Not ordinarily one to complain about such things but there is a WORLD of difference between Rolling Steel on Heresy and Damnation, and an even bigger one between regular Damnation and Auric missions.
The timer is such that one setback will doom your run on higher diffs, and no pub team works together perfectly, so that setback is pretty much inevitable unless each individual player is a sweatlord with 1000 hours and a meta build. With the increased density of specials it becomes a slog due to the cramped confines - and snipers in particular have very annoying sightlines where they can fire through the horde from 3 train cars away but you canāt. Tox bombers as well are horrific due to the cloud filling an entire train car.
Iād very much recommend either adjusting the timer or forcing the game to not spawn a good chunk of specials and disablers for this map - thereās simply not enough space for counterplay or tactics as it currently stands.
Aye, the mission generally needs some way to recover. If something happens and sets the team back early on, you can be halfway through the mission and clearly just have no chance at completing it, and spending several more minutes fighting through to an ending you can no longer do anything about can be frustrating.
Adding X numbers of seconds (maybe variable depending on difficulty, 15-45s or something) per stage completed could do a lot for the playability of the mission.
Not a sweatlord, have only 300h in total, never use meta builds and can handle the mission reasonably well on auric damnation. Snipers arent really that big of a threat.
However, hard agree on tox bombers, even just 1 bomb at the right time can completely make it impossible to win. Tox bombers have to be removed from this mission.
I would add like 5-10 seconds max to the timer and remove the tox bomber and thats all.
(Also rework the minigames but thats because theyāre boring as hell, not difficult)
I think its fine for the mission to not have a recoverable state since its so short. Youāre supposed to do it in 1 go without anyone going down, or max with 1 person being downed.
Different on a 30-40 min long mission but only 10min?
And dont forget it is auric damnation (i assume high gauntlet) its supposed to be the most difficult mission possible.
Expanding on the topic of tox bombers to get the point across how horrible and unfair they are in this mission :
I literally had 2 missions where at the last carriage/phase a tox bomber spawned hiding behind cover in 1 game where we had no line of sight on him so we couldnt shoot him and he just kept throwing tox bombs on us and we literally couldnt do anything about it.
In another game he spawned on the roof of the train and same as before, had no line of fire or any possible way to get him.
I saw where both of them are because i run with ES vet.
Both of the games were lost because he softlocked us from doing the objective for a good 20-30 seconds.
This is unacceptable.
So right now the mission has a major luck factor in it. If the director spawns a tox bomber at the right position, you automatically lost the game.
Maybe each segment of the train could be timed, so you have to make it to the next carriage before the timer runs out then it resets once youāre in the next area.
That way it keeps the pressure but doesnāt allow for an impossible mission.
Youāre not entitled to be able to win the hardest difficulty mate. If your or your teams mechanical skill is lacking, then thatās that. You gotta improve.
Iāve managed to do it several times in pubs, and Iām not a 1k+ sweat lord. It simply hinges on everyone having his sht together. Thatās the point of a fast paced high stakes mission. Sometimes you fail because you made a mistake where you shouldnāt have. Simple as.
To be fair, I would say that I completed it on auric, so I have all penances I need.
However, I really like the fact that we can have short missions and I would like to see more like that.
I have added the mod that gives you a giant timer. Then you can see that, higher is the difficulty, less time you get to complete the mission.
I am not sure that this design is a good thing. But, why notā¦
However, what is sure is that I could complete it on auric cause everybody knew what to do. I have never completed it on regular damnation, never.
This mission is too hard, and it is not a couple of seconds that will change this.
This mission has to be as hard as is a normal mission of the selected difficulty. Not worse.
So, thereās a need to adapt it. Maybe it is fine for Auric, but not for regular damnation, thatās sure.
The problem here is that, regardless of difficulty, as a game, there are some problems with the way the timer is implemented. Failures that could be recovered from in other missions just canāt here even if the team otherwise gets it together. This in turn disincentivizes playing again when something happens, and even if everything else goes right, thereās no way to win even with several minutes still left on the board and the party is faced with leaving to just start another run or running through the motions in a mission they already know theyāve failed. Iāve had to figuratively pull teeth to get people to play it when we look at the mission board because of that kind of experience.
Ideally if the team is going to fail at an early juncture, the game should trigger the failure at that point, like having timers to get through each stage (so if you fail early, youāre done early), with extra time being added for completion and padding some recovery time, instead of just a single static timer for the whole thing.
