Gamers are just too toxic and competitive, even in a co - op PVE game. You can’t make some classes have to be responsible for friendly fire but not others and expect a bunch of strangers to get along. I literally tell people “watch out I’m going to shoot that patrol with my trollhammer” and they just RUN right to the patrol. I always call out in voice chat before I use ranged weapons but they ALWAYS run in front of it, and then it’s ALWAYS my fault. The problem with friendly fire only being on ranged weapons is that melee classes despise ranged classes and just prefer playing all melee.
I literally ask people for a chance to kill stuff and they just tell me no. Why would they want me to get kills. They want to get the green circles. They say “I’m a melee class, I have to melee stuff. Why should I move out of the way for you?”. I am considerate and just never use my weapons and ask when is a good time to use it. They say there really is no good time, I should just use other weapons or play another class.
The solution is to add friendly fire to melee damage or remove it from ranged. Otherwise it will always be this boring stale meta of grail knights and warrior priests on the front line. Why would you EVER take something more than a merc with a handgun, when it’s handicapping your team to go BH with a volley crossbow, or a waystalker with a hagbane. It’s completely pointless because the only thing you need to do is occasionally shoot a special, melee literally does everything else objectively better with no risk to the team.
My entire experience playing engineer at cataclysm has been a negative one. I basically have to just play legend library runs with bots, because I don’t know any people who play this game so I just do random quickmatch. And half of these games I either get vote kicked for friendly fire, or I just don’t use my weapons at all because the melee classes are purposefully body blocking me to deny me kills so that they can have more on the scoreboard. The way engineer is designed is that your teammates have to be aware of your positioning and theirs relative to you. Nobody is aware of sh*t, most grail knights are smoking a blunt in 1 hand and furiously left clicking with the other.
Melee friendly fire would be fine. It works in mordhau and that has narrow corridors and 80 + players in a map. Deep rock galactic has friendly fire but only guns. Vermintide has friedly fire on guns but not melee? No wonder everybody plays melee classes. Why would you want to be the only person on your team that can be responsible for team damage. You will ALWAYS be the scapegoat. You will always be blamed when things go south. In a community of angry gamers, you need equal responsibilty on all parties. When you fail the run what is the first thing people think of? That one time they took friendly fire damage because they cluelessly or intentionally ran in front of your line of sight while greeding kills.
