A little preamble before: It’s really hard to really describe and put into words what i mean to say, as ofcourse the groundwork is really good, and it would be weird to not have each ranged enemie behave individually. I will try to explain what i mean but it might not really come across or at worst make sense in the way i say it, but i will try my best. Also i may just be too much in my Vermintide mindset or not experienced enough to solve the issue i have with this type of enemy.
In large groups they are really hard to deal with if further away. That ofcourse is and should be right. However if toughness is broken the amount of suppression and stagger feels excessive. Yes it should force one into cover, but unlike melee hordes, it doesn’t really feel like one can outskill such a situation. Melee hordes (in VT 2) could always be handled like a large solid unit. You could push and dodge to influence the wave as a whole. This is not true for ranged enemies in darktide which to a certain degree shouldn’t be… But lets say you are out of ammo, or have a low range weapon and need to approach on a group of ranged enemies. (For the sake of reallism, yes it’s a dumb idea but in the confiness of a game it may be needed) When you jump and sprint and slide you may dodge quite a bit of the barrage but an enemy will always fire out of “sync” making it more about luck than skill to make it to the next bit of cover. Ranged fire is handled like melee in this case. You get the telegraph of the lighting up gun beforehand, or the sound when you can’t see it, but in melee you can outrun and dodge a group of attacking enemies. This is ofcourse not true for a bullet or laser aimed at your back. It feels like it’s assumed you can just do the same. Atleast the type of enemy is applied in large enough numbers for it. In general what i mean to say is, that there is barely a toolkit to deal with such a situation other than cowering behind cover and hoping other people get more shots in than the enemy. Ofcourse the best you can do is just don’t get in such a situation but unlike melee it much more seems to depend on luck, hoping you don’t get targetted, than skill. I don’t know how one would handle this problem, to make it feel better, but this is how i feel (and some of my friends) and maybe we just need to learn to deal with it.
(On dodging ranged fire vs melee. While dodging melee you bring extra distance between you and the enemie, making the enemie miss attacks because you are out of range, as well as missing the exact attacks aimed at you that would have hit you in that exact second. This makes the dodge window larger in melee than vs ranged fire. You only seem to dodge enemy fire if you dodge the second they are firing. Slightly off and the amount you moved doesn’t mean anything to an aimbot ai. Resulting in only time and no space aspect for dodging. This makes dodging of ranged fire inherently harder than dodging melee. Again leading to enemies which you timed good firing into empty space eventhough they clearly could have corrected their fire and enemies which you barely dodged too late or too early aimbotting you eventhough they seemingly shouldn’t bee able to fire so accuratly. This all ofcourse is somewhat speculation as for now the exact dodge windows and mechanics are not openly out there as far as i know, but this is what my experience so far has felt like.)