Let's fix the crafting system to be kinda like Weaves (also traits and properties suggestions)

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
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Hello, it’s me. You may know me from such rants as the Back to Bögenhafen thread, Twitch Mode Improvements thread, or the more popular “Can we get rid of +20% health and +33% curse resistance already?” thread. Here’s a link to the reddit thread with the same content.

I feel like this is probably my most important thread out of the bunch that blows the other three out of the water in terms of how important it is to the game. The crafting system is a festering wound at this game’s very core, and our only recourse is to slap on the band-aid known as the “Reroll Improvements mod”. Sadly, our console friends do not have access to this mod, and this, of course, does not address the actual core problems with the crafting: it’s confusing, slow, and random, while also making lower-tier and low power weapons only useful as fodder. I’m going to try and address those main issues here, while acknowledging things that require more thought and I think are up for a lot more discussion like exact trait/property balance, as well as the issue with Veteran items (red items).

Summary of Issues

  1. The UI of the crafting system itself is confusing and clunky. It has pages that you flip through to do different stuff, you have to hover things with a mouse cursor to check the properties you rerolled, and it’s overall just unpleasant and overwhelming to new players. Whenever a new feature gets added, it just gets added to another page on this hot mess. I’m not a fan from a UX design perspective. Explaining to a new friend that bought the game on a Steam sale “oh okay well go to page 6 and look for the weapon you want to re-roll and right click it…” is a bit tedious. The Weaves’ tempering system is a step in the right direction, I think, because it helps unify and simplify a lot of the information on screen. I’m not going to give many recommendations on UX design itself beyond “hey Weave tempering looks a little better, go in that direction” because I only took one UX design course in college since it was my senior year and it sounded fun. I also took two semesters of bowling in my senior year.

  2. The crafting system is often unresponsive and slow. Occasionally, it will take several seconds to reroll something. On top of the delay of “hold to confirm crafting” and having to hover and re-select items in batches if you don’t have mods, crafting just starts to feel like a chore whenever you go into the screen. My main hypothesis for why this UI behaves this way is that it’s a built-in slowdown feature to prevent overloading the backend crafting service that you’re talking to on Fatshark’s end, which would explain the long delays in crafting if it’s because of a sudden, random burst of crafting traffic that clogs up the pipes. This also is exacerbated by the next point, which causes large bursts of traffic in crafting:

  3. The crafting system is random. There have been times where I have literally spent 10 minutes rerolling something to get Attack Speed + Crit Chance + Swift Slaying. That happens less often with the aforementioned rerolling mod, but sometimes you don’t have mods when you’re playing a separate beta client or a large update comes in and breaks all your mods. Even if there were new traits and properties coming out for me to experiment with in a large (much needed) balance pass, I don’t know how I’d feel about rerolling all of my crap. The randomness also sucks because, if there’s a backend service to request a new reroll, I am absolutely hammering it with requests whenever I want to try out a new combination. I don’t know if that scaling issue is what causes crafting to lag sometimes, but that would be my best guess.

  4. Lower-tier (green and blue) weapons are useless because they do not have a Trait. The difference between a blue and an orange in Vermintide 1 was usually fairly small. You’d usually have one or two traits that you really wanted on the weapon and the third trait was irrelevant. Often, I used blues (or even greens!) on Nightmare and Cataclysm because I didn’t have an orange and the weapon was still workable. This has never been the case for me in Vermintide 2. The difference between a blue and an orange is having +20% attack speed on critical hits, essentially unlimited ammo, health regeneration, damage resistance, 50% more effective potions, or being able to throw 5 bombs in a row to wipe a patrol/boss because you got lucky. It’s insane. A green weapon’s usefulness is pretty much limited to rerolling Attack Speed + Crit Chance on your orange weapons. Also, speaking of orange weapons…

  5. Orange weapons are basically useless because they’re just reds that waste more of your time. It’s even worse because, once you get to the higher difficulties and you want “the best” gear instead of “good enough” gear, rerolling becomes 10x more tedious if you’re using orange weapons still. Good luck getting +5% crit chance and +5% attack speed on an orange in less than 5 minutes without mods, I don’t see it happening. Also, the other issue with oranges is that they’re not necessarily 300 power, even if they come from a Legend’s Vault or you craft them, which brings up the issue…

  6. Everything not max power gets abandoned because it is useless. I tell my friends that it’s not worth rerolling their weapons to get good properties until it’s at least 300 power, since the weapon will be scrapped anyway. Find a really cool sword early on? Too bad, you should ditch it because here’s a hammer that has 40 more hero power. Sure, you can upgrade that sword from blue to orange, but if it’s not 300 power it’s still useless. Sorry. I know you’re maybe attached to one of your first orange weapons that you found (and got a Steam achievement + Okri’s challenge completion for getting it!), but it’s time to load up the Grudge-raker and take it out back like Old Yeller. You need the orange dust so that you can reroll Swift Slaying on an actually somewhat decent melee weapon with 300 power. It’s sad. I’ll wager that at least 90% of the playerbase doesn’t even remember what their first orange item was, and I’ll wager that 99% of the playerbase in Champion+ difficulty doesn’t even have their first orange item still. It was definitely scrapped.

