there is too little heavy armoured enemies on each map. due to this balance of weapons of choice is primary focused on flak or “softer” enemies. likewise with feats
guns like bolter or plasma (from vet perspecfive here) are suboptimal for killing tons or weak enemies but they shine at places where other guns just bounce of heavy armour.
due to the fact that most enemies on map are not wearing heavy armor it makes less incentive to use bolter or plasma or other weapon that is primary focused on dealing with thick and heavh armour.
i am not saying to just spawn more curshers or bulwaks (it will get annoying quickly, but could be good idea to implement new modifier) but to introduce following enemies on all modifiers:
heavy reaper: reaper wearing heavy armour of crusher and shooting the same weapon reaper has
heavy gunner: the same as normal gunner but wearing heavy armour
heavy rager: think of mauler but full heavy armor and slightly faster than ordinary mauler but slower than rager
heavy shotgunner: existing shotgun guy, but with heavy armor
these types of enemies would make current meta weapons meh and other meh weapons viable candidates for new meta. i am not even sure if there would be meta, most likely team would need to balance guns and mele weapons to be able to effectively deal with all targets
I think the way to do it isn’t to simply introduce copy/variants of normal enemies (At least not always)
The way to make Armour piercing more useful is to introduce new enemy roles:
Scab Endurant/Enforcer: Variant of Mauler’s, but spawn in groups of 3 to 5 who are armed with 1h weapons (Chain Swords) and Carapace Shield. Still armed with Flack and a Carapace helmet
→ Scab/Dreg XX: Horde, Bruiser variant with destroyable shield.
i think ranged variants are needed as well. vets life is too easy without ranged units they cannot kill with x12 or other soft gun.
when it comes to copy & paste its up to designers to make it appealing and unique, i just gave simple ideas about what is missing. no need to overthink the final visual outcome or naming (lore specialist should figure out names). problem is that there is bad enemies balance in the game.
Vermintide 2 only has two non boss enemy types with super armor.
Both of them have a weak head, which enables all weapons to deal with them.
This works pretty well.
As i see it, you would create a lot of issues for many weapons, unless all of these new carapace armored enemies have a weak head without carapace armor.
Especially with the carapace armored ranged enemies.
A lot of the weapons that are currently good, are also good or ok against carapace armor.
Many weapons that are currently not top picks, will be picked even less, because they struggle with carapace armor.
The boltgun is already a meta weapon and will be much stronger than it already is.
If there were a lot of carapace enemies, zealots would probably almost always run an axe with boltgun or flamer.
Unless these carapace enemies have a weak head, pretty much all ranged weapons except revolver, plasma gun, boltgun, zealot flamer, trauma staff and surge staff will be useless against them. Most of the ogryn guns are not great against carapace either.
For the humans that would be 6 ranged weapons that are good against carapace (5 of which are already good picks).
Meanwhile, these are the 25 ranged weapons that are bad against carapace: