title says it all, they functionally have stopped existing. You can go back to mindless m1-spam into hordes with no consequence! You’ll kill the vanguards easily. 
Good job guys, for a moment we almost had to learn how to deal with a new basic enemy that shook up how we played the game! Glad we can go back to how things were.
And barely existed as a factor in Auric/ML before that due to seriously increased individualism of players, speedrunning becoming the norm and being overwhelmingly flanked because of that as a default state of things.
Not to mention the incessant whining over how easy the game is and powercreep in the background, which is obviously a perfect stage set to ask for some enemies to get nerfed and have your wishes fulfilled 
10/10 respectable community
The controversy of the guard continues.
Personally, I think they were fine. I think why you have such a split in how people find them is probably due to three main reasons.
1.) The game is unbalanced. If you’re using off meta weapons, some weapons performed way worse on them than others.
2.) Skill. There’s a very large skill gap, at several stages between players. The players stuck at malice, the players doing Auric duos, and the people doing havoc 40 solos and such. Obviously the people with lower skill would want the nerf and people bored with difficulty would not.
3.) Game design/philosophy. A lot of people love the power fantasy. Arguably the most popular, and people like feeling powerful. I personally find it gets boring. I like the challenge and don’t mind feeling small and seeing threats as valid threats. I think too many games lean into power fantasy and Darktide was unique when it came out. Ever since the talent trees came out though that changed, though havoc was nice to bring some of that back.
What would I recommend? Enemy scaling and behaviour doesn’t have to be linear. Currently Auric is damnation just with more intensity. I would say let’s have some of these changes change at different difficulties. Keep vanguards as mild threats on the lower difficulties, but change their behaviours and values moreso on Auric and Maelstrom.
Also, the game should be more balanced in general. Vanguards being deleted easily by meta builds and players just randomly picking things with little understanding and struggling are going to create these gaps in experience.
People are conflating design and difficulty here. The vanguard’s were designed poorly. Very poorly tbh. That poor design had a byproduct of added difficulty/challenge.
The design needed to change. It was pure jank. Probably the most jank I’ve seen in DT since I started playing.
Difficulty can be tweaked now that the design has been fixed.
Should the shield now be bigger? Probably.
Should the shield be infinite HP like a bulwarks? Probably.
Should the enemies move together like a Roman shield wall? Probably.
Can difficulty be increased in other ways? Absolutely.
Did their jank need fixed? Absolutely.
Add scaling to Vanguards in Havoc
It feels silly they have the same HP in damnation compared to Havoc 40
I strongly disagree with this. Their base design is fine, and they were easily countered by just getting them to button up and then dodging behind them to attack their backs. It was not difficult, I just figured this out in my first few games with them. Also, their shields could be broken with enough hits, which meant that they were something that could ALWAYS be overcome, even in a disadvantaged position.
A very large group of them could cover each other to some degree and make clearing them take longer, but it was not difficult, just slightly time consuming. All they needed at most was a slightly lower spawn rate.
What’s bad design for a shield enemy in a 'tide game is threefold;
Them creating situations the player cannot escape, ie a group of Bulwarks crowding you in, and the blocking ones preventing attacks on those who open up to attack.
Only being countered by certain weapons.
Be so weak as to not serve their function of forcing a change in behavior in players.
To look at some of the prior shield enemies in 'tide games, all of them have one of these problems.
Shield Skaven and Shielded Marauders were so weak as to often be ignorable in VT2, so they fall into 3. Shieldvermin had a bit of 1, if a group of them were in your face, and Bulwarks do still. 2 also is something that affects Crushers, since certain weapons just don’t deal much damage to Unyielding in large amounts and others just bypass shields completely.
Vanguards are probably the best shield enemies they’ve made, because they solved all three problems - their shields can be broken, it just takes awhile, so you are never fully trapped by them and every weapon has the potential to kill them. All while they have a distinct counterplay that is executionally very simple and logical, ie “moving behind them”. Much moreso than “push twice to open them up”, which is a functional if unintuitive and slightly stupid counter.
Like, I don’t know what to say here; literally this was a case of people being bad at the game and dragged it down because they wouldn’t adapt at all. Now the Vanguards are basically ignorable and you can m1 spam with near impunity into hordes again. It is 100% a regression.
Personally, I think Vanguard is in a pretty good spot right now. The much bigger problem for the game is overpowered things like Gold Toughness, Inferno, and DoT damage, which haven’t been nerfed at all.
Right back atcha.
Their design was not “fine”. Their HP was ludicrous even without their shield. Their shield had a built in force field?? It didn’t make sense at all. It was jank. Now it is not jank and the difficulty can be increased in a sensible and logical manner. Whether you flanked them or not made no difference because of this invisible jank field that engulfed them. You just had to hit them loads from any angle. That was the design. Rubbish.
I barely played VT2 so I can’t comment on the enemies from that game. I started playing VT2 long after I started DT due to all the gushing it got from these forums but I really disliked the feel of VT2 and hated the locked characters. The combat felt flat and not kinetic like DT so I gave up quite quickly. It felt very dated in comparison. I do wonder if VT2 players often have rose tinted specs from a nostalgic familiarity with VT2 before DT?
I have already stated that I would happily see their difficulty now increased in sensible ways that didn’t rely on jank so, like…I don’t know what to say here! I’m not suggesting they remain exactly as they are.
This is very narrow-minded and you’ll not win any minds with it. I am not a bad player by any stretch, nor did I ever once find the vanguards much of a challenge beyond a slight annoyance. That does not change the fact that their “magic force field” jank needed fixed.
