Meta slaves are plentiful.
Been kicking around whether or not to respond more to this thread just because of the many metas there are, dueling sword and knives and smykers are the only three I can actually say I encounter per match. I used to include revolver in that list but then all guns got better or something and I see way less of it now.
I actually canât say the last time Iâve seen a metaslave plasma or flamer. I see bolters more often on zealots than veterans and the last toxic veteran bolter user in my game was me while I was knocking out the Marksman Focus penance.
Trauma Staff is supposed to be the number one face roll sleeper gameplay staff and I just never see it and have no idea how Iâm supposed to react when this forum or youtubers talk about how bad that staff is for the game.
The playerbaseâs expectations around solely randoming into the hardest difficulties without any class, weapon, or level restrictions means that chaos is the order of the day. Embrace the chaos or find some friends.
I have repeated this fact many times, and even did a poll. Of the people that answered the poll, most randomed into damnation or aurics solo every single game, and then - presumably - immediately post here to complain about balance and stupid teammates. Everything isnât a buffed assail.
You can literally not spend your skill points and still match into a game. This is not a quickmatch friendly design. Little of this game was designed well for quickmatching.
Itâs astounding you managed to type that much stuff when you very clearly should have understood the intent. (AKA you can lower the difficulty to make things easier in terms of normal gameplay. You cannot raise it ad infinitum.)
Obviously thereâs ways to very artificially make things more challenging. I do not need you attempting to dissect my post in a desperate attempt to be ârightâ to know that. Lord forbid someone use any form of normal speech on this forum apparently, youâre just asking for it to get taken absurdly literally.
EDIT:
Itâs pretty telling that you have a pretty crap attitude since apparently youâre a âno liferâ if you find the game too easy overall right now.
Again, that is not what i said.
You really seem to have a problem with reading comprehension.
I mean if you want to be extra pedantic you were implying that only people who no life the game will improve enough to be able to need more difficulty at the game, which is false.
I wonder how else you can back pedal?
That is also not what i said.
I am not backpedaling.
You are just adding and removing information as you see fit, so that you can criticize what ever i say.
You say that there is no option to increase the difficulty. That is not true.
So you âobviouslyâ meant something different than the option that is available.
Because then you were right.
I say that there is an option to increase difficulty. You do not like what i say.
So i âobviouslyâ meant to encourage trolling and âobviouslyâ thought that this option as a great solution that people should use in public lobbies. Because then my statement would be stupid.
And i âobviouslyâ really meant to say that, despite stating the opposite.
I say that difficulty settings are there for players within a certain skill range to have a proper challenge, and that there are some no-lifers who can not be catered to (without allowing virtually infinite difficulty), because they always keep getting better at the game and still expect a challenge. You do not like that.
So i âobviouslyâ meant that anyone who is not happy with the currently available difficulty, is a no-lifer.
Because that would make me look like an ass.
Eh IDK, while itâs true there are many whoâve plateauâed at vanilla malice|heresy|damnation and just go into the hardest just difficulty just 'cause, there are also plenty people who progressively and continually improve. These players have kept at it, learned, paid their dues so to speak and move up, itâs fine and even fun having them as teammates even if they are very green sometimes, you can tell they make an all-around effort.
This is where too low a ceiling stifles everyone, including your âno-lifersâ.
Furthermore many of this improving crowd eventually catch up to the âno-lifersâ who may have plateauâed here themselves, or donât improve because thereâs no driving force behind it. A too-low of a ceiling where many (more) will eventually bump their heads up against will just end up driving more players away, which is fine too I suppose depending on your PoV, but a shame for the end-game players who stuck around and those making their way to it.
Many people already do smaller teams etc., but thereâs still a place where the end-game, including in pugs, in any game actually requires 4 good players co-operating and using all the (balanced) tools at their disposal and succeed, this is what many people are clamoring for. I donât see how all these desires are mutually exclusive in disparate player groups.
I get that the sweet-sweet console+casuals money is appealing to FS, but again itâs not mutually exclusive, thereâs a a business upside to making some tangential design decisions to cater to some âno-lifersâ along the way.
