Champion deed. Vanguard, so all ambient rats were changed to elites. Harder better faster stronger, so all elites do double damage and have double health.
We went full books, very challenging deed, basically Legendary+ tier difficulty due to the modifiers. But when we got to the event to break the chains on the bell, we didn’t get the usual handful of groups of a dozen rats. We got an endless horde that just flooded us over and over.
We literally literally had to wade through rats together yard by yard from chain to chain to make it, no idea what was going on. Broke the chains, got a little respite as the Rat Ogre spawned, nuked it, then went to make our escape. Well, the endless horde started again, elites and rats everywhere, from the drop down after the Ogre all the way to the bridge. We barely made it, but it was the most intense experience we’ve had in Vermintide 2.
We ended up with around 2000 kills, 44000 damage. There were only 36 specials which was pretty low considering the special spam I’ve seen on some runs, but it still felt reasonable and challenging. There were 210 elite kills which means about 1800 kills were from hordes, and I think that about 1000 of those kills were from solely from the chain-event and escape sequence. The numbers from this run on a Champion Screaming Bell deed were about DOUBLE what I’ve seen in a lengthy Legendary WAR CAMP run which ended up with about 1000 kill and 23000 damage dealt and about 100 elite and 40 specials.
I’ve never seen anything like this happen on Screaming Bell before the latest patch. I had a massive nonstop horde during an escape once after the patch, but not during both escape and the bell. I’m happy when the chains and escape is a little more exciting, but this was next level insanity.
Apart from something needing to be adjusted on that map’s director I want to use this scoreboard as an example to talk about balance. The four classes we used are pretty popular and our group plays together regularly and work as a team.
The Sienna is top kills and damage by far, but is also our best player and plays consistently well with all five heroes. Sienna had practically no melee kills (because she didn’t need to melee because tanks meleed for her) and one stray hit from an empowered elite meant death.
The Saltzpyre has about half Sienna’s numbers, but doesn’t use an optimal build, hasn’t put in a ton of hours into the game, yet nevertheless was instrumental in clearing elites at close range, is a great team player and sometimes matches or beats our Sienna depending on the map.
The Kruber and Bardin each put up about half of Saltzpyre’s damage and half elite kills but kicked butt controlling the massive unending hordes spike with tons of elites so that Sienna could do her thing without hardly ever needing to switch weapons to melee: 12 melee kills out of 976 total.
I’m fine with this scoreboard. A Saltzpyre with better build and more experience and more room to maneuver would have put up higher numbers, but still should be less than Sienna since Saltzpyre can be effective range and melee. If the two tanks were trying to fight Sienna for kills instead of protecting her, she wouldn’t have been able to put up such massive numbers and we most likely would have failed the mission due to gibs. Yeah, Sienna got the most green circles, but we weren’t competing with each other for kills, we were competing against the AI director trying its hardest to wipe us without resorting to the cheap method of simply incapacitating three of us at once.
It was very challenging without feeling impossible, and while I’d like Screaming Bell and some oth
er events feel a bit empty and could use some more defense from rats, I think map quantities that require you to kill fifty rats just to be able to move forward a few yards to kill fifty more rats continually should be reserved for deeds that specifically have a +horde bonus modifier.