TL;DR of the crafting issues - pretty much everything

Suggestions for Fixes

Okay, so anybody can make this thread that says why everything about the crafting system is kinda bad, but that’s not constructive. We need to come up with suggestions on how to improve it. I think they’re on the right track with the introduction of the Weaves’ crafting interface. It’s a better interface, it allows you to directly select things you want, and you upgrade the weapon’s power as you level it. Build on that framework and bring something to the main game.

Also, as an aside, I personally dislike the concept of power as a whole, but that’s a separate issue than crafting itself. For the purposes of this thread, you can assume that item power is still a thing on a 5 to 300 scale, but I don’t think it’s relevant to this discussion. Just assume that a good item rework would allow you to either 1) upgrade the hero power of a weapon, or 2) remove the concept of hero power entirely. It’s not important to this discussion, but I think it’s an important consideration in a different thread.

Add a “slot system” and “mastery” for items like the Weaves’ tempering system

I don’t have many pictures to help pick explain exactly what I’m talking about because somebody, who shall remain unnamed, deleted the beta forum with all the posts and ideas inside to use as reference. Also, obviously, Winds of Magic is over so I can’t access the beta client to show off many screens of the crafting UI. Here’s a picture from Fatshark’s official stream.

Essentially, you have a certain number of “Mastery” points to spend to fill up your 10 slots for properties and 1 central slot for a trait. As you add more points to a specific property, it causes the price to go up. So, in this picture, +0.5 Stamina costs 30 Mastery points because he already spent two slots on Stamina.

The system in the Weaves is a little silly because the amount of Mastery you have on a weapon is directly tied to its Power, seen at the bottom left (yes, it’s 480, the scale isn’t 5-300 for some reason). On top of that, the availability of more slots is directly tied to Level as well. Instead, I would suggest this…

Make weapons of increasing rarity have more Mastery points and slots

So, the breakdown I’d imagine it would be something like:

  • Oranges: 400 Mastery Points + Trait Slot + 12 Property slots

  • Blues: 320 Mastery Points + Trait Slot + 10 Property slots

  • Greens: 240 Mastery Points + Trait Slot + 8 Property slots

  • Whites: 200 Mastery Points + Trait Slot + 6 Property slots

From there, the players can choose to prioritize what they want in a weapon from their slots. If Swift Slaying costs 100 points and 5% crit chance/attack speed each cost 150 points, you’re using up 400 points on an orange but you still have 2 unused slots.

On a blue, you don’t have enough points to get all three: would you sacrifice crit chance or attack speed to keep Swift Slaying? For a white, hey, you have enough to get Swift Slaying + 2% crit chance and some other property of your choice. Not bad. You’d still want to upgrade and get the next tier of weapon, but that’s workable for sure.

Obviously, numbers are irrelevant and would need to be tweaked to actually make sense within the system. I just based the numbers off the actual cost in the beta to roll the combos we have now, while adding some extra slots to open up options of customization.

Add more variable cost to assigning Mastery Points

In the beta, on the trinket-equivalent slots on the thing called the Amulet of Ashur, there is a single thing out of all the properties that I could see where the cost to maximize that property was not 150 points and 5 slots. It was +5% movement speed. Rather than going up to 5 in 1% increments each costing 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 Mastery points, it was simply 5% movement speed for 50 Mastery.

Again, I can’t dig around to find that stuff because someone deleted the beta forum and someone doesn’t have an open beta still running. Again, not pointing any fingers. Here’s a picture showing that screen which is way too cluttered because it crams talents + necklace + charm + traits on one screen. Still, it’s kinda cool.

For a lot of the crappier properties and traits that we have, we agree that they’re not useful on the same level as +5% Attack Speed, +5% Crit Chance, Swift Slaying, Scrounger, +20% health, or +33% curse resistance (cough cough look at that thread again).

If we don’t want to balance by tweaking the percentages of properties themselves, could we just ask “how cheap does it have to be for you to take it over attack speed?”

Would you take Power vs Berserkers/Monsters if they were 10% for 2 increments of 5% at a cost of, say, 25 + 50 points? So, 75 points total and half the cost of 5% attack speed. You could take both instead of attack speed, even, if you have the slots available. My answer is definitely maybe?

Would you take 5% movement speed if it only cost 50 points and 1 slot? So you’d be sacrificing 1% crit chance to take movement speed on your trinket (like in the beta).

