The +power vs x stat, as it currently exists, is bloating the properties pool, and generally only serves one purpose: to help you hit specific damage breakpoints against specific mobs. Investing significantly into the stat specializes your build even further beyond weapon and class selection, in a game where you will constantly be facing all available enemy types with the exception of bosses.
To my knowledge, the stat currently performs two of the three functions of your base hero power: damage, and stagger. It does not affect your ability to deal damage to more enemies per swing.
To lessen the impact of this over-specialization, and provide new build options to players, I propose condensing the six properties (+power vs chaos, skaven, infantry, armoured, berserkers, and monsters) to three generic stats: +%damage, +%stagger, and +%cleave. I won’t suggest any numbers, I would leave that to someone with a better understanding of the game than I have.
I believe these three stats would better allow players to meaningfully customize the effectiveness of their weapons, to either exaggerate a weapon’s effectiveness at its intended role, or to round it out to better deal with the variety of enemy types and numbers the game throws at you.
My suggestion:
+10% power vs chaos
+10% power vs skaven
+5% power
Remove all the other power vs modifiers and please don’t touch stagger or cleave.
If you were to add stagger and cleave modifiers it will make weapons feel inconsistent.
I don’t mind the idea that it would make weapons feel inconsistent. This already occurs with all of the other changes you can make to weapons (damage, crit, attack speed), and cleave and stagger affected by power changes inherent to talents, like Witch Hunter Captain’s Abjure Temptation that gives +15% power while affected by a grim.
Afaik stagger is already boosted by “power vs”. Also you might be shocked, but two mentioned things are already boosted by other power bonuses, like talents, And since you don’t feel inconsistent now, running grim power on Shade for example, I think your argument is non-viable.
Modifiers are good as is. They allow you to hit more enemies, they allow you to achieve breakpoints to oneshot specials on legend with handguns, or deal with monsters faster, you just need to choose what your style needs more.
Power vs armor is pretty good on sienna. Even like Power vs chaos in everyone oder vs monsters on shade/kruber/pyro… skaven and berzerk are not needed so far, but only the 3 you named? That would be really annoying…
More specification would be great… maybe an extra stat on new weapons like power vs CW or SV only
Hero Power, to my knowledge, does affect cleave - in theory. In practice, only the weapons that already have high cleave (4+) can benefit from it, as on anything less than that the required Power addition is too high to ever reach. On those high-cleave weapons, adding one slaverat to cleave is hard to notice, and practically irrelevant. Also, the build to utilize this would require quite specialized stacking of Properties with a likely suboptimal setup otherwise, so it’s even less likely to reach cleave breakpoints.
The Power vs. Properties are quite good as they are, for the most part. They mean that you have to sacrifice general effectiveness to better deal with specific enemies, either to specialize the character further or to help with problematic areas. This wouldn’t be the case if cleave, stagger and damage were to be implemented instead, as they would all just add general efficiency without giving up that much in exchange. They would also be a lot more boring, imo.
The only exception to this is Power vs. Berserkers. That one’s way too specific to be useful (effective against two specific enemies that aren’t that common) and as such, I wouldn’t miss it if it were removed. My personal suggestion would be to merge it with vs. Armored to produce vs. Elites, but I’m not sure of the consequences.
Single-target weapons for sure don’t benefit as much from cleave, although i wouldn’t underestimate it, since they should all be able ot hit the breakpoint to cleave through a clanrat.
For others, it’s hugely useful. Like the gaxe, it’s cleave is just short of being able to cleave through 4 (hitting 5) fanatics and 5 (hitting 6) slaverats. With the setup, you could kill 6 slaverats with a single swing. It’s a bit further away (requires 2 medium-low rolls) from another extremely useful cleave breakpoint: 2 marauders. Really, being able to hit this would help so much when dealing with marauders.
And this is just an example. A lot of weapons have similarly useful breakpoints, the cleaving through marauders is present in a ton of weapons, including halberd and glaive.
My personal suggestion would be to merge it with vs. Armored to produce vs. Elites, but I’m not sure of the consequences.
While i think that’s probably the best to merge it with, vs elites would be confusing as it also works against ratlings/warpfire throwers.
Personally would maybe just prefer buffing the value of vs monster&armor (maybe infantry for consistency, but it’s also the most useful of the 3) to 15% and zerk to 20%.
I have never seen any evidence of testing done that shows that increasing hero power through items increases cleave, unlike character talents, which does increase cleave. This missing feature is half of the point of my OP.
I think, that idea of making “single-purpose” classes, which floating in minds of many, the worst thing about V2. This isn’t turn-based RPG, it’s hack’n’slash action. And I really can’t understand why so many people trying to make first and don’t care about second. Classes have to be different, with different playstyles, but, all of them must dealing with every threat, at least, fine, not lesser than this. And sure no one will agree with that, I know.
The inclusion of Damage vs. Stats is one of the primary reasons Vermintide 2 is a lackluster game. It means nobody’s experience will be consistent between weapons, and it means enemies are balanced around arbitrary points rather than fine tuning each weapon like in V1.
Hero Power, and Damage vs. contribute a lot to what a travesty the game has become. It will take a monumental effort for Fatshark to balance this game. What we’ve seen over the last 3 months isn’t encouraging.
Nor is the console release they’ve scrogged off on.