Can we get rid of +20% health and +33% curse resistance already?

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
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I’ve been playing with friends that are new to the game from the Steam sale and Humble Bundle sale, and it’s weird having to explain Curse Resistance and the extra health as almost mandatory. It’s questionable why new players who are learning have significantly lower health than someone with good gear. It’s ironic that the players who need +20% health and +33% curse resistance are the ones who don’t have it. The game gets a lot easier when you’re taken out of one-shot range on higher difficulties, if you haven’t gotten dodging/blocking down. But, once you “git gud”, you should be comfy without the extra effective health. Even so, I always still take both unless I’m doing some niche build.

Both of these really make me wonder why they’re even in the game. They’re vastly superior to the other properties on Necklaces and Trinkets, except for niche circumstances on curse resistance with some tanks and Zealot. They’re almost as unbalanced as Swift Slaying is as a trait.

Can we just get rid of the +20% health and tweak down the damage accordingly?

Can we just get rid of curse resistance and tweak down the grimoire damage? Heck, maybe even make it vary by difficulty, instead of just praying to Ranald to give you a red trinket when you’re starting out.

  • Recruit = Grim damage as if you had 50% Curse Resistance

  • Veteran, Champion, Legend = Grim damage as if you had 33% Curse Resistance

  • Cataclysm = Grim damage as if you had 0-15% Curse Resistance, assuming Cataclysm damage = Legend damage

I feel like basically the entire loot and crafting system along with the stupid concept of hero power needs to be thrown in a dumpster, but these two properties in particular seem to be the most stupid and objectively better, even compared to Swift Slaying + Attack Speed + Crit Chance.

I could write a whole essay about how they should rework and scrap the item system in the base game, but I don’t really want to because it’s not worth the effort, like with the Bogenhafen and Twitch posts I made.

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Sorry for my defeatist and kinda dickhead tone in this post compared to the Twitch and Bogenhafen posts. I’m going to write the small essay rant anyway. I’ll say my callous tone is because I didn’t have my coffee yet, but it’s probably actually more because I’ve lost all hope after having to explain the concept of “Curse Resistance” for like the 7th time in one day to friends.

Oh well actually the reason why you keep getting one-shot by everything is because you don’t have any temporary health like me to keep your health up and occasionally trade hits with enemies if you make a small mistake and get poked in the butt by a slave rat with a slightly sharpened stick. Also, I have a red trinket on, so I have 70% of my health with two grimoires instead of 40% of my health. Also, I have 20% more base health on top of that because I have a red necklace. You should spend 15-20 minutes rerolling your highest power orange trinket and necklace to hopefully eventually get at least 25% curse resistance and 18% health… oh, well, actually it doesn’t matter at all because you’re going to immediately scrap all your garbage gear that isn’t 300 power as you work your way up the levels, since you need a higher hero power to deal damage or even access the higher difficulties with me. Oh you got a really cool looking orange sword? That’s cute, it’s actually trash, I don’t care if you got an achievement when you unlocked it, throw it in the garbage as soon as you get something with 1 more hero power.

Here’s a slightly off-topic but hero power related question:

Do any of you remember your first orange item in Vermintide 2?

I sure as hell don’t, because it was probably some garbage necklace or charm that got scrapped no more than an hour later as I earned something with a higher hero power. I unlocked that achievement on March 17, 2018 at 8:10pm, and that thing was probably out of my inventory no less than an hour later most likely. I have no idea. I don’t even remember my first red in Vermintide 2. I think maybe it was a trinket or necklace and I went “oh sweet, I don’t have to spend half an hour rerolling +33% curse resistance or +20% health on this”.

And don’t get me started on the loot box system severing the connection between the level and the loot. It’s cool because it lets you open stuff on other classes and get loot for whatever class you want, sure, but you don’t make that connection “oh that cool weapon dropped after I beat Halescourge for the first time on Champion”. You just kinda forget where it comes from and mass stack up your loot boxes to open them all at once. Or you’re like many players and you just don’t open them anymore because you have everything except the hats, which only come from Commendation chests.

Follow up question for the old-school players:

Do any of you remember your first orange item in Vermintide 1?