Would you take 10% damage resistance vs Skaven/Chaos/AoE if they cost about the same all together as taking +20% health? Because, right now, if you had all three, it’s only kinda better than taking +20% health lol.

Would Curse Resistance be less annoying if it only was 1 slot for 50 points like movement speed, so you had flexibility to take other stuff still? It’s still annoyingly overpowered and I hate it, but still. Look at the other thread for that rant, not here.

Let’s look at the Trait screen for melee weapons again:

Everything there costs 100 Mastery. No offense, but I think you’re probably a moron if you take Opportunist or Heroic Intervention for 100 points, instead of Swift Slaying or at least Parry. No offense.

How cheap would things have to be for you to consider taking stuff besides the bread and butter? What if Swift Slaying was 120 points and Opportunist was 60? What about Inspirational Shot? What if you didn’t have to take Opportunist or Heroic Intervention instead of Swift Slaying? What if we moved some Traits down in rank…

Get rid of the word “Properties” and say that we have a “Primary/Master Trait” and “Secondary Traits”

If you google the definition of the word “trait”, you will see that among its synonyms is the word “property”.

My theory, when Fatshark was creating this new crafting/item system is that they wanted to distinguish boring ol’ percentage point properties from the fun, sexy thing called traits carried over from the first game. That’s why there’s this stronger delineation between blues and oranges between this game and the first. Oranges have a trait, while blues only have properties. In Vermintide 1, blues had 2 properties while oranges had 3. There wasn’t too much difference.

Part of the reason for this was so a lot of these traits could move to talents and class perks. The other reason was to probably curtail some of the overpowered combinations of traits like Killing Blow + Bloodlust. V1 kinda handled this issue by making it so you couldn’t get certain combinations of traits like Bloodlust + Regrowth + Killing Blow all on one weapon.

We can kind of do a similar approach here, where we demote some of our traits that we have now so that you would choose to take them instead of attack speed/crit chance, rather than competing with Swift Slaying. At the same time, we can add some new traits (either original ideas or bring back some classics from V1) to make up for the deficit.

Examples of Master/Primary Traits:

  • Berserking: Killing an enemy with a critical hit increases attack speed by 20% for 5 seconds and reduces damage taken by 20%. Effect can only trigger once every 4 seconds.

  • Swift Slaying (classic rework): Critical hits increase attack speed by 20% and movement speed by 10% for 5 seconds. Effect can only trigger once every 4 seconds.

  • Scavenger (melee weapon): Critical hits replenish 5% ammunition for your ranged weapon. Effect can only trigger once every 4 seconds.

  • Resourceful Combatant/Sharpshooter: Melee/ranged critical hits reduce the cooldown of your Career Skill by 2-10%, based on damage dealt. Effect can only trigger once every 4 seconds. (ie: slight rework so that a critical sword.exe headshot with a strength potion returns more than doing the weapon butt with a shotgun)

  • Haste (ranged weapons): Critical hits increase your attack speed by 20% for 5 seconds. Ammunition is not consumed while the effect is active. Effect can only trigger once every 4 seconds.

  • Hawk Eye (ranged weapons): Increases headshot multiplier of weapon, but reduces crit power by 20%

  • Hunter: Critical hits increase attack power by 25% against targets with the same armor class for 10 seconds (not “a short time,” be more descriptive, Fatshark, c’mon now that’s pathetic).

Examples of Secondary Traits:

  • Thermal Equalizer: Weapon generates X% less overheat. If you could slot it multiple times, maybe you could do 10% for 50 points and another 10% for 60, so a total of 110. It’s kind of boring as a “trait” right now and feels more in line with what properties currently offer.

  • Inspirational Shot: Headshots restore X stamina to nearby allies. Maybe it’s in increments of 0.5 for 10, 20, 30, 40 points for a maximum of 2 stamina. I have honestly no idea how this trait currently works because it’s so damn useless lol.

  • Boon of Shallya: Increases effectiveness of healing on you by X%. Maybe you’re taking it in increments of 5% at 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 points.

  • Proxy: Consuming a potion spreads the effect with the closest X allies within 10 meters. Reduces potion duration by Y%. Maybe you can do 1 slot of Proxy to share with 1 ally -10%, 2 allies with -20%, and 3 allies with -30%. Maybe this costs 50, 60, 70 to become the designated potion chugger as a Ranger Veteran, so you’re giving up a lot of potential breakpoints on your charm.

  • Heal Share: Using a healing item on yourself heals the closest X allies within 10 meters for 20%. Reduces effectiveness of healing on you by Y%. Again, like Proxy. Rather than just taking heal share as a talent to flat-out sacrifice temp HP, maybe you’re taking it like a trait to sacrifice breakpoints and also your health generation from temp HP. Probably overpowered, but it’s an idea to make more people run healshare because everyone runs temp HP right now, jeez.

