Mission select.
With the way the mission select screen works currently you can come on to this game and find zero maps you want to play that are at the level you want to play. No Heresy maps on the board when I’ve checked twice. I know you like RNG but RNGing players out of playing the game was not what I expected. I really don’t see how this is a viable model for the game and if it isn’t rectified in the next few weeks I suspect your player drop off will be immense. If you are determined to keep it the way it is at least allow the difficulty for each map to be changed. I appreciate you’ll all be wanting to wind down for Christmas but honestly this will put the game in the ground if its not fixed before the new year. Maps should be rotating across a period of no greater than 90 minutes! You do really need to give us the ability to set up our own games, incentivise people joining these games in quickplay with bonuses.
Modifiers.
These currently don’t have any tangible benefit/negative for the difficulty they add or reduce. Have multiple on at one time, not just one for a period of hours followed by another. Grims and Scriptures should not be a modifier they should be a standard map feature. Currently if you want to play a difficulty of a map and it has grims/scriptures it’s kind of expected you get them (even if you don’t want/need them) because another player probably does and due to map rotation it can be a PITA to get these missions. The bonuses for these items really aren’t worth the bother of looking for them unless you have a weekly.
Increased boss spawn modifier as well as double stacking modifiers. Boss increase in a lights out setting? Yes please. Environmental danger modifier. I think ventilation purge is ok if a bit similar to lights out. Perhaps a modifier of Ventilation purge that requires coherency to stave off debuffs that are applied to you. Perhaps a weakness to melee and stamina reduction? I’m hoping you can come up with some good modifiers soon based on everything that you have in the game currently.
Map scoring. A big part of this genre is re-running maps and if you won’t add a scoreboard to let us see our improvements how about an overall team score generated by map completion time that takes into account difficulty, enemies killed, healing used and which type of modifiers are active? You’d need to set “standard” map times at that difficulty, with no modifiers and then then calculation would work off of this. Bonuses could be applied if the score is greater than a standard map score.
Boss updates & things for the future.
Bosses generally seem to be pretty infrequent on maps. I don’t think they should be guaranteed every single time but you should be at least wary of them spawning. As it stands they are rare and mostly pushovers unless you are already in a bad spot.
The BoN generally seems a bit weak. Should have some regeneration mechanic similar to the Plague Troll. Perhaps when it eats an enemy or when it hits a certain amount of health it “rampages” with its priority to eat players/enemies increasing, regenerating health, faster vomiting and receiving a speed boost. Add a plague thrower enemy based on the tox flamer but shoots the corruption increasing/slowing plague/vom of the BoN.
The plague Ogryn should be reduced in height but be given a speed boost. I do think this enemy should generate a cloud of flies out of the machinery on its back. Reducing incoming fire to it and units around it.
Add greater and lesser spawn. So the boss would be greater and a smaller version could be lesser. Potential game modifier for this could be Spawntide where Ogryn have the chance to mutate into lesser chaos spawn after receiving certain amounts of damage. This could also be an Assassination mission modifier where the Captain has a chance of turning into a Spawn.
Mantling over cover pushback. The player character should knock enemies back when climbing over cover with the vault. Same effect that currently happens when certain enemies climb up to the level that you are on. Would encourage aggressive gameplay and help force enemies out of cover.
Things to do on maps other than finding grims/scriptures.
If you want to add things to maps that would help players may I suggest a servo skull retrieval? On some maps there are powered down servo skulls sitting around. Hadron is particularly concerned that you don’t lose the one she gives you so I imagine claiming some of these lost ones for her would be welcome. You should be able to interact with them using your Auspex, having to hold out for a short time (like data upload on investigate missions) triggering a horde while the “incantations of awakening” are performed. If you complete this and finish the level you should receive a bonus multiplier (from Hadron) to materials on the end screen.
Allow the Auspex to be used an an enemy tracking radar on missions. This would help with Ventilation purge missions and lights out but still require team work as somebody would be a spotter. It could still go into “scanning mode” for investigation sections.
Greater access to weapons across classes. Give the Psyker access to the bolter and thunder hammer (daemon hammer basically like force sword). Zealot to get Power sword and Vet to get Flamer. Add the ability to double tap G to drop stun grenades at your feet as Zealot.
Classes are currently very limited, to boost variety please unbind these traits from columns and let us select six of our own choosing. Going forward as more are added these skills should just go into a general class pool with only the top line of immutable traits changing. Build variety will be massive, yes you may have some insane combinations but that can be resolved (see difficulty below). Top line traits should also be able to be mixed with each other. So for example say the next Zealot class is Death Cultist with the original being Preacher. You should be able to mix and match Preacher and Death Cultist top line abilities as well as the trait pool which would now sit at 36. This would give us significantly improved class generation and would allow you to get more creative with your ability traits i.e. them being in collumns doesn’t need to be considered just give us cool stuff.
Weapon RNG
Streamline modifiers for weapons by defaulting them to their highest values. Limit the levels to which the stats of weapons can be autogenerated so that pointless weapons are not cluttering up the store and wasting time (literally an hour). You’ll still have plenty of variety but pointless permutations will be dropped down by tens or hundreds of thousands. If you want to make weapons generally more interesting reconsider which traits are available to each. I think with the exception of one or two all traits should be available to all weapons (obviously divided between melee/range). If not necessarily in generation then certainly when you craft them with Hadron when that update drops.
Future difficulty.
Stop nerfing things so early into the lifecycle. If stuff needs tweaked for legitimately gamebreaking reasons then obviously but for stuff that people are having fun with that seems a bit OP allow it to play out. You seem to be concerned that people are finding the game too easy (toughness change that was rushed out broken, that still contradicts the tutorial btw) If you feel players are smashing the game too easily start working on higher difficulty levels. Nurgle is the antagonist so I don’t see why you can’t round out the difficulty levels to 7 (their (un)holy number).