Yeah; this clip is a great encapsulation of what I mean. Truthfully (from watching the rest of the video), aside from the sheer amount of content it would add to the game, I don’t think it would be impossible to progress the narrative of the game and add new Dreg Enemies. But perhaps it’s better that the two be separated as to avoid having multiple new enemies added who are as overtuned as the Plasma Gunner was on launch. I don’t honestly believe that it’s likely we would ever get an update that addresses everything at once; that’s not an assumption of any laziness on FS part though. There just really is that much deteriorating the health of the game. The Balance of the Weapons (including perks and blessings) feels largely reflective of the release meta, where your weapon choices primarily influenced your build, Classes are now reflective of the most recent balance meta, where your playstyle is heavily influenced by node options, and Enemies feel like they still exist in some balance meta between the two, from when around Havoc was first introduced. And the issue is that all of these balance decisions mesh well.
Your weapon choice doesn’t matter because enemy spawns invalidate it, so you invalidate enemy spawns by always choosing the handful of builds that can solve the problem, and those builds always run a few of the same weapons because none of the classes can gain enough power from their build to make a weaker weapon worth taking, but give way too much power to the stronger ones. It’s like a viscous cycle. Truthfully, if I had to pick between any of these to be addressed first, it would be enemies. The Classes, while still having their own problems with diversity of builds, are at least at a point where all of them feel roughly similar in power. And while weapons need more attention (in order to address the balance and power of blessings), the real issue is that both get held back by Enemies.
The best nodes on every class and the best weapons for every class are the best specifically because the kind and the way enemies spawn. When the game first came out, and you could run into sleeping hordes outside of Power Supply Disruption Missions, and there was a move even split of Dreg Enemies so you weren’t constantly dealing w/ Scab Armor, weapons and builds that focused on things aside from elite damage could actually shine. I used to love running Heavy Sword and Bolter, because I would focus on Horde Clear and switch to my Bolter to deal with the occasional Blob of multiple armored enemies. But now those Blobs of Armor are far more common, and ammo is far more scarce, so I can’t rely on the bolter to clean up the enemies I’m not spec-ed for. I actually had made a follow up post to this one based upon this exact conversation w/ my own peers, because I think there are comparatively smaller changes (to majorly overhauling/reworking enemies) that could be made to the game that would at least staunch the proverbial bleeding of fun from the experience until FS had more time to properly address enemy spawns and behaviors.