In its current form, the respawn timer constantly increasing with every round is a terrible way to penalize players. Not only does it slow down (if not stop) gameplay, it is also extremely discouraging to get back into the fight on later rounds.
The respawn penalty affects the performance of players and affects the quality of each game, coming to the last 2 or 3 rounds, players need to band together to take on heavy enemies. This respawn causes a delay and affects how players rally and take on bosses, this creates a line up effect, where players individually attack bosses and end up dying quickly because they’re missing a diversion (and or support). A player would have been there to help but they were held back by the respawn timer. It becomes a very common scenario, I’ve noticed this myself; I would get frustrated attacking a boss on my own, I die, and during the respawn screen, I notice that only 1 or 2 players are attacking the boss. Where is everyone else? well, they’re either respawing or running to the bosses location. You end up with this constant loop of a couple players hitting a boss at any given time, thus lowering team DPS and lack of diversion/meatshields. This is horrible, because this doesn’t penalize a player for making a wrong move and not taking cover, this penalty affects the entire team’s performance, which is why warzone firefight is so difficult and losing is so frequent. A more suitable penalty would be a score reduction, just like in campaign scoring, its a personal penalty that affects a single individual, no one else. Imagine if in campaign scoring instead of losing points, you have to wait an extra 10 seconds before respawning with each death. That isn’t a suitable penalty, and the players will probably get more frustrated than think about what they did wrong.
So remove the respawn timer altogether in warzone firefight, or have it set to a flat 5 seconds across all rounds.
P.S. I would use my reqs more knowing that if I die in round 5, that I’ll have enough time to get back and pick it up, because with the current respawn timer, the weapon or vehicle would have despawned long ago on round 5.
I agree. I somewhat understand why 343 made the longer timer in later rounds… But in reality, it really doesn’t work very well.
Maybe if dying respawn times were as the following they would be in my mind better
Round 1 - 3-5 seconds (We all know how dreadful back to back round 1 and round 2 base defences are (Who needs reqs anyways, Right?)
Round 2 - 5-7 seconds
Round 3 7-9 seconds
Round 4 9-12 seconds
Round 5 12-15 seconds
My reasoning behind this (What I mean by 3-5 seconds is depending on the difficulty) being, well when you die you still may lose whatever REQ weapon you were using whilst being KiA but like you said stated LexaHex It can be rather awkward indeed being on round 5 of mythic firefight and needing to kill multiple mythic bosses seeing as shields don’t regen (unless you punch and kill something but lets be honest, no shield on that difficulty is a little hard, dontcha think?) meaning you die pretty quickly and it takes 3 bloody minutes to respawn, but at least you have your level 9 REQ’s back by time you respawn right guys? But on a serious note (Try to communicate with your team rather than 1 guy being alive trying to take on the boss while the other 7 players have varying times on respawn meaning they become the 1 guy alive trying to take on the boss when the original 1 guy dies) they would need a trade off and it would need to be executed and developed properly, Because if you’re spawning every 15 seconds rather than 45 (I think its 45?? correct me if I’m wrong) Obviously you have waaay more damage potential and just increasing the boss’ health would work but would be a pretty lame trade off indeed, as well as the same 5 minutes you have before (so be it a much better respawn rate) to deal say 50k damage to a boss, well simple math says 45 divided by 3 is 15 so just increase the bosses health by 3x well, that would make underdog stories completely extinct (although carrying in MWZFF is a hard enough task as is) meaning the 50k hp mythic warden now has 150k hp and you could still have the same 7 other teammates who dont use their REQ’s and just shoot at it with their standard loadout AR’s.
Moral of the story being you can’t simply substitute faster respawn rate with increased boss health (Me saying 50k 50,000HP and 150k *150,000HP) are completely made up numbers for the sake of my example.