Yes, I know. Another thread about Havocs, but I was bored. Following the discussions happening on this forum after havoc hit live servers has met with a variety of views coming together to form the opinion that…havoc is not that good.
With the fear of demotion and seen as “must” take meta builds to complete it and combining it with the fun pastime that is waiting on Party Finder I can see that people are having a negative view of the whole concept.
So I’ve been trying to find a middle ground for what Havoc could be, and what I want is to make it into two separate things. A way to make it viable for Quick Play and Party Finder for dedicated groups. So my proposed solution to this is that we make a new difficulty level, a T6/Exterminatus if you will.
So how do we do that then? First, we create a new Havoc board, here we now introduce baseline modifiers to this new difficulty level. The base modifiers are a work in progress and the actual numbers for them can be determined later on, but if you have any ideas that you would like to share about them do so, but the ones I have thought about as a good starting line for how difficult havoc should be is the following:
- Fading Light (1), just as the current one would work. Perhaps Fatshark can look over the damage on ranged units abit if needed.
- Elite Resistance (1). Yes, it is back, but here you would move the current modifiers of more health, mass, damage, attack speed increase and more/denser hordes and so on.
- Nurgle’s Curse (1). Here we have the less toughness and health and additional corruption damage from enemies.
- Ill prepared (1). Less ammo, stimms, medipacks, ammo crates, grenades and less medstation charges.
These modifiers would always be present on each map played on this new difficulty. But as you know, having variation is fun! So here we would introduce additional modifiers, for example you could have the base modifiers and then add in +2-5 random modifiers for extra fun times. So what would these random modifiers be?
- The current line up of availble modifiers already in the game! Everyone surely loves Hunting Grounds and/or Pox Gas!
- Steal some from Vermintide, they won’t mind it one bit!
- If you have been paying attention, you could see that I have added (1) by the base modifiers, meaning that there would be upgrade version of them, how about Elite Resistance (3) Oops! All Maulers edition! where as Ill Prepared (4) could be reduced number of active medstations and placing the respawn points further appart, in addition to less of…everything else.
By adding these all together, the Havoc board would just be a Maelstrom board (in terms of active modifiers at least!) that you could have the option to Quick Play into. But I also mentioned Party Finder, didn’t I?
So here we have the same thing, the base modifiers are still there, but… for Party Finder you could add in the option that people could be able to pick which modifiers they would want to play with, it would mean that you would have the current 4 base modifiers and up to 7 empty slots (numbers to be determined I guess…) where all the extra modifiers could be picked meaning you could go as crazy with all the slots maxed out! or as easy you could want and just start a game with just the base modifiers in place.
Some modifiers should also be made only availble on Party Finder started maps, meaning that the very hard modifiers would be reserved for the 4 man stack on comms, where as the Quick Play experience would not throw you any extra hard curveballs with random players. In short, Quick Play havoc missions would be “easier”.
So what about gatekeeping in this “new” difficulty level? As soon as you have an option to quick play into a mission, you would want people on similar gameplay level as yourself, so some form of achievement must be met to make this new Havoc board availble for players.
Here Fatshark could make a achievement that would unlock after doing 50-75 maelstrom missions without going down, making it only count when you go down means that you don’t have to rely on teammates nor that you can carry people through them to help them qualify for this achievement.
The achievement is to grindy you say? True I guess, but couldn’t Fatshark give us a heads up notice that in X months the rework would be done, so you could have that achievement unlocked in time for game day!
Rewards should be better. Aquilas! there I said it, but I don’t think that they should be rewarded… as a set reward from havoc chests, but something that you can find during missions, a loot stash if you will. I also don’t think that it would be good to “lock” aquilas behind Havoc mission board aswell, so everyone should have a chance to find some, even in lower difficulties.
If you want to you could have the higher modifier count on Havoc mission give you an extra percentage bonus to every reward (ordos, plasteel, diamantine and aquilas found), so that people would feel that there is a reason to do Havocs and not just run lower difficulty levels over and over again. A possible concern could be that people would find out mission IDs for the maps with Aquilas drops, hopefully there could be a fix for that.
Lastly, trying to make the current iterations of achievements for Havoc work with this new system. Having the modifiers have a havoc level associated with them, for example, each base modifier could have a rating of 5 levels each, meaning if you keep the four previously presented you would start at Havoc level 20 (for Party Finder games with no additional modifiers chosen) and then you could add modifiers until you got to 40 or above (while still being capped at 40 clearance level total). And as for helping others? join Party Finder games as normal.
Happy holidays everyone!