Obligatory I beat Havoc 40 and got True Survivor on Ogryn so you can know which angle this is coming from. I have since beat about a dozen of Havoc 35-40 on every class. I mostly pugged. My winrate was pretty good overall, lost a couple times but not as many as expected of a challenge mode.
I’m going to outline a couple impressions in no particular order. My goal is to give a nuanced writeup on what Havoc does well and what it doesn’t do well.
- The gamemode was balanced around OP abilities and weapons rather than balancing the basegame
I understand that Fatshark is hesistant to nerf things like VoC and the Dueling Sword. It appears that Havoc 40 was designed as a gamemode where you can pick VoC and DS (in other words, minmax) and still face a challenge. Mostly via some stat changes and a severe shooter buff. This sounds okay at a glance, and it does actually do that, but it causes a couple seperate issues, such as:
- Weapons that aren’t on the same powerlevel as the Dueling Sword are struggling hard, and only a few of these exist. That means weapon variety at H40 is bad.
- Abilities that aren’t capable of counteracting the extreme shooter buffs are struggling very hard. This includes the entire Ogryn class, and basically everything outside of VoC, the psyker shield and vent, and chorus and zealot charge.
- Talents that provide CDR to these abilities scale up to absurd power levels. I mean chiefly psykinetics aura, which despite not being an aura, allows the entire team to spam the aforementioned abilities to achieve gamebreaking uptime and usage counts throughout a mission, but others exist.
- Lesser but still relevant to mention, flamers, certain uncapped aoe psyker staves and uncapped aoe bleed applications (shredder grenades) scale to absolute infinity on this gamemode aswell. I view that almost as a good thing though, since they’re not usually the meta. It does feel bad that most actual cleave weapons no longer cleave adequately though, creating even less incentive to bring a non-dueling sword and just packing a flamer or psyker instead.
- Ogryn struggling isn’t necessarily an Ogryn problem, it’s a problem with aforementioned design
I’m going to make this its own point even though it’s an extension of 1), sort of. Ogryn, unlike the other classes, has very limited abilities to deal with the particular Havoc 40 changes. This isn’t necessarily a problem with Ogryn, because he’s by far powerful enough to kill the hell out everything on non-Havoc (and lower Havocs) and doing extremely well, on his meta build at least.
I think re-balancing Ogryn to make Havoc more comfortable for him would be the wrong choice. That isn’t to say Ogryn doesn’t need changes, he has severely lacking build variety even outside of Havoc, however Havoc amplifies that problem and uniquely presents him with a problem he no longer has a solution to: superjuiced shooters and gunners. In a regular Damnation game, he can counter these (after overcoming the initial movement skillfloor) by sliding and with movement tech like side dodging into slides while winding up heavies. This ceases to be an option on high Havoc ranks, due to the extreme damage and fire rate buffs to the shooters, combined with the lack of toughness grace window and longer volleys, all designed to counter the current VoC-and-friends meta. And so Ogryn is now almost completely out of counterplay, save for mostly tedious sitting-behind-walls hoping for gunners to have an AI brainfart and walk into melee range.
If Havocs were redesigned to not specifically target those abilities, and the abilities were instead addressed, Ogryn would shine on Havocs due to his extreme crowd control abilities. Simply buffing his one viable build would be a bandaid fix. This leads me to the next point:
- Havoc shooter balance at Rank ~25 is excellent and reminds me of old release Damnation shooters
Shooters being buffed DOES add legitimate difficulty and is fun, just not to the extent the scaling past 30 goes. The balance on these mid 20s ranks (specifically concerning shooters) reminds me of the shooters when the game released. They’re super high damage, super punishing when they do catch you, but they don’t feel unfair. Sliding is still a decent defense, you can still flank them, rush them, suppress them while approaching (and obviously just shoot them) which keeps the breadth of strategies in the game intact. And finally, to tie these 3 points together:
- Havoc scaling is sort of boring and totally one dimensional and needs to be redesigned
As mentioned in point 3, shooters are the main reason Havoc becomes any sort of challenging. This is in part because tuning up the shooters this hard seems to be the sole thing that can actually wipe a party that engages in this games meta strategies (refer back to 1).
The other issue with the balancing is that Havoc ranks in the 30s to 40 feel honest to god the exact same. I’ve no idea if it even changes anything other than some missions getting Power Supply Interruption or Vent Purge at 35 I think it was. It basically just felt like “okay, you figured it out, now do it like 7 times” which is pretty lame. I’d even say by the time you get to 40 it’s too easy.
