When high intensity and shock gauntlet mutators are applied at the same time I feel like the game should enforce a minimum delay between special spawn waves. This isn’t a complaint about the difficulty being too high, but more how it is framed in terms of gameplay. The problem with having too high a spawn tempo is that the game sinks into this trap of forcing the players to repeat the same gameplay over and over again until it gets boring and even breaks the immersion somewhat.
I’m not sure if this is an intended feature or something going wrong, but I constantly see the spawn director get stuck in “loops” where it drops the same set of specials multiple times with only seconds between waves. When this happens the players can end up fighting over the same patch of ground for minutes at a time without being able to make forward progress.
The director punishes players diddling around trying to shoot everything. Bring frontline, learn to pace, know when you have to push thru a choke. Most pugs are rather terrible at it, taking their sweet time, eventually running out of resources amidst the never ending waves.
Yeah, this is pretty on point. The conventional wisdom going around in this game is terrible strategy for the higher difficulties. Pauses in tempo need to be incredibly strategic and rare. The default pace should be constant map/objective progression.
A few shooters/ low tier specials in the distance/ off to the side is not a valid reason to come to a complete halt in an auric maelstrom.
I’m on the other side of this because i think this is fun and sometimes forces the player into suicidal pushes and lunatic fighting advances. I played a game recently of auric maelstrom and we got like 5 plague ogryn and special waves in a row at a drop down and finally just went for it.
That’s the point, you CAN NOT outlast waves on HI STG and above, as they don’t stop, you have to keep pacing, dragging em with you.
Of course, there are situations where you have to hold chokes, but you absolutely can not kill everything before moving on, it does not work.
If it works like in VT2, timers start when you finish the wave on lower difficulties, whereas timer starts on wave spawning on DWONS and higher. You need damage and the skill to stay alive, while rolling like a deathball across the map.
Ehhh I don’t think you guys really understood the point I was making. I’m not talking about hordes at all, I’m referring specifically to specials.
The problem I’m encountering is that sometimes the director will just vomit an unending stream of specials, often out of a single doorway. They arrive so constantly that they cannot be divided into discrete waves and you end up rooted to the same spot doing the same thing over and over again for minutes at a time. This is boring. If your party is good there is no risk of dying but you end up standing there killing specials like a robotic assembly line.
Basically what I’m asking for when I want a minimum interval in spawn timings is not a reduction in difficulty but an increase in variety. Either space out the special spawns so that players can advance to a new part of the map in between, or have them spawn at different locations/distances so that they come at the player from multiple sides and don’t literally just pour out of a single doorway like lemmings.
I should add, I’m honestly not sure if the director “projectile vomiting” endless specials onto the map is an actual feature or if something is legitimately wrong with the spawn system. It only happens about once in every 3-5 missions where all other hi-shock games appear to be “normal” with nothing that particularly stands out about them.