Just to be clear I’m not complaining about the difficulty, I can handle the increased spawns even on damnation and I appreciate the attempt to mix up the basic formula. The issue I have with these mutators is that they play their hand too often, to the point that it starts to be annoying because you barely have any time to do things other than fight the next wave of specials. If you force the player to do the same thing too many times in a row it starts to become less interesting, even boring.
The old hunting grounds mutator worked fine, but the new one ups the frequency significantly and that can lead to the party having to face hounds several times in the same area, or in extreme cases twice in the same large room. The most effective way to handle hounds is for the entire party to group up and remain stationary in a chokepoint, if you have to do that too often it slows down the action a lot and forces the players to camp in a way that isn’t particularly interesting.
The new Shock Troop mutator also triggers too often. When it works “properly” it’s no big deal, a bunch of specials jump you at the same time, you deal with them and move on. Where it goes wrong is when special waves have difficulty pathfinding to the party and get kind of “stuck” in the background areas. Often the entire wave of specials forms a lemming train emerging from a single door and the party is forced to stop and gun them down one by one for the better part of an entire minute before they can safely move on. In extreme cases the specials can get lost for so long that they end up stacking with the next wave of special spawns forcing the players to fight specials continuously with no breaks in between.
All you have to do to fix this is simply increase the minimum length of time between successive special spawn waves so that players have a chance to experience other aspects of the gameplay and don’t get stuck doing the same thing over and over again. The difficulty of the waves does not need to be changed.