First off - love the shotgunners and ragers event. It was fun. It was also great seeing more build diversity as people figured out that their stock standard thing wasn’t cutting it. Crusher became popular, so did flame staff and ogryn shield. Love the way it challenged build selection and created diversity, and forced you to adopt a new playstyle.
Second - skulls. This event has been great for encouraging squad cohesion, and I’ve found far far more players sticking together, especially when you’re the front liner they tend to stick with you a lot more to keep the buffs up. The servers have felt a bit laggy, i think in part due to so many melee builds attacking much faster than usual, but it’s been fun, and changed the gameplay loop and incentivised playstyles in good ways.
I think if you can combine the two, we’ll have something amazing - a mechanic that gives you a certain buff for executing it, that incentivises squad coherency in order to maintain the buff, and an enemy makeup that incentivises different build styles, like bulwarks and reapers, with scab melee elites that are the only ones resistant to stun, but with a mechanic that when completed gives a squad wide buff that gives you extra melee impact and rending.
That’s not what I said. I said they became popular. That means I saw increased numbers of them, not that they are unusual to see. I see far more bully clubs and pickaxes than I do shovels or knives, and during the skull event because of the movement speed a lot of ogryns I come across are running knife. That doesn’t mean it’s unusual to see knives, only that the skull event made them more popular.
But they were already the most popular choice even in the normal game, their point is that it can’t get more popular because they’re already the most popular by a long shot
The point I was making is that inferno staff and slab shield are pretty much the most common weapons on their respective classes already, especially in higher difficulty content. It stood out to me that you’d call out those weapons in particular seeing use as the result of incentives for build diversity and people looking for new ways to engage with their class and the enemies.
I apologize if I was being too subtle or indirect with it, I had assumed it was common knowledge around here.
As I said, I do agree with your general point; the last couple events have been a lot of fun and had interesting mechanics that changed the texture of the game. The massive elite spam in the previous event especially was fantastic in all the goofiest ways. More stuff like that would be fantastic and I hope we get it.