So, after spending the evening reading lots and lots of feedback (which is awesome to get, thank you all) while contemplating life, balance, release builds and many other imporant things I wanted to provide some more clear, detailed info on what the scaling does. Might help your discussions, might give me some more great feedback, may help players running the beta at different power levels get a hint of what to expect. If nothing else, I love me good graph.
So I’ve mapped the red “raw” powerlevel used in the live game and the blue scaled powerlevel that we run in the beta branch. The different difficulty levels are reference points at round where we place the enemies in regards to health/cleave/stagger. Basically at around which powerlevel you should see similar results for the different difficulties.
Note that the gap over to Legend is bigger than the others with the current balance of the game and that the small bump around 0 Hero power is our “help the new guy”-mechanic that eases out progression for new heroes.
Anyways, back to collecting feedback! There’s alot of if and we really appreciate it, balancing and fixing will continue!
Appreciate the context and the legendary scaling lines up pretty well with what I’m noticing in game. Enemy’s that would take three head hits are taking 5 etc.
Seems like that would be a better option, with how it now some weapons that suck at cleaving are actually fun to use because they have been increased.
But if this change is going to take it away id rather them just have weapons be set at a certain cleave heck maybe at a property that increases cleave.
I liked power increasing cleave, seemed like a nice thing for weapons that are ignored because they have little to no cleave. Otherwise for a game that consists of mostly cutting through many enemies (often stacked ontop of eachother) weapons that are slightly better at other things really dont cut it most of the time.
The reason seems pretty obvious. With this mechanic talents and passives, which increase your power level, have bigger impact and feel much more useful.
Well, that is not your decision to make but the developer’s. They seem to have decided that they don’t want to use such mundane system of just increasing the damage and, as I stated in my last post (which seems that you didn’t read), using power to influence damage and both stagger and cleave too opens more possibilities to power increasing talents and passives making them more useful.
The reasoning behind adding stagger and cleave into the progression system is that we feel they are of equal importance to player performance as damage output. In V1 there was this thing that you could bring a white shield to a cata game and do the tank job just a good as a fully decked out top-geared tank.
Now, we also don’t want the progression to be a rollercoaster of relearning everything, which is why each difficulty acts similarly when progressing through them. You start slightly underpowered and have a slight journey until you hit a stable output as you cap out. The output differences are rather manageble and more importantly; they match between difficulties quite well so the progression shouldn’t be jarring. This is the main reason we have a scaling system. To make sure the progression is smooth, the gap between difficulties is manageble and that weapon performance isn’t wastly different and require relearning as you jump difficulties.
Stagger is scaled the hardest since it’s judged to be the most jarring. An important thing to remember is that eventhough we apply the scale to the player, the enemies restistance is tweaked to match.
But yeah, the option to not add stagger and or cleave to the progression has been a discussed.
I understand the reasoning behind it, progression systems are increasingly all the rage in games and serve as a kind of ‘hook’ to keep people invested in the game and satisfied with their progression, I just don’t believe it’s necessary in Vermintide.
There is already progression in the from of increasing damage output, unlocking character classes, unlocking class talents and of course the main draw, the loot system which has you go from whites > greens > oranges > oranges with carefully rerolled stats/traits > reds (eventually and hopefully). I believe stagger/cleave being all over the place as you play on different difficulties/classes with different power affecting talents is just unwieldy and off-putting.
Technically I think it is not possible to get to PowerLevel 200, since 15 -> 231,25. With (-)15 I mean approaching 15 from negative. Unless I’m wrong 14 HP -> 199 PL, but 15 HP -> 231,5 PL. So fun fact, the step from 14 to 15 HP is the most significant HeroPower step!
300
175
Veteran
253
75 HP more than required for the difficulty to hit like in Recruit, seems fair. Although stagger would be ish 16% less effective.
400
335
Champion
307
135 HP more than required for the difficulty to hit like in Recruit, seems fair. Although stagger would be ish 23% less effective.
600
655
Legend
413
Impossible to hit like in Recruit unless perfect +10% Power vs X for common enemies. Given it is endgame, very fair, but require optimal gear. How easy it is to acquire said gear without playing Legend? For avoidance of doubt, with 600 HP + 10% vs X you would for all intents and purposes have 660 HP vs that type, and 660 > 655 so it would feel like playing Recruit on a “naked” toon. Note that with +9% vs X it is very possible you miss a breakpoint. And should be noted that to play Legend you should then have almost double the HP as if you are playing Champion (i.e. 655 vs 335). Do keep in mind that stagger is 30% less effective! (compared to damage) You would need 1215 HP for the same (i.e. 600) stagger!
And as far as I know the enemy health scales as the PowerLevel scales per difficulty, i.e. if an enemy has 10 health in Recruit, said enemy will have 30 health in Legend (and 15 in Veteran and 20 in Champion).