  • Explosive Ordinance: Increases grenade explosion radius by X%. Reduces grenade friendly fire damage by Y%. This sucks and no one picks it instead of Grenadier or Shrapnel. Make it 25%/50% for 1 slot @ 25 Mastery and 50%/100% for 2 slots @ 50 Mastery total. Simple. Would stack well with either Grenadier or Shrapnel as the primary trait, or you could forego one of those two entirely to get more buffs on your trinket.

Obviously this is not a comprehensive list and many things should be changed about it. The difference is that I came up with all of this one day while I was sipping my coffee, and, honestly, it strikes me better than anything Fatshark has come up with in a year and a half to balance traits. Maybe that’s just my ego talking.

The Veteran weapon issue (reds)

So, where do reds fit in this new system? I don’t know. That’s a tough one. I could see it going one of many ways…

  1. Reds become prettier versions of oranges. Just make them have the same stats, but they look cooler. Maybe compensate people somehow who have crafted reds (aka own reds without corresponding illusions) with some extra red dust, and then allow red dust to be used in some meaningful way to craft cosmetic items in the Lohner’s Emporium update.

  2. Reds get some locked, special traits/properties like in the first game where certain combos were only possible with reds.

  3. Reds get more Mastery or slots than oranges. I don’t like this idea, but it’s on the table. As long as oranges get all the stuff that a red can do in the current live version, I don’t see much issue other than introducing more power creep.

  4. Reds don’t cost anything to recraft traits on. Currently, reds are a way to save time in the long run by not being tedious to re-roll. Instead, we could make them save crafting material by not costing anything to repick properties in this new system.

Anyway, that’s it. Let me hit you with the TL;DR for you lazy people:

TL;DR

  1. The crafting system is stupid, replace it with something more like the Weaves where you pick all the stuff you want directly.

  2. Whites/Greens/Blues not having Traits is stupid because they become junk automatically compared to oranges.

  3. You should be able to upgrade the power of your gear like in the Weaves, or hero power should be thrown out because it’s a terrible concept that arbitrarily gates content behind a grind.

  4. Properties are stupid because “property” is a synonym for “trait” and it sounds stupid. It should be “Primary/Master Trait” that is on-par with Swift Slaying and “Secondary Traits” that are just the simple breakpoint boosts or dumb bonuses like heroic intervention or inspirational shot.

  5. If you’re going to critique my idea, bear in mind that I literally came up with all of this in one single morning as an idea expanding on my other thread about +20% health and +33% curse resistance. Is it good? Maybe, but I’m not an entire studio full of people working full-time around the clock on this game for the past year and a half. These ideas are free, even though my hourly rate for ideas at my own work is very much not free. The ideas are here: take them, critique them, and improve on them.

  6. Discuss

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Firstly: I like all of this

Secondly: if I can’t have any of this then here is my compromise.

  • Remove click and hold to smith with 1 click functionality. Having to hold is nonsensical and a waste of time.

  • Incorporate the mod’s navigation layout, because vanilla’s system is unnecessary.

  • Take inspiration from the weave forge. Remove the rng from the traits and properties players desire for selectability. Increase the dust cost to something like ×30 or ×50 of vanilla’s. Why so high? Because that’s about how much dust the average player is spending already to get the stats they want, basically cut out the 50 2 second rerolls it takes in favor of getting what the player desires the first time. Also doesn’t remove the need to scrap extra loot.

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Thank you for getting the ball rolling.

  1. I at least think that the reroll improvements mod needs to be implemented, just to make it less tedious without mods for all players on all platforms. It probably needs to be an option like “quick craft” or something, if that minimum amount of work was done. That “hold to confirm” window is still okay for some people to prevent fatfingering their reds they forgot to favorite.

  2. Yeah, it’s weird how a lot of mods do UI better than Fatshark.

  3. I didn’t really want to go into crafting costs because I figured they were irrelevant to the rework. The other thing is that we may be getting a crafting sink where we convert dust and whatnot into cosmetic items, if I recall seeing the “Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders” thrown around. But yeah, crafting costs to save a new set of traits could be 100x what it costs now to reroll once, and you’d still come out ahead with the time saved that you could spend playing the game. Maybe for reds, they could be unique by not costing anything to reforge their traits. I’ll add that last bit to the OP as an idea.

Hold on a minute, I’m gonna edit the OP and I’m going to crosspost to reddit if you want to help get the ball rolling there.

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To be honest? I feel the opposite. To me I can rationalize the costs of re-selecting stats on reds to be excessive, since the stats are already going to be perfect. Illusion of an investment, I guess?

Would still rather your first suggestions.

