We're in an era of several PvE titles floating around that are all floundering in their own way in their approach to balance. Darktide, Helldivers and of course Space Marine 2 are some of them. Below I'll try to break down where I think they all either are or previously have gone wrong in their approach.

WHERE THEY GO WRONG

An unimaginative approach that is too heavily reliant on health and damage numbers

These games have all fallen into this trap in some form or another. Making the enemies you fight eat more damage before dropping does make the game harder, but it does so by being unreasonable and arbitrary. In the case of Space Marine 2, there is no understandable lore explanation for why a Tyranid Warrior can eat a whole mag of melta rounds without dying and it reduces players ability to gauge what can or can't be viable strategies and tactics to defeat the enemy. It makes it arbitrary and it feels very "gamey", which is not a good thing. 

Equally, doing things like nerfing players health pools, or like we've seen recently here, armor pools is just as arbitrary. In the case of this game there is no comprehensible reason why my 7-8 foot tall genetically enhanced super soldier in nuclear powered high tech armor suit drops dead after about 2 volleys of Tyranid devourer shots. Again, it makes the game more difficult but it's also completely arbitrary. Arbitrary is not a positive adjective in this conversation.

Relying on simple number tweaks to do a quick and dirty attempt at buffing the enemy or weakening the player is not a good approach as it creates a rift between how players reasonably expect the game's world to work versus what actually happens. This leads to frustrations and situations where you really should be doing better than you are. When you're heavy attacking a Tyranid Warrior with a venom cannon in the face and he still fires at you point blank, it feels like the game is cheating.

Undermining the value proposition of the game in the attempt to achieve difficulty

The value proposition of Helldivers 2 was that you were an expendable and frail soldier supplied with a plethora of powerful supports for every tactical situation that help you survive. When AT weapons and other heavy support weapons couldn't achieve what they were supposed to, people got fed up and the game came under fire from fans. The value proposition of Space Marine 2 is that you are a genetically enhanced super soldier, born and bred and trained for the sole purpose of combat. You are a demi-god of war and angel of death. Until two Tyranid Warriors with devourer's fire at you at the same time. Or two Warriors attack you in a staggered rhythm and stun lock you to death. Or a Thousand Sons marine keeps firing his boltgun in a completely unphased manner despite you punching him in the face 3-5 times. The boltgun, the single most iconic weapon of Warhammer 40k, needing half a dozen rounds to kill ONE hormagaunt/termagaunt sure does make the game harder, but at the price of ruining the power fantasy of the weapon.

These things all make the game more "difficult", but they also completely negate the appeal of the game that got us all here in the first place. This invalidates this approach in achieving difficulty as it undermines the whole premise of the game and turns people away.

WHAT THEY SHOULD BE DOING

Consistent and predictable individual enemies

This is a horde coop game. The whole threat of the enemy is their numbers. No individual enemy, save for bosses, should pose an existential threat. One of the greatest achievements of Helldivers 2 that I can not praise them enough for is refusing to fall into the trap of scaling health and damage pools across difficulties. Every enemy should be the same across all difficulties. A hormagaunt is a hormagaunt is a hormagaunt is a hormagaunt. There is no hormagaunt++. This creates a firm and clear level of threat expectation for players when they start their journey through the difficulties. Having to relearn how dangerous a Warrior is 5 different times is not a player friendly, or logical, approach to this problem. The learning curve should be a smooth curve, not a staircase. Enemies should perform and behave consistently across all difficulties. This is a big one and I can not emphasize this point enough. I should not be dropping 4-6 Thunder Hammer swipes on a Tyranid Warrior on the higher difficulties because on it's face it's a ridiculous proposition. Even visually it chafes against what your senses tell you should be happening.

Achieve difficulty not by nerfing the player or buffing the enemy, but by creating more challenging tactical situations and scenarios

Since we've ruled out stat tweaks as a means of achieving difficulty, we have to substitute it for something that doesn't interfere with the value proposition of the game or the power fantasy of being a space marine and using any of their weapons. Besides a gradual increase in the volume of enemies as the difficulty level increases, the way to do this is to affect the circumstances of each mission. Here's a big ol' list of simple things you can do to achieve a more challenging mission without hamstringing the player through arbitrary nerfs or bestowing chaotic gifts of power upon the enemy:

1. Reduce ammo, grenade and stim drops. 
   
2. Add more patrols/spawns per area. 
3. Add longer lasting wave events. 
4. Add more wave events. 
5. Add more boss encounters. 
6. Longer respawn timers
7. Limited respawns.
8. Poor visibility (fog, gas, etc)

These could all act as random modifiers much like in Helldivers 2 or Darktide and would achieve not just a challenge, but a variety of different kinds of challenges that can help keep the game and each mission feel fresh.

