Feedback from the Beta - Mainly on the Rioter.

[Delta69er]

I've been waiting until the patch to post some general thoughts on the update. Ill try and post it as concise as I can. I'll try and also avoid talks of issues in the game that are caused by known bugs

Husk Cannon – Pretty good, a bit OP. The fire burn DoT is too extreme for non-firebug; as it will basically kill you from 100 to 0.

Mac-10 – no issues, only one really was the switch time but that's been fixed

2011 – Yeah, no issue here

Trader Skip – seems broken half the time; ie doesn't work at all in some matches. Needs notifications when people want to skip trader and need better UI integration; esc and then pressing the ready up location is not very intuitive.

Hold Your Ground Locations – a good handful of these are terribly placed. They suffer from a couple of issues:

• Having a spawn/portal located in the middle of them – dosh tick will always occur for these
• Not having enough time to run to them – it's set at like 20secs for all them on all maps regardless of size. The time should definitely be like 30secs minimum.
• Some really terrible locations for anyone playing on HoE – some of them are near impossible to hold. Im sure some elitist guy will come in and say "ur not gud enuf'. But, can you really say holding the second floor of the bar on Paris is smart or really practical place to Stand Your Ground on 6p HoE on wave 7-10? Some of these places are just seemingly chosen at random with no regards to how the spawns actually work on the map. I've played the game enough and played the maps enough times to hold in all sorts of unconventional spots, but the ones your internal team chose are well"¦yeah… I think some further testing should be done on the locations of these.

Endless mode – Boring, I know you guys didn't want to do it for this reason but still. Not sure if difficulty scaling is in or bugged? Theres some other problems which are mostly non-related to bugs. One glaring one is the lack of balance for Scrake only and FP only waves – its not fun running around the map for 20-30 minutes hunting ammo. Theres a couple of solutions that have come up during mid-game discussion with my teammates:

• Reduce the spawn numbers or spawn interval during these waves, it just hurts the ears and the insane groupings of them often make it impossible to kite/move.
• Increase ammo frequency and reduce respawn time on the map
• Allow us to buy ammo expansions with the INSANE amount of dosh we make during the game. This would solve a large issue of duplicates disappearing and the constant ammo hunting.

One not so glaring issue is the spawning patterns in late waves (Im talking 100 and 200). Kiting a wave fighting ridiculously large hordes of larges zeds just isn't fun. You need to fix that Large Zed spawning ratio. I know you want to try and force the players to fail – but do it because the game gets harder, not because we quit out of boredom.

Rioter – 1 word summation: Ugh. To me, this is one of the worst additions to the game and seems you are drifting away and becoming disconnected from the core design documents. You took an awesome step forward in removing the tron-bracelets from the Zeds and introducing raging eyes; like awesome work, cant comment how nice this change is. But you took a major step backwards with the implementation of 1 zed. I hate to think what this could possibly mean for the future of the game, though I guess it was prefaced with the Abomination.

What is one of the core gameplay fundamentals that make the Killing Floor franchise work?

Headshots.​

KF (along with RO/RS) are one of the few games where Headshots just feel amazing and you always want to get them at all cost – with the introduction of the Rioter you throw that ideal out the window.

Headshots are what DEFINE the core of this game, its what we've been taught to do for the past decade, and then you introduce an enemy that punishes you for aiming and participating in one of the core fundamentals of the game. "Shoot the legs" – This is such a jarring departure from the established norm, hitting the head is what we are trained to do, requires a bit more skill and what each player aims for. This really messes with the flow of the game; Aiming at the heads, watching them pop 1 by 1 as you efficiently use your ammo, and then the last one left is the one you've been avoiding because there's no efficient or fun way to deal with it. You look at your weapon and sadly aim down and shoot its knee and watch it pathetically fall over sideways.

Let me put another scenario in perspective:

Over the past 3 years you've been playing this game and focused our skill on learning zed patterns, adapting to new maps and changes, but one thing has remained constant over the years – attacking the head as the most efficient way to kill enemies. It makes you feel skilled, accomplished and excited to see those heads pop in a row, its what keeps you coming back. Bloats blocking and Quarterpound head health issues popped up but it never really concerned you (that much). In comes the Rioter, something that now has a TTK of that of a large zed or bloat, heavily resists all damage on early waves and forces you to look DOWN from your previous position and aim at its legs. Sure you can brute force the head, but you'll lose ammo in the process and neglect more pressing issues running at you. Lord save you if you're demo, swat or survivalist with a bad weapon against it.

In my opinion something needs to be done about him. I got no real suggestions, the only ones that come to mind are "Remove Him" or "Remove the Helmet", because fundamentally this is all he has going for him and it's the only problem.

I would like to conclude by saying, I'm not the only person who feels the same about this, I have a discord of around 15 regular HoE players, and our opinion is unanimous on the rioter. And I'm sure many other players feel like this as well.

I'd like to ask if anyone else feels the same or even those that like the rioter...why?