I do. There’s an achievement for that too. I joined a little late to the V1 party, so I only experienced the game later on in its life when my friends and I bought it on sale and all the DLC. May 12, 2017 at 11:25pm is when it says I got it. I remember my first orange being Ursula, Kruber’s repeater handgun. I remember that being ridiculously fun to gun down a Rat Ogre with Haste, which was rightfully nerfed later on. I remember my first red was Saltzpyre’s Repeater Pistol, Perfect Storm. I made my friends jealous even though I was salty (hehe salty) that one of my friends got an orange Volley Crossbow on one of his first runs through Drachenfels on Nightmare, while I still had yet to try out even a green or blue one. I remember crafting a little narrative behind how I got some cool weapons, like, “Oh yeah, this Executioner Sword dropped on the first time I beat Krench on Cataclysm, pretty cool right?”

Loot doesn’t feel special in this game, I think, because hero power has made a lot of that specialness go away to the point that nothing you do matters in this game until you reach level 30 and you get that 600 power. It’s one of those dumb games where “the real game doesn’t start until some arbitrary level down the road, then everything changes”. Which, it does: once you get +20% health, +33% curse resistance, and some form of temporary health regeneration… the game instantly changes from a fight for your life to survive a single hit from a slave rat to hacking and slashing your way through hordes on Champion or above. At least temp health is finally getting shifted down to level 5 after over a year and a half of this game having one of its core mechanics come in to play at level 20. Maybe dumb people won’t instantly kick low level players in Champion and Legend anymore.

TL;DR - i think loot is doo doo in Vermintide 2, but the +20% health and +33% curse resistance are both extra smelly doo doo in the loot system.

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Getting rid if the two Properties isn’t what I’d go for, but I agree that they do need to be toned down to the level of effectiveness of other Properties. While CR kind of gets optional at higher skill level (though it still gives a significant additional safety margin) and certain builds, there really isn’t much to say for Extra Health’s defense. It’s always effective unlike its competitors, and more effective to boot. There really isn’t a good reason to use anything else.

Some of the balancing (for Health especially) could be done by toning the other options (namely, the DR vs. Properties) up, but I’m not sure whether that’d be a good choice. CR on the other hand needs other changes to accompany changes to it, unless FS wants to also change the roles of Grimoires somewhat (from picked-up-by-default to really negotiable resources).

I remember neither. I could check the achievements, but that’d accomplish nothing.

In VT1, it’s still likely there waiting for use, though undoubtedly changed by a lot from its initial setup. Depending on what it was, it still could be that it has been superseded by the red version or another weapon (or trinket) completely.

In VT2, it’s certain that I’ve trashed it already - I do remember that I found it when I was still raising my Power, maybe in the 150-range. I did use it for quite a while, though - the upgrading of a single item’s Power needs to be pretty significant to be worth trading away a Trait. Remember, your Item Power comes from the average of your equipped items, so one item only accounts for one fifth of its actual Power difference.

I don’t remember my first Red in either game either. In VT1, it was a couple of years ago - I vaguely remember the joy, but not what the item was or which map (or Quest) I got it from. In VT2, I remember a similar joy that faded down far sooner than in VT1, because the Reds weren’t (and aren’t) really that significant of an upgrade and don’t even feel different from their Orange counterparts (in VT1, they weren’t usually a huge upgrade either, but they were mostly different).

I do have gripes with the loot system too, but they’re different and not as serious as yours, it seems. I attribute a lot to balance (also in loot probabilities, though not rarity-wise) and the very crappy craft system.

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The item affixes and traits really needed to be looked at and I’m surprised the Expansion didn’t touch on this issue at all. We still have imbalanced affixes/traits and complete garbage ones as well that are never picked.

I guess we have the devs to thank for being sticklers when it comes to fixing obvious issues (crafting system as well) as opposed to them galivanting off to change things that didn’t need to be changed such as redoing the entire skill talent tree.

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Problem is there isn’t anything that great to compete with them (at least nothing you would want to use up their slot for), and like @scottz0rz said, they’re basically compulsory for newer players who are exactly the ones who won’t necessarily have them.

Good players anyway still make mistakes or have lapses of concentration and the increased HP helps compensate for those moments, hence I always take those two properties even if I often don’t need all the extra HP.

