They definitely aren’t going to retain anyone but the diehards with some of these changes. I’m ok with them, I can get used to them, but most (not all) of my friends are not having fun with how shooters are now.
Gonna try to convince them to stay and play on heresy instead, but the sheer volume of shooters/gunners compounded with these changes has made it more tedious in how you have to approach certain spots on certain maps.
Just laying it out there 
it is definitely important to please your core, but there still needs to be a balance.
Pandoras box was opened by making the game easier after the class rework. It’s one thing to give all that power to players, its another thing to take it away from them. People have gotten used to the state of the game in the last 8+ months.
A new difficulty higher than damnation would probably be a better choice here. Its not like people haven’t asked for that before anyway.
I don’t really care either way, I’ll still play it. But they should watch player numbers carefully in the coming months to see how this shakes out. Or just march to their own drumbeat anyway like they always do. 
agree
Its not taken away. People just dont know how to use it properly. Power is within them, they have lack of faith
I see many peoples with 30 level (i mean 30 true level) just go into the mess of shock troop golden gauntlets. And when i stay alive (and try just to survive) they constantly spammin in chat that i dont know how to play (825 lvl psyker).
U know how they dies? Go to the open space into the horde of ordinary heretics and just melted by 6-7 gunners.
Difficulty should be evenly distributed among all levels. There’s no point in adding a harder difficulty just because casuals feel entitled to pals auric damnation. There’s a reason non aurics, heresy and below exists.
Sadly we live in an age where the average player has too brittle of an ego to take blame on himself and improve his skills. Instead it’s always the teams fault, balance, or “bullsht mechanics”.
There’s a reason why team games flourish and 1v1 games barely exist anymore. They don’t allow for blame shifting as you have to accept that you might just be not as good as you thought you are.
The fact that devs pandered to these groups instead of doubling down made the situation worse over the years and what it is today.
tl,dr: step down a difficulty if you can’t cut it and don’t ruin other people’s fun
Yeah if the highest level of content isn’t actually hard for the top end then what’s the point? You aren’t getting some insane boost of resources either so there is not even the argument that “mah plasteel farming is inefficient”.
Exactly. If you want plasteel efficiency just run quickplay regular damnation. With heretic idols destroyed you can easily get 700-1000 plasteel per run.
Still getting silent crusher overheads from behind though. That’s still a layer of difficulty that I’m working on.
All that armour shouldn’t be able to sneak up on you imho 
And then, and maybe I’m so used to having them in front, but there’s no audio cue for them winding up a big hit? Am I wrong? You get that “swish” sound from mobs who are about to attack off screen and I’ve programmed myself to dodge when I hear that, but strangely crushers don’t seem to make a noise like that. At least that I can notice.
Crushers/Maulers should probably get their own entry cue like a special. “Crush You” is a bit wasted when a pack turn up; more important on lone crushers!
(Sorry I didn’t reply to your comment talking about this, told myself I was going to do it later and never got back to it lol)
I think the only way they could do this would be to have enemy behavior (movements speed, attack speed, etc.) be tied to difficulties. Which I think would be a good way to do it but idk how easy that is with the way FS has set up difficulties.
I will still keep saying that FS doesn’t teach players how to play the game well, and that you shouldn’t be required to go to 3rd party sources to start learning more advanced forms of play or how “you’re expected to play.” I only play at the level I do because of that, which I don’t think is a good thing.
However I still think that an additional difficulty would be a bad thing, at least for now, for reasons I mentioned earlier.
And I’m not going to understand the casual player. I don’t know how they play (Maybe besides Smite psykers trying to smite lone mutants 
) or what they want out of the game. All I can say was that playing Auric got to a point where that was basically casual play for me, and apparently other people as well. I don’t know what difficulty you and your friends played on, but for people who aren’t as “try hard” as I am the hardest difficulty should be more of a struggle (not saying you or your friends specifically, just as an in general statement).
In general I think it would be for the best if instead of health, enemy behavior was changed or just had more intelligent scaling between difficulties with stuff like attack speed, stagger, maybe suppression especially after they made enemies more lethal, and that there were more in game systems for teaching the player important tips. But I don’t think we are going to have that any time soon.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see if these changes positively effect the playerbase or not.
More maps, and more map sections / events need some tweaking at least for Auric Damnation.
Agreed, somewhat enjoyable again.
Well I tried.
We all did buddy. But the screeching minority of people with hurt egos will always be louder than a few challenge enjoyers clapping.
I have no problem to handle Mael, but the game to me is worse. Some enemies buff are fine, but shooters are really too much boring and too many enemies spawn
p.s anyway there are some non reasonable players with a big ego unable to lower the difficulty… but also exist non reasonable players with an even bigger ego wich don’t give a f*ck about balance, they just want a broken game to pump up their ego even more
Might be a hot take, but if we’re talking about the highest difficulty the game has to offer, which barely even offers a meaningful amount more rewards, it’s much more important that is busts your balls than it being “balanced”.
Not that there was anything genuinely unbalanced about the shooters before this Hotfix. Oh no you might actually be encouraged to bring an anti shooter ranged weapon how horrible.
The hardest difficulties in the game are exactly that on purpose, broken and unfair. Its not a routine follow the flow chart experience to deal with conga lines of poxbursters, regular shock gauntlet on top of hi intensity spawning and waves of dogs. I have no idea why you would go into that mode expecting the gameplay to be fair and balanced.
And shooters were finally back to how they were on launch, ie like a proper contingent of traitor guard. I think dregs should probably be the ones with the current ‘stalker’ AI and bad accuracy, but former guard should be deadly and use tactics. The most important tactic (that had temporarily returned with them being deadly) was to not engage the entire enemy guard force at one time. They have wide aggro spheres, but its still possible to approach the map in sections and not deal with multiple fire lines at once.
More enemy variant differentiation please! A la ragers etc.
Changing the behaviour rather than simply adjusting stats would be really cool.
Brought out my Recon 7a Vet that hadn’t seen play since patch 13. It felt really good, and it made Executioner’s Stance suddenly feel like a competitive option with VoC.
I’m sure it’ll still be decent enough to deal with Gunner spam. But I certainly won’t feel as important anymore, or that I’m doing something unique from a melee build.
About the first part, I just disagree… hard must never be a synonymous of unfair or artificial
About the second point, anti-ranged builds are among my favourite… I’ve always played the Exe Stance on my Vet, for example (even if for sure it’s not the strongest option)
Still, the higher spawn rate plus the persistent rain of laser, in certain situations, make imo the game unfair and less fun