In closing

I wanted to make this thread because I play a lot of games like this and I think I have a decent handle on where they tend to go wrong and where they succeed. Just look at the recent resurgence of Helldivers 2 after they basically buffed players across the board. It helps reinforce my main point here which is that number tweaking health and damage is not the way and is rarely, if ever, truly appreciated by the player base. It is an antiquated approach to difficulty that made sense in the early 2000's, but we can most definitely come up with more creative and logical solutions to this problem.

I really do enjoy this game, but I want to love it. These current problems in approach make that hard for me and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I hope the devs take this into consideration and commit to a change in course before they mire themselves in an approach and a balance system that no one likes.

Peace.

There is no way enemies can have same health across all difficulties :) Health and damage scaling is the staple of almost all difficulties in every game, especially in L4D clones. I don't think I've seen any game that doesn't have that. And in this game on top of that you have weapons scaling. And I do like such system. It's the lesser evil. Designing difficulties like you suggesting is like designing 5 different games. Certainly, some differences apart HP/dmg should be present, and they are currently.

I personally think Lethal is great. I like AI Director, I like crazy spawns and impossible situations. It was EVEN crazier in Darktide mind you, and it was also crazy fun there. I wonder what those who are not happy about 4 lictors would say about Darktide's mass mutant train on top of a Boss, on top of the Horde, on top of the Ogryn pack - and these situations are the best experiences Darktide has to offer, same here. By the way, while discussing Darktide, I should mention that only 1 single hit from armored Ogryn sends you straight to Jesus on Auric difficulty there, and even despite this, or maybe even because of the adrenaline it offers Darktide is one of the best co-op shooters I've played in my life. It's influence clearly seen in SM2 as well, where you have two defensive options with parry and roll which in tandem basically negates most of the incoming damage, but once you make a mistake, you have to pay the price. Again, the price for mistake here is not that dire as in Fatshark's project and you also presented an option to get some health back with contested health mechanic.

The only things I would change are:
- widening tethering range and making penalty for leaving it softer
- removing antistagger from enraged ranged elites, that are nightmare for the melee classes to deal with
- maybe bring down ranged damage a bit and maybe make them less accurate - right now ranged enemies shred you if you're not in cover
- make ravener unborrow action to take more time, because right now ravener can start unborrow AFTER you've started a gunshot and grab you before you finish it. This is bad, you can't react to this at all since you locked into animation.
- And stop elites from starting to call reinforcements immediately when someone started execution, basically making one of three marines unable to react to it from the start.
- Buff underperforming weapons and especially melee damage

Also, something about enemies being sponges - Heavy's plasma make the whole group of rubrics red in basically one charged shot. Laz fusile also doesn't have a problem deleting enemies. Same goes for grenade rifle on tactical that even has a glitch supplying it with almost infinite grenades which makes it strongest weapon in the game by a long shot. So, there are tools already who tackle Lethal enemies easily, just need to uplift those weapons that are currently struggling to make a difference.

Everything else I'm finding great already on Lethal. I'm NOT against nerfing other difficulties, but lethal should stay, well... lethal.

Although I should say, I would also LOVE for max difficulty to have some type of modifiers like those Auric missions in Darktide have.

P.S. For me personally SM2 Lethal makes you feel exactly like Space Marine. Lore wise, Tyranids are beasts eating ceramite for breakfast, same goes for Chaos Marines. And Space Marines prevail such enemies not with the thickness of their armor, but with their reflexes and tactical/combat prowess. And when I'm standing in the pack of 5-7 warriors where every mistake can be your last, and with Emperor's help managing to duel them into oblivion, parrying strikes, searching for better position and opening for gun strikes and finally standing on top of their corpses, even if injured - THAT is the Space Marine feeling that I like.

