Yeah this post is just the answer to the problem imo. Additionally, beyond the cleave of the trap ideally being something that could be tuned to ensure that the trapper remains a meaninful enemy type, the range the trapper can shoot at us could also be increased which would increase the number of perches and vantage points trappers could attack players from, while still ensuring that the players who were caught by the trappers, were only caught because they chose to not kill the high threat enemy when they should have, as opposed to now where getting caught by a trapper in hav mode is almost always due to dodging a few milliseconds too late due to a lag spike after not being able to sufficiently fall back and twittle your thumbs until someone gets the trapper to leave the infinite enemy mass shield they almost always attack from. Is it possible to play around it? Yes, definitively. Does having to play around it, absent substantive counterplay not feel anywhere near as enjoyable or engaging as it could be if the changed you listed were able to be implimented? I would argue yes, equally definitively.
I’ve just had a brainwave! (yes they do sometimes happen).
The net projectile has an ARC! Just like a grenade launcher. So you would be able to see the net flying through the sky towards you. Also, I think this would actually be most realistic in terms of physics for firing a net via a gun.
The net itself could be a tiny hint bigger but have a small red light on it or something. It could actually be a grenade then explode into a net when just over half way to the target.
That said, the suggestions above are also cool. More ideas on the table are best for discussions though 
throw a net at a wall until something sticks! 
I’m glad to see this post is getting mostly agreeance up to this point, it’s made the rounds repeatedly over and over and over, and up until now always gets old heads fighting against it for no legitimate reasons just because it would ‘invalidate the trappers’, like somehow removing bad game design for the sake of cohesion and enjoyment isn’t just strictly a good thing.
Snipers knock over units if they run in front of the laser when fired, you can run behind larger units to buy yourself time with literally every other effect in the game, even gunners can’t melt you through the walls of Ogryn flesh. But a sparky net shot by a giggling nut? Yeah that’s powered by Nurgle himself and will punch through cement if it has to, to make sure you fall over and get nuked from full to instantly dead just because you can’t read the game directors mechanical mind and know it spawned one behind those 6 bulwarks over there.
It’s aggravating, it’s the only reason I use spidy sense for specifically them (turn off the other indicators), and it’s the reason I’ve had the game on a thumbs down and continue to despite my play time. They are the ONLY enemy in the game that gets to completely ignore the rules, and they suck, no matter what angle you look at it.
So to conclude, yes, 100% everything you said, please for the love of the emperor finally LISTEN to all these dang posts asking for the same thing and change it to make sense.
I will signal my agreement here. Trappers being able to fire through a bulwark team is annoying and breaks immersion.
EDIT: That being said, I think that fixing how OP players are would take precedence first. Part of the reason this is so prevalent and annoying is because there’s bulwark swarms to begin with, and that is only a thing because the devs mashed the ‘spawn moar’ button in response to player power spikes.
Trappers would be beyond useless without trapping through hitmass, hard no.
Trappers actually give you audio warning? One of the (many) reasons I bailed on this junk pile is that I got tired of zero warning - as in literally none - before getting netted through a pack of bulwarks by a trapper that was hidding inside one of them. Or even more fun - from a trapper that was still behind a closed clown door. Says a whole lot about the - lack of - any sort of real testing or thought put into the whole mechanic.
If it takes you out of the fight entirely (aka nets, dog pins, etc) then that mechanic needs to require an absolute line of sight so the players can respond and some sort of setup time for the players to react. Period. Too bad I don’t think the bottom-feeders at FS have a clue how to actually script the trappers pathfinding to prioritize line of sight. They just took whatever was easiest and used that.
I can say this. When I get my Xbox I thoroughly intend that first game it holds will be HD2. And it will never ever be sullied by anything Fatshark has touched. Not even if they offered to pay me to.
Back to tell you , how about no.
Yeah I’m sure there is absolutely no other mechanics on earth in the entire history of civilization, that could add challenge without being unfair. Nope. Thats the only mechanic that can ever be used by a trapper 
This is just a skill issue I’m afraid to say. Not saying it’s easy or that your bad, but I’ve played an unhealthy amount of Left 4 Dead like games in my life, and sneaky disablers with subtle sound queues are a core part of the genre. Jockeys, hunters, chargers, smokers, gutter runners, pack masters, mactera grabbers, cave leeches, whatever the heck was in Back 4 Blood, they can all grab you through other enemies. It’s what makes hoards an actual threat, hammer and anvil. Manage your positioning, stay with your team, prioritize freeing teammates if they’re caught. This is the game. If you don’t like huge blobs of buffed elites making it harder to kill specialists, don’t play on havoc
Probably close to 10k hours on L4D2, close to 1K hours on V2, and 2K+ on DT- DT is the only one I’ve played where the literal input-output feedback loop of spawns consistently fails to play the sound cue (or at the very best, it is drowned out by too many other entities).
This has never been a problem for smokers or hook-rats (for me at least), but silent trapper scenarios have mountains of evidence in the bug reporting section in addition to my own played experience (other specials have this issue as well, to be fair).
