In the current game, zombies are easy to kill once you get them into a stun-lock. This presents zombies as more of a minor inconvenience rather than something you should really be worried about, or even much of a challenge. A simple whack on the noggin leaves them defenseless.
I propose that the zombies should only be stunned when players use a powered attack, or when they hit a zombie in the head from behind. This would mean that for most situations, players would need to move backwards while attacking the zombies in front of them (just like the good old days). Powered attacks could be used to thwart some zombies further back in the case of a horde, and sneaking up on zombies from behind would be better rewarded by allowing you to stun them.
Although there should be some exceptions, especially with the runners and crawlers (and possibly some other types). If the runners weren’t stunned like they are now, then it would cause each engagement to end with you losing some health almost guaranteed. And in regard to the crawlers, the hard to hit angles in addition to not being able to stun them would make these guys a nightmare to deal with (just like the good old days…). Allowing stuns on normal swings for these guys would probably be best.
I would imagine that not all players would be quite on board or ready for this, so I’d apply the change to normal, hard, and gold only (stunning could even be completely removed on hard mode if Nelson is crazy enough). But I believe that this would best address the monotonous and boring stun-locking meta that we’ve become accustomed to, whilst also opening up some new strategy in regards to how you approach zombies.
While that’s available, it doesn’t fix the problem in practicality. I’d wager that most server owners have no idea that this option exists (since there are so many), nor would many even care to try it out. If this rework was instead applied to all servers by default, and then the option to disable it was available, I believe it would be more beneficial to the game.
This also isn’t what I had intended. I’d like there to still be stunning in the instances I mentioned, because it opens up more strategy than with no stunning at all. And the blanket disabling of stunning still makes sprinters and crawlers nightmares to deal with, which just gives people more reason not to use it at all.
I think that if we could combine this with solid zombies, the game would benefit from it immensely. At the moment zombies can’t walk through themselfs, so there might be an easy way to add this mechanic to players also, even jus as an option.
I do agree with this. Zombies should be harder to stun, and would definitely make for a far more interesting fight. Couple this with the suggestion of guns doing the same damage to zombies as they do to players and you have a potentially solid rebalance to zombies as a whole, taking into account how far down the road 3.0 is.
This, plus solid zombies, plus nerfed zombie damage of guns would at least give the game’s intended enemies to be an actual threat to looting locations. I also hope the dev doesn’t go soft with the storm of complaints that would barge in the community sites afterwards
But I believe that a ‘soft rollout’ of the changes would help with that, where only 1 or 2 of these are done at a time to allow the community to get adjusted more easily. This would also allow time to patch any issues with practicality before the other mechanics are introduced.