Before I go on a rant about the complaints or issues people have about bringing other Horde only characters to Escape… I thought TC intended Horde Frenzy to be the fastest way of character leveling, regardless of whether there’s an XP boost or not. Why not give that a try? Now on to the main thing…
The only one I see a real issue with is Fahz, since he can wipe out practically any enemy with little issue(as long as they have spawned in) while he has X-Ray and ammo available. Cloak doesn’t magically make Scions, Wardens, Bastions and Stumps disappear and would only need some consideration for it having potential to skip encounters outside a saferoom or at the exit, but then you’d have to consider the fact that there isn’t just Kait on the team. Ideally you wouldn’t want your Keegan and other guy to die and lose whatever explosive weapons you had. Besides that, I’m pretty sure you couldn’t just bypass a large enemy spawn by using Cloak due to the way the game makes enemies spawn in Escape, eg they come out of a spawner when entering a certain tile. They’ll almost certainly go after you when coming out of Cloak, so what did you achieve with it?
If anything, I’d have more considerations towards the damage that Kait can potentially deal, even after the whole “fix” of her shotgun bleed thing.
But I don’t see why people are so overly concerned with the game breaking aspect of this all. Why do ultimates exist? To make otherwise difficult encounters easier or possible. Players already do this with Lizzie, Mac, Lahni, hell Keegan just wipes entire rooms clear with his explosives since he can afford to do it easily with venom Resupply for them. And it still requires a certain amount of player skill. I don’t see how any of those besides Fahz would allow players to just stumble through hives with no clue of what to do and succeed regardless of character. And then the Fahz player would still have to be competent to achieve results. And relies on precision weapons. I can already easily carry players through Insane, Incon and certain Master hives by playing Lahni. And her Electroblade can render her temporarily invincible to all types of damage with the right build. What difference does it make if I did that as Kait?
Now, Jack… his heal would be the only issue I see. He wouldn’t be able to flick switches if TC didn’t implement it for him. The healing beam providing infinite health regeneration and revives even through walls would need looking at.
Besides… the option to play without them in Custom is always available. But TC wants their precious “balance” anyway, judging by Twitter posts from Octus on the state of bringing other Horde only characters to Escape. So don’t worry about it too much… I’d actually be more worried about TC pulling the trigger on the “balancing” too much and making the character bad for Escape.
But I really don’t understand the whole “game breaking” concern of people, players can now already make Master hives be relatively easy if they’re good enough, with the right characters. Heck, I’ve soloed Incon and Master hives on certain maps with Lahni, without major complications. But people are concerned with how some other characters who would not even be that easy to make work could potentially be game breaking? Please illustrate me, because I’m not really seeing it.
All that aside… Del’s ult is pretty pointless besides being a short lived distraction. Wouldn’t change if he got into Escape, Baird’s DR-1 is infinitely better than two rolling, exploding balls.