I fear that too many balance decisions are done around an elite top of players.
I am not a professional and I am not educated in game balancing, but things such as the gunner buff seem out of place.
Yes, there are cracked zealots that can solo/duo havoc 40 out of sheer skill with or without help of mods/macros.
These people probably can go through whole missions without ever even being touched by a bullet due to stamina management and slide spam.
But there’s also a chunk of players that will never get to these levels with their vanilla ogryn or veteran and these people now have to deal with gunners that are now more dangerous than actual bosses.
I don’t think the game is in an ideal spot if in a room with a nameless gunner and a boss captain/monstrosity the gunner is the priority threat.
My feedback is that there should be a nerf to gunners spread and/or distance fallback but also a cooldown/nerf to dodges and slides.
The ability to spam slides and dodges paired with until death (for those that do not know it it is an ability that every 2 minutes allow to not die/be downed) for zealots means that no amount of damage buff to enemies will influence them, leaving other classes (that do not have the same stamina/dodge economy) to deal with balance changes that really hurt them.
This is especially hurtful in havoc due to toughness and health reduction, which invalidates (or at least really nerfs) builds built around tanking and regeneration of toughness, while not really impacting stamina at all.
It seems to limit diversity and also puts players in a lobby in a position of demanding others to bring specific stuff and criticizing builds.
That is very easy to activate and makes shooters and to a smaller extent gunners far less threatening. The on dodge activation paired with a hefty amount of toughness regen is part of it. Imo you could probably just change this to only on melee attacks dodged and still go through with shooters not being as strong in Havoc (I assume you’re talking about Havoc?)
However Psyker can do something similar super easily as well:
Veteran is unfortunately forced to either use a weapon with ghost, hope you have VoC when you need, or have to spend 2 talent points to get Exhilarating Takedown (get rid of the stupid Longshot requirement please FS).
While I enjoy Vet, I have completed Monstrous Duos and a couple of Havoc games with him, he definitely doesn’t feel as being in as good of a spot as Vet or Psyker (just my initial impressions, might change in the future).
Second Wind is a strong talent, no doubt. But it does not trivialize ranged enemies because you cannot dodge infinitely. One single gunner shoots more rounds per minute than you can dodge and eventually the hits you take will eat all toughness you could get from Second Wind within seconds!
Fatshark should implement a limitation to sliding similar to the dodge counter if they believe that ranged enemies are too trivial otherwise. Buffing gunners/reapers to the current level was a mistake. We are back to peek-a-boo gunfights like in earlier patches. Bad times for those who play Darktide for melee combat and not for the lackluster gunplay with guns that cannot shoot straight because of balance…
Aside from Empathic Evasion, what those talents do is they let you replenish toughness.
For those players for whom Gunners/Shooters are unthreatening, toughness is barely an issue at all. They don’t get hit in the first place by powersliding and, to a lesser extent, abusing Agile blessing.
Nerfing toughness replenishment will barely affect those for whom Gunners are barely threatening as they are right now, while significantly gimping your usual Heresy/Damnation players and making the average pub games even more of a slog. What you pointed out is not the core issue - powersliding and infinite dodges are.