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Here’s the reddit link, I’ll edit the OP as well to include it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vermintide/comments/ckt1i7/lets_fix_the_crafting_system_to_be_kinda_like/

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Yeah, I think it’s up in the air. We’d have to see if they implement a different materials/currency sink in the game where you would pay red dust to get a new cool skin of some sort. Lohner’s Emporium is coming Soon™, just like Winds of Magic is coming August™ and Versus is coming Uhhh…Eventually™.

I think it’s just one of the many considerations when doing this big of a change to something. I don’t know if my ideas for reds were even that good, but I wanted to at least acknowledge them. We’d have to do something to prevent people from whining about “but muh reds” if they reworked crafting to not be crappy, or else Fatshark might never do it (even more so than the current schedule of Never™). Kinda like how if you combine 5 red dust, you don’t get an illusion. That’s a compromise so that people would acquiesce to making reds more accessible without making them feel less special.

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I do have one criticism. The big thing that’s preventing a full “Weave Crafting” conversion is the loot.

Loot, right now, is unbelievably underutilized with only three purposes: increasing gear power, getting trash to scrap for crafting, and reds. If crafting adopts the mastery system then looting chests might be even more worthless than it already is, as you won’t be using material from scrapping trash.

Seriously, though, the loot system is tragic and deserves its own thread.

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The crafting system indeed needs at least some rehauling. I may find the actual issues of a little different priorities than you, and I won’t comment on the Weave crafting system as I didn’t experience it myself, so I’ll bring in another point of view. I think there are ways to make the crafting system a lot better without a complete overhaul (although I’m not exactly opposed to that either).

The randomness is indeed a (or even the most) significant factor in the annoyance of crafting. Especially as there’s no bad luck protection at all: I can roll the same Trait or the same two Properties several times in a row. Or I can roll ten times alternating between the same two Traits. And of course, if I’m (for whatever odd reason) rerolling the Properties on an Exotic (orange) item, I can get the right Properties but low percentages (significant especially when going for damage breakpoints) which means I’ll have to roll them again - with no guarantee I’ll get them in a reasonable timeframe. So introducing some protection for bad luck should reduce the frustration and resources (including time) spent on rerolling. Prevent repeat rolls, allow rolling for one Property at a time (or locking one in), and/or maybe introduce rolling for Property values alone. Of course, the latter would introduce a bit of a problem with Veteran items, but I’ll come to that soon.

Another annoyance I’ve found is salvaging. It’s done only nine items at a time, and each has to be clicked to the grid separately, which starts getting very annoying when there’s a page or more of items to salvage. We could (probably easily) be given an option to salvage all of our low-quality or low-Power items at once, which would indeed save a lot of useless clicking and time (and through that, our wrists and nerves).

Salvage brings me to resources. As things are, I have close to 10k Scrap, around 700 of each item part, and a ton of all dusts (except Bright). All of which is just gathering virtual dust there, never (at least for now) to be really used. Bright Dust is the only resource that has significant use in the end, and even that has its limits (which several players have already reached, and more will in the future). When Lohner’s Emporium gets implemented, I’d love to see it act as some kind of resource sink, letting us get something for all those useless resources we’ve gathered. More Deeds, Cosmetics, Keep decorations, whatever.

My final personal issue (at least for now) is one that I’ve talked about before in other threads: the state of Veteran items. The only real value they have is exactly because of the overly random crafting system, because their having always full Property values removes some of the frustration associated with that system. They’re what they are because they need to have something going for them, and that something is frustration reduction - frustration that shouldn’t be there to begin with. They don’t feel special or different, just a less annoying or less uncertain version of Exotics. No, glowy bits don’t make them any more special. Thus, I’d want to see them transformed into something that makes them feel somewhat different from Exotics. Not necessarily stronger, just different - make it worth it using them over full-roll Oranges (which do happen, by the way). It’s kind of hard to figure out how this could be achieved, but the best idea I’ve come up with is to give them special options for Traits, ones not available for Exotics. They should probably be roughly equal in power to the usual ones so as to not overshadow them, but they could be more of tradeoffs or skill-based than the usual ones. Give up some instant damage for (increased) DoT, or something triggering on melee headshot.

And of course there are the more minor QoL improvements that are already addressed by one mod or another, which should in some form be implemented in the base game.

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Wait, what!?

Explosive Ordinance is the only thing I’ve used for many months now. It’s so much better than the other two options that it’s almost ridiculous. Now, at launch it was terrible, but that’s just because it was bugged and didn’t actually work. Since they fixed it, it’s incredible.

Shrapnel, on the other hand, just seems like a complete waste to me. The way I see people use it is to proc on a boss for extra DPS, but if you’re clearing adds like you’re supposed to before you try to focus down the boss, then the slightly faster kill time on the boss doesn’t matter at all, because it’s the only threat around anyway.

