Lethal Difficulty is Perfectly Fine; Ranged Units Are Not.

[Oombrella]

Seeing a lot of complaints regarding the new difficulty that are blaming the symptoms rather than the cause for their annoyance. Coherency is fine; the increase in enemy spawns is fine; the removal of infinite ammo boxes is fine, and the nerf to armour is fine. How-ever, all of these things make the inherent poor design of ranged enemies more prevalent, which in turn makes Lethal in general feel unfair and poorly designed.

Less ammo would be fine if ranged enemies could be reliably melee'd with-out taking damage or wasting time.

Coherency would be fine if ranged enemies didn't force you to constantly move erratically, and weren't capable of turning the entire floor in-to venom traps.

Less armour would be fine if there were ways to recover it while fighting ranged enemies, or at the least it was possible to actually avoid ranged attacks (losing precious health because you keep getting shot in the foot while rolling is blatantly poor design.)

Neurothropes and Zoanthropes, wouldn't be too much of a problem if Zoanthropes could be melee'd and Neurothropes were programmed to land more often when players have no ammo.

The only way to deal with ranged units is ranged weapons, which in general feel weak to begin with. Using ranged weapons uses ammo, which is less ammo to shoot ranged units with. Getting hit results in permanently losing armour since the only ways to get it back require being close. Getting close makes it easier to get hit, so you lose even more health and armour, or your life if it's a Warrior with a Devourer and it point-blanks you. Staying away doesn't fix the problem of ammo, and enemies can see through walls and aim-bot no matter how far so you can't run either.

I can hand on heart say; I would take an entire wave of melee Tyranids backed by Lictors over a large group of ranged Warriors with Hormagaunt support. I doubt I'm alone in this. With melee enemies you can actually fight back and grind through them no matter how many there are, and the feeling of over-coming a superior force through grit and skill feels amazing. Against ranged enemies, there is simply no chance that isn't tanking damage and hoping they miss, or getting lucky with your squad and there is a Sniper with a Fusil on your team or a hyper competent Bolter/Plas Heavy.

Here's how to make the game better for the majority of people: add full ranged damage immunity when evading; reduce the health of all ranged enemies to the point a full-magazine of BODY shots is a kill with most fully-upgraded weapons; have enemies take bonus damage from shots when in an executable state so you don't have to waste so much ammo finishing them off or risking going for an execute (which will take you out of coherency 99% of the time...); have Barbed Strangler Warriors have a soft-limit on the amount of mines allowed at any point to prevent the map being drowned in them (basically, if amount of mines>=20, reduce life-span of youngest mine.)

I really like Lethal difficult when it isn't ramming ranged units down your throat, and I'd hate to see it heavily changed to mitigate a problem rather than just fixing the problem. It'd also massively help Chaos be any-thing more than tedious, which is some-thing you really need to fix considering they account for about half the bloody game.

[Panny]

100% Agreed

[Odin]

The only thing that seemed questionable to me was the debuff on restoring armor only when near a brother.

[Medicles]

Coherency is not fine, not even closely. It already went over the border of how limited the player should be. This kind of mechanic should come up during limited events only, not the whole run. Not to mention, the classes dont even have any perks to get something out of coherency compared to Darktide where coherency was a planned mechanic from the very beginning and the characters have innate and possible skill bonuses for this mechanic. Space Marine 2 just copied the mechanic without the positives and calls it a challenge and that is bad design.

They could have easily used the release mechanic of armor regen here, so no armor from parrying trash. That alone would have fitted more and people wouldnt complain so much. Because it really doesnt matter what you think is the problem, it only matters what the majority thinks is the problem and right now Coherency is the problem, which will very likely be ditched soon.

[Oombrella]

Originally posted by Odin:

The only thing that seemed questionable to me was the debuff on restoring armor only when near a brother.

They should add small buffs when in coherency, and then add coherency to all difficulties, but have the armour effect only be in harder ones. This way it isn't a straight downside in Lethal, while also letting people learn and benefit from it with-out jumping in the deep end.

[Aerofare the Deranged Daedalist]

Just want to make one correction though I fully agree; Neurothrope is the one that comes down every now and then. Zoanthropes never do unless they are forced to levitate lower when in confined spaces with lower ceilings.

That's something I wish they'd change long term as well which has been a complaint since the game's release. if you run out of ammo against Zoanthropes for whatever reason, you're screwed and can only dodge and run as there is absolutely nothing you can do against them, then. And MAN are they tanky, too. On Ruthless, even landing every hit with a charged shot with a Relic Plasma Pistol, they eat 8 or more of those things unshielded and still don't go down.

