That’s all there is to this sentiment. After playing a couple of Delta expeditions - typically the first one featuring dust storms - I came to acknowledge that:
- Being disabled by the dust storms for dozen of seconds on end is not fun; you can also fly out of a dust storm, hit terrain, and again be disabled by the very same dust storm,
- Being shot by shooters/gunners in the dust storms, with no immediate means to retaliate or at least being impervious to ranged attacks while being disabled by storms is not fun, either,
- Enemies can path into them - patrols included - and often die from colliding with terrain upon being expunged, which reduces the amount of interactions players get to have themselves with the enemies, which is arguably also not fun,
This roughly translates into the following:
- Pathing can be limited by the storms in a way that can result at best in a time loss due to having to choose alternate pathing - which is not inherently a bad thing,
- At worst it can result in random wipes due to players being thrown over ledges, or into unfavourable position,
- Enemies’ interactions with the storms result in less player interactions with the enemies, reducing the potential number of encounters; or make for a frustrating experience when gunners are involved and are targeting players „riding” storms.
Is that the idea with them? Are they just a bad case of asset recycling from VT2 Blighstormer enemy, with no depth on how their attack was interacting with players, and in what environments, and why? Open maps explain why it has a use case, but that doesn’t mean removing the “players receive damage upon leaving the storm” component from the storms is enough to make them interesting.
There is no other way to interact with them other than to avoid pathing into them, and that’s not great, because the odds that they turn the effect against your intention is just unfavourable to measure.
I do not want to present immediate ideas on how to improve those, but would it be feasible that players can interact with dust storms in any way, and make them essentially not a bad reuse of Blightstormer enemy assets from Vermintide 2? If I were to think of something in terms of soft rework - as unlikely as it is - I would:
- Make them affect bigger areas; maybe an entire point of interest, even,
- Storms no longer disable any entity; gunners and shooters lose line of sight of players inside the storm,
- Consider making them strictly apply debuffs for the players and the enemies (movespeed, dodge, manipulation speed related, i.e., attack, swap speed, etc.),
- Pathing through the eye of the storm (some circle-shaped area in the center of the storm “entity”) should remove any debuffs applied.
Thanks for reading. I don’t want to be stuck with a bad case of Blighstormer storms in this game mode.