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Britus wrote:

There is no way enemies can have same health across all difficulties :) Health and damage scaling is the staple of almost all difficulties in every game, especially in L4D clones. I don't think I've seen any game that doesn't have that. And in this game on top of that you have weapons scaling. And I do like such system. It's the lesser evil. Designing difficulties like you suggesting is like designing 5 different games. Certainly, some differences apart HP/dmg should be present, and they are currently.

Saying there is "no way" enemies can have the same health across difficulties without any real elaboration as to why and just rolling with that is essentially what the devs did and the responses relating to difficulty have been negative in the majority of cases where an opinion was voiced. People don't reach a negative conclusion for no reason, there are issues with this approach. It's inherently inconsistent and confusing. Two adjectives you want to avoid when it comes to a game mechanic. As mentioned, Helldivers 2 has successfully done what I suggest and is the perfect example of why and how it can be done. I would also not put Space Marine 2 in the L4D clone category. This is not a quick and twitchy FPS shooter, but a third person melee and ranged hybrid. It's really it's own thing and doesn't have any good direct comparisons out there.

Britus wrote:

I personally think Lethal is great. I like AI Director, I like crazy spawns and impossible situations. It was EVEN crazier in Darktide mind you, and it was also crazy fun there. I wonder what those who are not happy about 4 lictors would say about Darktide's mass mutant train on top of a Boss, on top of the Horde, on top of the Ogryn pack - and these situations are the best experiences Darktide has to offer, same here. By the way, while discussing Darktide, I should mention that only 1 single hit from armored Ogryn sends you straight to Jesus on Auric difficulty there, and even despite this, or maybe even because of the adrenaline it offers Darktide is one of the best co-op shooters I've played in my life. It's influence clearly seen in SM2 as well, where you have two defensive options with parry and roll which in tandem basically negates most of the incoming damage, but once you make a mistake, you have to pay the price. Again, the price for mistake here is not that dire as in Fatshark's project and you also presented an option to get some health back with contested health mechanic.

I have around 2500 hours in Darktide so I'm familiar with it. Again, Darktide is a VERY quick paced game and not very similar to SM2 in how it plays on a practical level. The plethora of abilities and talents and weapon blessings all amount to a cornucopia of ways to very quickly deal very large amounts of damage and that's how that game can get away with having the craziest spawn rates of all kinds of elites and specialists. SM2 does not have anything comparable to the means the player has in DT to rapidly deal with waves upon waves of elite enemies. SM2 is a much more of a slow and steady type of game. I'm not sure how you make a connection to DT when it comes to the parry and dodge. The parry only exists in DT on one particular melee weapon family and it works quite differently than it does here and the dodge mechanic is also a lot more different. It's much more tactile in SM2 where if the enemy appears to hit you, they actually hit you. There is no magical "dodge state" as there is in DT.

Your list of improvements I generally agree with.

Britus wrote:

Also, something about enemies being sponges - Heavy's plasma make the whole group of rubrics red in basically one charged shot. Laz fusile also doesn't have a problem deleting enemies. Same goes for grenade rifle on tactical that even has a glitch supplying it with almost infinite grenades which makes it strongest weapon in the game by a long shot. So, there are tools already who tackle Lethal enemies easily, just need to uplift those weapons that are currently struggling to make a difference.

That last sentence is the critical part. They didn't do that and rather just made the enemy super strong as the players capabilities were left as they were or nerfed. Feeling arbitrarily hamstrung to make the game harder is not conducive to an enjoyable gaming experience to most people. There is no doubt Majoris enemies are unreasonably tanky on the higher difficulties and the time to kill when you're beating on a single Warrior or Chaos Marine is just too long, never mind when there's a dozen of them on screen at once.

Britus wrote:

P.S. For me personally SM2 Lethal makes you feel exactly like Space Marine. Lore wise, Tyranids are beasts eating ceramite for breakfast, same goes for Chaos Marines. And Space Marines prevail such enemies not with the thickness of their armor, but with their reflexes and tactical/combat prowess. And when I'm standing in the pack of 5-7 warriors where every mistake can be your last, and with Emperor's help managing to duel them into oblivion, parrying strikes, searching for better position and opening for gun strikes and finally standing on top of their corpses, even if injured - THAT is the Space Marine feeling that I like.

