Havoc is objectively shirt. It’s obvious I was extremely lucky to find a team I played so well together with as I did to get Havoc 40 and True Survivor within the first few days of release. But ever since that, I’ve stopped enjoying the game tbh. I liked the difficulty that came with auric maelstrom and hi-intensity STG. Enemies didn’t hit harder or have more HP, there were simply more of them and more specialists.
This havoc crap where a gunner takes four brainbursts to die, and you get downed in one single dreg rifleman’s volley if you’re not standing in a bubble, is just a pathetic cope from developers.
They wanted to offer higher difficulty but didn’t want to spend the time it took going through genuine development of the core game mechanics or enemies to achieve it.
A higher difficulty could have come from keeping the damage of Auric Maelstrom Damnation/Hi-int STG, while developing new enemies and more variants of existing enemies. New specialists with interesting new abilities you have to learn. I liked the mines on the floor from one of the Karnak twins for example. An addition to the core gameplay loop you had to learn to deal with. It added complexity and required problem solving skills. It put a new challenging spin on how to handle existing enemies while also dodging mines and trying to clear them.
Variants of existing enemies too could have added to the difficulty of the game.
But no.
We got the “let’s change values for hp and damage in a database” development. Which has had the effect of destroying a lot of intuitions about how to handle specific enemies in the game.
I’ve played a psyker a lot and have internalized a lot of strategies for how to deal with certain situations. Dogs, bulwarks, trappers, gunners, muties etc. When to pull out a certain thing to deal with a certain specialist or elite.
A gunner used to take 1 brainburst, for example. If I knew there’d be 3 gunners, that might mean it was time to blitz and burst them down with brainburst if I could secure the area around me immediately beforehand. All these intuitions are basically useless in havoc. A single gunner will take so many brainbursts to kill, and the everlasting pus-hardened horde means I can never clear around me to get a brainburst off. The dog takes 3-4 brainbursts. The trapper might be pus-hardened and take a 3-4 also, etc. etc.
The forced into bubble thing means I don’t have venting shriek to stagger an enemy before launching into an attack that would normally reliably finish it off. But I don’t have the shriek now, and the attack won’t finish it off anyway.
The entire gameplay loop has devolved into this thing where you are just staying together in a tight clump, slowly bubble-chorus-shout-walking across the map while churning out fire to keep the wall of yellow-discharge leaking chaff at arms length.
There’s ironically less emphasis on good movement and what tool to use in this situation, and more emphasis on just standing basically on top of each other trying to maximize firepower into a chokepoint while being protected by taking turns cycling defensive blitzes.
It has largely taken away the whole feeling of a combat puzzle with many different options for how to solve it. And many of the tools we learned to use for how to solve these situations are almost entirely gone now. Now you generally don’t try to close the distance to engage gunners or groups of shooters in melee. There are to many of them, they are too spread out, and take too many hits to die, for that to be a reliable strategy. There’s just this one formula with a set of predefined roles now, and you basically have to stick to it both to even get a place on a team, and for that team to have any hope of success.
It’s ruined the game tbh.