Saying it’s a skill issue is such a dismissive attitude b/c you have a decent peripheral sound card or something that can handle the crazy levels of sound layer processing in these recent patches.
Additionally, I would like to add that the argument that a trapper’s net knocking down the enemies between them and the player would render trappers effectively inert is quite flawed, as other enemy types like mutants do knock down the enemies between them and the player. The mutant also has to get into melee range, something trappers definitionally do not, to be able to attack the player, and mutants are still entirely relevant in the moment-to-moment threat assessment the player has to constantly assess while being in combat not to mention the fact that nets travel emmensely faster at the player than a mutant runs toward the player, even if the mutant has had its speed increased by running through pox gas.
Beyond that a trapper knocking down the enemies in front of them with their net would mean that the player would have roughly literally one or less frames to shoot the trapper who is exposed by knocking down the enemies between the trapper and player, before getting trapped by the net *unless* the player still engages with the mechanic and avoids the net before taking out the then exposed trapper. In situations in which the room is filled with so much hit mass that there is simply no way for the net to travel through all of the mass *on the one dimensional plane the net is traveling over,* the solution isn’t to artlessly set variables to being unbounded, the solution is to adjust and alter the other variables at play, for example altering the range the trappers can shoot from, which when mixed with the other systems that exist in the game like the geometry of the maps, creates multitudes of other firing lines which would not be entirely blocked by enemy hit mass, for the trappers to use to attack the players.
All of this is also ignoring the fact that players are almost never fighting enemies in all directions, which means there is usually at least one or two completely different lanes of fire that the trappers could shoot at the players from with no hit mass between them and the player. It’s also ignoring that the fact that the skill in Dark Tide, and I would argue the reason almost all consistent players enjoy the game is that it isn’t about how a player interacts with one single enemy type, it has always been about how the player and group of players deal with the dynamism of addressing the differing situations that the totality of enemies currently at play can present. For example, one option is for a trapper to shoot through a monstrousity, a captain shield, the captain, two bulwarks, a crusher, and a pile of pox walkers, which turns the entire game at that point in time into all the players only dealing with the one single enemy type, which is the trapper. Another option in that situation is that the trapper could have to get ahead of enough of the enemies to shoot through (and knocking over) the pox walkers to attack the player, which creates an opportunity for the player to counterattack the trapper after addressing the danger of the net. Beyond that, one trapper could have flanked the group from behind, while another trapper attacks the group from a perch located ahead or to the side of the players, using the geometry of the maps to the enemy’s advantage in an interesting way, all while not simply deleting the element of counterplay in the game.
It’s simply not a skill issue unfortunately, many of the players that are asking for this change both in our community and it seems in this thread, successfully complete about a half dozen or more havoc 40 missions daily. So the issue has nothing to do with the difficulty of the interaction between the players and the enemy type, it is singularly with the almost complete lack of counterplay between the player and that one specific enemy type.
Although I personally don’t have any issue with audio cues playing, including trappers. I would recommend getting a mod to track when they spawn on the map and also record your runs, and if you do encounter situations where the mod reports or you see a trapper on the map when no cue played I would ask you make a ticket with FatShark, and making doubly sure you attach the video of the recording for them to take a look at. Based on the tickets I have made with them they definitively do both look at, and take action on issues we raise.
I don’t know if arcing trapper nets would work well because it could necessitate drastically increasing the window the player has to respond to the initial attack, which could legitimately render the nets functionally inert. I might really regret saying this later, but arcing attacks from enemies could be really interesting though, like an enemy who throws small traps that land on the ground that can trap both enemies and players, unless the player dodges or slides through the trap, they could even add in interesting mechanics like a trapped enemy or player gets an enraged damage buff for 5 seconds after touching the trap, and if trapped make the trap hold the enemy or player for 2 seconds (which in Darktide combat would feel like an eternity).
To be fair that’s usually a reaction to people asking for zero cleave trapper nets which would legitimately nullify them as any kind of threat.
If people came in with suggestions as thoughtful as @Taurus7350 a few posts above yours I think there would always have been little pushback.
You say no, and you added no explaination to why it would be beneficial to keep it in this bad state.
Alot of people here believe that hitmass just should apply to trapper nets, it ruins the flow of melee combat where they can just hide inside enemies and shoot without any counterplay. The ideas suggested adds counterplay, knowledge of enemy interaction and will reduce the “unfair” oneshot in large fights.
Like I said Emphasis on flanking trappers or trappers that pathfind around large enemies. You offer no solution or reason to keep it the way it is because your used to a god awful mechanic?
This is a perfect collection of constructive opinions. I’ve created a new internal report for this which encompasses all netting-related complaints, and I’ll see if I can bring some attention to it (remember, I can’t make any promises!)
Our hero
Not really. On certain maps the nets still go through crates/boxes, fences and some corners. It has been like this since the release. And before someone starts screeching that it works as intended and it is a skill issue: the dogs were fixed not to pounce at you through the corners and physical objects. How is this diffirent?
Carrying my opinion of Fatshark as always, Jules. You dropped this: 