u/ssgrantox

The flair is actually the perfect encapsulation of my point. Let's say we made heavy devastators laser accurate and deal double damage. Now difficulty 10 bots are insanely hard! And so is difficulty 5 bots. All 10 difficulties share an enemy pool. Making some enemies suck more also makes them that much harder on the lower difficulties. The current design that they want is that the enemies are the same no matter the difficulty. So any enemy that isn't exclusive to the harder difficulties can't be made challenging to us in low numbers because then low difficulties are too hard. Unless you looked at the difficulty number, often times 7-10 look identical. The funny part about don't use it is that the entire playerbase is stuck with enemy changes and weapon changes

So we have a couple options from here

1. Violate the core game design and tweak health and damage values, or make custom AI for harder difficulties

2. Nerf the players

3. Create custom variants of a lot of enemies exclusive to the higher difficulties

4. Mission Modifiers/ Mission design

5. Increase the spawns/ enemy density

As we can see from Platinum and Commando missions, higher spawn rates and mission design can increase difficulty without sticking lower level players with literal aimbots or Tokyo drift chargers. It also increases difficulty without making gear feel ass to use for low level players. Enemy Variants are also great ways to increase difficulty. You have to remember that potentially most of the negative opinions of player/weapon nerfs come from players who aren't D10. If AH didn't want those players we wouldn't have lower difficulties. Now mind you AH does need to stick to their guns on the mission difficulty, and difficulty of enemy variants.

(That being said, Launch Rupture strain was stupid. You can't bitch about explosive weapons being OP and then praise a faction that enforces a stale meta and includes unavoidable attacks unless you use explosive weapons. The hive lord also shouldn't spawn on the oil tanker missions. You need a specialized load out and to waste 10-20 minutes on side obj just to see if it will spawn otherwise just risk instantly failing with 0 counterplay)

I get it. The game currently is too easy. But the 90%+ winrate is not just because the game is too easy, it's because you've gotten too good. You have to remember that most of the playerbase is about as good as the devs are at this game. That is to say, complete ass. The people bored at D10 are better than 99% of players ever will be. But the problem is that if you add more challenge then you demons will eventually just be the guy in elden ring wearing nothing but a useless jar on your head, still soloing Malenia over and over. People have already full cleared D10 with a loadout of constitution rifles, and other ass stratagems. You keep calling for weapon nerfs, but that won't do any good if you can use literal garbage to still beat D10. People are going into commando missions guns blazing because they can handle the enemies.

This exact reason is why all the difficulty that has been added since launch has been essentially bullshit. Terrible ergonomics, enemies with no weakpoints, taking away controls with ragdolling, hellpod steering locks, keeping stratagems off high ground; none of it directly increases difficulty of the enemies or missions.

This post is not saying that the game shouldn't add any more challenge. It's just that the added challenge will cause the best players to adapt and it will once again no longer be challenging. Because the only way the devs saw to make the game harder is to directly nerf how good you all are at the game :)

Which is dumb btw, the collect platinum missions added spawns that didn't tank performance and made the objective require teamwork without being actual bullshit. This is the difficulty we need. I'm just saying that when y'all get good enough to once again win 90% of the time, stop asking for more difficulty, you're just too good at the game