Well to be fair, Alicia, especially with the new Novera, is especially effective against mooks. If you noticed ALL I was doing was staying in the air as much as possible, removing the possibility for melee attacks. I did not want to touch the ground at all. And even then, the Hollow One shot guns would constantly stun and ground me, I would have to jump again when they reloaded. I also have the rare card for regen 100 after 3 seconds with her, so I would heal while escaping very fast.

 I grouped with you after all the losses at 45% - 50% getting dominated by mooks and chose her out of exasperation, lol. That was my first win for the day. I consider that the exception, not the rule.

I think there needs to be some improvements on the Mooks, Grunts, and Minions on the game. There are a few problems with them right now that exist that feel unfun, unfair or inconsistent.

A) Chain Melee CC: At medium to high difficulty they can chain melee you to death. When you are melee attached by a minion AI it isn't the same as when you are hit by an Elite AI. Elites follow the rules of CQC, like players do, which means that IN THE MIDDLE of being melee attacked you can roll to escape. Mooks, or the minions, are different. THEY can roll out of YOUR melee attack, but if they melee attack YOU you are damaged (of course) but also CCed (crowd controlled, effectively stunned for a second) , AND they can chain this and melee again BEFORE you can recover and you cannot roll out of it. Sometimes mooks will kick, kick, kick all while moving forward and then you die. And the whole time you can't do ANYTHING. You can at least roll out of an elite's melee. Why would mooks be STRONGER than enemy players and elites?

Suggestion to fix: Make melee attacks for minions slower so you CAN dodge after the first hit in the event that they are right up in your face, or make it so you are immune a second after the first hit so you can roll, OR you can make the CC stun effect you get when melee attacked by a mook shorter (but they chain pretty fast). I don't know which one of these solutions would be the best, some of them I can see creating other ridiculous issues, but something has to change.

B) Mook attack priority: This may be a lag or server issue but I often go to attack a mook and he instead punches me instead, even though I punched before him.

Suggestion: Simply prioritize the players attack over the mook if they're done at the same time. The raider characters are the heroes and are unique badasses and should have priority over a mook, let alone a mook not being able to cancel my punch with his.

C) Damage: Is it me or do the mooks do MORE damage than the heroes AND elites with their melee attacks? Mooks will often only have to him me twice, maybe three times on a 100 health hero to wound me, while elites and other heroes have to hit me 4 times on average. Why are mooks 2 shotting with their kicks? With mooks this tough I would imagine they wouldn't take orders from the elites.

Suggestion: Reduce the damage to the level that players follow. Or make the mooks attack much slower if you aren't going to reduce the damage.

D) Those cheap ass shotguns: In the game mooks can CC stun you with their shot guns, and at a FAR distance. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but Alicia and Lycus cannot stun, let alone chain stun, with their shot guns. I can sort of understand this at close range, but across the map a mook fires his shot fun from far away and I get staggered, stunned for a second. So Harec or an Elite's flack gun or sniper shooting me for 80 points of damage doesn't sun me, but a mook firing bird shot for 30 makes me get knocked back? This is unfun, silly and annoying. Heck, this makes me wonder why the elites aren't able to do this.

Suggestion: Keep this for close range only. It's silly to be chain stunned from 80 feet away by 2 or 3 hallow ones walking towards you. Or at least keep the far distant shot gun stuns for much higher difficulties, like 50% or higher.

Closing: Mooks, minions and grunts should never be tougher than an elite or player in terms of technical capability. They should, at the very least, be bound by the same rules the players, and in this case elites, are bound to. Currently the mooks can do things that both players and elites cannot, and it feels unfun and un-heroic to be soloed by a mook, even in higher difficulties. Mooks should be the fun thing you kill a lot of, the cannon fodder, the reason why your character is supposed to be awesome. They should't be able to chain stun, chain melee or beat your punch with theirs.

EDIT: If anyone else wants to add your two cents please do. I want to hear what ideas you could have to fix the minions/mooks/grunts.

