So, with the recent mass buffs that went out, some things have of course come out broken. Other things have been broken for a while, and now that the population has had time to acclimate, every damnation match ends up as a walk in the park even in quickplay high intensity.
I’m going to speak mainly from the perspective of vet/zealot, and a little bit of psyker:
Kantrael MG XII. It’s solid. It has the best sight. It pulls out quickly. It oneshots every counterfire marked shooter with ult up, which reliably stays up til they and their elite buddies are all dead. It has reliably large dps with weakpoint shots, especially with deadly accurate. The dps matches the agripinaa infantry auto, which has worse sights, worse recoil, and worse ammo. It’s also one of the guns you can just walk around with liberally using ammo while leaving nearly all of the ammo finds for your team mates. Can we at least make a small tweak and increase the ammo consumption to 4 per shot to give the kantrael MG Ia a reason to exist?
Power sword. Yes, again. With the right perks, this thing still one shots every basic minion its cleave hits. Just needs power cycler now to have more than 2 swings again. It’s not quite as ridiculous as preorder beta, but it’s still disgusting enough to be able to sit there and watch the vet do everything against a horde while you just watch his back or help with elites. But, yea, a vet alone without a corner will struggle to solo the world with it…
Braced guns (non ogryn). Namely agripinaa viii and now the shredder autopistol. The agripinaa used to be a sleeper. Now there’s as many people roleplaying as rambo as there are roleplaying as ogryns. You can walk down a damnation map nearly without halting just spraying down the whole world. You get to have all the ammo, cause, you’re killing everything anyway, so it’s not like your team mates are using ammo. They just need to handle crushers, which should give them all their ammo back. These things are WAY TOO EFFECTIVE for not having to deal with that shooter nuance called “aiming”. They will knock down maulers/ragers and elites very quickly. They have fast swap speeds. I mean one is a pistol, so it should, but what a pistol probably should not do is flatten, in 3 shots, an armored chain axe weilding psychopath who insists on slow-walking toward you. Finally, they actually have pretty decent ammo consumption due to their large ammo pools. Just generously reduce the accuracy for hip firing these or generously reduce their ammo count.
Heavy sword. These were already meta level good with headtaker. Now you get to have +50% damage on top of that. This is a pretty reliable proc, because this is a horde game. Against pox swarms these are nearly as lol-ez as power sword, except with way faster swings, way more maneuvarability, and doesn’t have to be charged. It doesn’t even need a crit blessing to utilize the crit build due to its speed.
Flamer. It just covers way too much that this game can throw at it. Infinite penetration, great ammo economy, will stagger elites and do massive dps to anything that isn’t a crusher. With exploited mechanics, though, it does end up handling crushers too. TBH this is a fault of its functionality. It is a beam that looks cool and fiery. But I don’t feel like a power armored edgelord from a WH40k concept art spraying fire from this thing. I feel like I’m playing with videogame flamethrower #1201.
Honorable mentions:
Devil’s claw. People already solo’d damnation to this thing, why did it need a buff? Compared to the rest it’s not a huge offender, but now with +40% damage and +200% cleave, this thing will wreck the world it already did wreck, but even easier.
Agripinaa infantry auto. I mean it’s a solid gun. It’s kinda left in the dust at this point, however it is still one of the absolute strongest guns in the game ever since its buff in perorder beta. Are you really telling me you’re gonna make this thing stronger, too? This still almost feels like it’s nerfworthy at times.
Headhunters. Are a maniac damage modifier away from being way too strong.
Helbore. Swap speed tweak away from being the same.
Volleyfire, esp. Counterfire. There are going to be very few vets that don’t take this as their last feat. It’s either cause they’re bored or don’t know. As it stands now, you will basically always just kill every shooter in an encounter, or series of encounters if close enough, before it goes down. By the time it does go down, it’s usually back up again if you still needed it. Only a bribed ogryn and team mates running infront of you and knocking/killing everything out of your LMB can stop this from happening. Anyone that has ever recommended reload speed to supplement volleyfire/counterfire is just straight up wrong. Even with a mk3 helbore you can keep this skill going through natural reload+chargeup speed. This skill just needs to be harder to use. Refresh limit, shorter refresh window, CD starts after actual expiration - some or all of these and potentially more.
Chastise the wicked. Get rid of the ranged weapon interaction ASAP.
There seems to be a trend, finally, of buffs all around. Yay? But if you were on the fence about there being a difficulty 6 before, it better be clear as fricken day now that there is definitely going to be one. And thus the cycle goes: you buff everything, you nerf yourself cause the enemies will get buffed. Hooray! We get to grind all over again! Not necessarily a bad thing, but what’s the new balance going to be, and why are we OP right fkn now instead of whenever that gets introduced?
IMO, this being a tactical team game means that more care than this needs to be taken into balancing. One shot breakpoints need to have more meaning than: I push F and everything gets oneshot with most good guns, and not even on the head. Weapons that are powerful enough to hold down the trigger and commit mass genocide with accurately, need to have some major drawbacks, not necessarily be removed. This is still fundamentally L4D, just more action/less horror. The formula is not changed up enough to make us all spehce marines that randomly can’t pull ourselves up, can’t swim, and can’t push off a dog even though we can swing a giant chainsaw with enough force to cleave through dozens of people. If you’re telling me we get to transition to space marines and also get to fight more/harder enemies then I’m all ears, but it’s still going to be a boring game without care in balancing.
Anyway, this is just my take. FS is starting to rectify some of their mistakes, and I commend them for that. I just don’t want this to become one, though whether it is or not depends on everyone else’s opinion and not mine. I personally enjoy a challenge. I do not enjoy having 1 clown be able to run down and basically stat-check the map and clear it for everyone else, even if that clown is me. I would, however, enjoy someone running down the map and being so ridiculously skilled that they can pull it off.