Difficulty settings and the CW / Adventure mode

I think difficulty in general but especially on the chaos wastes needs to be looked at. To give you a bit of understanding as to why im posting this, I frequently play on Cata+ but have a lot of irl friends i’ve convinced to play who enjoy other difficulties or aren’t ready for that challenge yet, also some personal tests I ran through multiple difficulties to assess how I felt about each of their implementations left me with some thoughts.

Terror events in general should be tweaked, significantly shorter in some circumstances but more stressful. The barrel ones are prolly ok, but the “survive for x time” seem pretty tame or predictible

Cata is generally fine, the ending do typically seem easy with boons but that is more because the quality of players in pubs once handed powerful tools can make quick work of content, Cata for the most part should probably remain unchanged. Cata being “easy” is mostly just player skill being so much higher generally in this bracket + the addition of potentially powerful modifiers.

Ive been playing a decent bit of legend recently with friends and I see a lot of people struggle (like a LOT), I think the difficulty here is fine as well, but the lower difficulties need serious tweaks if we want new players to push to higher difficulties.

Champion, is a cake walk, constantly my friends who view legend is an insurmountable obstacle, hate to queue it on CW, or refuse to do books on adventire here if they even get convinced to play it, find Champion boring. I think health and damage numbers for champion are (mostly) fine, but the maps are pretty sparse, with enemies already being easier to kill and more open to stagger, I think spawns need to be increased. The jump from 1-2 ambient elites every 2 feet, to having to fight 10+ SVs at once on Legend, creates for a very steep learning curve for most new players.

Vet and Recruit, Recruit is pretty tame, almost boring but when you first buy the game having bad weapons and 0 power makes even that sparse map fairly daunting, but only the first few runs, I think maybe increasing the number of ambient elites by just a little, or bumping up horde size could help transitions to Vet level play, without seeming like a tutorial.

Vet, I think is (mostly) fine, since it seems like a large # of the player base stay here for various reasons, but if there is still a power req bar of entry I would remove it, since most players even if new can prolly jump into this the second they find a weapon that they like.

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This is an example of a Legend game from yesterday, where the team wiped on map 4 in CW, unfortunately the zealot left before I could snap a proper picture, but the reason I want to show this is, you can tell simply off damage numbers, damage taken, special kills ect, that players were struggling a little with Legend content, mostly because they were used to champion, this was the general case across 7-8 games yesterday when I was playing with a friend (the GK in the picture)

I was curious and talked to most of these players via in game chat, and they all expressed they felt champion was far to easy but the jump between it and legend seemed massive to them.

I do have this weird feeling too. Playing Legendary on any regular mission is like a tough challenge for me running with randoms. like it’s a tough fight to run from Start to Finish and the win rate is like +50% depending on what the game throws at you at once.
But Legendary Chaos Wastes feel like a Champion Regular Mission run, but can have a sudden heavy punch when the wastes unleash 5-6 of Leeches, Gutterrunners or Hookrats at you mid-Bossfight.
It’s a weird balance.

thanks for the awesome information.