The HeroPower -> PowerLevel formula for damage looks as follows according to my reverse engineering:
// javascript, useful in gdocs...
function getImpactScaling(heroPower, diff, type) {
// 200 for recruit, 400 veteran etc
// assume Legend, so 1000
if (typeof(diff)==='undefined') diff = 1000;
// assume attack / cleave == 8/5 if not given. Stagger == 3 (even in 1.05 beta? or changed?)
if (typeof(type)==='undefined') type = 8/5;
// scale down
heroPower = Math.min(heroPower, diff)
// any upscaling??
// heroPower = Math.max(heroPower, XXX?)
// add 185 to calc raw power
rawPower = heroPower + 185
// get scaling from raw power.
rawScaling = Math.min(rawPower, 200) + // base "rawness"
Math.max(rawPower - 200, 0) / type + // scaling from 200 raw power and up
(Math.max(Math.min(rawPower - 199, 1), 0) * (300 - Math.min(rawPower,300))) / (type * 2) // ninja math to handle the 200-300 bump
return rawScaling
}
I desperately miss the slot system for enemy’s from V1, if its bugged right now I get it, but if the enemy stacking is intended I really think that needs to be rethought.
The gap between RAW nad Scaled ib 600 Power is HUGE. It’s too big of a difference. 575 vs 800. That is 225 difference on 600 Power. Way too much considering we talk about MAXed players.
I also agree with some folks here- cleave and stagger should not be tied to Power progression. It makes everything counter intuitive when you progress from one difficulty to another. Weapons that cleaved suddenly stop doing it, enemies that could be staggered before (and therefore thaught player a certains behaviours/muscle memories) suddenly tank through all your hits, your fav weapon becomes worthless, you main career you love is now subpar etc.
Those should be set values- for example 2h hammer cleaves through mass of 10 slave rats or equivalent mass (for example 2 marauders + one clan rat just for the sake of argument). This way- players know what weapon can do through all difficulties and how it can or can’t benefit him. Like in V1. As for the cleave and stagger I think V1 did it better. But it’s only my preference.
Stagger is also in game and there is no reason for it to suddenly dissapear in Legend. I can understand that Zerkers or Maulers/SVs can be HARDER to stagger- like light Glaive attack won’t but if Zerker eats double power shot from Dual Axes- he should be staggered- period. Or why is even stagger mechanic in game if some enemies are just immune to it. You don’t need stagger vs trash, you need it vs heavy hitters.
Also in my humble opinion - I think you should first address underpowered weapons and careers that this change make even weaker before procceding with it to live. That at least. Only my thoughts about it.
I think I’m the only one on the planet, but I like the game as is in 1.05. Champion can be played consistently if you know what you’re doing, legendary is a real challenge, that’s the way VT1 nightmare/cataclysm was and I’m happy with that. I need something that is barely do-able at the top to give me some way to improve, some insurmountable peak to aspire to, but I need to grind loot as well. Currently I can do that.
If people are complaining that legendary is too hard it’s probably just right
EDIT: improve droprates though this is actually infuriating
I’m really enjoying 1.0.5 as well but not entirely as is. Some weapons have regained their integrity, say Flame Sword. But many other weapons have completely lost their appeal and might need tuning up even for Legendary. The fixed power and stagger ratios seem to have also introduced some new bugs for talents related to said ratios. I’d also be interested to hear what devs think about the ability of rats to indefinitely stack on each other.
I think there needs to be some tweaking of numbers on particular weapons/heroes - but we all already knew that would be the case.
I REALLY think the game needed this fix, and not just because it makes it easier for the devs on the back-end (though that is important; makes life easier for them and means it will be easier for them to fix things and probably add new things). Legend was just too easy before. The actual combat wasn’t hard, it was difficulty spikes that got you. The combat SHOULD be hard. People had Legend on farm only weeks into the game! Legend is really supposed to be a punishing challenge, not something you farm.
I even made a post awhile back about (not sure if here or on Reddit; I think here) about how it was odd that we could so easily one-shot common enemies with even light weapons, and that I hoped modders would tweak and give them a bit more health so you’d get rewarded for the skill of landing headshots instead of just being able to body-shot most enemies for kills easily. I am really glad that the game is now harder! Even if it means I will get my butt kicked. I will be forced to improve how I play because of it, and learn new skills to cope. We are like two days into this new patch; that we don’t necessarily have all the answers yet on the highest difficulty is not surprising.
I feel like people are missing the whole point of the progression; it’s to create more of a smooth journey for new players to go through the difficulties, to hopefully groom them upwards. Once you hit 600 power . . . it stops even being a thing that affects you. And everyone will hit 600 power eventually - commendation chests will continually boost you even if you never leave Recruit.
