If you haven’t encountered it yet, the radio operator is a pretty neat enemy. Spawns a grouping of 8 shooters, as well as a couple of snipers and a trapper. An enemy like this is a cool idea since it acts as a mini objective for teams to have to coordinate and eliminate- or it would be, if the thing didnt stand in the middle of the open with a flashing red light on it.
In all seriousness, it could be a really annoying (in a good way) foe with a couple easy changes.
Have its AI keep a standoff distance to the party. When they approach, it tries to fall back.
Have it hide and take cover (without peeking) instead of standing in the open to shoot and get shot.
Remove its machine gun and give it a shotgun. This will allow it to defend itself when pushed by the enemy.
remove the yelling thing it does and replace with an audible “reinforcement incoming!” And some sort of audio queue with the radio chatter to help communicate what it is doing and how much time players have to eliminate it.
Bonus points if it gets a truly unique model, what we have now feels like a leftover gunner with a pack slapped on.
The biggest complaint on game balancing is that higher difficulties just devolve into special/elite spawns. A new enemy is introduced. Does it have any interesting moves? Does it counter the player power creep?
No. Not at all. It doesn’t do anything interesting and causes more special spam.
please no, pushing enemy lines is often a difficult thing to do when overwhelmed but trivial when you’re already stomping. so it would just make difficult situations snowball even more easily without posing much additional challenge when things are going smooth
sounds good
i think this one is particularly interesting but we still need a way to locate it, if it’s not gonna push us like most other specials do then there needs to be something else - snipers have a laser, vox operator has audio cue.
on a side note, imo it shouldn’t be spawning just shooters but rather “shock squads” of 2-4 shotgunners + 4-8 bruisers/2-4 ragers, that’d be way better than just adding onto the already tiresome ranged spam in darktide
I notice that you end up doing these minigames in airlocks or end events a lot of the time and then the operator doesn’t even spawn in. Pretty craptacular event.
In my view he should be treated more like a special- give him an intro noise like “calling for backup!” to announce hes on the map. His little red blinking antenna could get brighter as he goes to summon more troops, or have a distinct audio PING! Something that wont get lost in the other noises. Kinda like how grenadiers have the pin pulling noise so you look in their direction, and then confirm their location before making a plan to eliminate them. And yes I agree that the troops summoned should be more frontline, it will help defend the operator more too.
