In hindsight, I could've worded my post a little more clearly.
My implication was that the head health/decap mechanics have been a thing for two games thus far, clearly put in via developer intention. The decap mechanics are there as a second form of risk/reward: you have to play more difficult perks/weapons to take advantage of that mechanic, but doing so lets you delete Zeds faster than perks/weapons which can't headshot.
Removing that mechanic for all Zeds (instead of just bosses) is removing a key balancing factor among the perks. Or to put it another way: other than just for giggles, why would one bother playing Sharpshooter vs Demolitionist without this mechanic? You'd have to
really incentivize playing the precision perks with this type of setup, like Sharpshooter doing 4x the total health damage per shot compared to Demolitionist to compensate for having to aim.
Obviously this is all an educated guess without Kittenmittens, Yoshiro, or someone else from the dev team coming in to confirm that, but it seems a reasonable inference.
Aside from damagetype dissynergies - you also NEED to do nigh perfect continuous headshots to make that bonus even count (since you need to decap the head for it to matter in the first place).
Not necessarily. Perks like Sharpshooter have 1-shot builds that remove the need for basically anything other than a couple of preparatory headshots for the sake of building Rack 'em Up stacks.
Even perks like Commando are forgiving enough past the first few waves once you start getting better weapons, where some of the nastiest trash Zeds can just die outright to one bodyshot from the AK.
Playing something like M14 Sharp is a different story, but given that M14 Sharp is probably the most demanding perk to reliably perform well with (just like in KF1), it's basically a self-imposed challenge.
Actually the hardest one is Support but that's because I'm bad at it because I'm allergic to non-hitscan shotguns but let's just ignore that
That's a huge skill-floor issue KF2 has, which makes it very unwelcoming and "elitist" by nature of its own designs.
Killing Floor 1 had the same thing going on and it was considered a feature rather than a bug.
Regardless, I would argue that's a case of skill ceiling rather than skill floor. This game's skill floor with regards to just killing Zeds is pretty undemanding, considering the chaos perks are basically the game's skill floor in a nutshell, and even the precision perks have received weapons that promote not aiming at the cost of hurting their skill ceiling/potential (here I side-eye the Beluga Beat). You absolutely don't have to play headshot perks to win, but the option is there for those that want to reap the benefits of the appropriate perks.
In fact, I'd say the game has basically a reverse issue where the chaos perks are strong enough at their roles (and then some) to the point where it almost disincentivizes learning to play the precision perks. Some of this can be blamed on certain mechanics (Zed spawning in its entirety; some official maps are just literally squares with spawn points that dump Zeds right on top of the players ,etc.), but if anything, the game's playerbase has leaned more towards chaos perks over time. Just look at the Steam forums and even the suggestions on this forum insinuating that Sharpshooter is one of the weakest perks in the game (a viewpoint which I
completely disagree with).
And honestly, TWI is definitely partially to blame for this, but that's a whole other story which I could easily make a long-winded thread. In fact, I just might; it would probably make for a good discussion on its own accord.
Mostly I was talking about the "balancing being a fustercluck" thing you mentioned from your previous post. What part of the game's balancing do you take issues with?
Not that I don't have issues with it but I want to hear other perspectives.
EDIT: I left out the other suggestion from this thread I was going to comment on: I like the seasonal events and I'm perfectly OK with them. HOWEVER--rather than mandating the Zed skins for everyone, I would suggest making the universal holiday Zeds client-side toggle options, except for the relevant stages that would have guaranteed skins. Also, please bring back the Hillbilly skins from KF1 and call it either "Killbilly" or "Psychobilly" because Dad jokes.
This would include stuff like removing the sword-swallower hitboxes because I don't like that as a rule for consistency's sake. Cool programming and it shows how far TWI was able to take this game's engine with regards to hitbox accuracy but
god having shots blocked is irritating.