Let’s find ways to increase their difficulty in a proper, logical approach, like some of my previous suggestions.
i’m fine with some more meaty trash mobs, but like why the hell should i just be completely blocked from killing anything because one guy is standing in the middle of a horde? it was just like bulwarks on steroids, if you’re not playing a class with infinite cleave or some instant easy access to a big aoe “F off”, it was downright miserable to encounter vanguards. like, sorry, cry for the challenge if you want, but for most people it was downright awful the way they came out, because vanguards AREN’T CHALLENGING, they were just damn annoying and a time waster, which is why you had (and still have) people who just run past them because they’re just literally not worth fighting, and make mixed hordes just straight up un-fun to fight in most scenarios, since they’re virtually indistinguishable from regular scabs & cultists when they all get mixed together.
The suggestion here being that Vanguards introduce some new level of player “skill” to the game is very funny to me.
Fuh nah
I still play VT2 to this day
The reason why to many VT2 feels “dated” is because VT2 doesn’t offer get out of jail free cards
Chased by Maulers on VT2? welp, time to kill and make space
Chased by Maulers on DT? Backdodge slide, and then start running
There’s 5000 situations like this in VT2 vs DT that it easily explains why cata is still a challenge nowadays in VT2, meanwhile Auric MAELSTROM is a joke in DT
VT2 focuses a lot more on frontliners actually being an important role for the team, in DT this doesn’t matter since if the enemies can’t catch to you, you don’t >need< a frontliner
The closer we got to this in DT is with the introduction of Havoc, and even then I’m willing to say Havoc 40 is easier than Cataclysm
Dodging behind an enemy to attack their back is a skill, if a minor one. The problem has continually been that people would not learn this incredibly simple skill and apply it.
No I mean the literal feel of the combat. DT feels almost like VR without goggles at times. The visual feedback and kinetic feel is sublime. Vt2 has none of this from what I played. It felt like I was clicking a mouse button, whereas DT feels like I am swinging heavy weapons into meat and armour.
We have all been doing that with bulwarks for actual years. This is not why people disliked the vanguard and you know it. You’re angry and you’re lashing out but please think critically. Their sponginess was absurd. Find better ways to increase difficulty than spamming the enemy hp into the statopshere.
I find a bunch of them. Still don’t like them at all.
Bullsh*t.
Blazing.
speaking of “critical” i think its high time to break the mindless falling forward playstyle with any means necessary
its quite schizophrenic if one says the enemy isnt much of an issue yet celebrates its dumbing down like the fall of idi amin.
in my book, if only one simpleton had trouble and got stopped by such a non-issue i say the vanguard served its purpose and id tripple down on such design moving forward.
no, it isnt refined or fine tuned, since its better than nothing for the time be though it was better than nothing.
the reason tempers fly high with this one is for the longest time we had a step away from casualisation and what happens? at the first setback a 180° cause some find it “troublesome”
guess by now we need a two class server system
fun-mode
purist mode
for it seems impossible for the devs to create a theme park mode until damnation and a skill check mode above and keep a big big fence between the two in one map-pool.
outside of trying new enemy patterns that would include the complete removal of
smite
dome
yellow toughness
100% cleave
to name a few.
guess the reddi-tears would flow just the same.
funny that ages ago as organizer one could freely pick any patch version of quake 3 and unreal tournament and say
“Patch x.xx gonna be played at the lan, take it or pss off” and still every event was full 
if available id switch to a pre patch 13 server this very moment.
and its the devs job to keep the games integrity intact lest we end up with total slob for the masses in every damn ip.
something id-software does right in my opinion, and no, theres no difference of “good” in single or multiplayer.
if someone cant make nightmare difficulty the game wont accommodate while 150% speed ultra nightmare runs remain an epic task for the 0.1%
here people seem to fool themselves by “if i made a difficulty by the cheapest means im good enough for it”
how they preserve any semblance of pride or self respect is a mystery to me 
to counter the insanely high cleave values of some weapons.
again, either new enemies to 100%absorb any cleave or get rid of 100% cleave options on any weapon.
the idea of doing it the enemy type way i find more appealing, it just needed a bit more refinement.
no weapon, ult, staff or talent should allow to hit that many enemies at once.
hard to undo this effect if you want to earn money as a dev after a good % got used to the “comfortable way”
I see the “glazedivers” phenomenon has reached darktide in full.
Vanguards were boring-a$$ chore to deal with, no skill was EVER involved in dealing with them.
NO-ONE bitch3d about the shield, everyone bitch3d about their giga inflated healtpools-
ALONG WITH NO VISUAL DISTINCTION BETWEEN A BASIC MOB AND SHIELDLESS VANGUARD
Oh BOY IS IT FUN to headshot a BASIC mob with 4+ attacks and it still lives. Amazing design, this requires real skill to deal with and their fixing really makes darktide worse.
Oh BOY IS IT FUN to headshot them with a ranged weapon - HEAR the headshot sound - and they still go on after several shots
Oh ye, I remember how the same people, that are b1tching and moaning about vanguards being too weak, bitch3d and moaned about “Bulwark spam is bad! Their shield push works even if you are stagger immune, they bodyblock shots, they allow for netters to catch people without counterplay..”
And as we got smaller bulwark BUT 3x as many of them “Peak Darktide design”
Interesting that you still cannot Brainburst one-shot them due to their helmet is crazy, given that their signature weapon is actually the shield.