Kittenmittens Foster Parent For visibility.

 

[TheTCREngineer]

You can headshot the rioter as the sharpshooter and pop its head even if he is armored with 1-2 shot from the more damage red dot LAR or whatever it's called. Crossbow and M14 also work. Gunslingers can do the same with deagle/magnum. Other perks aim for the legs. Basically let them do the job and you kill all the buffed zeds.

 

[imnrk]

I quite like the Rioter myself. Like TCR said, certain perks can kill him better than others with the use of headshots, others can shoot his legs. The Gorefiend was like this too - some perks had more trouble than others, but now people are used to it and it's not so bad.

 

[TheTCREngineer]

I quite like the Rioter myself. Like TCR said, certain perks can kill him better than others with the use of headshots, others can shoot his legs. The Gorefiend was like this too - some perks had more trouble than others, but now people are used to it and it's not so bad.

Gorefiend, Rioter, they're all the same. Just go support and give 'em the double barrel and they're dead. Although, at least the Rioter makes a difference gameplay wise whereas the Gorefiend is pretty lame and takes ages to recover when he's stumbled from a bash, guess that's why he's a very common zed on HoE.

 

[Delta69er]

I quite like the Rioter myself. Like TCR said, certain perks can kill him better than others with the use of headshots, others can shoot his legs. The Gorefiend was like this too - some perks had more trouble than others, but now people are used to it and it's not so bad.

You can headshot the rioter as the sharpshooter and pop its head even if he is armored with 1-2 shot from the more damage red dot LAR or whatever it's called. Crossbow and M14 also work. Gunslingers can do the same with deagle/magnum. Other perks aim for the legs. Basically let them do the job and you kill all the buffed zeds.

I think you both kinda miss the point of the main complaint; which is shooting the legs is unintuitive to the gameplay in KF.

You mention that certain perks can bypass the helmet altogether and all teams and players should delegate those certain perks to deal with them - for large zeds that don't spawn very frequently - sure. But these are trash zeds for the most part, very commonly spawning zeds. There is also the assumption that everyone is facing the same direction which is rarely the case. With the solution that you are both mentioning now GS and SS are running back and forward between points to deal specifically with Large Zeds AND trash zeds; that sort of team micromanagment is too much for this sort of game. And what if the team composition doesn't compliment precision classes like GS and SS? Demo wastes 3 m79 shots to take it down and just GL if you have a HX25. Before the update every single perk was able to take down all trash equally and efficiently and I think that should still be the case. Why isn't the commando and swat - some of THE dedicated trash killers are now having to cringe at the sight of a trash zed and waste additional ammo on legshots? It goes back to the principle of having players focus on headshots instead of the ground.

I dont think headshotting was the issue with gorefiends - rather the endless spin attack that was patched out. But even when it was introduced I dont think it was despised as much as the rioter is among players.

 

[oldmidget]

when the rioter shows up and im using fb/demo/commando/swat(things that cant 1shot its face) ill usually just pull out a knife and start slashing his tendons lol. you can stumnble lock him that way and kill him no problem. And again, any high power ballistic gun can 1-2shot the rioters face so i dont really think it matters that much. it did put me off at first though, cuz demo does suffer from it.

What i would like is to see his skin changed to red, because i think the blue clashes with the armor(glowing red veins.)

 

[TheTCREngineer]

...

You aim towards the floor to kill Crawlers, can you not do the same for the Rioter? Should we let crawlers start walking so we don't have to aim at its metaphorical "legs" because it goes against aiming towards the general location of headshotting 99% of all zeds? You and your group of HoE friends are complaining over a non-issue, a trivial matter that shouldn't even be complained about and I'll be showing you every single reason why.

Starting off with the first reason, the Rioter does not come in big numbers, they spawn as much as Fleshpounds/Scrakes in numbers but in every wave and can be easily killed. Sure, they might take more ammo from some perks weaponry but other perks can easily kill it as well. It's a co-op game, start letting your friends take the role of dedicated Rioter killer. Secondly, you call it a trash zed. What in the world does that label have to do with anything? Should we start calling clots with 5000 HP trash zeds simply because they are a clot, and a Fleshpound with 1 health a dangerous, must attack on sight zed because it's a fleshpound? It makes no sense. The rioter isn't a trash zed, a medium zed, or whatever label you want to attach to it, it's just a zed, and I hope for the rest of my argument you can forget what a trash zed is because the rioter clearly isn't one if you and your HoE mates have a hard time with it. Thirdly, there's a major flaw in your argument if you seriously think that every perk has to have an easy time with every zed. There is a reason we have many perks, and that is because they all have a role to fulfill. They also all have unique weapons just incase there is a situation that the weapon is good at dealing with and that it may be used to counter zeds that have a weakness to its main weapons, e.g the Firebug has the microwave gun to counter the Husks resistance to fire. Anyway, the point is not every perk is going to easily kill a certain zed or can deal with all situations and has to rely on other perks to assist them. Another reminder that this is a co-op game. The fourth and final point, he's a slow zed. He walks most of the time and sprints for a couple of seconds after raging all the other zeds. Since he's so slow, you can easily aim at his legs or head to easily kill it. Or, let me teach you every single way to easily kill the rioter in a nice bulleted list, including the demo weapons you seem to have trouble killing it with.