Other than that, I don’t understand some of your comments. You say that anything not 300 hero power should be trashed, but you also say that greens and blues were useful in Vermintide 1. Are you forgetting that oranges had significantly higher damage than blues or greens in V1? Even without unlocking any of the slots on the oranges, they were much stronger. Hero power on the weapons is essentially the same thing in Vermintide 2. (Probably less severe of a difference, in fact.) Why would it be okay in Vermintide 1 to use underpowered gear, but not okay in Vermintide 2?

I’ve used more “suboptimal” weapons in V1 than in V2, but I think that’s just because the loot is MUCH slower to acquire in V1. You just don’t really have options. In V2, you can just scrap a few things & craft the specific weapon that you want to use. It’s a much more welcoming system, in my opinion. (Though there is a LOT about it that I don’t like, mostly related to the tedium of re-rolling.)

They told us at the beginning of the beta that the beta forum was just temporary and would be shut down after the beta. So don’t get salty about that. :slight_smile: I’m actually surprised they left it open as long as they did.

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Hey, that’s on you. There’s plenty of people that will defend Parry and Resourceful Combatant to the death if I disrespect them, as well as people who mock me for thinking that +20% health or curse resistance are “mandatory”.

That’s great that you find utility in it. I don’t really. I used to use Shrapnel, but so many talents don’t stack with it. It’s so much more fun to just randomly chuck 3-4 bombs at a boss or a patrol as Ranger Veteran with Grenadier if you’re lucky, since he has the +10% passive dupe chance. The beta was hilarious with the bugged talent that let you have infinite bombs.

Other than that, I don’t understand some of your comments. You say that anything not 300 hero power should be trashed,

Not really the point of the post and I even say it there. That’s a different topic entirely to debate the merits of the hero power system.

but you also say that greens and blues were useful in Vermintide 1. Are you forgetting that oranges had significantly higher damage than blues or greens in V1?

Okay, but if I had a rapier with Regrowth + Killing Blow as a blue, it was perfectly fine to use. Many people used the blue sword and board on Kruber instead of the orange because it obstructed your vision less and you could roll better traits on it than the orange or red, if I remember correctly.

Yes, there was a hierarchy of weapons that was present, but I definitely still used my blue rapier or blue repeater handgun on the higher difficulties until the better ones dropped for me. People definitely ran Cataclysm with “white runs”.

Hero power has all but killed that concept, in my opinion. But, again, it’s totally not the point of this post. If you want me to rant on that for another 8 pages, I’ll have to make a separate thread for you, but I don’t feel like doing that right now.

They told us at the beginning of the beta that the beta forum was just temporary and would be shut down after the beta. So don’t get salty about that. :slight_smile: I’m actually surprised they left it open as long as they did.

Slight difference between “you can’t post in the beta forums anymore” and “you can’t see anything anyone posted in the beta forum at all because it’s been made private”. The other day, Hedge had to move a dev post explaining stagger to the main forum.

It seemed like an unnecessary move to remove it from public visibility, even if I think it should have been locked to prevent dumb posts like “when’s WoM coming out” or “is there another beta” every day. It seems doubly bad to shut down the forum suddenly when one of the biggest criticisms of Fatshark is…

“HEY FATSHARK WHY DON’T YOU TALK TO US AND RESPOND TO OUR IDEAS AND FEEDBACK MORE DIRECTLY TO INDICATE THAT YOU READ THE FORUMS LIKE YOU SAY YOU DO?”

Like I said, I could totally point to some good ideas and inspirations from the beta forum to cite my post if I did some digging, but I literally can’t do that. It’s silly.

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That ship has already sailed, my friend. I have several thousand of every crafting material. A complete overhaul and rework of the crafting system was needed a year ago. It’s like the proverb: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.”

I think that this whole crafting material oversaturation can be addressed elsewhere. If Lohner’s Emporium brings a way to purchase cosmetics with dust or scrap metal, even at a ridiculous ratio, that becomes a crafting sink that would hopefully reset the loot levels back to normal even for the most ridiculous of horders with thousands of chests and hours.

Please don’t make me write another thread lol.

The best part about my “complete overhaul” is that it’s using the already complete overhaul that they did for the Winds of Magic. So, it may be less work than just adding piles to the spaghetti code that is the existing crafting system. We don’t need a page 9 or 10 on the crafting tab lol. Throw it out.

Yes, I agree. Mass-salvaging is important to break up the tedium. There needs to be a resource sink in some capacity with Lohner’s Emporium. I wrote on the beta forum somewhere, cough cough doesn’t exist cough cough, that the Lohner’s Emporium update, if it took the approach of acquiring cosmetics by using your crafting resources, could come out almost in-sync with Winds of Magic. The reason being that Essence, the material used in the Weaves, would be one of the new currencies used to purchase various cosmetics, since that’s pretty much the only material that isn’t hyper-inflated to be worthless (since it doesn’t exist yet).

