I keep seeing the same thing circulating around mains of classes. I haven’t seen anything about the devs talking about ranged stagger, so I’ll say the more logical thing. Why is there so much ranged unit spam? Do you understand how little that lets some people play their class?
People going on damnation for the first time see 50 dudes with lasguns/autoguns bunched up, masking the 5 gunners, 3 shotgunners and 3 trappers behind them. No wonder people instantly die on damnation, they’re taking 20-30 damage per hit and there’s 100 shots flying at them at all times.
I know you’re trying to balance this over Vermintide, which didn’t have nearly as many ranged options, but with ranged stagger in the game, you have to either dial back the amount of enemies, or focus on fixing them. Even when I’m not ogryn, I play all my characters at the shortest height and unless I have a pillar between me and the enemy, chest high walls do not hide me while crouching. I get hit through objects by snipers, shot through tiny holes by autoguns, there’s no where safe to hide against ranged and yet the difficulty keeps demanding groups of 10+. This isn’t an issue on lower difficulties where you have nerfed ranged damage to 2-3 per shot. But on higher difficulties? That matters a lot more.
Zealots immediately get knocked out of charge, ogryns feel like they can’t move up without a shield because where the hell do you hide half the time. I imagine veterans pop up to take a shot, lose 200 toughness, and duck back down. Psykers lose HP to head pop the normal units since they can’t do much more, or to shoot off a spell they’ve been charging behind cover.
You can keep nerfing ranged damage, but as long as you keep spawning massive hordes of ranged units, someone is always going to say they feel useless against that.