Right now Heresy is in my opinion in a strange place - it‘s way closer to damnation then it is to malice which makes unsuited as a sensible learning step for damnation games. At the same you only get only marginally more resources then for malice making it unsuited for grinding.
So in my point of view there would be two variants how heresy would become a very sensible difficulty:
Either increase it’s learning value or it‘s farming potential.
Farming:
Easy - raise resources to damnation levels. period. Then all farming can be done in heresy and every player in damnation is in for the challenge alone.
Learning:
The key for successful damnation play is survival. So instead of the weird halfway approach heresy is now I‘d suggest leave enemy hit points and numbers at exactly malice level level. But raise enemy behaviour and damage exactly to damnation levels.
This way the gear that worked well for malice will work as well in heresy and no one has to accustom to new breakpoints that will be useless again when hitting damnation. At the same time you have to bring your defensive skills, your positioning and your situational awareness up to the same level you‘ll need later for damnation.
I think this is a bad idea since most of the difficulty jump in damnation is controlling numbers quickly. Without many elites and with elites that die to a fart (seriously Malice enemies have 1/2 what they have on Damnation) you would never learn this at all. This is why you have people unironically suggesting things like Vd Recon already, stuck in the Heresy realm where elite numbers and overall HP mass doesn’t really warrant the heavy hitting weapons that form the core of successful Damnation runs.
In general I think Heresy could use more difficulty. Part of the huge jump at current is the shooter aggression, not only do they hit a lot harder they have very little downtime between volleys now. They actually changed the overall aggression of shooters which made them even zippier on Damnation and weaker on lower difficulties. The scab assaulter (the sleeveless legion traitor trash) is almost a gunner.
If people want to jump to higher difficulty they should only have to deal with the increased damage, imo. Once you learn the shooter patterns on Heresy it should cover you on Damnation, you shouldn’t find out you aren’t dodging and sliding nearly enough.
As for the materials 100%, but I think materials in general should be tripled, because there is absolutely no reason for them to be so rare. And a completion bonus. And no crafting locks. And better brunts. But that’s another topic.
These two quotes seem to contradict each other or am I getting you wrong?
Yes - the different enemy HP on every difficulty are very demotivating in combination with the atrocious crafting. On malice all weapons are valid and fun to use. Now you jump to Heresy and find your weapons you enjoyed on Malice don’t cut it anymore. Now you painfully craft new ones and once your confident in heresy and want to jump into damnation you once again find your weaponry lacking. Using malice healthpools for heresy would reduce this annoying experience to one instead of two times. But as you say - for damnation you need a completely new dodging/blocking/sliding behaviour then with what you get away on malice. Thus my suggestion make the enemies as deadly asthenischem are on damnation so that players can learn to survive while still using their malice gear - I think if you got your defensive play right the higher hp and necessity to upgrade your gear only once would be less frustrating.
I personally found the jump from malice to heresy very frustrating because of the high difficulty gap (and my gear wasn’t working anymore) - I was quite discouraged to try damnation for a while expecting a similar increase in difficulty. When I tried I found the gap much smaller.
So my idea was to make the jump less frustrating while actually teaching useful skills you can use in damnation right away.
heresy is, if anything, WAY closer to malice than damnation so i’m going to have to suggest it gets less mats and slightly more spawns to make it a better training ground.
I have two viewpoints on Heresy, based on experience being on either side of the skill/gear leap.
Early on, coming up through the ranks (and yes, I played Legend VT2 - didn’t buy the expansion), the jump from Malice to Heresy was huge.
I found several weapons I had been using just “didn’t work” at that level, for my skill. e.g. Trauma staff, catachan sword. Handling large hordes with a few elites thrown in is a huge leap from what you see at Malice T3. I’d just get swarmed.
I think it’s also the first time you really have to get in to the stride of melee first, gun second when things get tough, which is a fairly alien concept outside fatshark games.
As a T5/T5+ player now looking back; I hate playing Heresy … e.g. for Melk’s tasks. I hate it because there are players in there who are just a liability and not good enough yet to get through those levels, and so trigger a wipe. BUT - and I say this openly - that’s a ME problem. I’m in there for the WRONG reasons - e.g. to finish off Melk’s tasks, or try something out. I’ve a post here about that. But even so, me playing in there does lvl3-4 players no benefit - I’m carrying with damage.
Those are the issues (at least for me) I think with having a level that is not linearly between T3 and T5. And so, in a long winded way, I think the suggestion of keeping damage the same is a good one. But being hit like a truck from trash mobs vs. the scratch at T3 might be a step too far? I’m almost of a mind that T2 should be raised a bit, and T3 raised a bit too … rather than T4 changing. T4 is a good stepping stone to T5 imho… just right.
Nah there can be more than one element of difficulty. Shooters are more of a threat on damnation from their aggression increase than their slightly higher HP. Elites meanwhile since they need to survive to the frontline and survive to trade hits to achieve anything at all need high numbers and beefy HP to be challenging.
If you just throw Damnation damage on you’ll still have people never actually learning how to engage these threats properly, because they don’t have to. Like Legend VT2 vs Cata, you can one hit monks on legend with like anything, so you can tell who gets carried pretty fast in a cata game when they manage to go down to 1 berserker.
Well if they’re only getting punished for getting hit they aren’t learning enough. This is why there’s already a fairly gradual step up in HP with Heresy already. I think getting rid of that middle hurdle and just straight up doubling HP on the next difficulty would alienate people.
Heresy does have a good challenge already, especially because Darktide is anti-solo and your teammates are so much worse than Damnation. It just needs to be worthwhile to actually play, in terms of rewards.
