TONE DOWN THE PLAGUE FERAL SPAWNS

[agentcardinam11]

I've been playing on Lethal difficulty for a while, I can steamroll a Nightmare map in a matter of hours. While the spawning frequency of zombies in general needs to be toned down in the late game, the amount of hordes and screamers and bloaters and juggernauts will never be as frustrating as the amount of PLAGUE FERALS. If you leave the base, you will likely attract the attention of a feral on the way out. If you arrive at a location, you will likely stumble upon a feral. If you attack a plague heart, one of them is virtually guaranteed to spawn. If you swivel the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ camera, you have a not insignificant chance of spawning THREE OF THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ FROM THIN ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ AIR. Half the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time, you will aggro a horde of ferals, only for another naturally spawning one to hear the scream and attack you as well.

I get the design choice. Ferals are supposed to place a high-intensity, high-damage enemy that can outrun you which forces you to switch priorities in an instant and take them out. Regular ferals suck, but at least they go down in one headshot and have a reliably predictable path of attack. But if you constantly, and I mean constantly, have to stop everything and find some burned out car to piss away ammo into the heads of the finicky bastards, it's not a challenge, it's a problem. Survivor communities and non-controlled PCs are killed by ferals all the time because the AI is awful at fighting anything more threatening than a standard-sized horde of zombies. Half the time, survivors in missions will die because they get eviscerated by ferals or run into the loving arms of a juggernaut.

What's more, there's an infuriating quality relating to the period between being able to land one of the three or so headshots required before the head becomes available to be destroyed. If you fire more than once in a second at the head, you attack the feral during one of its I-FRAME PERIODS. So you can't just mag-dump and be done with it, you have to space out your shots one after another while trying to relocate the head after it does its recoil animation and watch as the animation spazzes the ♥♥♥♥ out and relocates under your feet (because jumping onto something is the only sane way of killing the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥). Further, half the time the pathing will just force the feral to get as close as possible to the bottom of the car or whatever you're standing on and have the head clip into the brush-work. So you have to waste ammo shooting it in the ass so it recoils backwards and makes the head available to be shot. All that for, what, sixteen influence? That and gray hairs, I suppose.

If anybody in the current dev team reads this, please, TONE DOWN THE ZOMBIE SPAWNING. PARTICULARLY FERALS.

[Lemonidas of Sourta]

I can completely understand the frustration. I got my community of 76 days to a new map, this time starting on Lethal. So I had 9 people with maxed out skills and best gear possible. Went out to take out nearby plague heart. Within the next 30 mins, I lost 4 of my best people to the blood ferals. Like 5 of them, jittering around the place. Standing on a car just gives them time to roar and call more of them to you. I just gave up and restarted map on Nightmare again.

I agree having a grave threat is fine but having 5 of them running around with the crappy option of more spawning after you manage to take out one is just...

[Eden Monroe RWR]

Originally posted by Lemonidas of Sourta:

I can completely understand the frustration. I got my community of 76 days to a new map, this time starting on Lethal. So I had 9 people with maxed out skills and best gear possible. Went out to take out nearby plague heart. Within the next 30 mins, I lost 4 of my best people to the blood ferals. Like 5 of them, jittering around the place. Standing on a car just gives them time to roar and call more of them to you. I just gave up and restarted map on Nightmare again.

I agree having a grave threat is fine but having 5 of them running around with the crappy option of more spawning after you manage to take out one is just...

the best weapon against blood plague ferals is called the impaler car, take them out in rear march in the car.

And Also... farm caliber .50 rifles, you can take one plague feral with a caliber .50 headshot and only these guns

i agree that dynamic spawn can be miserable, agreed, but for veterans blood ferals are the only fun

use impaler, timberwolf and if you purchase it from exotic trader, the "BFG50" cal.50 but full auto gun, it is the most difficult to farm and also it is the best

just all advice i could give to deal with blood ferals

good gaming and best regards

EDIT... i agree with you both, but Lethal Difficulty was asked to be made Really and very Strong UNFAIR... that is the cause those beasts exist

[WarBucks]

It sounds like you maxed out the spawn scale as you have essentially a complete and maxed group.

You can lower the action difficulty if you need a breather, but the game was always intended to get harder as you get better stuff.

If it didnt get that hard then it would be pointless to do anything

[Dragon_Dude1]

"I play on hardest difficulty and it's too hard" if you cant compete, lower the difficulty. a pack of ferals isnt hard to deal with. use a molotov on them and run away, flashbang them, climb on a car and shoot them. stun them for an easy kill (i.e dropkick) leave the game and go back to main menu and they get despawned when you load it up again. everyone whines about them, seriously just quit the game and rejoin and they are gone, and don't make so much noise and bring proper equipment with you, there's a reason the difficulty is called "Lethal" and not "Sunshine and Cupcakes"

[Ladez]

If you can't deal with it, lower the difficulty.