I’d rather have them worked into the baseline and have an array of interesting choices to pick from.

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Health certainly doesn’t have worthwhile competition. CR would have several good options (though not all seem so at first glance, and thus don’t get even tested out - Revive speed is pretty nice occasionally, but as it competes not only with CR but Crit Chance, Movement Speed and others it really doesn’t get picked). I’d love for CR to be (or rather, feel) less compulsory to get some actual options for my Trinkets - and even then, Crit Chance and Movement Speed would likely dominate them, but at least I’d be effectively able to to choose two instead of one.

No matter how you view it, though, the end result is the same - the two Properties are way too useful compared to their alternatives and thus reduce the effective options available.

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I agree… in part. Curse res is totally stupid, but play Cata without +20% health and with only 0-15% curse res would be too hard and frustrating.

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To me, the idea of just tuning up the other talents just tries to sweep the issue under the rug as opposed to addressing the issue directly. I’d say conservatively that 90% of the players on higher difficulties are using +20% health and +33% curse resistance, and that’s what it seems the game is balanced around right now.

Curse Resistance as a whole is kinda stupid, since it really only applies to if you’re doing full books runs or if you’re playing Hysh weaves. I think having the curse scale by difficulty and affect everyone equally would make it a lot more interesting as opposed to just absolutely tanking a low-level player’s health because they didn’t bother to spend 10 minutes to reroll Curse Resistance on a trinket.

And that was my overall point. If it’s been 3-4 years, I wouldn’t expect you to remember it, but I can at least expect that you would still have it. It means something, if at least a little. I can’t even say Reds in Vermintide 2 are as special as Oranges in Vermintide 1, since I’ve probably scrapped more red dupes in V2 than I ever even received in oranges in V1.

But, you can still recall that moment a little bit, even if it’s faded from your memory. You can kinda piece together your individual player narrative and I’m sure you probably could tell me something more if I asked when the game was more fresh in your mind. With loot boxes and mass-opening them in the keep, a lot of that narrative disappears from the loot screen where you remember “oh yeah that Volley Crossbow dropped on my first Cata run of the Dungeons” or something to that effect. Right now, it’s just “Ranald please hurry up and fill the bar so I can go back to the keep and get on with my life”.

And I think the biggest issue is that since greens and blues don’t have traits like oranges and reds do, so the loot system has completely shifted to “anything not orange is crap automatically” and “anything not 300 power is also crap”.

I used blue weapons and trinkets all the time on Nightmare and Cataclysm until I finally rolled some good traits on orange stuff to replace them. The difference between a blue and an orange wasn’t as significant in V1 as it is in V2. A difference between a blue and an orange can be killing everything 20% faster, having infinite ammo, having health regen, or duping items so you can throw 5 bombs at a boss. It’s ridiculous how big of a jump it is.

I feel like whites, greens, and blues could totally still have the ability to slot traits and properties like higher tier weapons, maybe just reduce the number that they can have to maintain that hierarchy.

Like, if we went to a Weave system based on mastery where you just pick the traits and properties:

  • Oranges/Reds = 300 mastery points and 10 slots

  • Blues = 250 mastery points and 8 slots

  • Greens = 200 mastery points and 6 slots

  • Whites = 150 mastery points and 5 slots

So you can still roll Swift Slaying on a lower tier weapon, but maybe you can’t get Swift Slaying + 5% Attack Speed + 5% Crit Chance. Blues shouldn’t just be completely useless fodder for rerolling crit chance on your oranges.

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I mean, it is the highest difficulty, I think I’d be alright with it being hard.

Even then, I think it’d still need a balance pass to tune enemy damage if we’re removing +20% health from the baseline. All difficulties across the board should have their damage reduced by 15-20% to compensate for the lack of +20% health standard.

Cataclysm and Legend damage should be comparable, if not the same. Having your health be so low on Cataclysm should make you think before you pick up that second Grimoire. I’d be perfectly fine seeing teams weigh the pros and cons of taking another book, instead of just having every quickplayer automatically dash away on their own to grab a grimoire.

