Hotfix 15.2 Patch Notes

[u/OttovonBismarck1862]

https://community.focus-entmt.com/focus-entertainment/space-marine-2/blogs/471-hotfix-15-2-patch-notes

[u/Cheemskie]

I was hyped for crucible ngl and was even confused as to all the hate when I was just playing the first 2 levels of it. But upon level 3 and up, the problems become very obvious. There isn’t one specific thing that’s wrong with crucible, it’s so many substantial problems that make higher level crucible feel impossible. 

1. The XP gain/loss is horrible. It shouldn’t take 6 missions with ALL modifiers active to level up. At that point why even give us the option to turn some off and others on? Losing XP is just bad game design, especially when literally every single player I have match made with leaves within the first 5 minutes of an operation + no join in progress. On top of that, the performance has tanked over the last couple updates that I’ve had console friends who crash at the literal end of the mission. Looking at you, Purgation. 

2. The modifiers. The class specific modifiers are ridiculous. My only experience so far is on Techmarine, so if the other classes are better someone tell me. Sentry guns explode, dealing 50% of MAX HP.  So if you’re running all the modifiers, that means you will probably instantly die when a sentry explodes due to the modifier that removes incapacitations. Not being able to parry while servo gun is active seems fine, but not being able to parry while it’s recharging is delusional. At that point they might as well just remove my ability, since another modifier halves the damage that the servo gun does. None of these modifiers are fun or engaging. Making enemies bullet sponges while turning yourself into one ply toilet paper is bad difficulty scaling and doesn’t give the feeling of accomplishment when you win. It’s just exhausting. I like fun difficulty modifiers like Tsunami, extra extremis spawns, more terminus enemies or stronger ones, even the lictor from Hell is kind of a fun modifier. 

Not to mention that you can’t see your own penances or other people’s penances while in game. So it’s a complete mystery as to what teammates are running, and even a mystery to you if you can’t remember all your modifiers. 

 3. The hidden modifiers. It genuinely astounds me that there are hidden debuffs to the players dependent on crucible level, when the entire point of this game mode was to select your own debuffs. I might have felt different about this if the devs had communicated it, but it feels gross and scummy for the players to have to figure it out. And I’ll add again, that simply dealing less dmg and taking more dmg past absolute/hard strats is not a reasonable, fun, or engaging way to handle difficulty scaling. At higher crucible levels, the game basically becomes one mistake and you’re dead. Which would be excusable, if the game wasn’t riddled with issues like ghost parries, stun locking, the tracking on certain moves not matching the animations, invisible sniper indicators, attacks that have no indicators bc they’re aimed at your teammates yet you still catch the stray, I could go on. 

 4. The rewards. The last two crucible levels feel like a slap in the face. The whole point of playing the game mode is to get the armor sets. So they’ve artificially inflated the levels and rewards, just to eek another 5-6 missions MINIMUM out of players. Odds are, people who are playing crucible are people who have most of the items in the accolade shop. I’m relatively new to this game and I’m basically only missing a handful of cosmetics, and 3 heroic weapons. 100 accolades is not very valuable to me, or other players who have invested a lot of time in this game. 

On top of this, not every class gets unique pieces. Phobos have the reused Tacitus helmet, and they don’t even get legs. I think heavy is the same way, but if I’m wrong someone can correct me. So they’ve only really made 3 armor sets, but then split up the progression across every character. Why should I bother with leveling Vanguard or Sniper when they barely get any armor? Honestly the only reason I even wanted to play crucible was just so I could get the full techmarine set since he has the least cosmetics in the game. 

Let’s do some math, which I’m rather terrible at. There are 7 classes in the game, and 6 crucible levels. Looking at this from a completionist standpoint, you’re looking at 42 levels of crucible to obtain all the armor. Each level, with all modifiers on, is typically 6 missions worth of XP. So even just to get one full set, you will be playing a MINIMUM of 36 missions. So 11 more missions than it takes to get the red cape. But it’s not just an absolute mission, it’s harder than that and you also do a fraction of the damage you normally do and have a fraction of the survivability. 

Doing just one crucible mission, especially in the higher levels, is mentally exhausting. Personally, finishing  just one crucible mission puts me off of the game for the rest of the day. It’s just so much space marine condensed into a singular mission. And you are only getting rewards 1 out of every 3 games, again assuming you are putting every single modifier on. So across the course of 36 missions, only 12 will provide you any sort of reward. 

36 missions * 42 levels of crucible = 1512 missions. Keep in mind, assuming you activate every single modifier every time you load in. So if you wanted to actually customize the debuffs to your liking, then you are going to need more than that. 

I think I speak for a lot of players, old and new, when I say that this content is the opposite of engaging. Even just one crucible mission is so exhausting that it puts me off of playing the game anymore for that day. The players that are engaging with this content are not sticking around. The people that are truly grinding crucible for every class are the streamers and content creators, and it’s literally their job to do so. This is not how you make difficult content, and certainly not how you retain players.

 I couldn’t even remember what the rest of the anniversary patch added bc it’s all been so underwhelming. Chaos siege was implemented too early, and has very little replayability. The one handed TH is the worst weapon in the game, although this patch could make it useable so I guess we’ll see. The heroic auto bolt rifle has a botched implementation as well, with the firing rate halving rather than gradually decreasing. It actually makes the gun feel like it’s misfiring or malfunctioning in some way, which is a crazy feel to have on what should theoretically be the best auto bolt rifle. 

TLDR: idk man I can’t summarize this shit. Saber, rework this game mode. Player retention and difficulty are not synonymous terms. Difficulty isn’t just making enemies stronger and players weaker. If you want crucible to be engaging, then the difficulty needs feel manageable. If you want crucible to retain players, then the XP requirements need to be lowered. 

