reddit comments on 2000 upvoted post and steam comments almost unanimously praising the nerfs despite half the people on the forums insisting that they were fine.
Wimps who are afraid of the tiniest challenges
Obviously, vanguard were a chore to fight. A random idiot with shield has 3x+ more hp AFTER the shield is destroyed
ThE eLiTe “This is amazing, perfect design, fun enemy to fight”
Anyone who is normal “Why is this 1:1 model with basic enemy, is taking 10 seconds do fight? OH its one of those bulwarks with human textures”
Now it feels like a recoloured bruiser.
As it should. It’s a rank’n file enemy, who’s job is to disrupt cleave with their carapace shield.
That, they still do.
After testing it, I’d say this is a fairly reasonable nerf.
If you mindlessly attack it from the front, the shield will still block your attacks, and it can still stop cleave attacks. However, since it’s now possible to stagger it with a push, I feel like it has become the enemy it was originally intended to be.
The elite never really talked or gave a singular flying F about them…
said “look its the new enemy” and moved on never to visit the topic again, off to clear a ML in 17 minutes, while unconsciously rejoicing in the knowledge that they never incurred enough cognitive abnormalities to ask for nerfs to enemies in a game mode they can clear blindfolded 
The whiners won is all that happened. Vanguards were a good, core addition to the game - perhaps their spawn numbers could have been tuned down, but now you can just m1 spam into hordes again with near-full effect.
So yay for backwards, bad design . . . ?
Vanguards were above all completely meaningless as anything worth of objective attention, because their addition and brief unnerfed existence coincided with record breaking increase in how fast the runs are cleared!
Not even that, the NPC’s going off some broken nerf script won!
They were fine except when the game spawned 10 of them and they all targeted the same person.
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.
From the other thread:
On some level they were clearly not fine because a lot of my QP teammates were flat-out ignoring them and leaving them to be taken care of by the backline.
An enemy nobody wants to interact with (or who doesn’t offer much to interact with) isn’t much of an addition to the game.
You’re still wrong on that in this thread, though. They were well-designed, the best shielded enemies in a 'tide game, and I’ll re-iterate that from scratch here.
Other 'tide-game shield enemies have had major problems. Shield Skaven and Shield Marauders were not a serious issue; their shields broke easily to most weapons, and there’s the circumventing-the-shield mechanic of the double push.
Shieldvermin were easily countered with the “open up” pushes when alone, but groups of them could easily let the still-guarding ones eat swings aimed at one you had opened up. This is why they had the rather crude counter of “some weapons just invalidate them” (musket and flail, come to mind) added in.
Bulwarks went too far in the tanky side; you cannot force them to open up. The imbalance of some things in DT mean that some things invalidate them, but groups of Bulwarks can create situations that are annoyingly hard and genuinely take a very long time to break open, like when multiple Bulwarks are covering each other.
I stopped playing VT2 not long after Shielded Chaos Warriors were added, but I found they just got beat down pretty quickly.
Vanguards solved most of the problems of prior iterations. There is the same issue of some skills/weapons just invalidating them, but that is a general issue with those weapons. For every other weapon, they were actually extremely fair, the best iteration so far. You can break their shields, but it’s not easy, so it’s a trade-off to not take an anti-shield weapon. You can extremely easily just dodge behind them after they go into a block stance, meaning you can remove them, but you have to do something other than just “m1 spam”.
But, as a last ditch “out” for players to prevent the issue of groups covering each other too well, you CAN destroy the shields, meaning that you are not hard trapped by them and have a chance to fight your way out.
If people are having trouble with them, if they find themselves unable to deal with them efficiently, that is on them. I’m sorry, but like . . . this isn’t a huge skill. The challenge is commiting it to muscle memory, and that’s it. Yes, groups can kinda cover each other more, which is why reducing spawn numbers might have been reasonable, but even with a horde - it’s a simple gaming sequence of figuring out which is positioned in a way you can take advantage of. That’s all.
If you’re getting boxed in by them, that means you made a mistake in positioning. Sometimes this can be forced onto you, but these enemies are, like all other enemies, easy to kite.
So this is why complaints of not liking them swivel between “they annoy me” and “they’re too tanky”. If they’re annoying you, I think it’s likely that you’re just not used to them yet and you were used to everything else, so asking a new skill of you feels like a lot in your game. That is normal, but it leads the game to stagnation, because it means you oppose new things.
If you think they’re too tanky, then you’re just not approaching them right. Because I was having a fine time, on my support Zealot, killing them with two body shots from Tac Axe, Combat Axe, and on both the saber Dueling Sword and the Heavy Sword. Oh, and with Combat Knife and Shock Maul (the generic one) on Skitty.
Except Vanguards were not “challenging”. Crushers are challenging, ragers too. Vanguards were just boring HP-bloated walking turds you had to poke multiple times to get them off your way. They didn’t feel like trash mobs they are supposed to be at all.
They are at much better spot now, when it goes like “ouch I can’t hoard-clear as effective now, I need to stagger or flank the shield-bearer, poke him a couple times to remove - and now I can keep cutting regular trash hooray!” This is exactly how “a trash mob with a twist” must feel, not like a mini-bulwark.
Yup
Yes they are
You’re really overthinking it dude, and drawing bonkers conclusions at the same time.
For the umpteenth time, they were not challenging at all. I had zero trouble with them and killed millions of them like everything else. I didn’t even think about them or worry about them. Tbh I barely noticed them. They did not add any need to change my regular approach. They had ludicrous hp and stagger resistance and much greater values than their shieldless counterparts. They took many hits from either front or back so why bother strafing when you can just hit them a bunch of times from any angle to the same effect?
Such a master stroke of design! Design of the year award incoming!
Or, again for the umpteenth time, how about we now make them more interesting without the jank? How about making their shield invincible so you HAVE to flank them?
What bit of this are you not understanding? Praising utter jank as good design just looks unhinged.
switch them from melee type enemy to ranged with shield that applies hitscan dot damage?
maybe that puts a creaking hold to those strolling through hordes and skip 90% of an engagement while pretending to belong to that level?
first year of darktide if you ignored a bunch of enemies outside stealth zealot, it bit you in the ass, hard.
zippy zealot got caught on airlock and gangrped eventually if the rest had enough about his clownshit as well.
so said patterns got the according punishment it needed to keep those pests from spoiling each match.
now we need something similar, only on the level of a great unclean one to combat overblown character abilities and turning the game into a snes sidescroller for 6 year olds 
Yeah there’s lots of ways that difficulty (and fun!) can be added.
I do like the idea of the shield enemies moving in a line like Roman soldiers to try and trap you. If they had spears it would be even more interesting.
As long as it ain’t jank!