Preface: What was first, the chicken or the egg? Or in other words: what was first op weapons or insane difficulty spikes? Some players oppose nerfs, because they wonder how they beat H40 without them. But maybe H40 can stop ramping up its difficulty if weapons get to a healthy balanced state.
My issue with Havoc right now is that from my runs that end prematurely 80-90% are due to 3+ boss spawns. So I generally have a good time playing havoc, but I struggle with the fact that the mission success almost solely depends on having a team that can either withstand the pressure of multiple boss spawn or avoid getting into that situation due to luck, good clear times with appropriate builds or knowledge of trigger points.
Why does it annoy me so much? Well, it feels like being able to beat everything up to this is the expected baseline, but in the end the only thing that matters if you can survive this pressure point. Everything else doesn’t matter.
Bosses often spawn in tight spaces and body block you, which feels cheesy and untested.
Possible solutions:
balance the game to a healthy state where you don’t need to revert to 3+ bosses to make it challenging
make limitless boss spawns its own havoc modifier for those who enjoy it.
bonus: add a quickplay mode for aurics + several havoc modifiers
back in the day damnation was something to aspire to when vet with ps was akin to arbites now in some way.
still remember the “press the button = 3x wooosh” cause i got lucky and got the blessing right away
the only thing havoc really “needs” to do way with is demotions.
cause personally i’m fine with a less than 20% win rate as a standard since i exclusively play with randoms.
dont care about premades, with good enough people you can 100% everything the game throws at you, i prefer to keep things “fresh” though
but for fuggs sake i at least want to try 5 matches back to back without the rejected sheet to get that 1 win out of those tries.
yep 3 bosses in a tiny room and 4 people scattering to the 4 winds sucks, then again if it wasnt for such “obstacles” win rate for randoms could get into the “boring” ranges again.
there need to be stakes else the win feels hollow.
heck, auric maelstrom is a “given” nowadays and only the scope of outlandish foolery is something to “spice it up”
so i rather have the actual enemy team providing the opposition than my “teammates”
This isn’t just about Havoc, it’s the classic Fatshark approach of releasing an unfinished mess and spending years polishing it. Naturally, Havoc is unfinished, and versions 1.0 and 2.0 are still in a testing phase. They’re repeatedly trying out various mutations, then removing them, over and over again. With the release of the new class, the community manager finally made a statement that they plan to carry out an overall balance pass moving forward. Apparently, there isn’t even a single Fatshark developer who can complete Havoc 40, so they’re most likely working with skilled testers to develop the mode. It’s safe to assume the balance overhaul will be done in parallel with this, but whether it’ll be finished within the year is questionable.
But that’s exactly my issue. Instead of balancing the game properly they artificially increase difficulty to reduce the win rates. It’s like the duct tape of balancing.
The game has hit a point where the obvious problem of stamina and dodges being tied together and that dodging is so much more powerful since it’s a full reset rather than glacial recovery overtime (or the fact that you can’t block a crusher/mauler overhead anyway) that most of the runs lost are death hallways where the team can only back up to handle the density, essentially a massive dps check if it’s encroaching garden/final toll, and a massive skill check for frontliners if they can dodge overheads that they can’t even see inside the horde, and a massive teamskill check because the second one frontliner dodges backwards multiple times they’ve screwed over the other frontliners and dragged enemies inside them.
That, or you just bring flamethrowers and rending and nade spam and now there’s nothing but 3 bosses and if you die to that, skill issue. Cool game balance.
My personal fix would be to redesign so that either no drop down is a true drop down, or that every drop down has a roundabout. If the game’s hardest content is going to be balanced around kiting, you might as well put a kite circle in every room with challenging terrain. If it’s going to continue to be balanced around aoe spam, then it doesn’t matter.