More concretely, I think that, if the current OP ability spam meta was addressed, there is a far better way to design Havocs. Specifically here are the steps that I think need to be taken to fix Havoc balance for it to become a varied, non-railroaded experience:
- OP ability spam is addressed and no longer poops on the entire game no matter what it throws out.
- OP weapons are addressed. No more trivializing 50 crushers with a toothpick.
- Shooters stop scaling at around the Rank ~25 power level.
- Rather than just stat changes, Rank 25-40 (or whichever progression would be appropriate) should have increasingly difficult modifiers. Think IIVEG for auric maelstroms. Things that don’t completely kill non-meta things, but rather modifiers that create metas of their own without leaving anything in the dust. Monstrous specialists in maelstroms is great at achieving this. Moebian 21st hordes are another example of this. Invading cultist champions (the captains with the void shield) are also an excellent example of this. All these are great modifiers that increase difficulty without restraining the viable strategies and builds to a minimum. Scale the difficulty via modifiers like these instead. More of these!
To summarize I believe the fundamental scaling approach past 25 is bad, and needs to be overhauled. Interesting modifiers are key, imo. I think everyone agrees 21st hordes and the invading captain are great.
- Most of the current modifiers are terribly designed and they don’t add to variety of any sort
I’ll just list some examples.
- Exhibit A: The Blight Spreads. Random green enemies spawn that will spread their green illness on death, and each enemy with this will explode on death causing a puddle. Why is the spreading mechanic even a thing? Invariably when fighting enemies in melee the entire enemy stack will become green and turn the entire floor green. There is no specific counterplay. However, there is an aura in the game that almost completely negates this entire modifier, making it free. How does any of this make sense?
- Exhibit B: Pus-hardened skin. Theoretically a cool concept but in reality a plasmagun vet is mostly capable of ignoring this one, which is mindboggling, especially considering the HP values on Havoc are increased. This modifier basically punishes all the special killing ranged weapons that were already not good at it, while keeping the ones that completely overpowered the job to begin with relevant. A plasma gun or bolt pistol can still just blast every key target he wants and hit mostly the same breakpoints as on damnation. As a result, a more narrow meta. It is pretty noticable on things like reapers though, which is cool and good.
- Exhibit C: Cranial Growths. Just completely ignorable. You already don’t really shoot things people are meleeing because they got it covered and ammo is tight. The glowy VFX is cool but it also stays on when enemies die, which is annoying because all other glowy enemy effects disappear on ragdolls.
- Teamplay becoming relevant in this mode is great
The rare piece of Havoc praise I have is that it actually fundamentally encourages people to stick together and act as a strike team and not as 4 goofy protagonists. Unfortunately, it’s because that’s the only way their OP abilities get the most mileage, but this effect of it is good. It would be great if perhaps via more interesting modifiers this could stay. It’s very fun, and people are more social as a result, and the games do not devolve into “race to kill the elites because nothing is a challenge” like aurics do.
And finally, something a bit more on the nose:
- There is no particular reason that the Party Finder isn’t just a lobby browser.
I fail to see any reason for PF to exist. It’s just straight up a worse lobby browser. If you could create “lobbies” i.e. Strike Teams and could set filters and tags that would be far superior in pretty much every relevant way, including the ability to see games in other regions (relevant because the gamemode is dead in multiple regions at off hours). Imagine if you could talk to people and tell them “I can join on another class too, if you’d rather”. Another issue is class/meta discrimination. Right now you just can’t play Havoc on an Ogryn if you rely on the party finder to find a team.
I suppose partially the Mourning Star being this weird server lobby instead of having a personal lobby like in VT2 stands in the way of this, unfortunately, but I wanted to throw it out there.
This became a far bigger writeup than I expected it to be. so I’ll put a summary here. Also sorry if you decide to pass this on @FatsharkStrawHat I was doing my best to be concise.
TL;DR: I think Havoc as a gamemode is so-so. I had fun playing it initially. I will likely not play it more in the future unless it changes to allow for more variety while retaining a significant challenge, which it did manage to provide, although not a ton of it. Players are too OP for it to be good. People will straight up not invite you unless you stick to the cookie cutter strat, which is terribly boring. This mode was clearly not tested against Ogryns capabilities enough, nor with non minmaxed loadouts, and highlights the severe powergaps between top tier loadouts and the rest.
