Whats good brothers?

I've been ravenously consuming this game's PvE Content since release (PvP I found to be pretty lackluster. Only played enough to get the achievements) and now that I've come as close as I can to 100%ing the game I have a few thoughts and suggestions I'd like to share to improve the operations and PvE experience going forward. I mainly play on Ruthless when I'm queuing  for games with Randoms but also have a team of friends I do Lethal runs with semi-regularly so that's the perspective I'm speaking from.

1. Bolter Buffs
   • As most people have been saying since the game came out Bolters, especially the fully automatic ones, just feel bad to use in this game. The gunplay in SM2 feels satisfying and rewarding but only when using guns with extremely high damage (Heavy Plasma Incincerator, Melta Rifle, Grenade Launcher) or Weapons with good headshot multipliers that are also precise enough to land consistently (Las-Fusil, Instigator, Marksman Carbine). Even when using the appropriate tier of weapon Bolters like the Auto, Heavy, Occulus and Carbine feel like they're shooting confetti at Majoris or higher enemies and even their TTK on minoris enemies feels bad for the amount of ammo being expended. Now, I'm not here to say "ThEy NeEd tO bE LoRE aCcUrAtE aNd KiLl WaRrIoRs In 3 HiTs." I'm fine with SM2 being a slow TTK game but as it stands right now there's no real incentive to take an Auto Bolt Rifle over the Regular Bolter with a Grenade Launcher. There's no reason I should ever take the Bolt Carbine over a Las-Fusil or an Occulus over the Melta. These weapons need to fulfill a niche that the others available to the class can't and they need to do it well. That is, rapidly scything down hordes of Minor enemies in a fairly ammo efficient manner and/or quickly doing a lot of damage at close range by magdumping into a single target. My Suggestion,
     Give the Auto Bolt Rifle, Heavy Bolt Rifle, Regular Bolt Carbine, Occulus Bolt Carbine and Bolt Sniper an increase to their head shot multipliers and, on a case by case basis, giving damage, reload speed, max spread, ammo reserve and recoil another look. As of right now these aforementioned weapons all have a Headshot multiplier of 1.0 (source) while the regular Bolt Rifle, which by far feels the best to use out of all the automatic bolters, has a multiplier of 1.5 on top of its Grenade Launcher which basically has infinite ammo thanks to a single Tactical Perk. The higher ammo counts and/or high RoF of these weapons means little in a game where enemies are so spongy you have to be landing headshots consistently to kill in any reasonable amount of time. With higher headshot multipliers and less spread you would be able to aim at roughly head level and cut down an entire swarm of gaunts similar to what you can already do with a bolt pistol or use it to dump half a magazine into a majoris' head at close range and put them in the red.
   • Another approach to this could be to just reduce enemy Minoris and Majoris health across the board while also giving automatic bolter weapons a slight buff to their damage from where they currently stand but this could end up just being a "win-more" change for the weapons that are currently dominant picks. It would be interesting though if they tried this and then paired it with the increased wave sizes and extremis spawn rates of 4.0 to balance it out.
     
     
2. Taking Another Look at Some Perks
   
   • Most of the class perks are fine though some columns are dominated by one obvious pick (Bulwark perk that gives all contested health instantly, Vanguard Perk that gives him 10% health on executions) however there are a few, especially in the weapon perk trees, that feel like they were never playtested or even given a second thought before being put in the game. Two examples that stand out to me immediately, 
     • Doing 10% more melee damage when at full armor.  This has niche instances where its good like if you find a pack of Bone Sword Warriors with no range support sitting around. Or, for an Assaults first Ground Pound against an unaware pack of enemies. More often than not however this perk ceases to exist if even a single ranged enemy is present. A single las-shot tickling me as I close the distance turns it off. Termagaunt glancing menacingly in my direction during a big mosh pit fight turns it off, getting too close to a barbed strangler vine turns it off. I would suggest making this perk, "Increases melee damage by 10% if you have atleast 1 full bar of Armor" that way you actually have a chance to enjoy the damage buff for a meaningful amount of time and actually have hope of sustaining it during combat.
       
     • Armor recovering 0.5 seconds faster after every kill. Maybe somebody has tested this and found out its super broken but in a game where the passive armor recovery takes 50 seconds without receiving any damage to kick in on higher difficulties I see no reason to ever take this except if its on the way to something I actually want. I suppose it means that after clearing a big fight if I got 20 kills I'd only need to wait 40 seconds for my passive regen to start but I've never cleared a wave and then as the next wave starts thought to myself, "darn if only my armor came back 5 seconds sooner." My idea for an alternative effect would be "Executions restore an additional 1/4 of armor"
     • There are a lot of perks in general that need to be buffed to even be considered against their competition or need a second look now that they games been out and we've seen whats actually good and whats useless. (I'm looking at you entirety of Assaults Signature Column)
       
