I generally play on difficulty 6. It felt the right balance of difficulty, sample rewards, and enjoyment, for me.

I've been playing since release, so I'm a pretty high level now, and difficulty 6 was just starting to feel a bit too easy, and I was considering bumping up to level 7 as my standard difficulty.

Then this update came out, and I'm lucky to make it out of a level 6 alive! It's very teammate dependent and I find the quality of teammates has significantly degraded. That could be due to a higher percentage of school kids playing vs adults I guess, as it's the summer holidays, but it doesn't make it any less annoying.

Basically, people need to communicate more and remember it's a coop game. Ping the Bile Titans, Chargers, Impalers, there's others on the team that can help. Tagging where you're going on the map helps everyone coordinate. Microphones are not required, I use mine only when an in-game communication method isn't available or I'm being swarmed but still need to say something, probably about once every two games.

I don't enjoy the missions as much as I did before the update, and I think a lot of the blame rests on Arrowhead's shoulders but the user-base also needs to step up and learn to cooperate more in this cooperative game. Don't one-man-army a bile titan, don't ignore teammates that have found a bunker door, work together to increase your odds of survival, success, super credits, samples, and ultimately, fun.

Old man rant over