I’ve seen lots and lots of suggestions on here that all seem to have a common underlying cause: Players aren’t aware of all the tricks and features of the game.
Giving players things to learn as they go is good, but there’s a limit. V2 currently fails to teach players about some pretty fundamental stuff and I have no doubt that this results in a lot of newer players dropping the game. Frankly, this game can feel downright unfair when you’re not intimately familiar with it’s mechanics and you can see this in a lot of posts on this forum.
My suggestion is to add a tutorial or training mode that goes much deeper than the prologue. Short, solo missions that focus on specific things, with the aim of teaching players about important features of the game that we currently have to learn through trial and error in chance encounters or by experimenting with mods (which I bet new, casual players aren’t doing).
Things like:
Dealing damage: Light vs heavy attacks, attack combos, armour types and penetration.
Damage avoidance: Enemy attack windows, dodging and the “you’re about to get whacked” noise.
Buffs and debuffs.
Disablers and other specials.
Horde/pack management.
By focusing on specific areas in controlled environments, players are given the tools to deal with them in isolation, but still need to learn on their own how best to deal with combinations of them in the main game.
Something like this is a thing I’ve been mentioning every now and then and advocating almost since the beginning. I guess it could be a separate gamemode, but even a text-based “intermediate tutorial” accessible (and easily found) in-game would be a significant asset. I guess it could even be done as a special Deed, where instead of the normal modifiers a bunch of hints about gameplay appear. It should be something that’s completely optional, though, so as to not make anyone (particularly old players) feel they have any need to do it. As such, I think there should be no reward tied to it even from Okri (or if there has to be one, make it a low-level Recruit chest).
The reality is that this game has a ton of mechanics that are more or less hidden, and as I follow posts in Reddit (and here) there are occasionally people who already have hundreds of hours in and they still bump into mechanics that are new to them (but obvious to most of us). While all this info can be found from Steam guides and elsewhere, it tends to get lost and a good guide can be very hard to find. And besides, the best way to learn things is trying them as soon as you read about them, and I doubt many have a dual-monitor setup to look at text files while they’re gaming - and of course, alt-tabbing continuously is awkward at best.
While I think a few of your suggestions are things better just learned through playing (horde management, buffs) and a few others are potentially more advanced stuff than in my mind fit here, I think adding consumables and their effects, barrels, and books to the list of things taught would be a good idea. They are, after all, things that are encountered all the time, including the Prologue, but explained nowhere.
Heck, if I had any programming skill I’d probably try to make a mod for this myself, just as a proof of concept (and of course, to help new PC players).