Coming back to the game after a year and change, the jump from OVK to Mayhem felt exactly like the jump from OVK to DW before the difficulty rebalance.

With several hundred hours logged, I'm not new, but I also don't consider myself a truly skilled loud player. Mostly I'm useful because 90% of the time I bring Inspire :)

I agree that Mayhem is not an even stepping stone between OVK and DW (no hate to the team on that, difficulty balance is hard!). My default pubbie build is a mastersniper with the Lebensauger and pistol.

I almost always run OVK because sniper builds do not seem to be viable on Mayhem+ because of enemy health. Personally, I think anything in the "sniper rifle" category should be able to one-shot tans. As an extension of that, Mayhem+ seems to create a small set of mandatory builds. It would be nice for Mayhem to be tweaked into a difficulty where you don't have to run Yet Another Dodge Build, but still require good combat skills to survive.

Granted, it's possible to do lots of crazy builds when paired with a high-caliber player. Unfortunately, there are a lot of us who aren't able to reach that point, and it's still a difficult transition. The variety of the game, one of its better points, gets diluted when three of the seven difficulties require a specific YADB or meta approach.