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Kind of true but there's a difference between making an enemy potent and making it arbitrarily strong just to make the game harder. I don't mind the enemy hitting hard as long as I can hit back just as hard. That way you land in a place of balance where the player's choices are actually what matter, which I do believe is what we both want. I just don't want to feel like I've been intentionally weakened just so the game can be "hard". It's a lazy solution and an outdated approach. Remember, just because a lot of people do something (scaling health and damage pools in this instance) does not mean that something is correct. In this case we have better examples to follow, like Helldivers. They achieve their difficulty scaling by increasing the amount of heavy and elite enemies on top of increasing the amount of baseline enemies. This is the better solution and I think one more people would be happy with. Some health and damage scaling is fine, I have to assume it's here to stay, but there's a limit to how far you can stretch that before it becomes abjectly silly, which is what I feel it is presently.

I would leave the scaling up until Ruthless to accomplish some sense of weapon and power progression, but on lethal and onwards it should be the same as ruthless with the difference of the addition of affixes like in ARPGs like Diablo or other coop shooters like WWZ or Darktide.

Let each game to have something different and random, for example, an affix called "shadow of the warp" where the respawn timer if you die is bigger and the call of reinforcements is almost instant for Majoris, and you can also make them deal additional damage over time each time they hit you. (For chaos you can call it Warp Storm)

Another fun affix can be "broken supply lines" so the fixed ammo boxes are removed and you need to scavenge the level for the little ammo boxes from the destructible boxes (this can be done by increasing the amount of these boxes spawning all over the map and finding them more frequently), this way you have to actually search every corner and pick your fights well.

Those are just a few examples that come to my mind right now, but affixes are endless. Just look at Wow M+ affixes, Diablo, WWZ, and lots of other coop shooters, just add a bit of lore behind and we are set!

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Colancio wrote:

I would leave the scaling up until Ruthless to accomplish some sense of weapon and power progression, but on lethal and onwards it should be the same as ruthless with the difference of the addition of affixes like in ARPGs like Diablo or other coop shooters like WWZ or Darktide.

Let each game to have something different and random, for example, an affix called "shadow of the warp" where the respawn timer if you die is bigger and the call of reinforcements is almost instant for Majoris, and you can also make them deal additional damage over time each time they hit you. (For chaos you can call it Warp Storm)

Another fun affix can be "broken supply lines" so the fixed ammo boxes are removed and you need to scavenge the level for the little ammo boxes from the destructible boxes (this can be done by increasing the amount of these boxes spawning all over the map and finding them more frequently), this way you have to actually search every corner and pick your fights well.

Those are just a few examples that come to my mind right now, but affixes are endless. Just look at Wow M+ affixes, Diablo, WWZ, and lots of other coop shooters, just add a bit of lore behind and we are set!

Regarding enemy thickness - its like that now, Colancio. Enemies on lethal have exactly the same health levels as on ruthless and take the same amount of shots to take down, only enraged elites are tankier. 

Yea i would like the introduction of mutators as well

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Britus wrote:

There is no way enemies can have same health across all difficulties :) Health and damage scaling is the staple of almost all difficulties in every game, especially in L4D clones. I don't think I've seen any game that doesn't have that. 

Doom Eternal is a very good example of a game that doesn't have health and damage scaling with difficulty: no matter the difficulty level the enemies remain the exact same in terms of damage and health, i.e. an enemy you can kill with three shots at the easiest difficulty remains so at the hardest. What changes though are enemy composition and spawn frequency, e.g. where on a lower difficulty you might say face only one Mancubus at a time, on a higher difficulty you might face say three at once or even have an added Cyberdemon in the mix, and that's before the increased number of Imps and other low-tier enemies that make it more difficult to actually focus on said Mancubi. The devs for that game actually said the best thing about difficulty scaling: what you do across difficulties shouldn't change, only the number of decisions you make and how fast you need to make them.

Space Marine 2 already does a LOT of different things to make higher difficulties harder, like removing your free stim at the start, reducing stim effectiveness, reduced supply drop frequency, increased enemy spawn numbers, reduced player armor, etc. The increased enemy damage and health only serves as the tipping point that makes the game less fun than it should be.  Increasing enemy spawn density and frequency should be more than enough to change up the difficulty level, instead of just making enemies bullet sponges.