The problem with hordes is lack of moving attacks and attack speed to keep up with the player. Darktide has a lot more spammable options to manage hordes in much faster succession, from dodge spam to push spam to insanely high cleave weapons with no stagger drop off. This isn’t even including that almost all abilities in the game restore toughness now, making small hits not matter at all, and numerous abilities and blitz options are high stagger aoe.
Groaners and poxwalkers also lack a lot of range to their melee attacks, and often whiff to players just standing still or walking backwards ever so slightly. There’s also very little difference between horde chaff other than armor values and hp, which often don’t matter since their health pools aren’t high enough to make this distinction worth thinking about.
Then you have the problem of cleave mass being insanely high for players now. All classes but vet can take nodes that increase cleave, a lot of weapons have cleave blessings, and there are a ton of available aoe options.
There’s a few ways to fix all of this. Firstly, add new and improved attack animations for enemies across the board, largely focusing on making them animate faster and perform more reliable attack animations such as pokes or thrusts instead of swings. Poxwalkers and dregs should leap carelessly towards you while groaners and scabs should be dashing.
Secondly, to differentiate between horde enemies you give them different weapons. Dregs are vicious cultists losing most of their minds to the rot god, so a mace fits them, but why not have ritual daggers or swords with faster animations as well? Scabs are supposed to be sturdy and regimented soldiers, why not give them spears/two-handed weaponry that move a little slow but have greater reach? Both of these types of enemies should be able to catch players more often during kites with either their pokes or superior speed, and allowing the rest of the horde to catch up and actually kill them.
Finally, add thicker enemies to both sides. Dreg could have maniac armor horde that’s able to take more ranged damage and have higher hit mass and appear in great numbers among the horde. Scab should get a shielded horde that absorbs hits and requires opening them up to deal damage, but have appear in medium numbers in horde.
The problem with elites in darktide is one faction is 80% finished and the other faction is 40% finished but it’s all filled with copies of the other faction’s work with little to no variation. Dreg has been sore on variation for a very long time, with only 1 melee elite variant, and 2 ranged variants compared to scab’s 2 melee and 3 ranged variants (why did scabs get another shotgunner type enemy when they already have one? Who knows…), and only 2 faction specific specialists compared to scab’s 4. If you’re wondering why every modifier in the game is designed around scabs, this is probably it.
Both factions are missing high hitmass horde variants, and elites designed to stop or slow player progressions beyond a wall of shooters. Dreg is missing a melee elite similar to mauler, a trapper and sniper specialist, and dreg captain variation.
To slow down player progression, we probably need some sort of sergeant variation that takes command of squads. A dreg sergeant, for instance, could order nearby enemies to stim up with the modifiers from the current havoc stim modifier. This would make all nearby enemies sturdier or harder hitting, and therefore more punishing to players pushing directly into them. A scab sergeant, instead, could execute a nearby enemy and spread one of the other havoc buffs to everyone, such as max stacks of rampage, or make nearby enemies final toll. Add some behaviors that makes the enemies bunch up around them or they move towards and stay behind big groups, and give them fancy hats and some sort of las pistol, revolver, or bolt pistol weapon to shoot, and you have an interesting enemy type that forces players to take them down.
Another elite type to slow players down would be shielded elites and improving the bulwark. Ogryn enemies are already designed as “x but better in every way” as is, so having a scab/dreg bulwark doesn’t ruin the already amazing enemy design of the ogryn bulwark, especially when spammed in large groups. A scab bulwark would be slower and reliant on his weapon options to get at the player, performing shielded charges to knock them backwards or break their line. A dreg bulwark would be faster and more unconventional, having kick attacks to knock players away and performing charging thrust attacks to hit the player. Both should have some kind of very hard tracking attack that can stagger players even if they dodge. You should be able to break their guard by hitting their shield with enough stagger to enter medium stagger state.
Dregs could just copy-paste from vt2 chaos mauler and be completely fine, as long as the magic sweep attack can still hit and kill multiple players really fast, but I’d like for it to be a different direction of an elite. While scabs focus is, and should be, tough, and hard hitting enemies that will kill you, dregs should be incredibly focused on being fast, tying you down, and swarming you. So I think instead of a dreg mauler, it should be a dreg flagellant holding a flail made of bells. He swings it around in the air, the bells chime, and then he unleashes a fast tracking multi-hit combo that ends with a loud clanging slam to the ground. The goal of the enemy would be to force the player to block the first few swings, then dodge the final slam. This synergizes well with the dreg rager, whose goal is to force the player into a constant dodge state, and thus leads to greater resource exhaustion.
For dreg specialists, I think they could just use a psyker variant. The psyker could function as a highly mobile sniper, breaking out of cover to grab a player with a rapid brainburst that applies a stacking debuff to player mobility. Getting close to the psyker or repeated stunlocks could force them to teleport away from the player. At maximum debuff stacks, the psyker could attempt to disable the player with a dodgeable attack, and if they miss they enter a stun state for a period of time before teleporting and repositioning, repeating until either the stacks wear off or the psyker is killed.
Finally, the problem with captains. The dreg captain iirc only has the crusher/shotgun combo while scab captain has crusher/sword and shotgun/pistol variants. I think they should be more unique from one another in terms of actual combinations and attack patterns, as well as more variation.
Firstly, remove the bubble knockback and replace it with faction-coded attacks instead. It’s ridiculous looking and buggy and this idea would be more thematic. Scab can throw grenades off his bandolier to knock players back and create a firestorm around him looking like a badass while the dreg captain could release pox gas to buff himself and nearby allies like the stank lord he is.
Secondly, adding more unique weapons. Dreg captain should be able to bring double axes instead of a melee and ranged weapon. With this, he chucks the axes out at players then charges melee twin speed towards whoever/whatever he ends up hitting twice to pick his axes up, then goes back to performing melee combos for a bit of time. He should also be able to leap towards players, and get a rager style tracking combo that eventually slows down and leaves him vulnerable. Scab captain should be able to take a chainsword that applies a bleed debuff to whoever he hits, reducing their toughness overtime, toughness replenishment, and mobility. A dreg captain could have a heavy stubber or a bolter while the scab captain gets a hotshot volley gun or bolter, both with some more utility and counterplay to players who rush them in their ranged state such as kicks or dodging/rolling away from the player while still shooting.
Finally, to further differentiate them, make the dreg captain’s shield and health an inverse of the scab captain’s shield and health mechanic. As the dreg captain takes damage, a shield bar slowly builds up, and once it finishes, the captain takes a knee, and pops the shield, building up a percentage of the health he’s lost until the shield is destroyed. It would function just like troll from vt2, with forced phases and no attacks being able to directly oneshot/ fastly kill them as you currently can with stealthlot and other builds. The scab captain should instead enter a light stagger state on shield destruction, allowing them to recover faster and get immediately back to swinging.
The goal of the changes I personally want is to make enemies faster and more active threats and increasing faction variation enough that it actually feels like two different factions. Player mobility definitely needs a nerf, but if it’s going to remain this way, enemies need ways to interrupt or catch up to player mobility to make up for it. Making the dreg faction more designed around this (buffing themselves to be faster/stronger, debuffing players to be slower, and nonstop attacking and chip attacks, etc.) would place them as the proper threats in line with their intended design philosophy as a more numerous swarming threat to scab’s slower, bulkier and damaging threat. To deal with scabs, it requires consistency and being methodical, while dregs will require a faster, more reactive playstyle.