Love how the Illuminate is implemented but...

[Sad Bear.]

Everything is too tanky. Zombies surviving chest shots from rifles, the jetpack/stun lance enemies (idk their name) take an entire mag to kill for some weapons, even with medium armor pen. The striders take 4-5 railgun shots (to a weakpoint) on top of the shields that drain my resources before I can even begin to hurt them.

Jet pack enemies should be significant easier to kill or at least disable when there are half a dozen of them in the sky at once shooting me and throwing and endless amount of grenades.

On a side note, the sock lance is extremely underwhelming. If I am giving up the utility of a side arm and the range it provides. The lance needs to be capital G good.

The car is very, very unpleasant to drive. The gun on it is fun, except its recoil is insane. Also the car should be a strat, but if we are getting them later then this is a good time to hammer out the issues before making them a stratagem. I like how the car climbs and drives over everything, but it bugging out when a zombie get stuck inside of the model makes it something I am going to avoid unless I am absolutely desperate.

[Ragvard Grimclaw]

I'd say issue with zombies is not them being too tanky (with them being shot through with pretty much everything, allowing you to damage multiple ones with single shot, it's not that bad), but very little visual feedback when you damage them. Just doesn't feel as satisfying hitting them compared to other two factions. Same for overseers - can't really see if they're damaged or where their armor is peeled off, and they aren't staggered by anything but biggest guns. Just improving visual feedback and reducing their stagger resistance so zombies don't keep running at you while you shoot chunks of them and overseers don't keep perfect aim while being peppered by small arms should make fighting them feeling much nicer

[Ordon]

zombies are easy to kill with medium penetration weapons
the illuminate units themselves are too tanky for their speed and size, yeah, surviving a chest shot from a pistol grenade launcher is too much for my taste

[Dynamiez]

So far i got the hang of them with the tenderizer for the zombies (even no hits to the head they die in 2 shots) and the laser cannon for overseers while aiming for the head. It works too against harvesters and with this loadout you are free of choice which backpack you take. Usually it is the jetpack for me against this new threat to jump in cities for surprise attacks or jump out over the city walls for a tactical retreat but now i seem to always ragdoll with the jumppack 😅

[Mepho]

Couldn't find a weapon that satisfied me until I picked up a random arc thrower from a PoI.

With the clustering on these maps it's otherwordly.
I switched to blitzer + arc thrower immediately and found only pros with no cons. Even tripods are rendered inert by the stagger, so despite it taking ages to drop one you can keep it still while clearing everything else.

Blitzer is just for doing the same but in melee range and avoid situations where the arc jump might kill a teammate. If you actively manage distance you can easily do everything with the AT itself and bring whatever as a primary.

All of this regarding diffs 7 and 8, didn't try higher but I can't see any meaningful possible difference as the enemies are still just those 4 (zombies, tripods and the soldiers with and without jetpack).

[Iratus Machina]

My problem is even on trivial missions, there's way too many zombies. And all of those zombies take way too many hits to drop for mere foot soldiers.

Compare it to the average line of bugs or bots in their trivial missions. You usually face up to maybe 10-15 drones and/or troopers in a line at a time with maybe a couple of warriors or berserkers nearby just to mix things up. With zombies,I've counted up to maybe 35-40 in a batch all bunched up. And in higher level mission starting around level 2, that number seems to be at least double.

You can easily solo bugs and bots, especially on lower difficulties. Soloing squids at lower difficulties? Unless you got good rapid fire AOE and a plan, good friggin' luck.

I'm not even going to get into the main troops, the jetpack guys, and the tripods. Those are fine, even if the tripod shields are a pain to deal with. No, you're just thrown way too many zombies at once even at lower levels. And you really are at a disadvantage fighting them in too close of quarters.

Edit: Tl;Dr Illuminate zombies don't feel all that fair compared to Terminid and Automaton foot soldiers. They feel like artificial difficulty. Perhaps divide them by half or by four and you'll see what I mean.

[Din511]

no way people having issues with zombies

flame and gas are youre friend
turrets as well

[Veezora]

Originally posted by Mepho:

Couldn't find a weapon that satisfied me until I picked up a random arc thrower from a PoI.

With the clustering on these maps it's otherwordly.
I switched to blitzer + arc thrower immediately and found only pros with no cons. Even tripods are rendered inert by the stagger, so despite it taking ages to drop one you can keep it still while clearing everything else.

Blitzer is just for doing the same but in melee range and avoid situations where the arc jump might kill a teammate. If you actively manage distance you can easily do everything with the AT itself and bring whatever as a primary.

All of this regarding diffs 7 and 8, didn't try higher but I can't see any meaningful possible difference as the enemies are still just those 4 (zombies, tripods and the soldiers with and without jetpack).

