Editing Difficulty (section)

==[[File:HellonEarth.png|16px]] Hell on Earth ==
The Hell on Earth difficulty level was added in the 2010 Christmas Update. Like the old Suicidal (Suicidal decreased in difficulty during the update), in relation to Normal difficulty, specimens have 75% more health, inflict 75% more damage, move 30% faster. Players spawn with £100, lose 30% of their income on death and have 35% less income from kills and wave survival. Random weapon spawns are rare to come by now so scavenging may take a long time to gain any profits off from it. Ammo boxes are rare too and only have 14% chance to replenish [[grenade]]s and [[pipe bomb]]s. Last man standing or more than two-three casualty sceneries have to be planned through by changing perk to low upkeep equipment for respawn. Not only money sharing is now important as waves progress but managing trader time at late waves is crucial for team's positioning and mismanaging the time will impact their decision on hold spots. 

Patriarch is a deadly force with higher health, damage, faster attack animations and speed. His melee damage reaches the point of killing any player with about half armor in one swing. While capable of killing any non-kevlar wearing Berserker under level 5, he also can break a full kevlar in one simple hit besides Medic's improved kevlar. Big specimen requires team orientated approaches for trash clearing, proper aggro taking and sometimes crowd control if something breaches in. Besides reload management and recoil control, high accuracy is encouraged to get rid of high threats quickly before they create a mayhem to pillow smaller specimen behind. Ranged threats are unbearingly quick and accurate, causing squad to prioritize them before heading in for a killing blow to the bigger specimen. All middle threat specimen will try to evade shots, shuffle back and steer to use other specimen as a meat shield or scatter attention for a combinated attack from bigger threats.

Increased specimen health makes it pretty common to get in heated close contact with big specimen before dispatching them. This giving specimen an edge while smaller specimen will become dangerous by movement speed bonuses. Low threat specimen will position themselves to block your shots and overwhelm you if you were to fail to dispatch bigger targets right away. With their randomized movement speed bonuses compared to each other, they can create meat shields infront of higher threats like a hivemind. Small specimen can be seen circling the squad members more often to block their evacuation and cross flank them. Clots tend to patrol right behind corners, abusing blind spots, waiting to flank while loner players are busy with ranged or bigger threats. Small framed specimen may spawn anywhere deemed as out of player sightline given the right conditions. Spawn rates become tighter and stronger specimen will fill the roster quickly on mass killing to flush players out of position by flanks on choke points.

Additional modifications were made to make the game harder:
* Removing the ability to break free of a Clot's hold by jumping
* Increasing Fleshpound [[crossbow]] headshot resistance from 50% to 65%
* Doubling Fleshpound rage duration
* Increasing Scrake [[Crossbow]] headshot resistance to 50%
* Scrake now enrage at 75% of maximum health instead of 50%
* Scrake now have a brief inner cooldown for melee flinches
* Removing [[combat armour]] from the set of items with which a Level 6 [[Berserker]] can spawn
* Nullifying 5% maximum movement speed bonus of [[Field Medic]]
* Reducing [[9mm tactical pistol|9mm]] headshot bonus for [[Sharpshooter]]s from 140% to 40%

Note that most servers at this difficulty can choose to filter out players lower than level 5 or level 6 perks. For a veteran player it's possible to stay alive by your own terms as a lvl3-4 perk in this difficulty when you stick to the right equipment but besides insufficient discounts, you'll also be very reliant on other players sweeping the trash for you when you decide to step forward.
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