• Headshotting with the Crossbow
• Headshotting or legshotting with the centerfire
• Headshotting or legshotting with the magnum
• Headshotting/Legshotting with the eviscerator
• Legshotting with all ballistic that isn't listed above weaponry(yes, SWAT, Commando, support, mac-10, trenchgun, can easily kill it with shots to the legs)
• 1 shot headshots with the M79, M203, Seekersix & Pulverizer heavy attack
• Flamethrower/Caulk n burn spam(no it doesn't take forever to kill, just hold m1 down for 3-5 seconds)
• Zweihander heavy headshotting or legshotting

These were all tested offperk/with low level perks so it may be even easier to kill rioters.

And to conclude, there is no real issue with the Rioter other than the fact that he's covered in metal and takes forever to kill with the microwave gun, what's up with that TWI? Wasn't the microwave gun dealing more damage to Sirens, Husks and FP's because they have metal on 'em? Why does the Flamethrower & Caulk manage to kill him fast as hell compared to the Microwave gun? Hoping to see a buff to the microwave gun overall as well as it's in a state of being completely worthless unless if it's high tier zeds or bosses and even the Husk Gun outdoes it anyway.

TL;DR: There's not much of them even though they're in every wave, they're slow and prone to headshots/legshots, can easily have its legs shot off with shotguns/rifles, can be burned to death easily, can have its head blown off with demolitionist weapons, use team work with other perks instead of labelling it as a trash zed and complaining not all perks can kill it in a co-op game.

 

[Delta69er]

...

I feel you're still not getting the main complaint, about shooting legs being unintuitive. By the very nature of it - it doesn't feel rewarding and the game doesn't handle leg death dismemberment very well. Plenty of animations and effects for heads popping, but with leg deaths they just tumble over stiffly. So even from visual perspective it isn't rewarding or cool to see.

You still aim at the crawler and try to hit his head in most cases and it doesn't punish you for hitting it. You aim down but you can keep up the usual rhythm and target priority. Most cases you take out visible crawlers first and move up and start taking out heads or vice versa (Iunno how everyone plays). One thing that's apparent with Rioters is that when you finally get to level headed zeds, their heads are the only visible part of them, so you avoid them until the rest of the trash is dead so it is easier to take it out where its legs may be finally visible. Notice 'finally' visible, and you said it yourself, "he's a slow zed".

Rioters are usually at the back of the pack because they're sprinting and raging seems to have been reduced in this patch. Being at the back of the pack means that their legs are usually covered by every other zed in front of it. You have no good way of shooting its 'weakness'. This isn't some special behavior that's been implemented with zed packs, it's an artefact of their new design choice and quite possibly an unintended side effect. By the time you get to him, he's probably already raged everything; something you want to avoid - you want him to be a priority target. All of these issues would be non-existent if we weren't punished for participating the main mechanic of the game; headshotting. The original Elite Alpha was fine the way it was, slightly higher health but you could prioritize him easily enough, now its harder for no real apparent reason. I can understand body armor....but the head being covered in armor is just...so wrong for killing floor.

Using the words 'trivial' to describe other user's legitimate feedback seems to suggests that you think your opinions are the only valid ones and everyone else is wrong. You should also avoid writing arguments that try (and fail) to patronize someone because you're making assumptions. The assumption that I (and others) have a hard time with it - we don't, we just find it a tedious zed to fight for no other reason than "Lol lets put bullet sponge armor on clots, because whatever".

Why do you think having a zed, where its suggested method of takedown is to go against the main grain and philosophies of Killing Floor 'Saving ammo by getting headshots', is a good idea?

 

[Alex Milo]

I think the design of the rioter is pretty tame, but I love how there's now a new lower zed that forces you to aim at something other than his head (unless you're Sharps or Slinger). Design wise I hope it's just a placeholder.

 

[TheTCREngineer]

...

You aren't addressing the points where I clearly gave you many examples of ways you can pop his head off using the M79/M203/Seeker six/Center Fire and any of the other weapons that deal high damage and go through the head armor like nothing. I do not care about the visual effects, how rewarding it feels, nor do I care about how unintuitive you think it is because you want every perk to shoot his head and be an easy kill, because you want him to be a "trash zed" that doesn't change the dynamics of the game. They said they were going to add in zeds to counter perks and some methods of attacking, deal with it. You already have Sharpshooter(headshot/legshot), Gunslinger(headshot/legshot), Demolitionist(headshot), Support Specialist(boomstick legs), Berserker(Pulvy/Zwei) and Firebug(Caulk/Flamethrower) to counter him and that's good enough as it is.

