tl;dr
Due to the changes of the way specialists spawn in general with the recent update, every mission feels like it’s running the Shock Troop condition without the juicy rewards associated with it.
While I find Shock Troop to be really exhilarating and a new enjoyable level of difficulty, I don’t really like that every T5 mission seems to spawn multiple of the same specialists in groups almost all the time.
My suggestion is to discourage the director from doing this on missions that don’t have the Shock Troop condition, but still make it a rare occurrence.
I like the variety in difficulty and sometimes I just want less specialists to spawn without having to play T4 or even T3 (which I now find both pretty slow/‘boring’).
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I have a collected 472 hours on this game so far with my best friend and we’re at a point where we’re just farming T5 hi-intensity for fun and because it gave us the most rewards prior to the new special conditions.
Shock Troop has been a really fun and challenging addition that shakes up our playstyles a bit by addressing the sheer amount of specialists that spawn at a time. Naturally we tend to wipe somewhat often with 2 pubs, but when everyone is working together, it amounts to a really exhilarating experience.
However, it feels like T5 in general is just no different from shock troop with the changes to specialist spawns in Heresy/Damnation difficulty. While I generally welcome the increase in challenge, it does get exhausting having back to back to back missions where we get multiple of the same specialists coming in waves, to the point that we’re failing missions far more often and we’ve had multiple hours of wipes to our dismay.
I sometimes just like the variety of difficulty where I get to choose the intensity based on the special conditions. That way every mission doesn’t really feel like I’m doing the same thing all the time. That is the point of special conditions, after all!
On that note, I definitely miss endless horde, but it had problems.