[agentcardinam11]

Originally posted by Ladez:

If you can't deal with it, lower the difficulty.

Originally posted by Dragon_Dude1:

"I play on hardest difficulty and it's too hard" if you cant compete, lower the difficulty. a pack of ferals isnt hard to deal with. use a molotov on them and run away, flashbang them, climb on a car and shoot them. stun them for an easy kill (i.e dropkick) leave the game and go back to main menu and they get despawned when you load it up again. everyone whines about them, seriously just quit the game and rejoin and they are gone, and don't make so much noise and bring proper equipment with you, there's a reason the difficulty is called "Lethal" and not "Sunshine and Cupcakes"

I confess, I wrote this when especially frustrated after rage quitting. I have something like 500 hours in the game and have been playing since 2020, and I truly do mean that Nightmare mode is too easy. However, my primary point stands. The problem isn't that Plague Ferals are too difficult, it's simply that their spawn rate is too high.

I try to use the Main Menu exploit as little as possible in order to avoid losing out on active missions, and I think logging into a world increases infestation spawns. I remember doing that exploit a few times in a two hour session and I cleared out the Fire Chief's House infestation immediately behind the Fire Station in Providence Ridge like six times.

The unlockable moves are nice, but I swear that playing with fresh survivors on Lethal narrows the available skill set unlocks. Cardio was the most noticable, but out of fifteen survivors I maxed base cardio with, only two were given access to Stealth with the vast majority only getting Marathon and Backpacking.

My primary method of dealing with ferals is to jump on top of a burned out car and shoot them which I detail the issues with in my post. It works, but the method is finicky and interrupts the pace of the game. Fine every once in a while, but the sheer amount of spawns also means that simply carrying molotovs or even a variety of grenades will eventually not work.

[quote=Alarick Monroe;4039229582004143596

the best weapon against blood plague ferals is called the impaler car, take them out in rear march in the car.

And Also... farm caliber .50 rifles, you can take one plague feral with a caliber .50 headshot and only these guns

i agree that dynamic spawn can be miserable, agreed, but for veterans blood ferals are the only fun

use impaler, timberwolf and if you purchase it from exotic trader, the "BFG50" cal.50 but full auto gun, it is the most difficult to farm and also it is the best

just all advice i could give to deal with blood ferals

good gaming and best regards

EDIT... i agree with you both, but Lethal Difficulty was asked to be made Really and very Strong UNFAIR... that is the cause those beasts exist [/quote]

Thanks for the advice. I've always found car kills with Plague Ferals to be spotty at best since their dodging is a coin toss with no turning input, and turning around to try again risks losing a door. Sometimes you get lucky and they jump on the hood, but that rarely happens to me.

I think forcing the player to carry a .50 BMG to deal with Feral spawns is unfun and forces hyperspecializing your loadout to counter one enemy. What's the point of all the guns the devs put in the game if you're limited to maybe three? I'm also the sort of player that prefers to keep my inventory as open as possible to maximize loot collection, so I don't usually carry grenades/flashbangs outside of attacking Plague Hearts. Molotovs/grenades are better spent on bunched up hordes, and flashbangs are a rare enough drop that they're best used for hostile survivors.

I agree that Plague Ferals can be a thrilling curveball when the player can overcome through skill, and seven times out of ten, I walk away from an encounter with a Plague Feral with no damage. The problem mostly comes from blind horde spawns from moving the camera (which I think was increased after a recent update) and feral hordes spawning during a fight with a zombie horde.

Originally posted by WarBucks:

It sounds like you maxed out the spawn scale as you have essentially a complete and maxed group.

You can lower the action difficulty if you need a breather, but the game was always intended to get harder as you get better stuff.

If it didnt get that hard then it would be pointless to do anything

I'm on my third map with a nine survivor group (I think), so I think you're right. I think my frustrations are mixed with the fact that the zombie spawning and loot table systems have been redone at least four times since the game launched, so it's easy for a lot of the bad experiences to get mixed together. I think I'm going to have to lower the combat difficulty to Nightmare so I can finish this map and store my survivors without pulling my hair out.

Still, I wish Lethal Max was less about Plague Ferals than using more game systems in greater depth.

[BioFringe]

It's purposely meant to be Unfair. There's a warning and everything.