Trying to get some discussion here to keep an eye on how the forum feels the game balance is going.
Mostly intending to gather feedback for the main Book of Grudges thing. So please, let me know your thoughts.
CLASS ISSUES
Vet’s keystones are still half-baked and counter-productive due to stack-obsession and the broader environment/game design not rewarding his ostensible role (long range attacks)
Ogryn is underpowered and has many utterly useless talents, and got nerfed harder with the Havoc patch
WEAPON ISSUES
Dueling Sword is now far too OP for the classes that aren’t psyker and can act as a ridiculously strong melee weapon since it’s no longer balanced by being attached to a glass cannon class.
Shotguns fall behind in general.
BROADER GAMES ISSUES
Overreliance on enemy spam rather than curtailing player power, causing glitches and breakdowns in game mechanics
When a chaos warrior showed up in Vermintide it was spooky. You actually somewhat tried to avoid patrols of CWs or Stormvermin. Building for horde clearing vs elite slaying felt like a much harder choice.
Other stuff I think would be cool
Scrap all the power/strength boosting blessings/perks and rebalance the game from the highest difficulty down.
Add blessings that actually change how a weapon feels like deflector or that sticky nade on the rumbler.
Possibly make weapon balance on a per class basis. DS might have been a bit overtuned on Psyker, but as it is now, whenever they decide to nerf it they are going to use a hammer instead of a scalpel as always. So the zealot will probably be the only class that can use it at that point.
On that note…stop using a hammer instead of a scalpel, make more smaller changes, not sweeping giant ones.
Oh yeah, more chaff is fine. But when twenty ragers show up at once there’s a problem. I like the mega hordes that give weapons like the flamer a niche.
I think this is an interlinked issue. With many talents/blessings/etc in this game, you get bonuses and powerups for killing things. The more stuff gets thrown at you, the more powerful you get. CDR talents for instance are something some people complain about at higher difficulties as they allow abilities to be spammed in quick succession, but aren’t an issue at lower difficulty levels because they’re not being fed enough enemies to radically affect the cooldown time. There’s a ton of ways to address that (change the type of enemies spammed for instance to include more heavy hordes instead of elites) but there’s definitely an aspect of more enemies=more power.
Another issue is how often enemies “clump” or “conga-line”. 10 Shotgunners can be scary showing up all at once, but if they all pop out of the same door at once, well there’s a tons of stuff that can job bop 'em all at the same time. If they came from 3 or 4 different directions however, they’d be far scarier. A wall of Crushers is scary, except when a Krak grenade kills them all in the blink of an eye because they’re all standing on the same spot trying to whack the same player instead of spreading out and engaging different targets. Spreading enemies out more would make them much scarier.
Overall however, I’d don’t think balance is terrible, and in fact I find it better now than it ever has been in general (not that there aren’t issues). I fail my share of missions, I find Auric to be very challenging. I play with several different groups of people I know IRL with varying skill levels, and despite this game being out for two years now I don’t know anyone personally that finds the game’s highest difficulties to be a cakewalk, but nobody is putting in quad digits worth of hours to play either the way some players have.
dueling sword cleave isn’t great; there needs to be more armored enemies like infected moebian 21st, then dueling sword will be a lot less good(it was a pain to get through a full horde of them even at high hs rate).
Combat shotguns need a solid pass. I’d love to see a new stat for combat shotguns that increases damage/knockdown based on how close you are - replace the ammo stat so shotguns are capped 7+1. Combat shotguns should give you a reward for being up in the enemies face. Nothing feels worse than point blank 12 gauge buckshot into a crusher that they just shrug off.
Staves need more identity desperately. Primary fire should be unique to each staff, not just the inferno/purgatus. Every staff needs a meaningful and interesting special ability.
The psyker tree feels pretty bloated imo. It’s still workable, but could be a lot more interesting.
that’s the thing, why does the game have to spawn 20 ragers in the first place. i’d rather fight 5 ragers that are individually threatening, or 2 crushers that require some teamwork. the current enemy spam leads to bugs like the sound engine being unable to play all alerts, and generally slowdowns on less potent systems.
Yeah I tried a few matches and the game just doesn’t really feel fun at this point.
Even winning matches mostly just feels like a chore to be finished with how it’s just becoming more and more of a DPS arms race between players and enemies. Also, did they make it so that there’s no more toughness grace period at all now? Even outside of Havoc I was noticing it not existing. Combined with the gunner spam and gunners just plodding towards you now and it was just tedious as hell.
Bonus points like was mentioned where the game just can’t handle the number of audio cues. Had my first silent crusher in quite a while that just kinda popped out of nowhere and squished two of us.
EDIT: Actually, looking at it again, I was getting hit through my toughness by a reaper and there was no toughness gating. The hell?
Yep, I specifically checked the previous twenty seconds or so and hadn’t had my toughness broken so unless something changed that I didn’t know about I should have still had it available. I’ve pretty much exclusively been playing high intensity shock gauntlet damnation for a while now and something felt very off with the damage in general.
My two cents:
-Agree that shotguns feel underpowered compared to other ranged options. There’s always another gun that can perform any given task better.
-The Mk X heavy laspistol feels significantly weaker than the Mk II, although I find it more fun to use.
-Chain weapons in general feel underwhelming compared to other melee weapons, at least on zealot. Especially the Mk 3 Eviscerator. They are usable, but there is always another melee weapon that can do the job better and faster. They are cool though.
-Agree that dueling sword and knives are too powerful, at least on zealot. It seems silly that a little knife or puny sword grossly outperform a heavy eviscerator or thunder hammer.
-Revolver is too powerful and shouldn’t be able to do some of the things that it does.
-Zealot talent tree needs some balance work. Currently, some talents are objectively “correct” choices and seem mandatory for higher difficulties (enduring faith, second wind, good balance, thy wrath be swift, duelist, invocation of death, blades of faith, blazing piety, etc). Other talents are completely useless and basically block off portions of the talent tree. Immolation grenade feels quite weak and unhelpful much of the time. Stunstorm grenade is pretty good, but located in a very bad part of the talent tree. The talents that come before blades of faith are objectively better than most others. This basically makes blades of faith a necessary pick, even though I don’t like using them and would rather have a grenade. Beacon of purity is pretty useless and needs some kind of re-work. I like chorus of spiritual fortitude as a team support power, but it seems objectively worse than fury of the faithful in most cases and can’t be used nearly as often. Basically a worse version of veteran shout. Shroudfield is too powerful, encourages bad behavior, and can basically break the game and AI. All of this leads to what feels like an enforced meta.