[Oombrella]

Originally posted by Medicles:

Coherency is not fine, not even closely. It already went over the border of how limited the player should be. This kind of mechanic should come up during limited events only, not the whole run. Not to mention, the classes dont even have any perks to get something out of coherency compared to Darktide where coherency was a planned mechanic from the very beginning and the characters have innate and possible skill bonuses for this mechanic. Space Marine 2 just copied the mechanic without the positives and calls it a challenge and that is bad design.

They could have easily used the release mechanic of armor regen here, so no armor from parrying trash. That alone would have fitted more and people wouldnt complain so much. Because it really doesnt matter what you think is the problem, it only matters what the majority thinks is the problem and right now Coherency is the problem, which will very likely be ditched soon.

Disagree. The majority don't actually play Lethal and just band-wagon against it. Coherency helps keep teams together and makes being alone actually dangerous, which adds some risk-management when teams have to consider splitting up. It has it's flaws and needs some fixing (I meant to say so in the main post but forgot...) but in general it makes the game more engaging. So long as you aren't playing with idiots, you'll rarely struggle.

[Oombrella]

Originally posted by Aerofare the Deranged Daedalist:

Just want to make one correction though I fully agree; Neurothrope is the one that comes down every now and then. Zoanthropes never do unless they are forced to levitate lower when in confined spaces with lower ceilings.

Damn-it. Thanks I'll edit that quick.

[Medicles]

Originally posted by Oombrella:

Disagree. The majority don't actually play Lethal and just band-wagon against it. Coherency helps keep teams together and makes being alone actually dangerous, which adds some risk-management when teams have to consider splitting up. It has it's flaws and needs some fixing (I meant to say so in the main post but forgot...) but in general it makes the game more engaging. So long as you aren't playing with idiots, you'll rarely struggle.

Of course the majority of players arent playing lethal, i was talking about the majority of people playing lethal and yes, technically its not the majority either but if i have to explain to you what i mean by that when there are several posts on this forum alone complaining about coherency, then there is no point in talking.

You are also certainly allowed to disagree, but objectively its a fact that such a mechanic will not have a good time with randoms and here i can state to 100% that the majority of the playerbase is playing with randoms.

You see what i am getting at? I give you a more obvious example. If that mechanic would be used on the other difficulties, then this game would see a most significant fall in the playerbase.

[Edwardlloyd]

"all of the changes are fine"
"they would be fine if x was y"

lmao. i dont get why you trying so hard to defend this

[DeufoX]

Originally posted by Oombrella:

Originally posted by Medicles:

Coherency is not fine, not even closely. It already went over the border of how limited the player should be. This kind of mechanic should come up during limited events only, not the whole run. Not to mention, the classes dont even have any perks to get something out of coherency compared to Darktide where coherency was a planned mechanic from the very beginning and the characters have innate and possible skill bonuses for this mechanic. Space Marine 2 just copied the mechanic without the positives and calls it a challenge and that is bad design.

They could have easily used the release mechanic of armor regen here, so no armor from parrying trash. That alone would have fitted more and people wouldnt complain so much. Because it really doesnt matter what you think is the problem, it only matters what the majority thinks is the problem and right now Coherency is the problem, which will very likely be ditched soon.

Disagree. The majority don't actually play Lethal and just band-wagon against it. Coherency helps keep teams together and makes being alone actually dangerous, which adds some risk-management when teams have to consider splitting up. It has it's flaws and needs some fixing (I meant to say so in the main post but forgot...) but in general it makes the game more engaging. So long as you aren't playing with idiots, you'll rarely struggle.

The real problem is the thight formation system, that punishes your for playing the proper way, bulwark, vanguard and a sniper is a impossible composition in Lethal mode, as far as good you play, some compositions are being punished even playing the way they are supposed too

[Oombrella]

Originally posted by DeufoX:

The real problem is the thight formation system, that punishes your for playing the proper way, bulwark, vanguard and a sniper is a impossible composition in Lethal mode, as far as good you play, some compositions are being punished even playing the way they are supposed too

Funnily enough; I my last match was like this. Sniper gets melee support from the Bulwark, Vanguard ensures melee enemies stay away from them and stuns any stronger melee units that get close. I went the best any Lethal had gone.

Sniper doesn't hide in a corner, Vanguard doesn't abandon their team and mess around a mile away. Coherency radius should be larger if two brothers are close to each other, but I don't see any issue with any comps.