So because there's a bunch of zeds surrounding and covering him, you still cannot get any of your team members to use a shotgun to shoot through the pack into his legs? Or use the Crossbow/Magnum/Centerfire that penetrates through multiple zeds heads into his? Or shoot a nade to clear the group or shoot one into his head and blow him up along with the group? Or use the freeze/emp nade to stun him temporarily to deal with him and prevent the group from frenzying on you guys? There's many ways of attacking, stop sticking to the same method over and over, try new ones and find what works best for the group. Also, he's a bit taller than the other zeds and his head doesn't move as much, his slow moving helps you headshot him easily.

I'm saying your issue is trivial because there is nothing wrong with the rioter in his current state, and of course he can be improved upon. Your opinions aren't improving him, you want to ruin him and make him the same as other zeds, I don't want that and I will stick to keeping him mostly in his current state. We finally got one zed that makes the game a bit more difficult and you don't understand what makes him good in the first place, which is that it forces teamwork. You said in your op you couldn't headshot him when I've proven you can, so what's the issue? That he enrages everything around him before you can do any damage to him? If you want to complain about that, wouldn't it be better to recommend that the rioter should enrage zeds after he stares at a player for more than 3 seconds or something to delay it until you have enough time to take him out, similar to KF1's FP Raging after not attacking or having 10-15 secs of LoS? Something similar to that would make be able to stop him from raging everything around him before you have a chance to kill him and would be a much better idea than a big middle finger to his helmet.

"It goes against the main grain and philosophies of Killing Floor 'saving ammo by getting headshots'"...Say what now? So you don't acknowledge that zeds can have more weak points than just the head? Like the Fleshpounds chest? The Patriarachs arm and tentacle? Husk's Backpack? Hans' backpack and chest? This is a new game and new ideas are being presented, we don't need to stick to headshots only anymore and I'm glad were moving away from that, they can start making the game much more interesting by providing more weak points other than the head which is already the main one.

 

[Delta69er]

...

Many of the examples you provide assume that the rioter is by himself, upclose and not surrounded or behind a bunch of other trash zeds. You decap him with one shot with all those weapons, but good luck getting that headshot with the m79/m203/seeker6 when he's 10-20m away with zeds bobbing up and down in front of him. Even RPGs don't reliably 1 shot him. You keep saying he forces teamwork...he really doesn't though - be realistic, he's just a lazy inconvenience for over half the classes on early waves. Which is part of the problem as well, early wave bullet sponge where we already have very limited ammo.

If you dont care about how cool things are or how rewarding the gameplay is...what are you even playing it for? What do you play for?

It's cool to shoot the husk backpack because it explodes and kills things around it, shooting the tentacles on Patty can make him stumble, but its not cool watching a rioter fall stiffen up and fall over like a plank of wood. All those zeds have their weaknesses built into them - not there because it was lazily implemented and they couldn't be a little more creative with it on how the player should deal with them. All those zeds with other weaknesses, they all share a common one; Headshotting is still the most effective way (except husk). FP, Hans, Patty, they all take more damage from headshots.

I'm saying your issue is trivial because there is nothing wrong with the rioter in his current state, and of course he can be improved upon.

So "There's nothing wrong with him but also there are things wrong with him?" So you admit he needs to be improved - it's what I'm saying as well, I just think removing the ability to efficiently headshot him is a lazy implementation of trying the make the game more difficult. If the devs are really concerned with making the game more difficult - theres a cool little variable on each map called the "Wave Spawn Period" - hint hint: reduce this number. I never said you can't headshot him - I pretty much say its a pain to and it goes against what game we've been playing the past 3 years. If anything, one of the better solutions I could kind of forgive is if he just blocked shots like scs, gorefasts or bloats - provided they gave him mini wrist shields. That would be silly and a little bit more acceptable and I would welcome tiny shield clots over just having weird looking armor float on the head. It would give you small windows to get headshots in (like with gorefasts/fiends) but wouldn't outright discourage and punish you from headshotting.

This is a new game and new ideas are being presented, we don't need to stick to headshots only anymore and I'm glad were moving away from that, they can start making the game much more interesting by providing more weak points other than the head which is already the main one.

Mate, this is a 3yo game, its not a new game with new ideas. The general meta of headshotting is established for the majority of the perks and what a lot of people love, if you want something that doesn't focus on headshots maybe play a different game. Or just play Firebug and Demo. It'd be terrible to move away from it.

If they really want to change stuff - change stuff that has needed changing since EA days. Support has a useless set of skills - mainly the penetration ones, which have also become even more useless now since rioter armor will just absorb the shots. We've now got armored zeds, why can't we have have support actually 'support' again. Maybe let his penetration skill be changed to actually bypass armor - make him one of the counters. Or maybe bring back the AoE boost in Zed-time is used to have - except this time instead of increasing damage or defence, why not let other players bypass the armor as well. I could definitely see myself taking these rather than the alternatives - would make him extra viable against the Abomination which already shoehorns you into taking specific classes.