       
3. Dodging
   
   • I'm not asking for this game to become a Fromsoft roll spam simulator nor do I want it to be but right now dodging feels bad in comparison to parrying and it has negative downstream effects on classes that are, at least from my impression, supposed to lean on it and primarily use melee (Assault). Due to the fact that any attack at any point in its animation can be cancelled into a parry/block but not into a dodge means that sometimes if a Majoris enemy starts winding up an orange special during your string you just have to eat that. You can argue that it's what you get for wildly flailing a light string with no regard for the type of enemy you're fighting and that's fair enough but it also promotes a melee strategy of only using 1 or 2 hits and then waiting a bit to make sure the enemy doesn't start up an orange special and disproportionately favors melee weapons with quick attack animations. Whats the point in the Powerfist having all these cool strings that let you mix in any combination of lights, heavys and charged heavys and perks that want to reward me for landing the final heavy of a long string if I'm going to be punished severely for actually committing to anything beyond the 2nd hit of a string? My suggestion,
     Allow heavy attacks to be cancelled into a dodge at any point during their startup. This will still mean players who just wanna mindlessly mash lights with a Combat Knife will be punished by orange specials but now I can use the heavy attacks in my weapons movelist as a way to keep attacking and hedge against orange attacks since I can feint them into a dodge if I see an orange attack coming during their windup. Bulwark was able to do something akin to this pre-4.0 when he could cancel an attack into block and then cancel block into dodge. I think it should come back though in a more elegant way that's available to all classes.
     
   • Assault Specifically - I feel like the game should incentivize the use of Jump Pack dodging more. I know that Assault already gets a bigger perfect dodge window passively but that window should be even bigger on the jump pack dodge. Right now spending one of your precious jump pack stocks to dodge when you could just use a normal dodge makes this feel like a redundant mechanic. I think the perfect dodge window when using jump pack dodge should feel as easy and consistent to land as a parry with a fencing weapon. Combined with the above change we could see an Assault Playstyles emerge that actually make use of Jump Pack dodging more often and make the perks that reward it more attractive.
     

      
     

4. Enraged Ranged Enemies
   • I don't mind enraged enemies as a concept however the current implementation creates frustrating game play especially in Chaos levels. Since you can't just stunlock enraged Majoris with melee strings this means that ranged Majoris enemies with rapid fire weapons (Both types of Rubric, some Warriors) can just continuously lay into you at point blank range while you desperately flail on them with your pool noodle chainsword and give no opportunities to parry or block their attacks. If you don't have a Heavy with a plasma incinerator or a Sniper to quickly take them out they get to just lay down huge amounts of ranged damage that can do almost nothing about except back off and try to pick off from a long enough distance where you can dodge their shots or lose significant HP while they just stand there and blast you in melee. My suggestion,
     Enraged Majoris should aggressively close in on the nearest player and use exclusively use melee attacks and should not be allowed to summon reinforcements. This will still make them feel threatening without their damage feeling "cheap" and annoying and provides an intuitive counter-play.
     
     
5. Other Miscellaneous Things
   • I think there should be a reward for getting your Relic weapons to max level. Even if its just another weapon perk point. Once I have Relic tier unlocked and all the individual weapons mastered there's no real reason to get the Relic exp bar to full except as something that happens incidentally for using the weapons.
   • There needs to be a much bigger incentive to not use fencing weapons. Some arguments can be made for certain Balanced weapons but right now so much of your damage and survivability depends on parrying and gunstriking that fencing is a must on higher difficulties. Balanced and Block weapons need to be significantly stronger than they currently are and I think Block needs its own special mechanics like "Doesn't stagger when blocking heavy attacks" and "Each blocked attack regenerates a small amount of armor and contested health"
   • My biggest wishlist item right now is actually more executions. I could probably keep playing for another month with the current content even though I have nothing left to unlock but one thing I'm already getting kind of sick of is pulling heads off Rubric Marines. By no means do I think Chaos combat is "bad" in this game but it does feel significantly less polished than the near perfect Tyranid combat. Where this stands out most starkly to me is the sheer lack executions. Tzaangors never go into a executable state like the Gaunts do, neither do cultists.  Rubrics have one unarmed execution (punch them and pull their face off) and then 1 execution for every other melee weapon except the Chainsword which has 2. If you're playing Heavy you're going to be watching the same head-pulling animation over and over and over again compared to Tyranid Warriors where there are several unarmed executions that could play. Even if its just adding a different unarmed animation between the Bolter and Flamer Rubrics that would be nice. I dont mind this being season pass content I'd just like more universal non-weapon specific executions to come down the pipe at some point.

Thats all I have for now. Looking forward to the new Op and Volkite pistol. Love to hear other peoples thoughts and thanks to anyone from Saber that takes the time to read this. Good luck.

Ave Dominus Nox

now these are some decent well thought out ideas, rather than the dirge that seems to usually be spat out here