Warpick is underpowered and only really viable on Slayer. It should have more armorpen, cleave and dmgcleave on lights. Right now there’s not much reason to use it over Coghammer.
Bardin’s hammer and shield heavy combo should consist only of high armorpen overheads. As it stands right now, there’s little reason to ever pick it over axe and shield.
Drakefire Pistols direly need a buff. I’ve played with them for hundreds of hours and while they are viable on Champion, they struggle on Legend and aren’t viable on Cata. They should be made pinpoint accurate (I mean no spread, the projectile drop/trajectory should be left untouched ofc) and have more damage against armored targets (especially specials). These two buffs alone would bring the weapon up on par with the rest of ranged weapons.
Drakegun needs a complete overhaul. It’s an underpowered mess that is only a meme on difficulties above Veteran. Just make it work like real life flamethrowers (or like the one in Space Hulk Deathwing), so it’s a mid-range flamethrower that spews a concentrated stream of burning gel that sticks to surfaces and enemies. Also rework IB’s drakefire talent, it’s dead.
There are many other weapons (especially on Markus and Saltzpyre) that are never used because they are too weak when compared to meta. A good way of buffing them up would be changing their combos so they are more easily controllable - for example make the light combo only have attacks that are good at cleaving and the heavy combos only have single target high dmg/armorpen attacks.
Replace the universal 3rd column talent (20% teammate heal when using a healing item). That was good in Vermintide 1, but not in V2. I doubt anyone would give up on THP generation talents (arguably the most important in the game), so I’d suggest just giving each class a 3rd THP option.
Buff natbond. Its drawbacks are a bit too large for what it offers. It’s not even worth picking on Waystalker because 30% more healing necklace increases her regen more. Just make it regenerate more HP + make it additive with THP instead of replacing it.
Perhaps consider giving RV the ‘Leading Shots’ talent that OE had? It allows for some unique builds with some ranged weapons.
Improve the AI. The bots are buggy, undecisive and aren’t reliable on Champion and above.
On high difficulty cata + twins + skull and such things it is the best weapon you can take
Here the dwarf has 250k damage dealt and this year we have done it as well with again over 200k damage of IB with flamethrower
With push attack + light attack you can bully a whole SV patrol by your own and you will deal as much damage vs armour as the axe + shield, but in addition with you will stagger them all and all enemies surrounding you as well, which makes hammer + shield a S-Tier weapon imo.
natural bond is on cata a common pick by players who are comfortable on that difficulty. You you dont take much hits barkskin wont give you much, since barkskin only reduces the damage of the second hit within 2 seconds and not the damage of the initial hit. And most often you wont get 2 hits within 2 seconds. Its most of the time a single hit by a slaverat or a dumb overhead. And specials arent that of a big deal outside of a more special deed on cata.
Looks interesting, I’ll have to look into that. Maybe it helps that the higher difficulties have higher elite enemy density so it can do more work?
But that eats away your stamina quickly even with the IB talent for stamina regen, you don’t deal as much damage vs armor as the axe (axe armor DPS is still higher with a proper light-heavy combo with overheads) and stagger cleave is not an issue with either of those weapons because both of them have H1 shield attack that has high stagger that has infinite cleave and that attack is also slightly faster on axe for some reason. So axe is still literally better at everything.
Common pick? Last time I checked everyone had either barkskin or boon of shallya. And boon of shallya is probably a much better choice than natbond because it applies to THP and THP isn’t that hard to get with the amount of enemies cata has. Natbond will just veeeeery slowly regen your GHP when you get hit. You don’t get DR from barkskin so you’re fudged if a special gets you and you cannot build THP as reliably as with Shallya.
An extra from Shallya is that first aid kits heal you for 104% HP and potions for 97.5 HP. Not to mention the healing you get from teammate talents/abilities.
I’ve only seen it being picked on Cata once. And it was someone who got hit all the time lmao
It doesn’t offer anything better than the other two. It’s slow, it replaces your THP. And it only works when you get hit - and when you get hit it’s probably better to have Boon of Shallya so you can quickly replace the lost GHP with THP.
