Beastmen need a buff

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
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Beastmen as they stand right now need a bit of a buff. And I’m not expressly meaning just a stat buff on the current enemies, though they do need a slight one, but adding a little more variation in the unit roster. Right now Beastmen have the fewest units of all three factions with only one special and one elite, compared to Skaven and Chaos having three elites apiece, and a combined eight specials. I propose we amend this by adding a few new Beastmen units that would fill some of the common roles that are set by the other factions, like a berserker unit and a control unit.
ㅤㅤㅤ•First off to fill the role of the berserker unit similar to that of plague rats, there should be Beastmen warhounds. A pack of between three and five warhounds can be released snarly and gnashing at the heroes having similar behaviors to the aforementioned plague rats however, they would be comparable in height to Bardin and have slightly less health to balance their smaller builds and hitboxes.
ㅤㅤㅤ•Next, I’d say there needs to be a Beastman shaman, someone who could use some controlling effects against the heroes, such as sending forth tiny angry nature spirits to slow and damage the party similar to the cursed skulls in Chaos Waste without the incapacitating effect or cause roots to tangle around the party’s feet stopping them from moving until they break them, The elf’s not the only one that can use nature magic you know. neither one of these effects should put you in a true incapacitation state like a leech or gutter runner, but either slow you and do some damage or just root you in place until broken. Have him slowly walk amongst the rest of the horde at a similar speed to the blightstormer, without the teleporting around.
ㅤㅤㅤ•Now lastly we come to the buffs to existing units, really there are only two. Bestigors just need more health, right now they have less than half the health of a chaos warrior, taking veteran difficulty as an example a chaos warrior has sixty-nine health compared to a bestigor’s thirty, that’s around forty-three percent less health. now I’m not saying a bestigor should have the same health as a chaos warrior but maybe it should only be around sixty-five percent less, that or you would need to put bestigor into the fully armored category. personally, I think they just need the extra health.
ㅤㅤㅤ•Finally for the dreaded ungor, the archer variant in particular, as a threat they just kinda suck either you’re not getting hit by them at all or when you do the damage is so negligible that it doesn’t even matter. I’d suggest either returning some of their accuracy so that they might actually hit something or increasing the bow’s damage so that on the rare occasion that they do hit it is more impactful, maybe even playing around with the attack speed along with either of those values could yield a more interesting foe. One more thing that would be interesting to see is them having a bit more self-preservation, so instead of them just standing there and then immediately switching to melee when the heroes get too close, have them edge away slightly, not so fast that they can’t be caught but maybe just enough to get one more arrow off before trying to stab you.
ㅤㅤㅤI am aware of the great controversy that this faction has caused and do recognize that balancing them has been a nightmare however, I hope that you can at least consider some of my suggestions to improve the Beastmen as a faction. And yes I’m realize that I’m a little late on this, but still feel that these changes would improve the game for those who own Winds of Magic or those that play a lot of Chaos Wastes.

Now to the rest of the community that is probably frothing at the mouth by this time, I don’t care how much you hate the Beastmen, hate these suggestions, or even hate me for making them in the first place. All I’m trying to do is help improve one of the core additions that Winds of Magic added, and by extension improve the game as a whole. Maybe if we stop whining and give them a chance we might see improvements to the DLC or an update that expands it. But if you so wish to complain in the comments then go ahead, makes no difference to me, however for those of you who truly wish to discuss how to improve the Beastmen I’m all ears.

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Ive always loved beastmen personally but i am in the minority here. I would adore a few more beast units but i sincerely do not believe it will happen for one main reason.

The winds of magic release was…frankly a horrible time to be a vermintide player. If you were here you know. The beastmen faction was almost universally hated upon release to the point Fat Shark got a few legitimate death threats. As a responce they nerfed the beastmen into the ground and removed them entirely from 85% of the normal gameplay maps. With the reception they recived at launch i dont know that they would be willing to tinker with them too much even this far after the fact. Fatshark lost alot of good faith with the Darktide launch too so…as much as i would love to see expanded beastmen i dont see it happening.

I love the beastmen as a faction, always have…but we let the community dig our graves on this one.

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I disagree with the need to buff Beastmen because they’re never supposed to be that strong, Beastmen get routinely repelled by the Empire.

