They’re simply unsatisfying to fight. Since it’s not worth the loss of health and ammo for the team (outside of thammer zealots), there’s little incentive to fight them at all. It becomes a tedious waiting game of letting it kill 2 players and vanish.
But the underlying gameplay mechanic itself though is still great, as well as the the art and effects.
Therefore I propose that the mechanic is streamlined - and that it should instantly grab and kill whoever woke it up before vanishing. That way the danger and dread of The Witch from L4D is still retained, and careless players are still punished. But the tedium, ‘unfair’ cost and potential grief from fighting it is negated entirely.
As for fighting it for real - how about replacing the Chasm Terminal boss with it? I’d love to walk out the elevator into the mist and seeing that green glow rise up out of the middle of the platform. A boss fight like Nurgloth would help inject some boss variety too.
They really need to add something like the loot dice that drop when you kill bosses in VT. It would help improve the loot RNG and make fighting Daemonhosts more of a risk/reward thing than the pointless roadblock it is now.
The reason witches aren’t as tedious is because she is short and sharp. You can avoid her, her reaction is a bit more nuanced and she calms down, but you can also crown her with a shotgun, or she dies really quickly if she gets triggered and at most you have one person downed or killed. The Daemonhost tries to be the witch, but again misses the point of being a hazard. It tries to be a boss at the same time which means it’s strong enough to have consequences but it takes nearly forever to get rid of unless you lose 2 people and get a ton of corruption, which is a massive punishment, or have a dedicated bosskiller like a THammer, and also spend a boss amount of time killing it. That’s why it feels so unrewarding.
I would propose that it doesn’t give any reward, but instead it has a massive weakpoint on it somewhere (like a chaos circle or sigil or whatever) where you can dunk it back into the warp about as quick as you can crown a witch. It would be visible in both its inactive stages but brightly glows when it it active. Another thing I would like is if it’s on a random location of the daemonhost. That way you can evaluate where to hit if you have to activate it, but also still leave it alone if it’s not completely blocking a path. Also it only eats one person.
In some way yes, but bonk zealot kills it in like what, 5 seconds? That’s tough to beat, and dh also causes corruption in an area around it while attacking, so if it takes longer to kill then you (and other nearby allies) will end up loosing a good chunk of your health to it.
The main problem of the shield is that most users will just sit and block and end up being dead weight during fights, that and the fact that there are no synergies from feats/blessings for using it defensively and it’s offensive capabilities are massively outshined by other melee weapons.
I feel like L4D’s witch got it right perfectly. She was haunting, menacing, predictable in her actions but unpredictable in location (and locomotion). Added to that she wasn’t large and surrounded by glowing fog.
Once you hear a witch you become cautious, you move slower, maybe even turn off your light just to be safe. She could be around any corner, or worse, shambling towards you.
It’s dangerous to move slow around such a dangerous target, and your zombie counterparts know this. Confusing the humans around a witch can be fruitful indeed. Not applicable to DT but worth mentioning.
Most importantly, she’s quite the glass cannon. With proper preparation and a bit of skill, she can be killed quickly before doing any damage. Very satisfying.
Demon host has none of that. Whenever I heard it trying to lure the nearest cat into an early grave, I just sighed and moved around it.
The corruption inflicted by a DH should be removed completely when it dies. That way the team doesn’t have low reserves and 50% purple bar as a reward for not just letting 2 people die and picking them up 17m down the road less than a minute later.
That’s my biggest complaint with it, its an absolute failure from a game design perspective in a team based game. No teamwork!
The problem with daemonhost is that FS tried to make it a witch but also make it a boss.
In L4D you don’t have witches with tank’s hp and damage aura running around.
Imo they need to be divided into two separate enemies: one is lesser DH that is “demoted” in rank to a special with appropriate stat adjustments to make it a proper witch and the other becomes either a full-time monstrosity or an assassination target (would probably prefer the latter).
You aren’t supposed to fight Demon Hosts. They aren’t a boss, they are an environmental hazard designed to make you change your pathing. You can think of them as a pitfall trap if that helps you grasp the concept. You go around the pitfall trap if you are paying attention, if not you fall in and are punished by dying on the spikes below.
It doesn’t have the slightly random multiple paths that even VT1 and 2 had either. I heard that they were planning on putting it in DT but had to turn it off because of bugs… but you know how that story is going.
It’s no use bleating at me mate, I also think they are a poor substitute for proper randomised pathing, but it is what it is.
The DH makes you path into back alleys or skirt around instead of cutting right across along the most efficient line to completion. It’s minor repathing design. You can see the same design archetype in the middle of archivum sycorax with the random doors, or at the end of hab drako with the randomly destroyed bridges. It adds variety, just… not much.
Personally I would love to see the middle of archivum sycorax expanded on as that is the closest we have gotten to randomised pathing that matters in any significance. A cross section of streets and alleys and sewers that are randomly blocked off for example with different enemy spawns depending on what route you get.