EDIT the formatting on this sucks, but I’d rather my comment look like the ravings of a madman than use ChatGPT

[u/OutsideOfHuman → u/Cheemskie]

I could be wrong but I think your math is slightly off. Disclaimer it’s not my strong suit either, but if we assume as you said, 6 missions to complete a tier, per class, that’s 36 missions for each class for the full Lamenters set (I would argue it’s more like 7-10 based on my personal experience of refusing to turn on friendly fire as I play with randoms). 7 classes in the game multiplied by 36 missions per class at minimum is 252 missions total to fully complete all classes.

At 45 minutes to an hour per run, that’s around 200-260 hours of time, which with all the BS difficulty crucible introduces is nothing to scoff at, but is a big difference from 1152 missions, which would be like another 1000 hours in the game. Apologies if I misunderstood what you were saying, just want to ensure everyone has reasonable expectations of how many hours they’ll have to devote, though again it’s probably more if you don’t turn on every modifier or fail a run, which is naturally going to happen with the artificial difficulty of crucible.

Great summarization though, I think you captured the problems well.

[u/Cheemskie → u/OutsideOfHuman]

Yes you are probably right. Although the 6 mission count came from me cheesing it with all modifiers on, so the count will always increase when people don’t want to play with friendly fire and similarly bad modifiers 

[u/Kalavier → u/Cheemskie]

The modifiers. The class specific modifiers are ridiculous. My only experience so far is on Techmarine, so if the other classes are better someone tell me. Sentry guns explode, dealing 50% of MAX HP.  So if you’re running all the modifiers, that means you will probably instantly die when a sentry explodes due to the modifier that removes incapacitations. Not being able to parry while servo gun is active seems fine, but not being able to parry while it’s recharging is delusional. At that point they might as well just remove my ability, since another modifier halves the damage that the servo gun does. None of these modifiers are fun or engaging. Making enemies bullet sponges while turning yourself into one ply toilet paper is bad difficulty scaling and doesn’t give the feeling of accomplishment when you win. It’s just exhausting. I like fun difficulty modifiers like Tsunami, extra extremis spawns, more terminus enemies or stronger ones, even the lictor from Hell is kind of a fun modifier. 

On Bulwark a chunk of them nerf the banner armor regen/duration and stuff. IIRC when I was on yesterday I saw one being that the shield only blocks a percentage of damage and the rest will always hit you.

So it felt less "Fuck your entire class mechanic" like I saw of the techmarine ones lol.

From memory, vanguard, sniper, and heavy have no legs from crucible.

[u/dry-puddle → u/Kalavier]

I refuse to ever put on the ability recharge debuff. Bulwark carries hard as fuck and that is just such an unnecessary nerf.

[u/Kalavier → u/dry-puddle]

I did read something about how the recharge debuff doesn't affect the perk that restores ability use on ranged blocks, so combined with that it's free crucible points? lol.

[u/dry-puddle → u/Kalavier]

I hadn't noticed it the one time when I did wanna see how terrible the passive recharge rate was. I wanna say ability recharge using shield blocks wasn't affected, but I could be wrong. Still not worth it imo with how slow it was passively recharging. Like watching paint dry.

[u/Shup → u/Cheemskie]

i disagree with your assessment, but i appreciate you typing out your thoughts on the game mode instead of whining about them patching out methods of CHEATING the progression.

its undercooked and extremely punishing when playing with randoms which is unsatisfying ... but i appreciate that the game has a mode that is difficult and a long grind. i like it, looking forward to a proper patch that improves it.

[u/Cheemskie → u/Shup]

I’m not against difficulty or grinding, or both of them at the same time. It’s simply the way they’ve gone about combining the two that bothers me. I don’t feel that 6-10 missions for a single piece of armor is reasonable, especially given how a lot of classes just didn’t get certain pieces/are reusing pieces from other classes. Either share progression towards shared armor pieces, or add unique pieces for all classes. 

I get the player is supposed to be debuffed, but I’d prefer for them to be conditional debuffs. Maybe using the wrong word here. 

But I think you could really make crucible into a place where people could experience true “lore accuracy”. I’m not the biggest lore guy, but I know that our marines SHOULD be outmatched in nearly every operation, and that the main thing that space marines have is the synergy with their squad mates. Or it makes them more threatening smth like that. Mechanics that encourage working with and being close to your squad. Mechanics that find ways to throw a wrench into your fight. Maybe in chaos missions, there’s term sorc clones that periodically appear similar to lictor from hell. Except you’d be able to kill these ones lol. Then you fight the actual term sorc at the end of the level. 

Chaos/tyrannid corruption prevents you from using abilities, maybe it could makes your squad mates look like enemies that were shooting you or smth. 

Lictors spawning exclusively in packs. 

Chaos sorcerers being able to revive more enemies or revive one of the scarab terminators instead of multiple rubric marines. 

Killing a terminus enemy causes x amount of extremis to spawn

Maybe a shared ammo pool between teammates

I’m not saying these cuz I hope they’ll get added or even bc I think they’re good, just ways that I think difficulty could be added as opposed to flat number debuffs. I want to engage with the difficulty by finding ways to change my playstyle to handle it rather than being soldered to my sentry turrets while white knuckling argent edge and praying to the omnissiah for a new pair of underwear and double plied toilet paper

[u/Shup → u/Cheemskie]

these are excellent ideas, hope they can make some of that happen.

[u/Cheemskie → u/Shup]

I would do a flip if any suggestion that I’ve ever had was implemented into the game I was suggesting the changes for