Bestigors for instance are in a decent spot in terms of power level. Just like in the lore they’re a slight step above Stormvermin but below Chaos Warriors.

The Ungors aren’t supposed to do high damage, but gradual chip damage to whittle you down or hinder you. Ungors are the lowest of the low among Beastmen, and their arrows are just there to poke at enemies a bit while the gors rush in. Ungors are common units like clan rats.

THIS…I agree with. Beastmen badly need more Specials. You’re referring to a Bray Shaman right? Magical ethereal skulls don’t make sense for them. But being a Bray Shaman, he could instead summon murders of crows, crawling ground insects, devolve the heroes back to animals, or let out a damaging cone shaped scream…

They could also give Beastmen Tuskgors and chaos warhounds that would function like dogs in Dark Tide.

Or Harpies that would harass players from above

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I had though at release that we would have a Beast Lord final fight and not the Minautor, seeing the video about the Gave

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Bestigors are less like CW´s and more like Stormvermin, but bulkier and with even better tracking and damage for the most part if i am not mistaken. Plus charge.

And hell, i fear a goat horde with a few armors in + banner more than a whole ass CW patrol.

…

So heck no to outright buffs, but, i do agree that the unit rooster could probably be expanded on.

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You could easily see a Bovigor (Slightly bigger then Bestigor) as a bigger Bestigor

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The issue is beastmen are legitimately an awful enemy, especially at launch. You have ranged enemies in a melee-dominated game that can just get really nasty pot shots at you, a boss with extremely difficult to understand attack patterns (I ended up needing to watch a video to understand what was happening,) and literally the single strongest special enemy in the game. The only special that legitimately can sink a run, by itself, just by taking the most dangerous threat in the game and making it worse. Standard bearer (and hordes as the most dangerous threat.)

And, as icing on the cake, you have an enemy that is tankier than a stormvermin, as threatening as a chaos warrior (but not as tanky,) that just straight up charges at you across the map. The only saving grace to bestigors is they also tend to knock down and damage enemies on the way in as well.

They may have been nerfed, but even maps like Athel Yenlui get noticeably harder when they’re present versus absent. There’s a reason beastmen are hated.

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They’re honestly not that hard to deal with, they’re ranged units just like Ratling and Warofires, but way easier to kill but more numerous. So treat them as such. I’d say they add dimensions to the game. It’s just weird that they only exist for Beastmen, who among the 3 enemy factions are the least defined by ranged combat. Skavenslave Slingers and Marauder Hunters would have made more sense. :man_shrugging:

That’s…a good thing?

Outside of being caught sandwiched in a tunnel with a Stormfiend, monsters are such non-threars threats that it’s often best to just dance around them to take out everything else first.

Again that sounds like a good thing. Hordes are typically harmless and exists to cover specials and give you THP.

What SHOULD be addressed is their visibility though. These are Wargors, they’re supposed to have the second biggest horns beneath Beast Lords, in this game they’re indistinguishable from an Ungors they blend in with.

And probably limit their knockback effects so when 4 spawns at once they don’t stunlock you in a tunnel.

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If the dimension is getting randomly shot through enemies from people in the back then, sure, they add ‘dimension’ to the game. It doesn’t feel fun getting randomly shot, especially in a game that makes it punishing to be shot randomly in a fairly untelegraphed and difficult way to avoid.

They don’t exist for other races because when VT2 came out, it flat out would break the game. When Beastmen came out, it was a significant component of why runs would just end from beastmen. They aren’t fun to engage with and the game’s very limited ranged combat options (especially for the time when they came out) made them feel cheap, not interesting.

It is not a good thing when a boss has such a difficult to discern attack pattern that it feels cheap or impossible to fairly deal with.

And chaos spawns are still threats. Hell, outside of playing with cata players, the only boss that’s a true non-issue is the troll. And even then. I’ve seen players expertly lose to the easiest of bosses because of simple mistakes. That doesn’t excuse attack patterns that poorly telegraph how to properly handle the enemy.

This isn’t a good thing when it massively ratchets up difficulty. Part of the horde-slayer genre is a fairly expected and even difficulty level.