It still seems to be present. I've noticed that the loss %, for me at least, is very high this last week. The AI mooks shouldn't rapid chain melee, especially at 35% - 45%, there's quite literally NOTHING at all you can do about it when wounded, can't shoot, dodge, nothing. Challenge is one thing, but being powerless if shot once or twice is not fun at all.

I still feel it's overtuned. I figured if the ELO system sensed enough losses it would decrease, NOPE, it's not, it DOESN'T go down, at least not at a rate that is significant or noticeable enough. The difficulty is outweighing the fun factor. You have to have a balance for some suspension of disbelief. Are these Raiders, these heroes, you're playing really awesome and competent characters? Are they unique with unique powers? If they are should common mooks kill them so easily? If so, then what makes the heroes so special? Elites are one thing, but mooks should be able to solo you, unless the difficulty is high (NOTE: What's laughable is the elites can be EASIER than the mooks at higher difficulties because they follow the rules of CQC, the mooks DON'T).

Example: You go to melee the mook, the roll, fine, then kick, kick, your down, then fire weapon, your dead. Really? on 35% -45%? It's even worse with shot guns, you keep getting staggered and are effectively CCed into lack of any movement until dead.

Is this a ploy to lengthen grind? If it is, it's not any fun. I now ONLY have fun at around 30% which is the fairest difficulty in terms of being a hero fighting weaker, but dangerous, minions with dangerous elites.

Please either tune the difficulty down OR, if not that, make the ELO a little more intelligent and drop the difficulty a little further after a lost game. Losing over and over and over again when you have absolutely NO control over the games difficulty is REALLY unfun. I'd like to add that if we could choose the difficulty we wanted none of this would be an issue in the first place.

I agree and have high hopes as well. The lore has a ton of potential to expand upon. And the characters themselves are very distinct.

Then LordDraco can beat me up on planet Earth and other Dimensions to. Where can a poor PvEer run...

I'm a gen-Xer gamer so I grew up purchasing games and owning them and playing them for years, like books, you go back and pull out a game form the shelf (Like FF Tactics, Enclave or Halo 2) and play it years later. Now I REALLY like this game so I'm wondering what the future of this game will be.

I'm not sure if anyone here has heard, Gigantic, a hero shooter 3rd person MOBA just died. Now it was a free game, but anyone who liked the game cannot go and play it. Since it's online only it's gone.

That got me thinking of other games I get that I enjoy. Evolve is dead, but I can go back and play offline campaign mode just fine, and it's a complete experience, albeit against AI, but all of your earned items are yours and you can use them. For RotBP you have nothing until you connect with Mercurysteam servers and then you have all of your earned items.

Years from now, when I go back and show friends or sit down and play some RotBP will I have all the things I earned in the game? Even if the servers are offline? I would like to think, that at the very least 3, 5 or even 10 years from now I can still play this game solo mode with all the things I earned.

I think it should be upped to 2 anyway especially since they lose their killer instincts. Maybe get an Elite with 5 Aleph

That would be so sick! An elite on Weapon of the Past shooting his flack gun into the crowds of wardog mooks. It would be too much of a headache for antags, it's basically a 5th raider who's kind of dumb and not really doing the objective.

Also, man they're regen and damage is INSANE. Although I would think this is REALLY fun, I think it's too OP.

The one with the cloud? Well the antag just moves out of the cloud. And with AI it's random and dicey if they stay in it. I used the default weapons for the consecutive CQC and the reduced damage from infected, because once you got them they were infected and couldn't do anything about it, so it worked well. And really any elite or antag that got near you and was infected was screwed. But that's just me.

And I would be ok with this IF the Novera didn't cause you to risk death over uselessness in order to set it up.

But anyways, the guys I usually roll with said they see an improvement with the new card. They were pissed when I chose Hive again, reminding me of how much the Novera sucks and why I shouldn't be using it. The last few times I did I tied over and over again. But I told them I changed some cards and wanted to try it out. After laughing that I was using them as guinea pigs they noticed improvement. So I'm recanting my criticism a little, but I think it still needs some sort of usefulness on the downtime between the set up.