V. Big changes:
I think the main problem of this game right now is not bugs, balance or gameplay. The bugs do exist, but the game is in a very playable state. A lot of game content is not very well balanced to put it mildly, but A LOT of content works great, and the latter part is more than big enough to make Vermintide a great game. Gameplay… well, gameplay also has its good and bad sides, but two things are for sure: it works and there is no any other game with such gameplay.
So while being far from polished, Vermintide 2 is already a great game worth playing… would be, if it wasn’t for one thing. Details matter, and one little detail completely ruins otherwise great game, imho. I am talking about progression system, end game progression system more precisely. I think it needs an improvement as soon as possible, and a significant one. Why? Well, right now people are leaving the game, and leaving quickly. According to SteamCharts the game has lost 40% of its playerbase in the last 30 days! And some people quit before that, so in sum it might be 50%-60% quitters already. And according to the forum, most of the frustration is caused by the end game progression system. So the more people get to end game, the more people leave - that’s completely logical. Another logical thing, is that if nothing is going to be done with it, the game will become completely empty in a month or two.
So paragraphs 1 to 10 of this section address exactly this problem, and they’re the biggest and most important changes the game needs right now.
Links: SteamCharts, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and more.
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Let players choose an item trait for x5 dust, and choose properties for x10 dust for green items and x50 for blue, orange and red items. Values are still randomized. (Item traits and item properties rolling is a subject to the law of large numbers, so there is zero reason to randomize such things. Not to mention, that rolling this stuff takes a lot of time. In addition, although item rolling is a subject to the law large numbers in general, it is not when rolling properties or traits for a particular item. Sometimes you’ll have to reroll stats 100-150 times, and this can be very frustrating. VERY frustrating. Yes, sometimes you will get lucky fast rerolls, but they can not compensate for the frustration. Why? Well, it’s because of how psychology works. I can’t prove it, but you might search the forum for topics on crafting randomness to see that I am right. And this change can also deal with crafting speed problem, without actually changing crafting speed or any animations.
P.S. Item drop does not fall into the law of large numbers, at least when it comes down to orange and red items. So while the above change will not affect gameplay at all, except for easing stuff, it cannot be applied for chest drops, without drastically changing the game experience.)
Some links are duplicates of paragraph 14 from “Easy important fixes” section.
Links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 AND MORE. -
(There should have been a letter based set of paragraphs here, but since the forum does not accept them for lists, I had to switch to numbers only. That’s why this paragraph kind of doesn’t fit the whole picture.)
Right now Vermintide 2 endgame reward system is completely broken in a bad way. I made some calculations, and it turned out, that it would take about 4100 hours on average to get at least one instance of red color of each weapon in the game prior to patch 1.0.5. And this is the MOST OPTIMISTIC number for A VERY SKILLED player. What does optimistic mean? Well, there are two different numbers for red item drops: one comes from data mining, another comes from a cheater opening 3k chests. They differ by about 3 times, with the latter being lower, and the pessimistic evaluation is 14,5k hours. And don’t forget “a very skilled player” part. The number should be increased by 2-3 times for an average player, if not by 10 (by my estimations it’s a 5-6 multiplier). You can see all the calculations with comments and play with the numbers here. In addition I made a separate topic addressing this problem.
Also the drop rates are said to be DRASTICALLY increased at 1.0.5, but this could mean both 3% or 300% percent increase. This word means nothing without the numbers. From my evaluation it’s about 100% increase, but that’s not accurate in any way. And even if it is 300% percent (which it is not), that still not good enough, because a) That’s still 2-3k hours for an average player at the very least. b) We still don’t know the basic numbers. In case of pessimistic numbers even a 1000% drop rate increase is far from being enough. c) The problem can not be solved by increasing drop chance alone, a crafting system is needed.
But why is increasing drop rates not enough, and why is a crafting system needed so much? It’s because of randomness. Because the drop system is completely random, you’re not guaranteed to get any item at all. You might spend hundreds even thousands hours farming for a particular weapon, and still not get it. You might get it first try though, but what are the chances, especially if you need more than one item? And the 4k hours mentioned above can (and will) very well turn into 8k, 12k or 20k hours for some players.
