General suggestions to improve the game.

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
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After my first lvl 30 I have put about 49 hours into the game and I must say the combat is fantastic. While the difficulty feels brutal at first, if you stick with it it gets much easier.

I think it could be a truly GREAT game by tweaking a few general things that I feel would improve the quality of life for most players:

  1. Please spawn my hero in the middle of Taal’s Horn Keep, so I don’t have to keep walking from the door to the mission map repeatedly.

  2. Somehow please improve the loading speed for Taal’s Horn Keep. I fail to understand why it takes so long to reload the same area that you’re already in when you leave a party. I keep seeing loading screens loading from Taal’s Horn Keep to… Taal’s Horn Keep and I have to again walk from the door to the map or to the Bridge of Shadows over and over and over. A little annoying!

  3. Since XP is only rewarded at the end of a mission, I believe this encourages people to rush through levels and this leads to people not sticking together, which is bad. I think enemies should award a small amount of XP when killed, with elites and specials giving slightly more, and monsters giving the most. OR give bonus XP at the end of a map based on how many enemies and/or specials and monsters were killed. Farming wouldn’t occur because you could either (a) limit the amount of total XP on a map, (b) somehow pause hordes or most enemies until the next checkpoint is reached. I think the above would encourage teams to move as a team through each level, as was intended (I think). In general, it would be good if more was done to encourage teams sticking together (perhaps some more passive group bonuses tied to certain talents).

  4. Give “assist” credit for kills on specials, elites and monsters. Right now, the system encourages kill sniping and getting the killing blow on a monster is pretty meaningless too. I have seen teammates use their career skill to boost past me and take all the kills for themselves, leaving me in the dust. Currently it often feels like a competition rather than teamwork.

  5. When a host disconnects, use checkpoints so that the remaining party doesn’t have to restart the entire map from the beginning. This would be a great quality of life addition.

  6. Vertical jump distance for heroes is pitifully weak as many minor ledges and stairs force players to “take the long way around” rather than jumping up a few inches. Perhaps boost jump strength but cause jumping to drain stamina. Walk speed also feels dreadfully slow overall. Perhaps running could be an option but it drains stamina.

  7. Across-the-board tooltip improvements to explain how the game works (and allow players to toggle tooltips). For example, I didn’t even know that you could “discard” a grimoire and clicked it on accident and drew the wrath of my whole party. A simple informative tooltip would have prevented that and improved the quality of life for all involved.

  8. Improve player cosmetics (more diversity and more distinction between skins) and add more weapon variety. Some cosmetic items are minor recolors of others and are quite underwhelming. Additionally, it feels like there are only a handful of weapon types, weapon names, and flavor text that you see over and over. I guess this goes for trinkets, charms and necklaces as well.

  9. On some maps, hordes occasionally have too few enemies or it takes way too long for the horde to reach the party. I’ve heard the horde sounds and it was a solid 20 seconds before skaven started trickling in.

I know many of these have been touched on by others but I feel these are also closely tied to many of the criticisms I see about the game, and rightfully so. I still have fun playing it, but all too often it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. Thanks for reading!

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1 and 2. In general there is far too much wasting of players time. The keep is unnecessarily big, and as such lacks the charm of the inn in vermintide 1 as well as causing excessive loading times. Could fatshark explain why it takes 60% of my cpu on an overclocked 6 core 12 thread 8700k just to do nothing in the keep? Not spawning in the portal is a time waster, not allowing failed missions to be restarted, not allowing skipping the chest section, but then tying everyone to the same score screen (with each person shown vastly different numbers because reasons) so that if 1 person skips it times down for everyone. These are just some of the time wasters and almost trolling mechanics by Fatshark.

  1. If sprinting was a thing the game would be even easier than it already is. Legend right now is a joke compared to the cata of v1.
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These are all good points! I hope you don’t mind, but I’d like to try to respond to them:

1 & 2: I agree, it can be a little ridiculous. I think it encourages looking at your gear and goofing around, but that’s not so helpful when you want to get back to killing those ratties! Admittedly, though, I do love the keep. It’s huge and epic and everyone has awesome scenery… feels like a true Headquarters of the Resistance!

3: Lots of players are grinding to get XP or the item they want and it can lead them to go super fast. My solution to this is team communication; voice comms always helps a little bit and better conveys where you are and what yo are doing. XP reward from kills would be unfortunate: there are Careers designed to absorb blows and manipulate aggro who don’t kill a lot of stuff. They are designed to protec, not attac!