This. Arc thrower was netting me typically 4 zombie kills fired into a cluster (with ship upgrade). Blitzer will one-tap them up close. Most other weapons take them down with a few shots in the head / upper torso. Stalwart and Machine Gun also make short work of them. Try MG sentry to mow down a ton of them on a minute CD.

Illuminate soldiers feel quite tanky for their size, yes, their armor seems to allow them to take quite a few hits, and can be chunked off with repeated hits in the same area. I found plasma weapons to be the most effective in combating them. Their weapons are not that accurate, so being on the move and effectively managing hordes is the best counter to them, as they rely on the zombie hordes to bog you down.

Illuminate also have only one way of calling in reinforcements, with a light unit that is quite visible and needs to be fairly close and in view of you in order to do so, compared to bugs and robots, where most to all units can reinforce, and sometimes even without catching sight of a Helldiver.

We're learning how to fight the new enemy type, and there will probably be adjustments to unit health over time, but to me it's a good thing that the Illuminate feel different to fight than the other factions, otherwise you might as well be fighting a reskin of the bugs with a few ranged units thrown in.

[Professor Hugedix]

Originally posted by Iratus Machina:

My problem is even on trivial missions, there's way too many zombies. And all of those zombies take way too many hits to drop for mere foot soldiers.

Compare it to the average line of bugs or bots in their trivial missions. You usually face up to maybe 10-15 drones and/or troopers in a line at a time with maybe a couple of warriors or berserkers nearby just to mix things up. With zombies,I've counted up to maybe 35-40 in a batch all bunched up. And in higher level mission starting around level 2, that number seems to be at least double.

You can easily solo bugs and bots, especially on lower difficulties. Soloing squids at lower difficulties? Unless you got good rapid fire AOE and a plan, good friggin' luck.

I'm not even going to get into the main troops, the jetpack guys, and the tripods. Those are fine, even if the tripod shields are a pain to deal with. No, you're just thrown way too many zombies at once even at lower levels. And you really are at a disadvantage fighting them in too close of quarters.

Definitely feel this. Initially I tried to approach them by bringing some robust swarm clear as one would for bugs, but I couldn't make use of much of it due to the city environments and the staggered nature with which they approach you after breaking out of their initial spawn cluster.

Even my go-to stratagem and wife, the Heavy Machine Gun Emplacement, is having trouble because they just get around me in any situation where it's not already set up like a target gallery. Eventually I just started running past them which worked a little too well, but not perfectly.

Been trying a lot of weapons just to see what sticks but have yet to make much progress here as the DC issue is hitting me without fail every game.

[Bliff]

OH NO, don't tell me the zombies need to be shot in the head like a zombie, oh my god worst game ever everyone down vote the game again

i cant be killing zombies like there zombies that's just bad game design

[Yuh]

Just like din511 said: Gas grenades kill zombies in a few seconds, even blind them. They are so slow and with so little health that you can trap them in gas/fire. Gas is better though, because you can throw 2-3 nades and suddenly the 4-5 giant zombie hordes surrounding you are fighting one another and running in circles instead of chasing you.

[JuX]

Take supply backpack and Stalwart, then enjoy the slaughter.

[TheClosetSkeleton]

They are weakpoint based. Essentially it's a "aim well or die" type of enemy, that is very difficult to brute force, and was needed in the game to counter-balance to sheer stupidity of the RR and explosives.

Plasma weapons are still great, but you need to be very smart about what you take and what you use in a mission.

[Rhen]

i haven't really had an issue with the with them being tanky more like inconsistent especially Harvesters, sometimes the Railcannon strike kill them instantly even if they have a shield other times it feels like it does 0 damage with a direct hit even if they dont have a shield, just had one just tank a 500Kg that was at its feet like it was nothing

[Lunar Tides]

generally, it's kinda annoying to fight them. you need to focus the heavy ass flying guys but if you do, you get overwhelmed. i don't enjoy also having to run the same two or three metal builds that I've been running for almost a year now. Light armor, turrets, arc. or light armor, MG, turrets.

it's gotten boring. also the nee melee is kinda ass

[Lunar Tides]

Originally posted by Bliff:

OH NO, don't tell me the zombies need to be shot in the head like a zombie, oh my god worst game ever everyone down vote the game again

i cant be killing zombies like there zombies that's just bad game design

yeah it is when you have even more difficult enemies to kill at all times that demand your attention. the zombies are relatively easy to deal with if you have turrets, but then you still need to ensure they don't start coming in from other directions. which is hard when you're fighting guys who eat entire magazines while flying faster than you who also take over a 3rd of your health in even heavy armor PER HIT.

it's a poorly designed enemy who just floods you with numbers that all require equal attention at all times, and all require a rather extreme amount of resources to fight properly.