Good grief they need to sort out their QA issues.
I’m still playing at least a few dives each day because I’m having fun overall, but the constant surprises with stuff not working as intended makes for a lot of confusion and a reluctance to try things out. Whenever I take a flamethrower there are a ton of spitters who don’t miss, and they seem to be all or nothing.
They really have the feel of the game down, and I actually love the new warbond thematically, but actually using the stuff in game is lackluster.
Well, I think the performance issues were definitely understated. I know the patch notes said “we have stability issues in difficulty 10” but we went for it anyway, and it feels like not a single match goes by without at least one person disconnecting or crashing.
Additionally it makes zero sense to have nerfed fire and then put out an all fire-based battle pass. That was going to lose them points. It’s not like the flamethrower was particularly good at anything besides burning bugs to a crisp, and now none of it is good for anything.
I generally play on difficulty 6. It felt the right balance of difficulty, sample rewards, and enjoyment, for me.
I’ve been playing since release, so I’m a pretty high level now, and difficulty 6 was just starting to feel a bit too easy, and I was considering bumping up to level 7 as my standard difficulty.
Then this update came out, and I’m lucky to make it out of a level 6 alive! It’s very teammate dependent and I find the quality of teammates has significantly degraded. That could be due to a higher percentage of school kids playing vs adults I guess, as it’s the summer holidays, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying.
Basically, people need to communicate more and remember it’s a coop game. Ping the Bile Titans, Chargers, Impalers, there’s others on the team that can help. Tagging where you’re going on the map helps everyone coordinate. Microphones are not required, I use mine only when an in-game communication method isn’t available or I’m being swarmed but still need to say something, probably about once every two games.
I don’t enjoy the missions as much as I did before the update, and I think a lot of the blame rests on Arrowhead’s shoulders but the user-base also needs to step up and learn to cooperate more in this cooperative game. Don’t one-man-army a bile titan, don’t ignore teammates that have found a bunker door, work together to increase your odds of survival, success, super credits, samples, and ultimately, fun.
Old man rant over
I don’t play much public games, I play with some friends, and I felt the opposite. Usually playing lvl6 against bots, lvl7 against bugs. Lvl7 bugs felt like a cakewalk since the new patch.
But it depends on the planet too. Some planets are hells. Either because of the climate or because of enemy distribution.
Perhaps they need to stop nerfing stuff nobody asked to get nerfed. The flamethrower was fun to use, but it was also necessary because of the broken amount of charger spawns that made it a vital weapon in battling these.
It’s not a competitive game, there should be no need to nerf stuff unless it’s broken beyond comprehension. In this case the charger spawns were utterly broken in many difficulties and missions, but instead they chose to “fix” the weapon instead of the spawns.
It’s not a competitive game, so why do people feel the need to play the highest difficulty if they can’t deal with an enemy you learn in d4 mission?
There is no broken amount of chargers. There are people incapable of dealing with them, which makes situations degenerate into chaos, which is exactly the point of this kind of enemy.
This is not a difficulty level thing, it’s a broken feature thing.
It also wasn’t consistent every mission. I did level 9 all the time and sometimes it was easy as fuck with next to no spawns, and other missions we had 10+ chargers (I’m not kidding) and bile titans on top at the same time during extraction.
It was physically not possible that the four of us could spawn in enough anti-heavy weapons to deal with all of them while trying to stick around the extraction area. Even despite the fact that we were all equipped to deal with these enemy types.
Which is when it stops being a skill issue and just becomes a broken game issue. Devs have already changed how enemy spawns work in this game multiple times, and admitted that it hasn’t worked as it should’ve before.
Tentacles make it worse. I’ve just been juggled by them for like 30 seconds or more at a time. If you get hit by one and ragdoll into another, you just bounce around until the game decides you’re allowed to play it again.
When those things spawn on the extract, it gets 10x more difficult, even on top of bile titans and chargers.
Different things will affect your feeling : different missions have different enemy distribution for one, and biome and modifiers will make a massive difference in difficulty. I am also comfident sometimes MO planets have increased difficulty too.
And again, you don’t need anti heavy to kill a charger. Shoot the yellow part of the tail and even a primary can do it.
What you’re telling me here is that you weren’t coordinated with your team and not even trying to help eachother. Or that you were all clueless about how to kill a charger without AT weaponry.
If this is really the clueless part, this is very sad tbh.
Nerfing flame weapons then releasing a war bond with only flame weapons has to be the worst marketing move ever.
Even if the nerfing is totally fine, the messaging is awful, hey we just made this stuff worse come buy it from us now.
I’m convinced the conversation went something like this:
“Hey we made these primary and secondary weapons that are mini flamethrowers, they don’t shoot as far but they’re still pretty cool, right?!”
“Cool, so you can kill a Charger with your pistol now?”
“Oh shit… Guess we’ll just nerf all fire damage then and say we’re doing it for ‘realisim’.”
“Sounds good, Chief.”