4: Well… yeah, people do that. You will also find that those same people are far less prepared when it comes to high-difficulty gameplay. You need to have people who snipe specials for you if you have a Slayer Bardin and you will need people to clear hordes for you if you are Foot Knight Kruber. Alternatively, you can all play catch-alls, but I find that less ‘teamwork-y’. Get a crew of people communicating in voice comms or on Discord and you can do call-outs and forming of war-lines… it feels better as a team, I promise!

5: That would be AWESOME! In certain situations it’d be weird and difficult (like in deeds) but the QoL would be great. 100% agree there. It would be nigh-impossible to implement, but it would be awesome nonetheless.

6: There are stairs you can jump and stairs you can’t… you’ll get the feel for which are which after a few more hours of gaming! Jumping is a weird subject because it shouldn’t be used all THAT much, but giving it a height increase would require them to edit 90% of the games walls, scenery, and jumping puzzles. I don’t think it’s a realistic request… so I am sorry you don’t enjoy the jump-system! Sprinting would be… weird. Think of it like Left 4 Dead: move speed is super important. Also, increased jump height/sprint speed would, thematically, be totally out of the question for the armor-wearers. Having been there and done that… it’s hard.

7: That’d be easy to do and very helpful! I don’t know if there is one already or not, but I agree that it should be more immediately visible/knowable for a new player. Accessibility can help a game a lot! Many of us carried our knowledge of it over from VT1… try the sanctioned mod ‘Sticky Grim’ that helps protect against discarding Grims… very helpful.

8: I think the flavor text would be great and I agree with you there. I imagine that skins and cosmetics are hard to make cool/realistic while still part of the Warhammer universe. I guess we just have to get jazzed up about more cosmetics as they are released!

9: Hordes are weird, stay weird, and cause lots of problems with their timing… but that’s part of the fun! Sometimes it is a blessing when they arrive late so you can clean up a Rogre and sometimes they arrive so instantly you start crying. That’s part of the Skaven charm… they’re so disorganized that when the leader yells “charge” it might take them a bit to get moving!

I think we all appreciate your feedback, chief, so thank you for voicing your opinion. Always feel free to post! Talking these things over are a great way to learn about the game/preferences of the community and also to figure out what you like and don’t like.

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Point 1 is less relevant on PC, as there are shortcuts for the Keep’s actions as keybindings, and hopefully with kb&m support, that extends to consoles too. If you can, try O for Okri’s challenges, I for anything inventory-related and M for map selection. Spawning closer to the middle of things would be a slight QoL improvement, though, but only slight.

Loading speeds are always one thing to optimize. Not just the Keep, but any map. When leaving a party, unless you were the host, you load a completely new instance of the Keep, and as the Keep changes with your character levels, I don’t know how easy or resource-intensive it would be to load just the changes. I suspect it would be far more complex to implement, and bring in a negligible difference in loading times.

The games’s systems are meant to encourage a “moderate hurry” approach, with more things thrown at you if you stay put. Any one player running ahead of the others is more a problem of player attitude than of the game itself, and the mechanics actually discourage it already by spawning more disablers (and possibly other specials) near separated players. Basing Exp rewards on kills or other performance (beyond the “players alive” part that’s already in) will encourage either competition (if tracked individually) or foolish behaviors (if tracked as a group; as you also predicted).

Number four is similarly mostly a question of player attitude. There is some meaning in who gets the kills for temp health generation, but that seems to be minor. It could stand some looking into, at least for Monsters and Lords, though. Otherwise, what matters is that everyone (or at least someone) gets to the end of the map; the green circles are irrelevant and should be considered either a curiosity or a (not-very-effective) tool for learning and following your own progress. The latter case still means the other players’ results are irrelevant, only our own matter; and anyway, you need to already know what yo are doing before you can use them in any way.

Point five I agree with completely, even if it’s not often relevant to me.

@Torantolis has the right point for the jumps: it would affect too many things to be sensibly implemented. Besides, if the jump height and distance were to be increased slightly, it would just introduce the same troubles in other locations, and the circle would be ready. Let’s just trust the map designers and their intent, and learn the maps, yeah?