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I don’t agree, they should be hard as they are… not more. Legend is both hard but also a difficulty meant to let skilled players to farm. (in fact in QP I see a lot of players that can’t handle it). And Cataclysm… well, I think is already too hard (or better, unfair for some things, like Banner Guys).

I guess we have just different opinions… but -50% health is just too much.

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I’m assuming that the final difficulty balance of Cataclysm is not finalized. Wargors were terribly overpowered and we haven’t even seen what Minotaurs are like.

Point being, taking 1 grimoire or no grimoires on Cataclysm give better loot than Legend full book runs. Same with partial book runs on Legend versus full book on Champion. Doing a full book run on Cataclysm should be hard, and I think I’d prefer them to make grims more dangerous on Cataclysm while enemy damage is more in line with Legend, rather than just making Cata enemies deal even more damage than Legend enemies.

I think if you can farm Legend, you should still have to work a little to get through Cataclysm. It’s not intended to be part of the regular difficulty progression. If you’re doing Cataclysm runs, it should be a major consideration to pick up a grimoire or a tome, not an afterthought like pub legend.

You’re also forgetting that if we added the 20% health and 33% resistance by default, you’d have extra property slots to take stamina regeneration, movement speed, or damage resistance, or block cost to make things easier. It opens up variety in builds, if we just rescale the damage based off not having these two crutch properties.

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I would like to take this opportunity to say that I never use curse resistance. It’s just a waste of a slot. I always feel like the odd one out without it, as 95.98% of players use curse resistance - it’s a fact!

I’m not “good” at this game, I just don’t rely on THP farming like most people do. I fully support the notion to remove curse resistance.

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I wouldn’t say it’s that much tbh, more like 50% based on my observations. Of course it depends on one’s build, skill and personal preference, but running without CR is not as uncommon as some may think.
But who cares really. FS should be adding more interesting traits which would encourage more varied/interesting (maybe difficult) choices based on what the player/their team will need, not removing them.

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Honestly it seems to me just an unmotivated complication… and the game has already a lot of problems.

We agree about curse res property, it is totally wrong because too mandatory… but I would just remove it and I would give a passive 20-25% res.

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I mean, having a lot of extra health and being taken out of one-shot range when you get hit by random attacks that are inevitable with this game’s crap netcode isn’t a “waste of a slot” to me. It removes the pressure of playing perfectly by assuming that either you’re going to make a mistake by missing a dodge/block or you’re going to make the mistake of daring to play this game with more than 50 ping.

So, yeah, having a health buffer to protect you from netcode is definitely not a waste of a slot, for me at least. Sometimes you just want to join a quickplay game to get a few quick runs in, not being able to control everything as a host. This point kinda becomes invalid when they fix their netcode, which, y’know… I’m sure that fix is underway soon haha.

Are you arguing that they should add more stuff that’s on par with +20% health and +33% curse resistance? Sure, that’s a great approach too, but I truly don’t realistically see that happening soon. I’d love to be proven wrong and see that Fatshark has large sweeping trait and property reworks planned or underway after WoM gets released.

Sometimes removing something and seeing what people gravitate towards afterwards is enough. Even if they just buffed other properties and added new ones, many people probably wouldn’t budge from their current setups because they can’t be assed to reroll necklaces and trinkets again.

Many games take this subtractive approach where they notice a mechanic or skill is being used a lot, so they try and just incorporate it by default instead of just nerfing it or buffing other things. It gives a small buff to players where they have that extra freedom and it also increases loadout diversity, just by removing something. I’m reminded of the skill “Transporter” in Payday 2 that everyone picked because it was useful for moving bags (basically 90% of the game). They just gave everyone that bonus by default because it sped up the game to take the skill, then they reworked the skill to be something else, giving players another 3 or 6 talent points to play with. I wonder if a buff like this where we just scrap the health bonus and curse resistance would make the game more approachable. As they are right now, they’re basically just gates to prevent new players from doing full book runs comfortably because they get one shot by things.

They could even just take an approach like in Winds of Magic’s Weave crafting where things cost variable amounts with crafting. Taking +20% health, +5% crit chance, or +33% curse resistance all cost 150 mastery and 5 total slots (the cost was 10 + 20 + 30 + 40 + 50).

