The idea behind this project is to allow for a more or less clean HoE experience, but without the most egregious post-release BS, such as spawnrage, novel garbage zeds nobody likes, etc. It’s not supposed to be harder in any way than the vanilla HoE experience, except for solo games, which are significantly harder as these servers feature always enforce the multi-player experience, e.g. the syringe always heals just mere 20 HP (not 50 HP like in vanilla solo), medium and big zeds always do 1.5 more damage, everything as if it was a multi player game and so on. It is supposed to be just less frustrating.
* no spawnrage on FPs;
* per player maxmonsters is balanced to be more reasonable, MaxMonsters=(15,20,25,30,35,40);
* dropped weapon despawn time 60m;
* rebalanced vanilla spawn cycle in order to slightly reduce the difficulty spikes/dips and overall “normalize” the cycle with zeds being more spread out over the wave, e.g. no 10 crawlers at once, no 8 stalkers at once, the hardest squad that appears only on wave 10 is the 3FP squad;
* support starting ammo x1.67 ;
* bosses are almost vanilla, just spawn more zeds; Abom spawns higher amounts of clots and bloats; Matriarch spawns EDARs, Husks and trash, but never EDAR trappers;
* trader time 100s (to allow for weapon pickup and reaching the trader, vote to skip if not needed), there’s no remote trader or trader dash, which probably will never be introduced as they are immersion breaking, however, I’m open for discussing each and every balance change;
* no white crawler explosion;
* exactly vanilla HoE wave sizes;
* knife parry/block 50%/40%;
* kicks are pretty much unlimited (in vanilla one is limited to 2 kicks per match);
* no big zed HP downscaling with players dying: say, in a 4 players game if 3 die and don’t leave, the remaining 1 will keep getting 4p HP fleshpounds and scrakes spawned to disincentivize medics/zerks/survivalists from betraying the team, downscaling the game experience to LMS scenario and clutching easily;
* features “True Solo” experience by Macrallex, more on this:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Huwhyte/announcements/detail/3601222453346447539 ;
* “Homogeneous Fleshpounds”, which are different from vanilla in these ways:
– adjusted so they don’t miss the attacks the vanilla ones miss;
– the hits that almost never register with the vanilla FPs do indeed always register;
– homogenized attacks so they inflict roughly 68 HP damage, the combo attacks reach that number summarily, i.e. 3-punch combo each punch deals roughly 1/3 of 68 HP;
– are very unlikely to follow up immediately with calm state punches, unless the player was cornered, bumped into something or otherwise wasn’t allowed to be knocked back from the raging attack;
– if they lose LoS with their targeted enemy their timerage counter gets reset, similarly to KF1 fleshpounds (the author and the initial researcher into this was Keyes, go write a +rep on his profile), although I have implemented it differently in the end;
– however, you can’t kite them indefinitely, as there’s another unconditional 90 seconds timer, upon expiration of which AND establishing LoS with any player causes FPs to rage;
– never skip the rage animation;
– their bump damage to scrakes rages scrakes on 1 bump;
* consistent 100% reliable stuns, including crossbow stuns on scrakes;
* rioter head armor break threshold HP 125 -> 85, head armor 450 -> 250 HP, body health from 300 -> 420 HP;
* each swing of the crawler’s Atk_Lunge_V3 combo attack does damage with 0.6 factor which translates to 7 HP per swing as opposed to vanilla 12 HP per swing;
* the final blow to the head of any zed inflicts additional 37% to body HP, as opposed to 25% in vanilla;
* the sprint chance for most trash is reduced from various vanilla values from 85-100% down to 70%, the non-sprinting trash still starts sprinting if rallied by rioters;
* gorefast -> gorefiend conversion chance is 45% -> 25%;
* alpha clot -> rioter conversion chance is 35% -> 25%;
* no other differences with HoE.
I’ve developed and tested that mod long time ago (in late 2021), but hadn’t had much interest in going live with it as I’m personally not interested much in playing this difficulty as vanilla HoE is typically too slow to the point of being extremely boring and tedious. Still, I recognize that there are players out there who aren’t experienced enough to play HoE+/CD games, but don’t like the vanilla HoE for a number of reasons we’ve discussed here many times, so this mod is a present for these players.