When we look at other 4 person coop PvE shooter games, they donāt tend to just give say āyou get X minutes to get through this extremely narrow and pre-defined path full of scripted and timed events, and thereās a hard fail stop once time runs outā. HD2 for example encourages teams to split up if necessary and address objectives simultaneously across an open world with different options for travel and appraoch, and the mission doesnāt flat end when you run out of time (you are instead cut off from support assets and respawns).
Even with the timer on auric itās not as hard as a maelstrom. You can afford to muck around a little but the second big mistake will usually cost you the run. In six months most players will have adapted and pugs will be completing it with minutes to spare.
For me the win rate went up when I prioritised the interrogator over everything and when I started using stimms for the boss fight and standing near something solid to prevent knockback.
Same. I failed my first auric run and managed to do the second. People are just entitled and feel that they need to have everything handed to them. God forbid we āsufferā through some adversity difficulty wise.
The problem is not getting betterā¦ it is making others better. I cannot control 3 others characters.
The game is written to play with randomsā¦ and randoms usually donāt know what they do.
The actual timing is fine on auric, with players that understand their role and what to do. It is not on regular damnation.
As I said, I have not succeeded to complete it once on regular damnation, even after several tries. Sure I have run out of luck it seemsā¦
But the first time I have picked it in Auricā¦ it was done without even a difficulty. But here everybody knew what to do.
I was thinking it might but after grinding it with many more try + QP players (this short duration mission is possibly the best use of this mod for that) there really wouldnāt be any tension. You can already recover from a loss so long as you werenāt not progressing the objective. Any more and there just wouldnāt be any reward to it, it would just simply be a short mission. Thatās how it felt when I tried it on Heresy and was able to flounder a team through 2 wipes instead just for the sake of replaying it.
Congrats, yāall got good teams or people who knew what they were doing.
Meanwhile I keep ending up last man standing because some dumbass wanders into a sniper sightline, fails to move with the group, ignores the five gunners parked on a gantry to tunnel-vision into a tiny group of groaners, ignores the data interrogator or power cells to run off and kill things, or otherwise screws up.
I can control myself. I can bring a good build and do decently enough, even if Iām hardly the best player. Iād like to think Iām pretty good at this game, Iāve got auric completion for every single map except this one even if I hang around vanilla Damnation for the fun factor most often.
I cannot control the other three randoms who donāt communicate and bring some looney toons weaponry. I watched a psyker bring an autopistol, assail, and a devilās claw to one of these matches. Three crushers showed up, and guess what? He couldnāt do jack and was way out of position from everyone trying to do the objective so he got evaporated the second he mistimed a dodge.
Hate to burst your bubble but If you donāt consider auric maelstrom or auric HISTG your fun baseline, wanting harder challenges, youāre not as good as you think you are. The people going for duo or solo auric maelstorm runs are which Iād consider good. Neither are you entitled to complete the hardest difficulty simply because your ego tells you to.
Iāve seen many people have no issue completing it with pubs in a few attempts. Even with one guy going down. If your only argument is to blame the rest of the team this might just be a you problem.
When you get that Ogryn that plays with mittens and does 1/4 of the damages you do, the 2 others that are waiting him and try to revive him multiple timesā¦
When you end the first hack, the mission is already failed.
How do you do with them, superman?
Of course, it is not always this nightmareā¦ but still, in regular damnation players are less trained and donāt know what they have to do. They need a little more time (and I did not say double the timer).
I say it, I did it easily on Auric. I never completed it on Regular damnation.
Do I have to conclude with simple reasoning that the difficulty is:
Damnation regular > Auric damnation HiStg
I hate timed objectives that result in a game over, in general. While I understand the need for urgency for the mission to function, it still sucks and I avoid it at all cost.
One: it costs you nothing to not be condescending.
Two: I work a full-time job. I found I had more fun playing regular Damnation with the occasional high-intensity/STG match after work rather than going full ham on Aurics. People having different preferences doesnāt translate to them not being sufficiently skilled - I just prefer a more casual experience than the typical forumites who all claim to be solo run Auric gigachads.
I didnāt say I was entitled, and your constant claims of such are baseless.
I said that there is far less mistake allowance than any other map, even on Auric, and that I think thatās probably not intended.
Ah, so youāre just trying to annoy people. Got it.