Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Players Up in Arms Over 'Bulls**t' Nerfs: 'Have You Learnt Nothing From Helldivers 2?'

ign.com:

The Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 community is up in arms over sweeping nerfs made by the latest patch — so much so that some players are review bombing the game on Steam.

Update 4.0, which kicks off Space Marine 2 Season 2 with a new PvE map, Tyranid enemy, and Lethal difficulty, also changes the game balance in significant ways to make Operations mode harder.

Here’s the relevant section from the Update 4.0 patch notes:

Melee Archetypes: Fencing weapons' perfect parry window will now have the same duration as balanced weapons but it will start from the first frame of parry animation.

Melee Perks: Chainsword, Power Fist, Combat Knife charged attacks perks get significant damage increase.

Basic Auspex Scan: bonus damage on bosses is reduced by 30%.

Melta Charge: damage to bosses is reduced by 70%.

​Enemy Spawn Director PvE:

Difficulty:

It’s worth highlighting the change to fencing weapons’ perfect parry window (Space Marine 2 combat is all about well-timed perfect parries, indeed they’re essential for success on the harder PvE difficulties because they let you follow up with a high damage shot from your pistol).

Fencing weapons were by far the most popular weapon type in the game due to their more generous perfect parry window compared to the balance weapon type (block weapons can't perfect parry). But Update 4.0 limits fencing weapons' active parry frames to the first half of the parry animation (frames 1-10), whereas pre-patch it covered the entirety of the animation. This means fencing weapons now revolve around parrying at the last moment; indeed it may be the case that the developers wish for fencing weapons to lean on last moment parries.

In contrast, balance weapons parry frames 11-20, and so require players predict a parry in advance. There are trade-offs here, but the perception of this change right now is currently a negative one, given it halves the active parry frames of all fencing weapons.

Then there’s the significant nerf to the basic Auspex Scan, which