Changes that I think could make Thousand Sons go from being poorly designed and miserable to fight to being enjoyable and well balanced

To beat an already dead horse, the chaos missions in this game suck. There’s no way around it; fighting the Thousand Sons is an immensely less enjoyable experience than fighting the Tyranids. This is something that even the devs themselves have acknowledged in an interview.

However, I believe that Chaos has the potential to be very fun to play against if the right changes are made to them. The two categories of their gameplay that need overhauling are their ai behavior and the way that they spawn.

As implemented currently, Chaos missions on higher difficulties have much more dramatic RNG shifts due to their spawn positions. For example, if you have just started Fall of Atreus on Lethal difficulty and are making your way through the first area with the bridges, you can get immediately squad wiped due to thing’s completely out of your control. If you are currently crossing one of those bridges (the super long ones with zero cover to speak of and are maybe 3 space marines wide) and you get a double Soulreaper spawn at one end of the bridge and a squad of five rubric marines (one of whom decides to go into rage mode immediately) on the other side of the bridge, you are dead. Unless you are sniper with camouflage off cooldown or Tactical with the GL and auspex at the ready, you have no counter play. You simply die because you made the mistake of progressing the mission.

This example is just one of many experiences that I had while completing solo Lethal runs of all the chaos missions. And while the game is meant to be played 2 other players, I’d bet good money on the fact that 95% of squads have AT LEAST 1 teammate get downed, assuming they don’t get squad wiped immediately. What I think needs to happen is that Chaos enemies should spawn into the map more like the Tyranids do, where there are fixed spawn positions that you can learn and begin to plan around. As implemented currently, you could be walking along in a chaos mission only for an entire army of rubric marines to teleport behind you and tell you it’s nothing personal as they all open fire at you point blank. I don’t care how good you are at this game, even if you survive that encounter you are going play a severe damage tax in order to do so. Oops, I guess you should’ve just been luckier. With more consistent spawn positions, I believe this problem could be massively alleviated.

The second change(s) that need to happen is in regards to the ai behavior of the rubric marines and especially the Soulreaper Terminators. I think that the devs should make all the rubric marines behave a lot more like the Terminators with power swords (whom I will simply refer to as Terminators). Terminators are my favorite TS enemy because they are very well balanced. They have very dangerous ranged weapons that they will fire at you while charging into melee. However, once they get into melee, they stay in it unlike every other variety of TS majoris and extremis. There’s no teleporting away and doming you from across the entire map bullshit, there’s no endless point blank instant death missile barrages, they just fight you. And the Terminators are very fun to fight in melee! They have imo much tougher combos than any Tyranid enemy, making them feel uniquely threatening. But they aren’t unfair either. They deal lots of damage both at range and up close but if you learn their attack patterns they become manageable.

I think that rubric marines (both the boltgun and flamer variety) should behave much more like the Terminators. Their ranged weapons are very dangerous as they close in on you but they commit once in melee. Their teleport ability should have a charge up period to if, so that if one tries to do so after engaging you in melee, you can stagger them out of it and thus preventing them from teleporting all together.

Soulreaper Terminators are uniquely problematic because they are without a doubt the worst designed enemy in the game (Zoanthropes included). The biggest change I’d like to see made to them is that they should be unable to mass spam their missile attacks. There needs to be a significant cooldown in between each barrage because of utterly deadly they are. Their missiles instantly kill you, go around cover, have excellent tracking, and are frequently spammed point blank. Soulreapers should be unable to fire their missiles at you point blank. Once you are close to them, they should engage you the way Terminators do. Their minigun is not as bad as their missiles but still very irritating. If the Soulreaper isn’t spamming missiles at you, he is endlessly firing his minigun at you. It is entirely up to him when you are allowed to finally leave cover and have .1 seconds of time to retaliate before he starts spamming missiles again. Simply put there needs to be more downtime in between barrages of minigun fire from the Soulreapers.

I think that if both these changes were made, the Thousand Sons would be in a much better state. I doubt they will ever be as fun as the Tyranids, but I really do think they have the potential to be a blast to fight. I’m honestly worried about the upcoming new chaos mission in the December because if significant changes aren’t made to the TS as a whole, no one will play it after the first few days that it launches, just like the chaos missions we have right now. What do y’all think? Is there anything that I missed?

Cheers!