 

[Pharrahnox]

Issues

Please go to the 'Potential solutions' section if you don't want to read this one. I understand that many people will agree with me here.

I don't have an issue with zeds having different weak points and vulnerabilities. I think the rioter is uninspired, looks bad, and feels bad. This is rather critical feedback, I do not mean to be negative or offensive, I am merely being honest. I will explain why I say this:

• Uninspired: as I said, I think the idea of zeds having different weak points is a good thing. It provides a bit of variation in the shooting/aiming component of the gameplay. A good example of this is the husk's backpack. It makes sense that the backpack is a vulnerable zone, and the location of the backpack (and even the fact that husks have a backpack) makes sense. Now for the rioter. It has armour over the top half of its body, encouraging - sometimes forcing - you to shoot at the lower half of the rioter. I guess it can pass... but it's not really that interesting compared to the husk's backpack.
• Visuals: the design of the armour doesn't make sense. It's far from practical, and I don't think it fits in with the lore of KF2 very well either.
  • Impractical: I'm not saying TWI should come up with an amazing armour design that compromises weight and maneuverability with thickness and surface area, but the current design doesn't appear to satisfy any of those constraints well.
  • Lore: the scrake's chainsaw, the fleshpound's arm mincers, Patty's chaingun are grafted to the body with some form of precision. Compare that to the rioter's armour which appears to be plates of metal nailed hastily into the body. Counter-examples are the siren and Hans' suit, but the siren's 'armour' is apparently merely to pin her arms away from her body, and Hans' suit is an exo-suit, hence why it isn't tight-fitting, and probably isn't designed to be used as a suit of armour.
  • I'll finish this point by saying that I don't actually find the new look appealing. That's completely subjective though.
• Feedback (impact): I agree with Delta that shooting the legs isn't satisfying. Their is no special sound for shooting the legs, the gore system doesn't seem to really do anything on the legs until the zed is already dead, and stumbling - probably the most appropriate form of feedback - is only going to hinder the player's ability to sustain fire on the legs. Compare this with the husk's backpack. It makes a sound when you shoot it, and it explodes when you destroy it.

The whole 'visuals' point is largely unimportant. The 'feedback' is something that could probably be easily tweaked. The 'uninspired' point is something that would be harder to address. Maybe it's not something that can be addressed with this zed, but perhaps any new zeds or updated zeds with unique vulnerabilities could be a little more interesting than armour over the top half of the zed's body. Again, the husk's backpack is a perfect example of this.

Potential solutions

Another thing I would like to mention is how the armour is pretty much all-or-nothing in the sense that it's either all gone, or it's all still there. The helmet is indeed a separate piece of armour, but the rioter has 125 head hp and 450 helmet hp. How often do you see rioter's without their helmets, still alive and well? I don't see it often at all. Once the helmet is gone, the head goes very quickly after. I personally think this to be a bad thing, and I think it wouldn't be hard to tweak so that this isn't as much of an issue. As for the body armour, I think it would be nice if you could take off chunks of it, like drill your way into it using bullets. Of course this would be on a macroscopic scale, where largish chunks would come off after being damaged. To make the armour more interesting, I propose:

• Have the body armour be composed of several chunks.
• Each chunk has health, e.g. 100, compared to 500 of the entire body armour currently.
• Each chunk has a damage threshold above which it breaks instantly and deals the remaining damage to the body, e.g. 50 damage. Damage values below this threshold will not be able to deal body damage. E.g. chunk X has been damaged and now has 35 health. A bullet that does 50 damage or above will destroy the armour chunk and deal the remaining damage to the body. A bullet that does 35-49 damage breaks the armour but doesn't deal body damage.

This would allow high-damage weapons like the centrefire to instantly destroy a chunk of armour and deal body damage, while low-damage weapons like the bullpup would have to drill through the armour. Precise aiming allows you to continually deal body damage through the hole you made in the armour, whereas spraying all over the place will serve to chip slowly away at separate armour pieces. Using this system, you could potentially cover a larger portion of the zed's body with armour without making the zed even harder to kill. If you keep the armour on the top half only, you can still shoot the legs, but have a more efficient approach than is currently available for dealing damage to the top half of the rioter.

This system wouldn't really work for the helmet since it's too small to break up into separate chunks. So I propose an alternative specific to the helmet section:

• When the helmet is unbroken, it halves (for example) all incoming damage to the head.
• Once the helmet is broken, no damage modification is applied.
• The helmet would have (potentially significantly) less than 450 health, the current health value for the rioter's helmet.

This would make the helmet effective for preventing medium-damage weapons (e.g. SCAR, LAR, deagle) from decapping the rioter in one or two shots, while still allowing low-damage (e.g. bullpup, mp7, 9mm) to kill the rioter without wasting heaps of ammo, and high-damage (e.g. centrefire, railgun, magnum) to kill the rioter in one shot (as intended behaviour**).