So it’s overall worthless.
It has a short range, laughable damage, it has pretty much no armorpen, it heats up pretty quickly and is as clunky and requires as much space as OE’s ult. You get fudged over by any special other than assassin, because you can stagger assassin with the LMB attack, though you really need two or three of them to close the distance and get into the melee range to kill him.
Bardin is my most played character. I’ve tested all the weapons extensively (except grudge raker) and I really want to like hammer and shield, but it just falls short of axe and shield. Maybe it’s because of my aggressive playstyle (IB) but I ran out of stamina relatively quickly with hammer and shield.
To get anywhere near axe shield in terms of armored damage (L2+H3 combo on axe) you have to do a push, a push attack and then L3, but that’s still lower than axe and shield, eats up your stamina and is more complex than just L2+H3. And if you’re really into going P+PA+L3 then you might as well just pick axe and shield, do L1, cancel and repeat, because that has highest armor DPS. And don’t forget axe and shield has slightly faster H1.
The only thing that hammer and shield offers better over axe and shield is stagger cleave on weapon attacks. It makes a difference if you’re using the weapons without a shield but the shield renders that aspect absolutely irrelevant because H1 has infinite stagger cleave and probably the highest stagger value in the game.
If you being hit not often its better than the other 2, because you wont need to consume healing and you regen life for a good amount. In about 2min you will have 25% of your health regnerated as green health as shade for example and boon of shallya is not that important for her because she get chunks of thp by killing elites.
But overall if you arent eating many hits natural bond is better, if you eat many hits boon of shallya will be better.
it kills stormvermin quite effectivly and has pretty sick damage output on non-armoured units and a good range for a flamethrower, i mean it isnt a sniper weapon obviously.
And keep in mind the enemies at the video have 225% the health of cata enemies as soon as we have taken up the skull.
If you’re taking many hits the Boon of Shallya is better.
If you’re not taking many hits the Boon of Shallya is still better, because you can replace that lost HP quickier.
There’s no value difference between GHP and THP on cata and Boon of Shallya allows you to get your HP to 100% WAY quickier than natbond (with which you would still have to wait for to replace your THP with GHP, so the moment the natbond ACTUALLY starts adding to your total HP pool can be much more postponed).
And on lower difficulties the less skillful players will get hit all the time, so natbond isn’t a good choice there either.
It’s just useless.
It doesn’t kill SV effectively lol. It applies a weak DoT (probably momentarily blinding your whole team with fire spam in the process and perhaps causing friendly fire). Other weapons can achieve what Drakegun can and still manage to hunt down specials.
That just means drakegun has more HP to knock off of the weakest enemies, which it is good at (which isn’t necessarily a good thing because the team needs those to build THP). Couple that with the fact that you had enemies split into weaker enemies on death + the map being made out of choke points and suddenly ~200k damage isn’t that impressive.
Also not a single person in that video uses natbond.
And that’s becuase no one ever takes it because it’s useless compared to BS and BoS.
If you say so, but its 60k more than a BW with coru and the same result is on maps like warcamp with almost no choke points.
And with killing elites he is not far behind of GK and BW on those runs.
But you have done those runs you know it better.
If you have most of the time full thp it doesnt matter if you have full thp with boon of shallya or if you have full thp with natural bond, in both cases you have full thp. The difference with natural bond is that you will slowly heal yourself in addition.
But i dont see much sense in this discussion because i have already said that for most players boon of shallya is better, and i have never stated something else.
maybe something like you generate thp when you kill enemis (not based on hp the enemis has but a standard amount) and when you full thp, you generate thp to the closest ally.
that can be good for tanks and high lvl player to help others.
a weak thp talent which has the trait to heal the most nearby ally as well sounds fun, especially if you want to help out struggling players and it wont be too op because it needs a higher level of skill.
I think a good replacement talent for the 20% teammate healing from items would be to have a talent that disables THP decay and regenerates a small amount of GHP every few seconds that does not replace THP but adds on top of it.