I doubt any sensible, real balancing would be felt in the lower diffs.
The problem currently isnât entirely people getting better, itâs that the game has gotten demonstrably easier, with it being the most drastic after the most recent patch. The gameâs balance hasnât stayed static. It has become less difficult, so people who are better at it are having less fun because the game is less engaging. Part of this is spawn behavior, such as the insane change to move from timed hordes to pre set hordes that make every difficulty easier.
I donât think expecting the gameâs hardest difficult to be engaging (not difficult: at least engaging) is too much of an ask.
Since you kept editing apparently:
I clearly gave too much credit to you. That much is my bad, I guess.
I didnât think I needed to point out that thereâs blatant handicapping options of all sorts to increase the challenge. I could also play with my eyes closed and rely only on audio.
Yes, Iâm using absurd examples but I genuinely donât see how any reasonable person could think I was incapable of realizing I could use trash gear. Thatâs just such an incredibly terrible solution itâs not even worth considering for normal gameplay purposes.
To quote myself from a similar discussion: No. This is not a reasonable expectation. Actively nerfing yourself because thereâs a few major outliers fixes nothing. It also solves nothing when it comes to having people join your matches that then just faceroll their keyboard and hold M1 to win while youâre relegated to âstand back and make sure they donât make a big enough screw up while they get to enjoy their power fantasy as you do nothing.â
Choosing to latch onto that as some sort of bizarre âgotchaâ statement is disingenuous at best, actively malicious at worst. Or maybe just plain unthinking. 
Ah, so now I have to read your mind for things that arenât normal gameplay. Got it. âObviouslyâ your terrible solution was actually meant to only be used in private matches. Youâre literally doing everything youâre accusing me of. Including cutting out things, considering your initial response latched onto a single sentence.
Really? What else do you mean then? If this intended as some sort of explanation of your point itâs doing a really, really bad job of it because youâre still doubling down on the no-lifer comment.
You do not have to no-life the game to do well in the current state of it.
At all. I came back after not playing since patch 12 and was back to doing high intensity shock gauntlet auric damnation within a day. While running random stuff/leveling stuff for mastery as I did so. Even beyond the current major outliers for weapons, the player power level has been crept a ton with the talent tree rework.
Iâm not trying to make you look like an ass, I just have very little patience for arguments that try to shift all of the onus of responsibility onto the player when they have a valid criticism.
Rather than endlessly buffing and nerfing like this is a pvp game, why donât they work on the AI Director to provide a more consistent experience based on in game performance?
This is really what we are talking about here. They could buff and nerf every day, and you could just walk in with base weapons and never dodge. No amount of buffing and nerfing will change that. What if you just suck with the plasma rifle or never use grenades. These numbers manifest in game more easily because the AI director controls the spawning in the first place, but there are no controls when throwing people together in a group. I can just fire a single shot into the wall and hoover up all of the ammo, and then carry with melee anyway depending on the spawns. Buff and nerf your way out of that.
I said, that the option i mentioned is probably not what you were looking for, from the start. I even immediately pointed out (within the same post) the specific things that you criticized afterwards.
Again, you are trying your hardest to argue with me, when you could have just said. âTrue. This is an option. But as you said, it is not the kind of challenge that i was looking for.â
Because you obviously do agree with me. You just do not want to.
No. You should just try to read what i write, without bending and twisting it so that you can disagree with me. I mentioned it as an existing option. Again, you are interpreting in all kinds of things that were not said.
You could have just said âTrue. But this would not be something that i would suggest people to do in pubs.â And we would be in agreement. Instead, you claim that i suggested a specific thing (which i did not) so that you can say how bad and dumb my comment is.
I pointed out, how difficulty options are reasonable within a certain range, but that some players just play the game so much, that they will always be far ahead of everyone else. Those certain players will outskill and outscale everyone else, every time (as long as the degree of skill expression within a game allows for it). Any âreasonableâ difficulty will not be difficult for them and they would require a constant further increase of difficulty in order to be satisfied.
That is what i said. And it is what i meant.
Although it does seem, that some people feel like i was talking specifically about them, when i used the word no-lifer. Well⌠I used the word for what it means. Those who basically play the game as much as if it was their job.
