High intensity damnation should be the regular damnation. Like the title says, the regular damnation has way too low mob density, its extremely boring and doesn’t feel like the highest difficulty. High Intensity damnation should have an even higher density.
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That’s what auric missions are for - the game now has the super high difficulties for high tier players. Leave some space for us regular players 
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What’s the issue with it being separate though? Other than you being bored.
Personally I’d keep regular damnation the same, but standardize Auric on High-Intensity as a baseline, and only sprinkle in some shock gauntlet on top for variety. What I don’t like about auric is that it has made Shock Gauntlet the standard because everyone queues for it, even people who have no idea what they’re doing.
Shock Gauntlet is fun in small doses but it quickly becomes frustrating because it breaks the game in a lot of ways. For instance if too many of the same special spawn at the same time, the game will only play sounds for one of them. You also spend >80% of the match just gunning down specials over and over again, and the lack of variety gets boring after a while.
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Had a game where we had monstrosities back to back.
It was a fun game. But after the 6th or perhaps 8th monstrosity in a row, the team got wiped by the 7th with only me left standing, (alone in the dark since it was lights out) with a horde and ton of specials between me and my captured team, I wasn’t having fun anymore… As a squad mate said: “Sometimes the devs overcook these things”
Don’t get me wrong, Auric is fun, but balanced they are not.
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There have been some high-shock games that just seem like unwinnable clown circus bs. There was one time on hab dreyko where EIGHT scab bombers attacked us at the same time. Or another game that had endless dreg gunners around every imaginable corner, around 150 in total (I counted). Or when you see a trapper in front of you and you press shift to dodge the net, but it doesn’t work because it’s actually FIVE trappers all standing on the same spot with animations synced together and you only realize it when the trapper hydra shoots more nets in a row than you can physically dodge.
That’s the sort of thing that “breaks” the game because there’s no reasonable way that the players can deal with it using the tools they have, or even understand what’s happening.
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The Monster-on-special-kill-spawn is probably the best modifier this game currently has. It’s essentially this game’s equivalent to Twitch Mode, especially since it usually comes coupled with another few nice modifiers.
This is the type of endgame this game needs. Hard challenge, but wholly optional.
You don’t have to pick the Maelstrom Auric mission, of all things. It’s the ultimate challenge. You can play other regular Auric missions and you won’t get the kitchen sink experience like that.
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I’m fairly certain the weakened monstrosity spawns are bugged, one auric final, at the very end of the mission, we just got the last power cell installed and it was time to leave for the exit, and a chaos spawn appeared, not weakened, but at full health, it downed on Ogyrn, then leaped at another, and its hitbox was just large enough to collide with me and knock me off the platform and ledge me, then finished off the last two.
Never had I felt more cheated in Darktide than that moment. That was some serious bs.
Plus the monstrosities can spawn in odd places, which can make for awkward moments or team wipes…
Ordinary monsters at full strength can still spawn.
The weakened monster spawns are just in addition to them. That’s why it’s fun to begin with.
Yeah, I think the full strength monster spawns are a bug? Usually when I lose those auric damnation monster missions, it’s because 2 or 3 full strength monsters spawned at the same time – very hard to handle.
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Yeah, but I’m talking end game, when it was time to leave for the exit. That’s when it spawned.
That’s never happened before. There have also been times when two monsters spawn and they’re both not weakened. The monstrosity modifier messes with the monstrosity spawn code and it can lead to some janky stuff, it’s why I think it’s bugged.
As Tamren pointed out, you can have Trappers stacked on top of each other, which is janky and shouldn’t happen. Even the devs in the patch notes acknowledged there was a bug that let too many flamers spawn and they fixed it.
Auric is fun but there is some janky code to iron out.
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I mean there was (is?) a bug that it just spawns regular monsters. I think that bug returned.
I don’t mind it, though. You signed up for Auric T5 Maelstrom. If you sign up for the Kitchen Sink, you better be ready to get wet. 
Yeah unfortunately they will fix with the Flamer thing, too. The same bug currently exists with Gunners. The game was never this intense before and I had hoped this was intended, not a bug.
At the moment it can give you entire gunner and flamer squads at random, spawning in more than ordinary shooters on the occasion. It’s great, it’s the good type of jank real games need to stand out from the crowd of boring mainstream stuff.
Will be quite a wind down when all the spawning bugs are fixed.
I understand you think the unpredictable mayhem is fun, but the modifiers really shouldn’t be breaking the rules of the game just to screw the players over. Such as when mass specials spawn and you only get the sound notification of one of them.
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But that’s… what the modifiers do? They break the game rules to change the entire thing up? Minus the soundbug, but that’s another topic for itself.
Let me approach it from this angle. You acknowledged there is a bug where the weakened monstrosity modifier spawns regular monsters sometimes, that’s a case where it’s breaking the rules of the game.
I don’t have a problem with introducing a modifier that spawns regular monsters, but the one that says it spawns weakened monsters should not be spawning regular monsters. Understand?
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Strong disagree for 2 main reasons.
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Damnation is still unfortunately the de facto farming difficulty, as long as this remains increasing its difficult just pushes even more unprepared players into missions where they are a burden.
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This would just continue propagating the cycle we’re in of endlessly buffing player characters and difficulty in some kind of uncomfortably escalation when some pointed nerfs would achieve the same thing in a much cleaner manner.
You’re describing DT heaven. That’s what I play this game for.
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If they limited it to one full-strength monstrosity at a time, I’d be on board with this. It’s really when you get multiple full-strength ones at the same time that things just become impossible. (Yeah yeah skill issue I know I know but still)
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I think each type of mass specials should have their own unique sound effects. They already do this for dogs (lots of dogs yipping) and snipers (sound of aircraft whooshing, followed by staticky radio) – why not other specials too?
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Today I’ve played a certain maelstrom map 6 times with Monstrous Specialist and Nurgle’s blessing mod. In those 6 games, there were 2 teammates I would consider appropriately skilled to carry their own weight and 2 more who could carry more than their own weight(one of them was probably @Flawless ).
The remaining people were so incredibly bad that even a standard Auric STG map would have been way too much for them. People who can’t push poxbursters, and not in horde just the poxie coming alone, people getting dropped by simple horde enemies…
It was an otherwordly experience.
Now I don’t know if it’s because the general power of the characters has grown too much, or because of the chasm of difficulty between Auric high-int and Auric STG, but in Auric STG I seen this pretty regularly, and now it’s even on maelstrom.
While this might be partly a new player problem, it’s probably made a lot worse by not separating STG and High-Int on Auric properly. They shouldn’t be both in the same quickplay at least.
I personally don’t enjoy the enemy spam of STG at all, but I keep playing it since High-Int is way too easy, but with absolutely clueless people filling up 50% of the roaster even my enjoyment of playing challenging difficulty evaporated.
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