That’s a little trickier to do, but I like the idea itself. There’s plenty of wacky traits and trinkets from V1 that didn’t make the cut in some way or another. They could differentiate effects to make the reds a little spicier. I thought it was a little too bold to ask for that in this meager proposal. I merely acknowledged “yep reds are a problem worthy of a whole different thread, I’m not touchin’ that one”.

Yeah, I definitely think even basic UI stuff to show if someone has been downed, has natural bond equipped, and showing the actual health numbers or damage numbers as options in the game would be great. I don’t know if Fatshark is in the business of integrating good UI mods in their game by default. It might be a little sticky if they have to compensate modders for using their code, unless there’s an EULA on the workshop that I’m not aware of. They’re not even sanctioning mods right now until after the update, since it’ll just break everything.

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As I’ve understood it, that’s pretty much the biggest problem for implementing several of the changes. Well, they’ve worded it as (iirc) “having doubts about taking control away from the original authors”, but that’s essentially it. I’ve no doubt that (nearly) all of the modders would gladly give their code for FS to use without compensation (as they didn’t expect any from the start, and especially if they get acknowledgement). Another reason is, of course, that as long as (approved) mods can help, there’s no immediate need to implement those changes and thus they can wait - but hopefully FS will heed our request and work hard on making QoL improvements to the base game.

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Yeah, I’m sure that all these people contributing quality mods would love to see their work get forked and officially implemented within the game’s code base itself. Even if it’s just the idea that gets implemented, that’d still be a cool as hell accomplishment, in my book.

Having it written down in legalese somewhere that says “we don’t need to pay you money for it if it’s on the workshop, so don’t sue us please” would just be a good option for Fatshark to protect themselves.

They could even dole out special portrait frames to people who 1) have a sanctioned mod or 2) have a mod that was so good that it was just brought into the game itself.

TF2 did a similar concept with “Community Items” where people that did something super-duper cool got a special sparkly version of an item in the game. Hey, maybe Fatshark could just distribute a special color glowy illusion of that person’s choice. Green instead of blue, like TF2’s color rarity.

I’ll take the Dual Axes or the Throwing Axes please (kidding but also not really if you’re giving those out)

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Why do you use Explosive Ordinance may I ask?

As for Shrapnel, I like it for softening up CWs in chaos patrols, but that’s its main use. SV patrols already get deleted by well-placed bombs.

To be fair to Parry, it’s a great trait for when things go bad, but it competes with the BiS that is SS and in this game, the best defence is truly a good offence. You get much more consistent meaningful use out of the quicker attacks than you do out of the added blocking.

That aside, agreed with the OP so much. I haven’t played Vt1 but when I look at the item system there and the one in Vt2 I’m left scratching my head, the items there look way more interesting (even if I hear everyone took Bloodlust and Regrowth, but that’s a balance issue - people still only take certain traits/properties in Vt2).

WHC heavy breathing…

Honestly inspirational would be great if it gave AS or crit chance for a bit.

Or hell, if they really want to go the support angle, 100% BCR for eg 1/2/3 seconds to allies near the enemy you headshot (ofc then this would have to be an expensive trait, and the effect low radius). That’d turn it into a nifty tool for bailing out anyone that gets isolated (cough the wutelgi cough).

This is great! I think it’d need a higher ramp up in price though if implemented (instead of duration reductions) or else it’ll be Junkietide 2.

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Yep, I think the trinket traits all have at least a somewhat decent pickrate, if only because you don’t need to put as much thought into picking them, since bombs are usually good no matter what you do.

I think Explosive Ordinance sounds pretty good in terms of just giving good coverage and horde clear to the bombs, especially fire bombs. It gains in horde utility while the other two gain utility against bosses and patrols moreso.

I understand his taking it, and I was hesitant to talk crap about the trait or any others, for fear of people coming out of the woodwork to debate me on trait utility instead of the actual content of the post lol.

Yep, I agree. I think moving a lot of the defensive-oriented traits to the secondary trait slots would go a long way in improving Parry to be on the same level as Swift Slaying. Like, if Off Balance and Opportunist were both secondary traits to take alongside Parry at a significant cost.

Yeah, it was definitely a significant issue in V1. I liked the approach of temp HP in this game, but I’m not a big fan of it being locked away at such a high level. Moving it down to level 5 was a great move, in my opinion.

I’d say a lot of the traits in that game definitely got carried over in some capacity. Like Killing Blow just became the WHC’s insta-kill perk, essentially. Ammunition Holder and Master Crafted got shifted to a lot of the ranged careers. Hail of Doom (two shots for the price of one randomly) is a new talent on Waystalker in the beta, I think. There’s still quite a few that didn’t get ported over like Skullcracker (small chance for bodyshots to count as headshots) and some mentioned in the OP.

