I dunno if anyone else has noticed but since patch 13 dreg elites like shotgunners, ragers and gunners have become extremely common, obnoxiously so. It feels like regular horde waves on auric are almost guaranteed to have 2-8 dreg ragers mixed into them every time. I often get into games where there are more dreg gunners than any other elite type, once it was nothing but dreg gunners, over 150 of them (I counted).
They need to change the spawn system to give it more variety. Back at launch the split was roughly 50-50 between dregs and scabs. Now it feels more like 7:1. It wouldn’t surprise me if they deliberately configured it this way to stress test some aspect of the game like the rebalanced health pools, but it’s getting annoying and they should stop.
To a lesser extend this also applies to regular ranged/melee scabs, I once got a contract to melee-kill 1000 scabs and it took me almost an entire week to finish it because every map was wall to wall dregs and I’d get maybe 50 scabs kills per map (most of them specials).
It doesn’t feel like alternating since that would imply that one section has to have the other kind of enemies than in the one section prior.
I’ve gone entire missions not seeing either scab or dreg.
It’s more like RNG, which enemy you find in a section. Aka, it taking longer to get one contract over the other is just luck dependant, not difficulty.
Oh it’s definitely RNG. But I regularly find it switch up in sections. Unless of you course do Maelstrom and get “Scab Only” as a modifier mixed in. That one exists.
While I do wish there were more Scabs, I enjoy fighting them much more than the Dregs (So Scab only is one of my favorite sub modifiers for Malestrom missions) it is random. Some missions will be full of Scabs, vice versa, or an even split. Its all up to the director.
If it truly is just director RNG then it needs to be more random because I’ve been noticing obvious patterns (re: too many dregs) since patch 13 dropped. Dreg elites especially tend to outnumber scabs by a huge margin.
What a shocker this was the culprit all along. Want to complete your randomly generated weekly on a randomly generated mission and map containing randomly placed enemy types and factions?
Mmmmm, pour more of thar RNG… Give me random cosmetics, random talent trees, random height and voices. Player choice is overrated.
On a serious note though Scab/Dreg spawns seem tied to the map type in terms of likelihood. The “outside” maps seem to be more likely to spawn dregs, and the nicer parts of Atoma seem more likely to have scabs.
Just my singular opinion, but I would like the missions themselves to predominate towards a faction.
All the missions with sandy areas = dregs.
All the missions with metal suburbs = scabs.
Not exclusively so, mind you (I like those maelstrom missions that do, but they should be a specific case). A bit of mix up of armour types helps test full builds.
But I think doing this would help with Melk’s quests. And also it could replace low intensity missions as you could, crafting allowing, specify for anti-flak or unarmoured for example.