Subscribe to download
True Veteran Difficulty

True Veteran is a series of mutations that serve as a middleground difficulty between Advanced and Expert, using Expert as a base. Primarily this is the same as Expert except most of the damage numbers have been lowered to intermediary values between Expert and Advanced. This is different from Simple Veteran because that mutation uses Advanced as a base and only scales up common infected, friendly fire, and fire damage values, not special infected damage. This has been more rigorously tested and is a much more accurate reflection of a hypothetical difficulty Valve could have made to prepare players for Expert.

• Special Infected are more aggressive and their AI is improved (according to the L4D wiki). Specials, especially smokers, attack much more quickly around corners, boomers can vomit from above or suicide boom, etc.
  
• Common infected attacks deal 10 damage from the front and 5 from behind. This is consistent with the way that Valve would have made a difficulty level in between Advanced and Expert. Damage values are doubled or nearly doubled for each successive difficulty mode, and this doubles the values of Advanced, while doubling these will yield Expert values.
  
• A witch will kill you if you get hit by her swipe, but she can still be crowned (except on Realism modes).
  
• Friendly fire isn't as brutal as on Expert, but it is higher than on Advanced. This is to make friendly fire punishing but not crippling, rage-inducing, or griefer-enabling.
  
• Fire damage isn't as brutal as on Expert but it is still higher than Advanced.

Specific Damage Values:
Common Infected (Front): 10 (Easy = 1, Normal = 2, Advanced = 5, Expert = 20)
Common Infected (Behind): 5 (Easy = 1, Normal = 1, Advanced = 2, Expert = 10)
Hunter (Scratch): 30
Hunter (Pounce Attack): 12/half-second
Smoker (Scratch): 12
Smoker (Tongue Attack): 25/second
Jockey (Scratch): 12
Jockey (Ride Attack): 10/second (due to a currently unknown glitch, this will be 9/second on Survival mode only)
Charger (Scratch): 17
Charger (First Charge Impact): 17
Charger (Subsequent Ground Pounds): 15
Boomer (Scratch): 12
Spitter (Scratch): 12
Tank (Punch): 49 (Normal = 24, Advanced = 33, Expert = 100)
Tank (Rock): 49 (Normal = 24, Advanced = 33, Expert = 100)
Tank Ground Pound (on incapped survivors): 100 (on survivors' 300 temp incap health)
Tank HP: 8000 (same as Advanced and Expert).
Witch: Instant kill on hit. This is not currently changeable without Sourcemod.
Non-Headshot Damage Factor: 0.66 (this means that all non-headshots are multiplied by this number. On Normal this is 1.0, on Advanced this is 0.75, and on Expert this is 0.5)
Max common infected hit interval: 0.75 seconds (on Advanced this is 0.5, on Expert this is 1.0).

There has been some debate over whether tank punches and rock throws should be 50. I have elected to go for 49, not 50 because of the logic Valve used for tank attack values on other difficulties. On Normal, tank attacks deal 24 damage specifically so players can survive five hits from 100 HP (24 x 4 = 96). On Advanced, tank attacks deal 33 damage specifically so players can survive four hits from 100 HP (33 x 3 = 99). The same logic applies here. On True Veteran, tank attacks deal 49 damage so players can survive three hits from 100 HP (49 x 2 = 98). Regardless of the likelihood of having 100 HP and this factor actually applying (although it's very possible with pills or adrenaline), it's clear to me that this was Valve's logic when setting up the damage values of Normal and Advanced.

There shouldn't be any bugs aside from the jockey damage in Survival, but please notify me of bugs if you find any.

Console names
True Veteran (Campaign): trueveteran
True Veteran - Increased Mobs: trueveteranincreased
True Veteran - L4D1: trueveteranl4d1
True Veteran - Realism: trueveteranrealism
True Veteran - Realism L4D1: trueveteranrealisml4d1
True Veteran - Realism Lite: trueveteranrealismlite
True Veteran - Scavenge: trueveteranscavenge
True Veteran - Survival: trueveteransurvival
True Veteran - Versus: trueveteranversus