I just got this game and I have a couple questions.
1. What are the things that change most dramatically as you ascend to higher difficulties? Does the AI get smarter? Are there stronger enemies placed at more strategic locations? Stronger hordes as well I'm assuming.
2. What are the fundamentals that are important to master? I guess I don't understand what it means to be "good" at this game. From what I've seen it's all about managing blocks/parries, pushbacks, and resource management.
Enemies get more aggressive, they "track" you a bit more (have to dodge later in their attack animation in order for them to miss), more HP and damage obviously. There's more enemies overall. Composition % changes, with more enemies with shields and tougher enemies being more prevalent. Elite enemies spawning in horde attacks only happens frequently on Cataclysm, I think it very rarely happens in legend (before this any elites you see were just standing around before the horde and got roped in, but you'll never see like 12 stormvermin or 6 plague monks all suddenly charge together through the horde to fuck you up). Patrols get vastly bigger, probably a dozen or more chaos warriors or like 30 stormvermin.
Most important thing is to get a good sense of awareness, an intuitive understanding of your "space" and when something is about to flank you (there's an audio cue when something out of vision is about to attack you and if your awareness is good you'll know what direction its from and how to dodge it), along with managing enemies to ensure you can keep space to dodge in. Understanding how to keep enemies stunlocked, how to block at the last moment (really fast weapons can basically keep up their attack tempo until the final 0.2s of enemies attacking), along with how to dodge and what attacks enemies are likely to do based on where you are standing (e.g. chaos warriors are very predictable and you can "bait" certain easily dodgable attacks to basically neuter them whilst you are busy dealing with a horde or other enemies, you save the chaos warriors for last generally). Also obviously what the best places in an area to fight hordes, where specials generally spawn, and your ability to 360 noscope elites/specials like a boss with builds that have sniping ability. Lots of classes also greatly benefit from swapping to their ranged weapon in the middle of melee for various reasons (e.g. with kruber using spear and shield it isn't great at anti-armor but carrying the repeater rifle can easily take care of storm vermin, or kerillian with hagbane using it to stunlock in an AoE in between sniping elites with dual daggers).
Also, quick specials tips:
- For the assassin you can literally just circle strafe as long as your movement isn't slowed. If you want to be more pro, you can turn and try to push to stunlock him mid air. He always kneels down before leaping and this is a great chance to shoot him. Also abuse the easily predictable animations for climbing when he does them.
- For the teleports behind you dude, dodge about 2s after you hear him teleport.
- For the flamer boy its sometimes better to just leave him standing so he kills other rats. Otherwise the easiest way to deal with him if you can't just kill him is to break line of sight, he immediately interrupts shooting and then you move back into sight and can just dance back and forth. Unfortunately Ratling gunner just keeps shooting like an asshole and isn't easily abused.