So I insist that a full set of measures should be adopted to speed up red item farm and compensate for bad luck, rather than just one. Here is a list of my thoughts on how to deal with the red item drop situation.
Unlike other sections, links in this section might overlap a little, because people address multiple problems in the same post, while I try to split them.
Links: all paragraphs 3, 6 and 7 links plus 1, 2, 3, 4. Start with paragraph 7, since it’s most related. -
Increase weapon drop rate compared to jewelry drop rate by several times, at least for red items. (Thanks to data miners it is known, that right now there is a 55% for a jewelry to drop from a chest slot (3 slots in chest) and a 45% chance for a weapon (not counting deeds, only comparing items). The problem is that all the jewelry is the same (inside its type), while there is about dozen different weapons for each class. There is an average of 10.8 weapon types per class (let’s round it to 11), which means that there is a 4% chance for a particular weapon type to drop from a chest slot, while there is an 18% chance for a particular jewelry type - a 4.5 times difference. This numbers mean that while rolling for 1 unit of each weapon type for a single character, you will get 4.5 instances of each jewelry, and that’s ONLY if you get no duplicates. But you will get them. On average, you will need to roll a number of weapons, equal to 3 times the basic weapon pool, in order to get each and every one of them. Calculations can be found in the second sheet of this spreadsheet. Yet again, the actual number if highly dependant on your luck and might be significantly bigger or smaller. But on average you will get 4.5 * 3 = 13.5 of each jewelry type or 50.5 jewelry in total while farming an instance of each weapon for one character… and there is 5 characters… and you only need 2-3 jewelries of each type, which you will get long before you’re done rolling weapons for just one character.
On the bright side, there is a crafting system, which makes this whole situation A LOT better. You can always craft the last 2-3 weapons you’re missing. Also, your need a lot of dust for stat/trait rerolls, and you don’t care if it comes from weapons or jewelry. But when you start farming red items, the numbers kick in, and grinding becomes completely ridiculous, since there is currently no red items crafting.)
Links: 1, 2, 3, 4. -
Fixed in 1.1 Increase red items drop rates. (Even after implementation of a crafting system, it would still take thousands of hours for a player to get all red items, just because they drop so poorly. If the drop rates will be left unchanged, the crafting system will mostly speed up the whole process by about 3 times, depending on the exact implementation. And, imho, that’s no enough. I feel that getting all the items should take 1500 hours max for an average player. But that’s a max number, I would prefer it to be 2-3 times lower. To be fair since I don’t know all the numbers, reds drop rate increase might not be necessary after implementing all the listed features.)
Links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. -
Allow crafting red items for 500 scrap and cosmetics for 1500 scrap. (Right now scrap is 100% useless in late game. You can only convert it to dust by crafting items, which in turn takes a lot of time. Allowing players to get a few more red or cosmetic items would be nice, and it wouldn’t break the system for such a cost. And both reds and cosmetics crafted can even be random, as long as they don’t give duplicates (if possible).)
Links: no links. -
Allow players scrapping red items for 1 red dust. Allow crafting red items for 3-5 red dust (and possibly some scrap). (No comments, since I already explained the significance of crafting system.)
Links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. -
Add a bad luck compensation system. (This is a standard practice, and this system is implemented in many games nowadays. It has 2 possible implementations. #1, after not getting a rare item x times in a row, a player is guaranteed to get one. This system, for example, is implemented in Hearthstone for legendary card drops. Implementation #2: every time a player does not get a rare item, a chance for getting that item gets increased. Such a system is implemented in Rainbow Six for loot boxes. One system is enough, and I like the second one better.)
Links: 1, 2, 3, 4. -
Add progression to a guaranteed red item for slaying bosses and completing some deeds on Legend. (Add a progression bar, which when filled, gives a chest with 1 guaranteed red item. This progression bar should be filled by completing boss levels on Legend and some of the deeds. Progression for quickplay should be twice the progression for custom games to prevent abusive farming. Progression should also be affected by tomes and grims, otherwise taking them might be pointless for both boss levels and deeds. Champion bosses might also give some progression, but it should be very low. Btw bosses might be powered up a little to turn them into a real challenge for a real reward.