I’ve thrown around a thought about an “intermediate” tutorial a few times before, either as a simple text option to just read about things or something more interactive like a special Deed augmentation. It would need to be in-game in any case, to both make it easy for people who need it to find it and to help testing and practicing the stuff it tells about. There are so many fundamental mechanics in this game that aren’t really introduced anywhere, or just told about in loading screen tips (which I doubt that many read anyway) that experienced people, with hundreds of hours in the game, still occasionally bump into a (obvious and/or important, in hindsight) mechanic they didn’t know about. Books are one of them.

“Better” (quotes because it’s still a question of personal taste) and more cosmetics is something that will be always wanted. There isn’t much to add to that.

Hordes and other things do need tweaking and will need such for a long time, and they require many iterations too. It’s an ongoing process, and they will change several times in the future, either on purpose or by accident.

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Excellently put!

This is a brilliant point. There are so many difficult concepts that can be mentioned (but not taught) that could tip the balance in how players develop and the strategies they use in combat. In VT1 I never blocked because I thought “why not just do more damage?” Well, I learned early on into Cataclysm difficulty that I couldn’t get away without resetting my attack pattern. It’s the little things!

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I see you didn’t touch on the crafting system. Maybe you haven’t invested in it yet or simply don’t care about it, but I can tell you now that’s where the “real fun” begins.

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Maybe they could add that as an option you can pick. Spawn at the gate is the default but you could also spawn by the loot crate, or spawn by the mission select map etc.

As an addition to this I think you should always spawn next to the shadow gate if you are joining a lobby through the QP queue.

That’s a great idea, they would just have to track the number of kills you contributed to in some way or another but didn’t get the killing blow.

I agree with this but it would be difficult to implement because VM2 maps don’t have the same “safehouse” functionality a game like L4D2 does.

In particular the only black outfit that I consider “black enough” is the IB black armour. But I don’t like using that one because recolours almost half of the outfit to gold instead and it looks kinda gaudy. (unfortunately it’s the only armour that matches most IB helmets since those are almost all black). The other black outfits only get a minor surface tint like they were dipped in dirty water, or come out grey instead. The red outfits are also lame, they should be bright red like a coke machine instead of just being a light tint. In fact a lot of the inventory icons are misleading in that regard as they are currently far more red than the actual items.

I’m no texture artist but it would seem like an easy fix to tweak the colours a bit more, at least compared to texturing whole new models. While they are at it I would like to see a way of mixing and matching colours to truly customize our outfits, as well as recolouring hats to match armour.

One of the ideas I suggested a while back was to add more “illusions” to trinkets and allow you to customize the appearance of trinkets. This way it doesn’t matter if you get 10 red rat skull trinkets, you can still give each one a unique appearance. Having character specific accessories would also improve inventory management for different item property builds, for instance if you give an item a kruber specific illusion it would appear at the top of the list whenever you play as kruber.

There are a few maps that are notorious for this. It’s okay if the horde can only reach you from 1-2 directions or through a chokepoint like a door. What isn’t acceptable is if the horde forces you to stand around for a minute or more until they actually arrive. The worst culprit for this is the sewer drop on Convocation. If you stay on top of the hole it takes several minutes to fight the horde. But you can’t just drop down the hole immediately because there could be 24 berserkers just standing around at the bottom that would overwhelm you in addition to the horde (that happened to me once). Even if you elect to drop it still stretches out the horde because they dribble in a little at a time instead of as a discrete attack wave.

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  1. How do we even enter through that door anyway? There’s a cliff on the other side of it.
  2. This doesn’t worry me too much, but I think it would be less of a hurdle if there was more to do in the keep. After you’ve explored it and found out there’s nothing to do there, you don’t really leave the main room.
  3. If the goal is to make players work as a team, I’d look at rewarding the team for actions that promote general teamplay before I looked rewarding individual players. Like staying within a certain distance of a teammate, for example.
  4. See this one FS? Circle chasing. Circle chasing is bad and it shouldn’t be promoted.
  5. Can’t argue with this.
  6. There’s always going to be ledges that are just out of reach, regardless of your vertical jump height. It’s part of the design of the game. There are definitely places in the game where you feel like you should be able to jump up though (or that you shouldn’t have to jump to at all).
  7. This game isn’t very good at telling you the fine details. It could definitely be improved here.
  8. What I hear when people talk about the game’s cosmetics is that they want to be able to customise their hero. They want to make it “theirs”. Between the mostly samey cosmetics, the RNG loot system and the RNG crafting system, the player’s control over making their heroes their own is pretty tightly restricted.
  9. This is annoying, but I find that if you just keep moving forward you only get one wave of the horde and then it stops.
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