The reasons players have issue with the game on higher difficulties has little to do with damage values and enemy health. what it boils down to is a lack of satisfaction when interacting with enemies as they do not react to being shot. Giving the player the feedback that their actions have no effect.

I want to talk about design principles in Space Marine 2 and how they fail the player. in this I'll be comparing it to one of the best third person shooters design wise, in my opinion Helldivers 2
THIS IS NOT A THREAD CLAIMING HELLDIVERS 2 IS A BETTER GAME. THIS IS ABOUT HOW DESIGN PRINCIPLES IN HELLDIVERS 2 WORKS WHILE SPACE MARINE 2 DO NOT  

There are blenty of bullet sponge enemies in Helldivers2 yet no one makes the complaint that enemies are bullet sponges.

Helldivers 2 goes out of its way to let its players know they interact with the world environment. They have footprints, their explosions leave craters, and most importantly their actions effect their enemies more than ticking a health bar to 0. Space Marine 2 never needed nor should it have environmental effects and craters as its not really part of the game, but it completely falls apart when it meets contact with the enemies. 

Helldivers allows the player to know their weapons have impact and weight to them. It staggers enemy animations, leaves damage marks in the meshes, and can even change behavior by damaging parts and limbs. Enemies twitch when shot. This tells the players they are making an actual difference in the fight.
Whereas in space marine when you shoot an enemy they sometimes shrug, or react but ultimately they seem indifferent to being shot at. This is mostly why people don't enjoy the chaos missions. Its not because they are any harder to play, but shooting a rubric is so unsatisfying. From the first shot till the shot that staggers them to execute state, there is no noticeable difference. this makes players uneasy as bullet sponges make a player feel weak and anemic. 

Yet, in helldivers almost all their enemies are bullet sponges ( devatsators brood alphas e.g.) yet it feels absolutely satisfying to mag dump a devastator because it will twitch, spark break apart, show bullet holes and ultimately lose parts as you shoot it. You get the sense of a Devatstator near death and one fresh. Shooting a rubric gives none of this feedback to the player so their weapons feel anemic. thus they don't enjoy the gameplay. Warriors are a bit different as they at least spray out blood, but they never gib or stagger.
A player will love stopping a melee attack from an enemy by shooting it. it feels good and reward direct interaction with the game. So when a full mag dump leaves a Warrior looking the same as when the engagement started it feels bad.  It also makes players feel weak.

Because this lack of impact players dont feel much difference in their weapons. ( why pick an autoboltgun over a heavy boltgun or a plasma over a melta) when the goal is get enemy HP to 0 the gun with the most power to reduce the HP is the only thing that feels like it makes an impact, simply by making you shoot less. This isn't satisfying in a way a weaker gun would be if you felt it had some impact.  If a pistol staggered a warrior every time it was shot players would say the pistols felt very powerful.

Because of these impacts, in helldivers you'll feel more powerful because the player will intuit that enemy weapons will behave the same. Therefore you will feel tough when you take damage. Even when the hit chunks your health to near zero. Inversely in Space Marine it almost feels unfair when you get hit and see your health chunk because you have to expend so much effort to kill your enemy and they do so little to impact you. It isn't really a matter of balance, as they can be perfectly balanced, and it will still feel bad and leave the player less engaged.  Balancing weapons to do x% more damage doesn't address this because the issue isn't a balance issue, its a user experience issue.

All changing vlaues does it make it so you need to click the mouse 10 times instead of 15, and a player will not notice this difference. The key here is make the enemies look as if loosing health impacts them, even if it does not slow animation frames, attack times, or even damage. This is the proper way to adress difficulty and enemy encounters, by not treating it as a balance issue.

Like many other players, I'm agree about your analysis of the lack of impact. 

I was first here because I wanted to react about the last patch 4.1 and the attempt to balance the difficulty.

I think chalenge is directly rely to weakness of many weapons and lack of ammos. It's not only beacause of the frequency of the chaotic spawns we have seen since 4.0. Have a lot of ennemies is fun (Helldivers, Darktide). Sometimes for the biggers, it's really enjoyable to have a longer time to kill and a real fight (warriors...) But when it needs too much time to kill and spawns comes again and again, it's no more manageable and you have this feeling the game is become too much difficult like the past week.

Today, after the 4.1 rollback, I did two games in ruthless and I had the feeling to get bored because of the lack of ennemies presents in the map and frequency of spawns. It's not fun to walk one minute without meet any oposition.

My thoughts is if devs wants to offer a "shooter game" and not a rush / "run to the end game" to their players, I think they have to think about INCREASING the spawns and the numbers of ennemies, BUT/AND lower their stats or drasticaly buff the "no meta" weapons. 

I was playing Helldivers 2 just today. 

What a game. It’s so epic. 

But the difference in the feeling of impact was noticeable. 

Space Marine 1 had more weight and sense of impact. Combat felt more precise. 

I’m not sold on Space Marine 2 … yet. 

It was my most anticipated game of 2024. I love W40k…

Whilst I am enjoying the game. It’s just not hitting those sweet notes as yet. 

early days tho. Only played around 3hrs…

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PlagueOfGripes wrote:

Part of it is enemies not reacting to hits.

Another is that you can spend more time evading than attacking.

Yet another is the game isn't as visceral as, say, Space Marine 1; hits often don't feel as impactful.

Another big one is that even the most basic enemies can take many hits to kill; it feels better to wail on a sponge if you're normally wiping out a hundred enemies per minute.

The jist of it is that there's a lack of framing to the player's agency due to failing to establish a baseline for how powerful the player is comparatively.

I really cannot follow here. Every melee or ranged hit impacts the opponents. Minors are immediately staggered by everything. Majors react to every hammer hit, or power fist hit, even the light one. They do not react to every pistol shot but so what? While major melees tyranids actually do, they start blocking.

Hitting majors in the head with my sniper always triggers some reaction.

You have animation for almost every hit you land.

Maybe we play two different games >.>