Correct. And i did not claim that you do.
If you actually read my comment, you might have noticed me saying, that difficulty options should be present within a reasonable range.
And that when i mentioned âno-lifersâ, i was talking specifically about the players who can not be satisfied unless the difficulty keeps going up basically forever and outscale almost the entire playerbase.
Of course not.
I totally agree with you.
Again, i said that difficulty options within a certain range should exist.
I also said, that those who no-life a game, can not really be catered to, unless basically infinite difficulty scaling is offered.
I did not say that the gameâs difficulty cap is currently in a perfect state, or that the current top difficulty is as high as FS should go.
I have been suggesting for months, if not years, that FS allow basically free pickings of modifiers for private lobbies.
I also think that a havoc-like addition to the game could be a good thing. It would just be important to gatekeep the top difficulties to a degree, and to not make too many different options available for a progression system that relies on the party finder.
Afaict from steamcharts, DT has a higher average of players overall than V2 and even boosted V2âs numbers to 100k peak when DT arrived.
imo Fatshark must be doing something right.
There is nothing wrong with people offering feedback, criticisms and opinions. This includes counter opinion-opinions like this thread 
Personally, I trust Fatshark to make the right choices overall to the good of the game which includes listening to but not always acting on player feedback.
Dextaâs threads are far from thatâŚ
He just wants to buff everything⌠He seems that he considers that the game has only one difficulty. And I guess this is linked to penances. Penances are the problem, it pushes players to play difficulties they canât handle.
The most skilled players donât ask new penances and rewards. Thatâs why Havoc mode is badly designated. It should have NO PENANCE linked to it.
- About difficulty
Buffing is not the solution. Anyways there are a lot of difficulties in the game. Even malice has high intensity, but not enough missions are proposed with that (I play them in solo with many more try mod).
Malice missions should also have an Auric mode. Yes, I know it could hurt several here⌠They should remove uprising difficulty and introduce a new one between malice and heresy. This one should also be with auric.
And it they fear that people will complete the auric penance too easily, they can tweak these penance to work only on heresy and damnation difficulties.
But, there is nothing wrong that a player wants to play malice and give also his opinion here. Nothing wrong at playing the difficulty that suits well the skill of the player. Nothing wrong that they want to play something harder. But actually, thereâs a a big gap between malice and heresy. The gap should be reduced by introducing a new difficulty. Like there is no difficulty in uprising and sedition. One difficulty level for both is enough.
- About buff / nerf
Buffing everything is stupid. You buff, then the game is too easy, everything is broken, so you have to buff enemies. Then everybody complain (like stagger resist increased - and they are right to complain about his, thatâs not the question here) and you start again buffing.
This is a stupid cycle that will never permit to balance the game. Each time they empower us, they aggravate the lack of balance.
They should proceed by small changes.
Imagine for a moment that you have never played gamesâŚ
âŚotherwise I agree. Its a balancing act. Nothing is set in stone and it doesnt matter if you do 100 damage per swing or 1 million damage per swing, so long as the game is balanced properly around those numbers. Balance is key.
Seriously? you really think that you can fail at these levels? and that it needs 2 difficulty levels?
My opinion is that uprising and sedition are really close, while there is a BIG gap between malice and heresy.
So thats a no then 
I kinda agree here. I think they could be squashed in to one and an extra diff put in between malice and heresy.
Still, Iv spent a lifetime playing games and I find it difficult to imagine uprising and sedition being difficult, but I brought a friend in who is a proper gamer (thrashes every game in the Souls series with ease) and he was stressing on sedition, mostly with being hit in the back all the time. The Tide games require almost 100% awareness to avoid such things and that takes time to learn. So even for a long time gamer the different style of play can throw them.
So even though I find it hard to fathom, Iv seen it in practice. Then I imagine what its like for someone who doesnt play games much. Maybe candy crush is their experience level 
Ok. My feeling is that sedition should be for the first mission only and should not appear as missions.
Uprising should be the first difficulty level proposed.
I can understand the stress for the new player⌠However, there is close to no difference between the 2.