---

I appreciate that TWI has made an attempt to justify the tankiness of elite alphas, but I believe it could be improved. I have proposed a few possible avenues of improvement in the hope that the rioter can be improved to be more interesting and satisfying to fight.

Some side notes that have been mentioned in this thread that need to be addressed:

• Zeds with metal are not vulnerable to microwave damage, contrary to the loading screen tip.
• **High-damage weapons decapping rioters without dealing armour damage is potentially a bug - it appears to be unintended behaviour, but maybe not. Using this 'feature' as an argument on either side should be avoided until we know for sure if this is intended behaviour.

 

[TheTCREngineer]

Snip

I have and always agreed that the Rioter is an ugly mess that doesn't fit in KF2, but I do enjoy him as a Zed and I do not want him to be removed entirely, which is why I disagree with this thread. If people are going to casualize the game by making the Rioter an unimportant trash zed or remove him, I won't stand for it. We already have enough ways to easily deal with him using headshots with 3-4 important perks that every HoE team should have at least 1 of, and of course it makes a satisfying sound when you blow off his head compared to blowing off his legs. Anyway, before I go through your list of points really quickly, I actually have finally realised an actual problem with the Rioter. You're supposed to counter him by having him put his back towards you right? The issue is, even if he is facing towards the other way, you CANNOT headshot him. That's something I do not want at all as it is an actual problem other than the microwave gun taking forever to kill him. TWI pls fix. Anyway, back to your points:

Rioter is uninspired: I don't doubt that, most of the new zeds are uninspired. A gorefast...but with two blades. A fleshpound boss that is much more bullet spongy than a regular fleshpound. A bloat boss that is much more bullet spongy than a regular bloat and a smaller fleshpound. That's all we have. Is it a problem that the rioter is boring? Probably. Can it be improved upon? Sure, but I don't see any proposal of improving him other than "remove his head armor" or "remove him", two things I'm against.

Visuals: Agreed from the start, he doesn't fit in visually with his armor. I complained about this in the thread where he was first shown, someone didn't understand that I don't care if he was given the armor in the horzine lab or whatever, his armor design makes no sense for a mad scientists creation. If this was an Alpha Slasher with spikes protruding all over his body, it would be much more interesting visually. Just imagine popping metal fleshy spikes.

Impractical: Agree to some extent.

Lore: Agreed from the start.

Feedback: I already know that it isn't satisfying, but for me that isn't the point as you can go behind him and bypass his armor...but of course TWI messed that up. You can't actually go behind him and headshot him in the first place, one of the actual problems with the rioter that I've noticed. If you want to do something akin to Left 4 Deads armored dudes and make it so weapon bashing spins him around and you can shoot into the back of his head to counter this, I would be fine with it.

Now, I got to say I do enjoy some of your proposed ideas and I doubt that tripwire cannot add a better armor system than the one we currently have. Here's some additional ideas proposed onto yours:

• Head armor and body armor is split into two chunks. Left face + Right face + Upper torso + Lower torso, the thing on his head is just a visual and not considered armor.
• Each armor on the head has 200 health
• Armor is vulnerable to nades/explosives, Rioter gains additional fire resistance damage.
• Destroying pieces of the armor with grenades/microwave gun sends out additional shrapnel that knocks down zeds around the Rioter
• Shooting the head directly will multiply the damage more than the standard headshot multiplier, an additional 50% ontop
• Popping the rioters head off will instantly kill him, any zeds currently boosted or sprinting within a distance of 10 meters start walking/go passive even if they are enraged

That's what I've got and I'm hoping we can come to some form of compromise that doesn't involve removing the Rioter(and buffing the microwave gun a lot more to instantly kill rioters). I'm going to go get busy now relevelling all my perks back to 25 again until TWI adds prestiage, don't feel like constantly responding after I've made my points much more clearer now

 

[oldmidget]

I feel you're still not getting the main complaint, about shooting legs being unintuitive.

Have you considered that that is the entire point of adding the zed? Maybe TWI looked at the game and thought that it was too easy because all you do is shoot headshots, and so they added this perk.

Theyve done it before with the husk, and somewhat the QP(in the sense its headhealth is so high compared to body, that many perks are better off just laying into them.)

Whati think could be a cool inbetween, is make it so that if you shoot right under the helmet int he mouth area, it goes through the armor. Im not sure how accurate TWI can get the head hitboxes, but i know the back area hitboxes are awful for the rioter.

