There’s not much challenge left in the game now. Overall, everything feels way easier. Even outside of Havoc, in Auric, the game barely feels threatening anymore. A lot of matches feel closer to regular Damnation or even Heresy instead of the insanity it used to be. H40 basically feels like Auric V-E-G with blight or rituals slapped on top. It doesn’t have that same fear factor anymore where you’d get rushed by death balls of 8+ Crushers and maulers stacked behind Bulwarks, while hitscanning Reapers, Flamers, and Trappers were all layered into the chaos at once.
I can understand how the old enemy spawns probably affected performance or stability, but now it feels like weenie hut jr’s compared to what we used to deal with. Back then, you could end up fighting 2 to 5 bosses on top of all the other instant kill threats happening at the same time. Yeah, sometimes situations were borderline unwinnable, but the fact that there was still a possibility of clutching it made the mode exciting and worth playing.
Maybe I’m just too used to the chaos or have Stockholm syndrome from old H40, but come on. I don’t know if this is them prepping for H50 or what, but the current difficulty just doesn’t hit the same anymore. Ty for joining my Ted talk.
That actually would not make a change except prolonging the unloosable fight. With our high toughness replenishment options we are immune to a hit every two seconds except bleed through attacks (overheads and bombers). Changing this immunity to only apply every four seconds gives more room to chip damage aka attrition damage. The game gets a chance to whittle you down with your small mistakes.
This sounds like a very rush conclusion. We played few games yesterday, still got multiple boss spawns in pretty dire places, and 44 minute match resulted in 4300 enemies killed. Lowering Crusher number was probably a mistake, especially if they are replaced by more Bulwarks, Reapers or scab rager clown cars.
I know its probably hard for Fatshark to track all comments and please everyone, but over time I felt that Crushers aren’t a problem. Their HP changes undermine some weapons / builds, but this becomes really “unfun” mainly with Rotten Armour, and some overlapping modifiers like Garden. Rotten has also the very annoying issue with visibility due to particle effects and hyperdensity nonsense.
That holds true for any game you play a lot? Also have you tried spicing it up? Disable all gameplay modifying mods: Healthbar, field of view mods, visuals VFX removing mods, Spidey Sense, just leave stuff like NumericUI or UI improvements / scoreboard. Pick up far less optimal weapons and the game suddenly because more difficult.
It’s a horde game, I bet enemy “AI” cannot be fleshed out too much, as it’s too “expensive”. Melee combat might be far from “perfect”, but name one other title which does it better. Mount & Blade is probably the only one which has more complex melee with a lot of units on the screen.
I frames on dodge, slow enemy attacks, quick, high cleave attacks on most weapons, easy to manage stamina economy that allows you to spam push attacks for ages just by taking a stamina curio, near instant toughness regen, get out of jail free combat abilities, no melee bleed through on toughness, and insane mobility make it trivial to avoid taking damage from melee attacks when you understand how the game works. Poxwalkers, groaners and bruisers almost never hit you outside of bruisers hitting you through dodges. The only melee enemy that stands a chance of hitting a player who knows what they’re doing are ragers, but only when 10 of them are stacked inside each other so that you can’t dodge all of them
I agree on all points ; however this is not taking into account other importants facts, such as that only a small fraction of the playerbase actually regularly plays Auric, the highest “normal” difficulty available, and a smaller fraction of that has actually played Havoc more than once.
Also, while not terribly complex, mastering the combat system requires map knowledge, good spatial awareness, good reflexes and intuition, decent mechanical skill, and a bunch of QoL mods to not throw your Mouse and Keyboard at the wall in frustration when the game ignores your inputs or refuses to let your character vault etc. That’s already quite a lot to ask from a regular “gamer”, imo. Nevermind that not everybody’s playing in 4K 120fps with a war machine rig.
Furthermore, Havoc exists and is tailor-made to push the engine to its limits…And if that’s still too easy then I’d recommend switching to a different game because clearly there’s nothing new the game can teach you.
Well, that’s only natural.
The number of Crushers, one of the main threats, has been reduced, while player power has remained almost unchanged. On top of that, Gold Toughness, VoC, and Smite were left completely untouched.
And to make matters worse, Fatshark somehow decided to buff Inferno.
