Aside from the obvious mechanics that are just not fun to deal with (like preraged Fleshpounds and wacky Zed spawn/teleporting mechanics), the big thing I'd look at is the Game Conductor, or whatever the automatic difficulty scaling is called. Actually, random difficulty scaling in general.
In a game where there's already 4 separate difficulties with their own tweaked numbers and Zed movesets, does there really need to be another layer of quasi-randomized ever-changing variables based on how good everyone kills the floor? Is that not adding too much variation where it doesn't really need to be added?
I know Left 4 Dead does the thing with the spawn pools and items, but it doesn't have stuff like zombies randomly going Mach 3 because one guy on your team shot all the zombies in the face and God decided he wasn't too fond of that. Or slowing all the zombies down and dropping the game's difficulty because your team's weak link ran off and died.
And drop-in/drop-out and death scaling probably also needs to be looked at. I can understand dropping the game's curve down a notch because someone had to drop out on account of their smoke alarm going off, but does that really need to apply on player death? Maybe just have it as an explicitly mentioned mechanic on lower difficulties but not the higher ones to make sure the hard difficulty really is hard?
-Have fewer bosses, but making them less predictable and more compelling to fight. We don't need to have 10+ bosses into the game, but the ones we got should be both challenging and enjoyable. NOBODY love bullet sponges. Absolutely nobody, and I don't get why it is still a thing in 2021. Having a boss that's less of a tank and more of a cunning bastard would be better.
Agreed. On top of that, there should be a notifier on
what boss you're dealing with when the time comes.
Not letting players know what boss is coming means that most players will choose the safest option to win, because getting to the boss wave and wiping
ssssssssssssucks. Problem is, some perks are just flat out good to have against all bosses (Medic, Berserker, Demolitionist, Support), some are situationally strong (Commando, Gunslinger, Firebug, arguably Sharpshooter) and some are just bad period (SWAT, Survivalist). But leaving it entirely to random chance means that the situational perks get left on the sideline unless the dice roll is in your favor.
It feels really bad to pick something that does poorly against the boss because, well, it's out of the player's hands if they wind up with Commando against Hans. Is it such a crime to let them at least prepare rather than pick Zerk/Med/Demo/Demo/Demo/Firebug (because Matriarch/Hans)?
Something I would like is:
No more "head health" vs "body health".
The only thing this mechanic does is create a huge rift between precision perks/weapons and chaos perks/weapons. The enemies should just have ONE healthbar, and if shooting the weakspots with precision weapons, it should simply deal more damage.
Standard risk/reward in FPS design: harder target = more mechanical skill and knowledge involved = greater reward. It's there to provide an even greater incentive to learn headshotting (hitting smaller, tougher targets) because it provides a faster, cleaner way to take down Zeds rather than just throwing damage at the Zed until it dies. With body-damage perks, you don't risk the all-or-nothing nature of headshots (where missing is bad), but you aren't rewarded with effecient takedowns (for the most part).
This doesn't even necessarily apply to opposite perks, this can even apply to different weapons on the same perk. Note that the Demo's weapons can be versatile with both explosions and dud hits, which are under the player's control. Rather than spamming rockets at a Scrake's torso, you can just dome him with one or two well-placed hits involving the RPG. No mess, minimal fuss. Much nicer than throwing rockets until he dies, and while it's not
much harder than just throwing bodyshot rockets at the Scrake, you've rewarded the player for accuracy (Scrake dies faster, he doesn't rage and tear you or your buddies apart)!
Removing that would indeed remove some of the negative synergy, but at the cost of removing one of the series' main balancing factors and tremendously blurring the lines between perks. This, by the way, is the worst feature about Quarter Pounds; their disproportionate body/head health ratio reduces any nuance to "magdump it and shoot it until it dies because headshots don't really help."
This balancing factor was a holdover from KF1, where the body/head health difference was even more severe since the Zeds weren't as fast. As an extreme example from that game, a Gorefast can be decapitated from one Winchester shot but can survive an M99 round to the torso.
That's not the only problematic issue when it comes to chaos perks vs precision perks (see: DoT-related panic, stumbles from outside sources throwing off tracking, particle effect LOS obstruction, Zerk aggro pulls), but it is
a factor. Even without the split health bars, though, you'd still have all of the previously mentioned issues that would make life hard for precision perks in standard pub games; you're just punishing precision perks less for screwing up but also rewarding them less for succeeding. So it would only be a band-aid, not a fix.
Headshots actually doing more damage feels like a distant memory. I'd like to think that KF2's balancing would've been much less of a clusterf#@* if weapons also played a part in the amount of damage headshots did (IIRC, headshots only dealt more damage if you were a Sharpshooter via passive headshot bonus, or a Berserker with Smash).
Rack 'em Up, too (rewards consistency and aim), but even with that aside, I'm not certain I understand where you're coming from with this. Even if a weapon or perk doesn't specifically do more damage on a headshot, you're just fighting against a smaller health pool with headshots, which in the end is more effective damage regardless.