 

[TheTCREngineer]

Wrote a lengthy response and it got flagged as spam after I edited it...I'm not going to bother waiting for it to come back so here's a repost of some bits:

Snip

I have and always agreed that the Rioter is an ugly mess that doesn't fit in KF2, but I do enjoy him as a Zed and I do not want him to be removed entirely, which is why I disagree with this thread. If people are going to casualize the game by making the Rioter an unimportant trash zed or remove him, I won't stand for it. We already have enough ways to easily deal with him using headshots with 3-4 important perks that every HoE team should have at least 1 of, and of course it makes a satisfying sound when you blow off his head compared to blowing off his legs. Just before I go through your list of points really quickly, I finally found an actual problem with the rioter other than the fact that's he resists microwave damage: You CANNOT headshot him after flanking him from the side or behind, which TWI stated you should be doing if you don't want to shoot him in the legs. I don't know what they were thinking, but this is a major design flaw. Pls fix. Anyway, back to your points:

Rioter is uninspired: I don't doubt that, most of the new zeds are uninspired. A gorefast...but with two blades. A fleshpound boss that is much more bullet spongy than a regular fleshpound. A bloat boss that is much more bullet spongy than a regular bloat and a smaller fleshpound. That's all we have. Is it a problem that the rioter is boring? Probably. Can it be improved upon? Sure, but I don't see any proposal of improving him other than "remove his head armor" or "remove him", two things I'm against.

Visuals: I already agreed on this before he was added, he doesn't fit in visually with his armor. I complained about this in the thread where he was first shown, someone didn't understand that I don't care if he was given the armor in the horzine lab or whatever, his armor design makes no sense for a mad scientist's creation. If this was an Alpha Slasher with spikes protruding all over his body, it would be much more interesting visually. Just imagine popping his metal fleshy spikes with your shotty.

Impractical: Agree to some extent.

Lore: Agree.

Feedback: Not all perks or weapons are supposed to feel great killing very zed, some are probably going to feel worse while some are going to feel awesome. I know, you guys hate shooting at the legs of this guy, but you should be using another weapon or perk to kill him. Or if you want to shoot his head more often, how about something akins to L4D2's armoured dude where you can weapon bash to spin him and then shoot him in his head? It sounds like it could work imo.

Now, I got to say I do enjoy some of your proposed ideas and I doubt that tripwire cannot add a better armor system than the one we currently have. Here's some additional ideas proposed onto yours:

• Head armor and body armor is split into two chunks. Left face + Right face + Upper torso + Lower torso, the thing on his head is just a visual and not considered armor.
• Each armor on the head has 200 health
• Armor is vulnerable to nades, Rioter resists fire and almost instantly dies to microwave gun.
• Destroying pieces of the armor with grenades/microwave gun sends out additional shrapnel that knocks down zeds around the Rioter
• Shooting the head directly will multiply the damage more than the standard headshot multiplier, an additional 50% ontop
• Popping the rioters head off will instantly kill him, any zeds currently boosted or sprinting within a distance of 10 meters start walking/go passive even if they are enraged

That's what I've got and I'm hoping we can come to some form of compromise that doesn't involve removing the Rioter. I'm going to go get busy now, don't feel like constantly responding after I've made my points clear and I have to relevel my perks back to Level 25 after resetting them again...

 

[Dr. Lethal]

I thought the core of the game was to survive and outwit the zeds using whatever means possible. I fully disagree with the notion that headshots are what define the core of this game. Saying headshots are all that matter sounds like something someone who needs to stroke their ePeen would say. Headshots exist in any FPS as a means of multiplying damage, and most of the time, enemies will have some damage resistance modifier to make it a challenge. If you're just popping heads left and right, there's no challenge and the game becomes boring. There are other ways to kill zeds besides aiming for the head. Husks have their backpack which is a bigger target than the head, and Fleshpounds have their chest core when it's not being covered. When you reach 25, you're doing so much damage with your perk weapons that a few hits to the body will be enough to kill most zeds. A few perks like the pyro, demo, and support don't even need to use headshots since their weapons often dismember or incinerate most zeds. Even Sniper and GS weapons can fell trash in one hit to the body.

I've heard complaints about the rioter being rather difficult to kill, and if he needs a small adjustment on that, then so be it. I like TCR's idea to give the armor segments their own health, which will be blown off when enough damage is dealt. It's the same formula when it comes to the Abomination. You can hardly damage his health until you get rid of his body armor. But, it's wrong to remove a zed just because it has a defense against headshots. All zeds in the game have some form of resistance, like scrakes to explosives, bloats to shotguns, gorefasts are a bit resistant to rifles, and fleshpounds to everything besides explosives. It also isn't too hard to nail something in the legs if it's walking slowly. Like TCR said earlier, you aim at the floor to kill crawlers unless they jump at your face. I've blown the legs off zeds in several instances without really aiming as a Support, and for fun, I shoot the legs as a SWAT during zed time. As a zerk, you'll often be crouching to get a better swing on crawlers, and half the time I'm killing them, I end up hacking off a couple clots and gorefiend legs in the process. Unless he starts sprinting, you shouldn't be having much trouble dispatching him. It's not like he has a ton of health to begin with.

 

[Delta69er]

One thing that I guess I didn't make clear at all in the original post and subsequent replies was that I'm not entirely against the rioter nor am I against other zeds having weaknesses. I did also mention that I dont have any current suggestions aside from removing armor, because at the time I didn't have any other suggestions. I hoped that maybe the thread would spur discussion on solutions to the issue thats in front of us. I just happen to view one of the core issues being with regards to punishing headshot and wasting ammo with this current implementation.