Meanwhile, 5% movement speed only cost 1 slot and 50 mastery. Taking that approach for a lot of the crappier properties and traits would also be an interesting way to tackle the problem. Maybe stuff like Respawn Speed, Reduced Damage from AoE, or Power vs Berserkers could be fixed by just simply costing less to add to a weapon as opposed to their more useful counterparts.

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Well… the chance of FS adding new traits that would reduce this… “cookie cutting” the game currently suffers from is probably as high as changing the health/CR issue you are talking about. But I really think that adding more viable trait choices is more important than changing the current ones. There is, however, no reason why they could not do both if they see fit.

I highly doubt that we’re gonna see any change of the property/trait system in WoM, but maybe in the future… if they are willing that is.

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I just noticed (or remembered, as it has come up before) an additional problem in completely removing Traits and Properties from the game. Namely, what will happen to the items with that ability on it?

It could be replaced with another, random one, which would cause people to reroll the items and thus massive frustration and stress on FS’s backend servers. It could be replaced with a certain other Trait or Property - which would result pretty much in the same thing, though likely in slightly smaller amount, but would also be kind of weird and possibly equal to just changing the attribute to another. The items in question could be forcibly rerolled completely, which would cause even more frustration and server stress, and a huge backlash to boot. Or the items could be just destroyed, which would save the servers but cause an incredible amount of backlash (and if something else was given as a replacement, that would effectively be the forced reroll). Or the items could be left as is, which would make the whole removal pointless and merely cause people to not reroll those items ever, leading to large advantages (and inventory clutter) for older players. There’s actually a precedent for the latter course; see the changes to “Power vs. [race]” on Charms soon after the game’s release.

So pretty much no matter how it’s handled, the attempt would be somehow doomed anyway. From that practical standpoint too, I’d say changing those Properties, either to just nerf them or to change them to something else completely, would be the correct course of action.

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Or… change the way the trait re-roll system works, from RNG button smash to direct selection :smiley:

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I’d say that’s another issue, and isn’t (directly) related to the one discussed here. A larger rework of the whole system could help solving the problem, though.

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If +20% health and +33% curse resistance were removed from the game by being incorporated as part of the baseline, I could see several courses of action:

  1. Replace them with a specific, new property to replace them in a data migration.

  2. Replace them with a random existing property for each item.

Either way, with my idea of just incorporating the health and curse resistance as part of the new baseline, regardless of whatever new property replaces them on the Necklace and Trinket, the player should be better off than they were before. They should have a brand new property that they previously didn’t and the effects of the old property are just part of the base game now.

It’s almost like the reroll system where someone will do dozens of calls per minute to the crafting server just to try and get a different property or trait on their item is a really poorly thought-out system, instead of just letting people select exactly what combination of things they want and then clicking a “save/craft” button.

It’s a terrible system and if they’re going back to rework traits and properties, they might as well go back and add the Winds of Magic crafting system while they’re at it. This piece of crap crafting system shouldn’t be a blocker for reworking any traits and properties because we don’t want the increased crafting load by changing stuff up.

I’m actually not familiar with this. Did they really just block the property combination on new weapons without removing old ones with the barred combination? That’s… actually really terrible to just have invalid combinations just left there alone. That’s sad if what you’re saying is true.

See, I don’t like this attitude. There’s almost never a “perfect solution” to a problem that will make everyone happy. A person or company is going to have to make decisions where they might anger someone. Maybe because they did a loot migration, they changed their favorite talent tree, or they reworked a weapon. It’s up to them to decide if something is bad enough that it’ll make more people happy than angry and if it’s worth the effort. You’re not going to be able to change anything if you don’t accept that you’re going to make some people upset.

While I didn’t particularly like the Weaves, some talent reworks, and various other things about the beta, I can at least respect Fatshark for taking the risk to do things that they think are good, despite them angering people.

Doing something like a loot migration where they change properties and do sweeping crafting reworks will probably anger a lot of people, but I think it’s worth doing. Obviously I think it’s a good idea because it’s my idea. Other people may have better and different ideas, but I feel like at least something needs to be done about these loot and crafting problems. A balance pass for properties and traits, accompanied with crafting reworks so we can easily test and evaluate the changes is gravely needed. The loot system is a tremendous turn off for new players.