As more and more havoc modifiers get added, more and more of them seem to just be adding more damage resist, more carapace, more stagger resist, and more healing to enemies. This is not a great direction to be pushing modifiers as it forces so much of the game out of viability as weapons that don’t have a certain level of damage output and carapace penetration borderline can’t be used. In turn pushing people to use only the pre-discovered meta builds, which then makes fatshark have to add even tankier enemy modifiers, add more stagger resistance, add more carapace, to avoid the players just vaporizing everything on screen.
A big part of this issue is in how havoc is inherently designed. So many modifiers impact one specific aspect of the game in a way where there is one specific way a players build has to be made to counter it. Heres some examples:
Emperors fading light increases enemy hit mass, reduces enemy stagger, reduces player toughness and health, and reduces ammo pickups. This singlehandedly makes most weapons whose identities are focused on cleaving and crowd control be much more impacted than weapons focused on single target damage and mobility. Similarly, staves and a survivalist vet become almost mandatory because of how limited ammo becomes (not to mention how two of the staves can ignore the cleave downside of this modifier as well).
Encroaching garden yet again makes weapons that focus on cleaving multiple targets pointless, as unless you first pick off the pink enemies, they will almost always outheal your spread out damage. But again, single target precision weapons not only have an easier time picking out the pink enemies, but often can just one shot targets through the healing.
Rotten armor spawns waves of carapace, make weapons with no significant access to rending and low carapace modifiers be much more impacted than weapons with uncanny and/or high armor damage modifiers.
Those are just a few examples, but we continue to see this trend of havoc modifiers continuing to push sets of weapons and builds completely out of viability until we are left with nothing but the long used meta. When will we see more modifiers like heinous rituals? That was a modifier that could be very threatening if left unchecked, but could be managed with almost any team comp. The key thing here is it changed how you play, not what you play. It will always be more fun to make the players change their approach to an encounter than it will be to just force them to pick specific builds and play every game the exact same.
Anyways, I know this is a fairly popular opinion of havoc already but the more people saying it the better. All I have left to say is simply: Fatshark, please put more thought into your modifiers. If you’re worried about lowering the tankiness of enemies, then please go nerf those outlying weapons and builds as well. Balancing havoc around the few things that are performing the best is not good for the health of havoc or the rest of the game. Havoc (nor the rest of the game for that matter) should not be designed in a way where it directly counters the identity of so much of the weapon and talent roster of the game. Again, we dont want modifiers that change what we play, we want modifiers that change how we play and how we have to change and adapt to different situations. Picking builds and team comps should be something we can do to make those situations easier to handle, not something you HAVE to do to even start playing havoc in the first place.
That’s an excellent point and why binding powerful enemy modifiers like Rotten Armor, Encroaching, Rampaging etc to events (like Rituals does with DH) or Specialist enemies that can be addressed by player skill proactively without the need for overpowered, outlier meta builds could be the best path forward the game can take if the goal is expanding build variety in higher difficulty content IMO.
Ex: Ritualist Psyker Specialist - controls and applies Encroaching, Rotten Armor, Rampaging, and Final Toll. (not simultaneously, but like this)
Dealt with quickly, the importance of those OP outlier meta builds diminishes, ignore him and the game gets noticeably more difficult much like DH ritual.
Of course, it wouldn’t always be possible to eliminate him before he completes his ritual (and the speed at which he does his ritual, the distance he could be away from those affected could both be adjusted by FS based on feedback), so there would be difficulty spikes especially in higher difficulties.
This is the big thing. To me the game is being rebalanced such that they want players to be powerful without high skill floor requirements. Making toughness stupidly easy to access and survival not require sprint slides or weird abuses of how the game handles animation cancelling has the double benefit of also making the game more accessible on consoles. Without spoiling the difficulty because modifiers like this add difficulty but don’t ruin the inherent survival players can have.
Where this becomes a problem is in things like Rotten Armor, because the modifier is just way too much extra for most players, cycling back to the skill floor issue that necessitated making survival easier, just with a different expression.
In this sense, allowing the enemies to have modifiers applied and removed randomly, perhaps with a specialist enemy as you bring up, is a good idea. Doubly so if it can’t appear with certain things (rotten armors + crusher patrols can be a complete death sentence if people aren’t ready for it)
Best way to do a psyker ‘ritual’ enemy is to make it like a standard bearer but floating. It limits where the psyker can spawn but guarantees they’re visible. Pair it with a warp shield or something else to artificially inflate its health pool since it’s always visible and the buff it applies is dangerous enough that you need to work together to create space for someone to kill them.
The only last point of contention is making sure players can still melee it or force it down if everyone’s out of ammo. Which is mostly just good design practices.
Then, rotting armor being overwhelming as a permanent modifier becomes a mini panic event even in a crusher patrol because there’s a clear solution to the problem. Pair with things like rotten hordes to make it easier, crusher patrols to make it harder, and it also can be tuned to be more difficult at higher difficulties without overwhelming newer players.