And I want to say a couple of words about dices dropping from bosses. Basically - this is a joke. If we assume 1 dice per mission on average, than 2 boss dice increase emperors chest drop rate by 28%, from 45.5%, to 58% (you should divide one by another), or giving 0.125 more emperors chests per level on average. You can see that yourself using previously mentioned spreadsheet.)
Links: 1, 2. -
This is the only paragraph I am not sure about, but it might be a nice addition to the game crafting system.
Add red tokens: melee, ranged and jewelry. Tokens can be used to craft red items (with some scrap). Tokens should make about 10%-15% of all red items drops, and weapon tokens should be 3 times as common as jewelry tokens. Also if taking paragraph 6 into account, then tokens should be scrapped for 1.5 dust, making even jewelry tokens to be somewhat decent drop. (Players might not get red weapons they want at first, and they might not want scrapping few weapons they have already gotten, because it is very hard to get red items overall. Later they will get excessive red dust from duplicate weapons and from jewelry, but at first these tokens might help a lot to compensate for not so lucky drops.)
Links: no links. -
Open up exact drop chances for red items. (Lots of the most played and successful games like WoW or Hearthstone have their drop chances open (although the latter one has them calculated by fans, not given by devs.). When those things are unknown, it makes players nervous, makes them come up with different theories, suspect devs in intentional promotion of grind. This is especially true when there is no bad luck compensation system, since then a lot of players do get bad drops. And opening these numbers help a lot will all the possible negative reactions. Also I se no drawbacks in opening drop chances, only positive things, unless of course you want to promote microtransactions or prolong gameplay to 1k+ hours purely by grinding.)
Links: 1, 2, 3, 4. -
Improved in 1.0.8? Enemies should not lunge at approaching or stationary players. (I understand the lunge mechanics and what it was made for. Lunging is needed to stop players from indefinitely kiting the enemies. Without lunge attacks a player could potentially kite any number of enemies if given enough space. But enemies should lunge only when a player runs or dashes away from them. When a player moves away from an enemy, lunging takes a reasonable amount of time and can be reacted to without any problems. Otherwise, an enemy gets close to the player very fast, and it is very hard to react to that, sometimes impossible. However, that’s not the main problem. The worst part is that an enemy can lunge through a swarm of other mobs, and often times you can’t just see them. Even if you notice that move, you can’t stop that lunge, because you can’t pierce the mass of enemies, and you’re forced to block or dash away. The latter is not that important, though, as stealth lunges through a mob.)
Links: no links. -
Make Stormvermin shields breakable. Maybe having 2, 3 or even 4 times more durable than regular shields, but breakable. Alternatively stormvermin can be made to not unstagger, when taking damage. At least make it so they’re not pushed back when staggered. (Shielded Stromvermins are ridiculously strong, especially in numbers or in tight spaces, or when supporting a wave or some other group. In these situations, they are even stronger than Chaos Warriors, because you can at least kill the latter. These guys on other hand just protect everyone with their bodies, since all the hits get stopped by their shields, and as soon as they open up - they’re pushed backwards, so you can’t get em through other enemies. So the only thing left to you, is to accept their existence and deal with other enemies first. And that’s a very hard thing to do, when all you swings get stopped by armor.)
Links: 1. -
Allow giving medkits to teammates on Use button. (There is no reason medkits can’t be given to teammates. Unlike grims, you can exchange them between teammates, you just need to find a healing potion or a tome on the ground to be used as a “buffer” and make a bunch of manipulations. This change will just make players life a little bit more comfortable. Right now, the inability to swap medkits between players feels like an artificial difficulty raising.)
Links: no links. -
Allow swapping tomes and healing items between players. In order to receive a healing item a player must be holding the tome in hands. (Same as previous.)
Links: no links.