At any difficulty 3+, you can and will get stunlocked by a Reaper, a Gunner, or even just a handful of Traitor Guardsmen. You get hit once and you are staggered permanently, and god help you if you’re against a crate or other terrain. You will not be able to move. It is the single most frustrating experience in this game, and you cannot dodge or slide away from it, because cover is somehow not high enough to protect you completely in most cases.
The Reaper is especially egregious because of the absurd knockback pinning, but the Guardsmen shooting THROUGH COVER at the player comes up Every. Single. Game. You may think you’re behind cover, but no, there’s a 2px split in the crates that the AI can shoot through, but you cannot. Even worse, they will “arc” their bullets around corners, especially pillars. It seems like the bullets point of origination on the hitbox is off, because the enemy can be totally covered but still shooting at crazy angles to hit a player behind cover.
The best solution I can think of is to increase the range at which ranged enemies will switch to melee. Currently, they’ll sit there shooting you in the face while you’re 1.5m away. Realistic? Sure. Fun gameplay? No, not in the slightest. The training mission even tells you to engage them in melee, but it doesn’t work that way in practice at all. They just keep shooting you lol.
Additionally, the accuracy of ranged enemies continues to be a problem from halfway across the map. They do not miss, even when you’re behind cover. Essentially, neither using cover nor engaging them in melee counters ranged enemies. Shooting them first (exposing yourself to ranged counterfire, which is a losing battle 100% of the time) is the only way to handle them, or hope your psyker can pick them off slowly.
It’s honestly ruining my enjoyment of this game, and I sincerely hope steps are taken to address this. The maps are awesome but they are not built to support this sort of focus on long-range combat, where the enemy has a huge advantage.
I’ve also noticed ranged enemy behaviours being massively inconsistent.
Sometimes suppression doesn’t work. Or sometimes I will literally be within swinging distance and ranged enemies will fire a volley into my face.
On higher difficulties this gets more and more ridiculous because one traitor guardsman can delete your toughness within three seconds with a couple of volleys if you don’t immediately incapacitate him.
Yeah me and my friends attempted heresy (all 15+) because leveling from malice was becoming a slog, and holy hell are the ranged enemies oppressive. We found that the best method of dealing with it was just having the ogryns run riot shields while the psyker and veteran slowly pick off the ranged/elites but it becomes this vicious cycle of constantly killing specials, hordes and elites over and over again just to finish off all the ranged guardsmen very frustrating.
Hello. I went Sharpshooter first in the beta thinking it would be fun for me. Then I realized that the Bolter is the best gun in the game. Las Guns dont penetrate heavy armor (it seems). Then I was like… If that is true I will just run Zealot. Far better set up for the bolter
Then I quickly realized how painful the stun locks (like what you mentioned) are. Cover doesn’t work as well, as you mentioned
I think an equally annoying thing is stun locking a horde with cleave only for a Trapper to shoot its net through ALL of its friendlies and nail me
I will agree that the ranged enemy behavior is too much. That combined with BS like the trapper… It is too much
Oh I forgot, the special skill of the veteran is mostly useless as special units can be easily highlighted with a click.
Meanwhile, a small squad of elite shooters will tear your team apart and if they are quite far, or god assist you, you are in a map with limited visibility, you are completely screwed because your fantastic 5 second skill will not mark them which leave you shooting in the dark hoping to hit something.