorus spam, mainly due to CDR issues.
Especially with the current Havoc conditions, you see nothing but this from Zealot players these days (particularly newer ones).
Since they lack any real positioning or dodging skills, they repeatedly tank Burster explosions and Crusher hits by relying on Gold Toughness.
Without it, I can confidently say theyād be downed at least five times per game.
From my perspective, the impact of Gold Toughness on gameplay far outweighs that of any single class.
I strongly believe it should either be removed entirely, have the CDR problem fixed, or be replaced with something else like a flat DR.
Arbites and Ogryn
As you probably know, when judged by Auric standards, their class power levels are completely over the top and absolutely in need of a nerf.
While you donāt see Ogryn as much after the update, likely due to the new class stealing the spotlight, Arbites remains top-tier in both survivability and damage.
Its performance feels like a supercharged combination of Zealot and Veteran, to the point where playing any other class feels like a joke in comparison.
Smite
No explanation needed, itās basically a punching bag generator.
Not only is it broken, itās also just not a fun skill to use. It really needs to be addressed.
If these three issues were properly dealt with, and if DS and Plasma were nerfed as well, I think the clear rate for Auric and Maelstrom would settle at a more reasonable level.
That said, Havoc 40 would likely become nearly impossible to clear, so adjustments there would be necessary too.
When you say āA5,ā are you referring to Auric HISTG? I basically only play Auric HISTG or Maelstrom, and Iāve played them countless times.
Since the difficulty of Auric was raised at the end of June, Iāve played about 20 games, and Iāve definitely noticed some changes: the number of elites deployed, the frequency of hordes, and most notably, the Bursters. While itās not quite on the level of the Burster trains in Maelstrom, there were still 2 or 3 Bursters coming in a row, which wasnāt something you saw often in the older version of Auric HISTG.
I was using fairly weak builds and weapons (Veteran with ES, Focus Target, Brace Autogun, TAxe, and Psyker with DD, Laspistol, Great Force Sword), so itās possible that the overall DPS was lower and it just took longer to kill things. Still, Iād say without a doubt that the overall difficulty has increased compared to the previous HISTG. It would be helpful if someone could show the numbers to confirm this.
A5 = Auric Damnation, modifiers not included, at least when I say it.
I welcome other perspectives on this as I hope to just be crazy and they didnāt actually break anything. But all of your examples (sans Arbites) were a thing before the update and nothing felt as off as it does now.
It was clear as day for me: I played my usual A5 QP games night before update, went to sleep, woke up to the update, and Auric was a snooze fest. Then many other people poured in with the same opinion. Weāve since filtered out the issue of QP placing you into ālow-intensityā campaign missions, but there is still something not quite right.
They have since actually patched in their baseline Hi-Int for all Aurics and, allegedly, Hi-int on the board now means ādouble hi-int.ā
Iām wishy washy on this because I never expected this to be an issue, so i donāt have hard data from before the update. But the universal opinion was new Auric is off. I donāt know where the consensus stands 3 hotfixes later.
Now Iām investigating how things feel when Arbites isnāt around, but thatās hard to do at the moment, and may be for some time.
I never use QP, so I canāt say for sure. I donāt think Iāve used it at all in over three years.
Right after the update, it was definitely way too easy.
However, after the recent hotfixes, I feel like the difficulty has gone up.
I can āconfirmā with my own anecdotal evidence, I think the hotfix today āstealth fixedā Auric.
AT least for the games I played this evening, everything felt mostly āback to normalā. I played a Clandestine Gloriana and got obliterated in the first battery room because I got unlucky/stuck in the stairs trying to revive a bud and got trappered, then watched my team mate desperately flail behind their shield for like 5 minutes against IMMENSE levels of enemy spam before eventually making the mistake of not taking the āback wayā to the res pilon and dying horribly (great times honestly, was the mission that made me go āwait are we so back?ā). Got obliterated on the Train yard mission (though to be fair it was two man with a Pysker that was having a really hard time, cause our other teammates DCād for some reason and nobody came to join them) in the final section because a sniper lived to long, clipped my big toe, and I went down before I could recover myself, but the enemies where constant and plentiful (unlike when I did a two man a week into the update with a friend because nobody else was playing auric and we slept through the whole thing).
And played a Dark Communion where we won this time, but it was QUITE dense/very hectic and I had to try VERY hard to get us through all the things trying to kill use, and chain revive at the pilon with usually just one other buddy alive a good number of times (and got called āthe man the myth the legendā when I had to run through the dark staircase largely by myself to get to the āambushā area and do a full revive on my other 3 dead teammates).
This all being with me still playing Arbite (25 missions to freedommmm). Granted, they all also had Psykers/Veterans and maybe one other token Arbite, but still. The other games of lesser note still felt ādense enoughā despite being relatively painless victories, instead of making me want to fall asleep.
So, not sure what they did over there, but all I can say is donāt, touch, anything XD at least from my end. I think we have returned to form!.. Goes and knocks on all the wood possible. Shall see if thatās still the case tomorrow though. (I also see that a lot of people where/are still having server issuesā¦I didnāt run into any, but I hope this wasnāt/isnāt the culprit and it doesnāt get reverted as they try and fix that).
Trying to understand your stories clearly, but it sounds like your āback to formā experiences were mostly with 1-3 teammates down. While I agree thatās fun these days, I would not credit that as Auric being where it used to be. I never needed to be shorthanded to feel the pressure on the old board.
I do agree with you for those scenarios, though. I did play one Auric, maybe a mael, canāt remember, where it was just me and 2 arbites (only 1 with a dog) after the 3rd cop DCd early and, presumably due to the server issues, we never got back fill.
It was fun, but I think itās a data point against Auric being in the right spot, not for it.
