Death Sentence not Fun?

[TheMiraculouslyMadDrZygmond]

Am i the only one who doesnt find One Down/Death Sentence fun? now hear me out i get its supposed to be "hard" and im not saying it is easy and thats alright. But does anyone actually play One down/DS for fun? like a majority of builds kind of get shuffled out of the fray (yes you can use whatever you want and make it viable to a degree but no reasonable person will argue that a majority of builds do not follow a pattern such as dodge, stoic, kingpin and the occasional armorer with respective skills) i think that kinda makes the gameplay monotonous, but i mean you also have the fact that barely anyone chooses to do a DS lobby (usually met by cheaters or the beginner who is ambitious) which means you have to lobby up with friends who are willing to or just go solo, which if youre like me you go with the latter. Then finally it kind of feels like artificial difficulty rather than a difficulty spike, now what i mean is that playing these heist solo, whether im using bots or just me there always comes a point where the game just flips me the bird and spawns clusters of annoying enemies, now im looking forward to the comment "thats just DS nerd you should just make a better build" no i mean its kind of not fun when my downs come from 5 Dozers coming into my holdout zone or 3 cloakers or like 4 medics (2 normal 2 dozer) and they eventually fat block you, at that point no skill is involved to handle it the game just spams the special to get you down to the point where the enemy damage seems like a neglegible thing to add, or if you use bots they take the most dangerous paths to follow you and just teeter/totter into a cycle of downs until youre solo taking on 4 times the enemies (im looking at you biker heist with your mini dozers snipers and turret downing my idiotic bots like theyre nothing) and they still just follow you even with the stay mechanic which leads to further annoyance. Then you have the entire heist you cannot enjoy it or any side stuff because you just wanna rush objectives and get it done, rarely anyone actually gets to sit back and enjoy the heist or do the quirky sidestuff that Overkill has added. I dont know im not making this post to be lectured i just wanna kind of know if people agree with what im saying or if someone has found something that brings back the charm of One Down/DS or any suggestions on what may make it fun (although changes are not bound to happen cause the game has a legit ending)

[Angel]

I mainly play Death Sentence, many solo with AI and think it's the most fun but respect any others' perspectives. I like a challenge; stealth is an bit more obvious to stay quiet but in loud, it comes down to build (high damage or armor) and taking cover (to me).

But each to their own; they have other difficulties which caters for different playstyles.

[LeazPL4Y3R]

My personal idea is that, I mainly play death sentence/ one down, and most of times I play ds/od only. The difficulty of dw only makes me a feeling that people compete together to compare who kills more cops.. it simply makes me want to sleep and very boring. Different people have different ideas, some are hardcore players and some are not, that's all. Just enjoy the game itself.

[TheMiraculouslyMadDrZygmond]

Maybe its the fact i still need the OD mask missions completed that makes it unfun and more chorelike at the moment, i enjoy the fact that enemies are tougher but i just hate how it feels spammy on some mission, like i go down and there is either upwards of 30 zeals sitting in my 5x5x5 holdout room or like i mentioned a plethera of just obnoxious specials all at once. Maybe you two are just cut from a more patient cloth than i am because boy do i hate feeling like the 30 minutes i spent on a heist just for my 4 man to all get cloaked simultaneously on the last objectives is the biggest waste of time.i guess i kind of wished that different things would come (possibly new specials or branching pathways on heists) instead of a broken spawn system and increased damage taken, Well i do appreciate i good response rather than the "git gud's" people usually get

[Yuurai]

I mostly play it for fun, especially when trying new builds that don't involve the overpowered and overrated boring; stoic, rogue, anarchist paired with shotgun or lmgs.

Ex-president DMR dodge for example.

Anything below deathwish is tedious given the fact that players are now overpowered with their shotgun skill meta and lmg meta.

To each their own, not everyone enjoys punishment on deathsentence.

[Machiavelli]

The main issue with ds and ds/od is that achievements are locked behind it. Otherwise barely anyone would play it. And with very good reasons too, since ds/od is a difficulty without any rebalance whatsoever. Ya, the devs wanted to create something "challenging" but they did so in the most lazy and boring way possible: increase amount of cops, increase enemy damage output by a huge amount, add new types of enemies such as medic dozers (thats the least of its problems tho) and remove the damage drop-off.

The difficulty gap between DW and ds is so big that we basically compare two types of meta here. DW is what the game is actually balanced around, almost all builds can work if applied correctly. DS on the other hand requires you to use the most exploiting equipment available. Or to play with bots, which are basically invincible unless they stand right in front of a turret or get cloaked. Playing with bots is most of the time vastly easier than with real ppl.

Iirc, when I played ds/od the last time, the idea behind it was to hide in some corner during the waves and complete objectives during the short breaks in between. This way of playing just does not attract the vast majority of players and i feel kinda sad for all of those that want to get all the difficulty mask.

Tl;dr: Ds/od is not everyones cake, it's not balanced or challenging in any fun way. Its a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ difficulty that should have been introduced as a mutation and not force you to play it by locking achievements behind it.

[MTGMaxer]

It's not meant to be fun.

[Machiavelli]

Originally posted by MTGMaxer:

It's not meant to be fun.

Obviously, this is what i want the game i play to be like.


The first time i realized that the devs had lost every clue about payday 2 meta was when they decided to "nerf" ds/od by reducing the health of enemies, which was basically irrelevant and completely missed the mark on what the real issue of the difficulty is and why ppl refuse to play it.

[Meredith K Pseudonym]

There are about a dozen people total in the whole world that actually think Death Sentence is fun and most of them are just bored of running the Death Sentence meta on Death Wish. It's not about being better at taking cover to avoid damage or whatever, it's about taking perk decks to avoid damage and playing the arcade shooter Jules insisted on making Payday 2 into as little as humanly possible.

Originally posted by Machiavelli:

The first time i realized that the devs had lost every clue about payday 2 meta was when they decided to "nerf" ds/od by reducing the health of enemies, which was basically irrelevant and completely missed the mark on what the real issue of the difficulty is and why ppl refuse to play it.

They didn't want to reduce difficulty, they just wanted to erase Specialised Killing and had to compensate for it. The effect wasn't that enemies got easier to kill but that more weapons could kill them as easily as the guns everyone was already using, excluding Dragon's Breath shotguns which absolutely do have an easier time now.

Outside of that, all that changed from that update was that they added bulldozer types that don't count to the bulldozer spawn limit, jacked up bulldozer health to comical levels, decoupled cop actions from frame rate and raised the total spawn limit another 30%.

But that all means it's easier now, right?

[Grfchn]

I think it depends how you define fun.

I personally don't like DS/OD because the spawns are for me too much and i don't have the patients to do it. Feels way more worse if I want to get back in DS/OD...

[UnknownMerc]

You're not the only one