I still view headshots as something you should reward the player with, rather than punish. It was mentioned that the core of the game isn't headshotting but surviving, which is true, but headshotting has always played a bit part on how players actually survive; conserving ammo and faster zed take down which in turn add to survival. Every single class's optimal take down relies on headshots (with exception to FB), so I and many other players instinctively see it as a core aspect of the game. Its good having zeds with other weaknesses just in case headshots aren't possible, but having possibility always there is important.

Pharrahnox words a lot of what I was trying to communicate a bit better and brings up the most valid points raised in the thread so far. The armor is a good visual cue to explain the tankiness of the clot but at the same time it doesn't aesthetically fit with the game nor that his 'weakness' was well implemented.

His solutions to the armor issue also seem to be the most plausible; Being able to actually have some general penetration to the armor if it was damaged, which would prevent instant decaps (which I assume is what was trying to be prevented with the armor), but also allow the user to chip away at the health of the zed. I do agree the current health of the armor is way too high and even his leg health, his new 'weakness' is also a bit high. Additionally why does it take 3 Commando grenades to break his armor? These are thrown at his feat, shouldn't it just blow him up? The other suggestion of drilling away at a particular part of the armor to expose the body part would work a lot better instead of having an unusually tanky amount of hitpoints on the armor before being actually able to damage the zed.

A general rework of penetration with support as I mentioned in a previous post would also be an additional improvement to the game and with the addition of all these armored zeds.

If the devs focus was to really prevent the instant decapping as well, Im confused on why this new clot variation doesn't actually block bullets like other zeds.

 

[Dr. Lethal]

For the lore of the Rioter, I'm assuming Hans and Patty realized that the elite alpha wasn't working as well as they intended. It was basically an albino clot with the ability to rally others, and would die as quick as its lesser breatheren. Hans noted some of the mercenaries have a tendency to aim for the head. So, and I'm assuming it was Patriarch's idea; he decided, "Let's just strap some armor onto the next batch. That'll teach those fools a thing or two." They could've also pulled every other elite alpha off the field to give them an armor upgrade while upgrading those coming out of the cloning press. Sadly, this only seemed to make the elite alpha a bit less susceptible to death.

 

[taiiat]

i think this might be getting blown out of proportion. regardless of Difficulty, you'll see Rioters basically as often relative to the pile of Enemies in front of you as you do Heavies in normal Survival Waves.
that is, about one per shovel load.

unlike Heavies, since the Rioter is still classified as a Light/Medium - the Health and Armor doesn't scale. so what you're looking at is just 450+125 for Head and 500+300 for Body. though ofcourse like most Enemies, since the Head is 1.1x, shave off an effective 10% from the Head.
yes, the Enemy is pretty durable compared to anything that isn't a Heavy. i'm sure that's the point. now see, i... usually don't even bother dealing with the Rioter in a special way. more durable, sure. means it's faster to clear out the other Enemies he's buffing, than to take him out before he buffs anything. which again i'm sure is the point.
if you clear out the Trash that he's going to buff, then he's just a higher Health basic Enemy, isn't he.


on the other hand however, the Armor looking fancier like how the Scrake and Fleshpound are uh, 'modified' people - yeah sure, that would be nice.

Armor is vulnerable to nades, Rioter resists fire and almost instantly dies to microwave gun.

here's a strange thing that this made me think of - if we want the Armor to be highly weak to something like Microwave, what if Microwave would make the Armor explode on breaking (if been hit by it a sufficient amount recently), firing some fragments around? or maybe a better wording could be violently shatters and sends shrapnel out, while also applying solid Knockdown Power to nearby Enemies (like 100pts).


why? idunno it sounds cool. gives some nice potential for Enemies to not have just Weaknesses and Resistances to Damage, but also critical Weaknesses that certain types of attacks can do something extra fancy. sorta like the Husk Backpack, but limited to certain types of attacks (not all being Explosions ofcourse, just critical weaknesses).

some other spitballing on that could be things like...
Puncture Attacks could be able to temporarily disable the Scrakes' Chainsaw if they hit it enough, meaning either the Scrake does the same swings but dealing less Damage or performs different Melee for a bit.
Freezethrower/Freeze Attacks temporarily disabling Husks' Cannon by hitting it enough.
something temporarily disabling Fleshpounds from being able to Enrage by hitting it enough.

Et Cetera. i'm sure people can imagine the sorts of things here - it's like the Status Effects, except more specific rather than broad across all Enemies. instead being sorta like special 'perks' that a few Weapons in the game would be able to do that the rest cannot.

 

[missing_trigger]

I wish TWI would bring alpha clot back, and remake rioter as big zed, not as strong as others but more armored than FP and still has rally skill(with skin, different from alpha ofc)