The secondary objectives don’t contain enough reward for the risk. The extra rewards are too low in comparison for how much harder the game gets. Take 2 grimoires on malice for a bonus of 510 xp when base xp is 2550 but lose 2/3 of your health? Not good enough, not even close. Also, picking up 1/2 grimoire should yield half the reward, not 1/3 or less, same thing goes for scriptures.
The conditions are interesting and fun but the reduced visibility one is basically the AI cheating. They fire through the fog while you in turn can’t see them. Also the condition which gives you fewer enemies is a pure benefit, it has no risk vs reward, it makes the run easier while also giving you rewards for it…???
The lasguns have way too much hipfire recoil to the point that they’re unusable, the accatra one is decent but the lucius and kantrael aren’t. The recoil on the guns firing in ads is also too much. You know yourselves that the lore doesn’t have recoil for lasguns but you decided to hamper our gameplay experience by adding it because it “feels good”. Well, it doesn’t! It doesn’t feel good to equip a kantrael lasgun and have a scope and fire and your gun recoils so hard making follow up shots tricky to land, especially when they’re firing back and suppressing you. I do NOT feel like a sharpshooter using kantrael lasgun with the scope. Not at all, the recoil is too much to reliably land several shots at range in the head.
The sharpshooter has a damage debuff when firing at enemies in close range, this makes no real sense at all especially since you have a coherency system which promotes proximity teamplay with allies who are sometimes pure melee characters. Same thing goes with feats like “demolition team”. You want me to stick close to my allies but also give me feats like “sniper” which one is it Fatshark? Stay close to team for coherency bonuses, and get a damage debuff, or leave coherency with sniper to get a damage bonus? It doesn’t help that you don’t even specify the ranges at which the debuff or the sniper feat activates.
Malice requiring level 3 only makes absolutely no sense. Might as well leave it at level 1 then, it should be set at a minimum to level 5 to ensure players at least have their toughness feat. If not set to level 10. I’ve met so many players in malice below lvl 10 and all of them are less effective than they should be. Difficulty 1 is extremely easy, difficulty 2 is easy, but malice is actually hard until you have a full team of level 10’s and even then you can wipe. I am speaking as someone who plays with randoms, and not premade teams.