See, that’s really cool because I forgot about that synergy with WHC’s insta-kill crit headshot. In the first game, Berserking felt good to me on the big weapons that couldn’t fish for Swift Slaying procs by swinging as fast as possible. It was also +40% attack speed and +50% damage resistance, but that seemed a bit excessive here lol.

I could see this trait being really good in that case for WHC or, as I said, for really big weapons that don’t fish for crits always. Like, on a Merc Kruber with the executioner sword overhead’s passive +20% crit rate (or whatever it is idk). It also has a downside of being less useful for boss DPS, obviously. It honestly seems pretty fair compared to Swift Slaying.

I like the concept of the stamina regeneration, since it seems kinda unique. I feel like attack speed or crit chance kinda steps on the toes of a couple careers’ talents, like Merc and WHC. Still, it’d be interesting to try, although it sounds pretty strong.

The thing I like most about the crafting system is that it gives them the flexibility to add something and then remove it if it seems stupidly broken in testing. They can see more reliable usage stats if people are always picking that trait, as opposed to the reroll system.

If something gets removed because it’s OP, players can instantly pick something new to try out, without worrying about rerolling. If a weapon has a no longer valid trait on it (or it goes up in price and the player’s pick becomes invalid that way) due to a patch, Fatshark could clear out the traits for them and give them a free first re-craft on that weapon to try something else out.

For that reason, I’d be down to try out your suggestion and then giggle with glee at how fun and OP it is to have a Huntsman Kruber pooping out a shared Swift Slaying proc for his team lol.

Did you misunderstand my pricing structure or does it really just seem that overpowered? Proxy sharing with your entire team was a trinket in the first game and it didn’t even have a duration reduction associated with it at all lol. You did usually see one person running it at least to become the potion monkey, while others carried the grimoires and took trinkets like infinite dodges instead (which was also stupidly OP and fun lol).

To share with 3 allies, I suggested the price would be 50 + 60 + 70, so a total of 180 Mastery Points. Swift Slaying right now is 100 points, while 5% crit chance is 150 points.

Like I said in the post, exact pricing and balance is immaterial to the actual content and ideas themselves, but I’m curious if maybe my ideas were way off in balance and that turned some people off from the post. I’m pretty sure one guy on reddit was having PTSD flashbacks when I mentioned the trait Haste from Vermintide 1.

Bear in mind, it got nerfed later to still require reloading. You just had infinite ammo for a short duration, kinda like the Guns Blazing buff from Twitch mode which is so cool and fun to get. On top of that, there was the attack speed increase. You often didn’t need to take that game’s equivalent of Scrounger if you were lucky enough with the proc chance on Haste, although it was easy to run out of ammo fishing for Haste procs if you missed or were unlucky.

Either way, good to see some different discussion here on the Fatshark thread. It definitely didn’t take off like the twin thread on reddit or the other thread on health/curse properties, sadly.

Hopefully we see a Fatshark employee pop in to give their thoughts on the ideas. Nobody ping them, I want to see them come here on their own to prove that they actually read things on the forums, like they say they do.

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I was thinking 5% of either AS or crit chance at max, anything more would be ridiculous.

I still don’t like stamina because you don’t know how much stamina your ally has, how much stamina regen they have, whether or not they have parry, BCR etc., there’re so many 'if’s as to its usefulness I don’t know why anyone would take Inspirational Shot, even at a discount. Hence I’d prefer a more active buff from it.

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It makes the AoE a LOT bigger. More than you might expect. (50% increase in radius means it covers more than twice as much area.) That makes it pretty easy to hit basically an entire patrol, or to just lay down a huge pool of fire to completely block off an area.

I initially started using it when I was playing a lot of ranger vet with bomb drops, because there were so many bomb drops that bomb dupe felt totally unnecessary. But then once I had tried it with ranger vet and realized how much more impactful it made every bomb feel, I couldn’t go back to normal bombs again.

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That’s a good point. With higher difficulty patrols being so much larger, you probably need to have Explosive Ordinance to reliably hit them all.

Either way, hopefully the bomb dupe ult stays on Ranger Vet. Having two super big bombs is huge, I’m sure.

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Sounds a bit like you’ve never actually used it. :slight_smile: In practice, it’s very good vs. patrols, because you can hit basically the entire patrol with each bomb. I wouldn’t use bombs vs. a simple horde unless I just have extra bombs lying around, but a larger bomb makes it a lot easier to take out anything dangerous hiding in the middle of a horde, such as multiple elites, packmaster, etc. Throwing a fire bomb near a downed ally gives a lot of room for the revive. Against bosses, I would usually use bombs to clear adds fast & keep the arena clean for an easy boss fight, rather than getting slightly more dps on the boss.

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Is it still bugged where it’s host only or does it work for everyone now?

Also: how’s the increased radius with FF?