To really explain this better: The difficulty spike of standard bearers (especially) is so high that they’re actually placed above chaos warriors in general threat to the team. This is a special that can just randomly be running about like a packrat or gutter runner. Most specials are dangerous because they’re in a horde and they do something to complicate that. A blightstormer forces you to scatter and/or deal with a ranged threat. A leech likes to flank you and disable someone. Gutter runners disable and push people away leaving the victim more vulnerable. Pack Rats yoink you out of position (and are fairly awful for how hard they are to find and deal with mid-horde, as the next worst special.)

Gas Rats are like blightstormers, but are harder to stop if you let them throw (but easier to kill when you find them and they can’t run away as easily.)

On the flip side, due to how standard bearers work, they simultaneously effectively debuff your weapons (in reality it’s boosting the health of the enemy) so they no longer behave as you expect. Enemies also do more damage to you. They also set up these standards in the back behind the horde (so fighting through it is a nightmare.) They are armored (so killing them with ranged isn’t easy under all circumstances.) You can bomb the standard itself but that’s a very expensive resource to throw away on a special.

They can show up in large groups, they can stack their buffs. They take the most dangerous threat in the game and magnify it far above and beyond what anything else in the game short of a boss does. A single standard bearer legitimately can be more threatening than a chaos warrior patrol.

Putting it in simpler terms, they stand out as feeling especially unfair.

Having an enemy that, when present, can easily double or triple the difficulty of the match isn’t a good thing. It’s a good challenge option, but it’s not a good challenge to exist just as something that randomly can happen.

This is the same thing that makes things like Convocation of Decay especially badly designed. It stands out as a difficulty spike that shouldn’t be there to the degree it is.

Beastmen needed to be nerfed, and even post-nerf, they still can catch the unaware completely by surprise and end a game before they knew what hit them. Which is somewhat true of most enemies in VT2, but you at least have a good idea of what a packmaster is actually doing when it yoinks you the first time, as opposed to standard bearers that appear to be buffing enemies, but you can’t even tell what or how aside from your weapons feeling like pool noodles once they’re down.

In summation: Beastmen fail at providing a fair challenge. Their special doesn’t properly tell the player what it’s actually doing. The difficulty spike is unfair to put it mildly. The gameplay is unfair to put it mildly. Archers aren’t a fun enemy to deal with in the limitations of how VT2 is designed. Bestigors can be especially awful and can outright end runs if they hit you at exactly the wrong spot in a map without any real ability to absorb it without understanding how to play a full difficulty level above the one you’re in. And the cherry on top is the fastest attacking boss in the game with a hit pattern that is extremely hard for a new or ignorant player to understand how to deal with, that somehow manages to make the chaos spawn, the next hardest boss, look like child’s play in comparison.

I don’t often like saying this about games, but if beastmen were removed from VT2, the quality of the game would improve. They just aren’t fun to deal with.

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The only real problems with Beastmen on release was the frequency of Wargors which causes stunlocks and entrapments in cramped spaces and their headbutt attacks who look identical to a stagger animation combined with unusually high stagger resist.

Most of those have long been fixed. At the very most Wargors could use bigger horns, some more variety in enemy types, and that’s about it. They offer a different and varied challenge and that’s what’s awesome about them.

You are WAAAY exaggerating the difficulty of Ungor Archers. Their arrows are easy to read thanks to white trails and most of the arrows will inherently miss you because you’re always dodging and weaving around.

What even is “random”? They offer a challenge that’s different, that’s all, you just need to learn to solve a different obstacle. They’re not that big an obstacle, they just need to be adapted to.

What DOES need changing is bot behavior as currently they don’t know Ungor Archers even exist.

But the thing is they’re not even cheap, they’re a challenge as monsters should. They’re more aggressive and they require a little more practice to learn, but they’re anything but “cheap”. How do you even define cheap? All of their attacks can be dodged and they can still be kited by a single player while teammates handle the rest of the horde. And a team can still juggle it around like other monsters.

Unlike the Gor headbutts that lack proper animations, none of the Minotaur’s attacks are difficult to read or are poorly telegraphed, you can see them coming and their patterns are about the same level of difficulty as the Chaos Spawn at worst.

Chaos Warriors (and elites in general) are very low in the threat hierarchy. Placing above them isn’t a high bar. Your biggest threats are always Assassins/Packmasters, followed by Leech, and you continue going down till you reach the Elites. Yes they can down you in one hit, but they’re also easily dodged.

And yes, they’re SUPPOSED to buff all the enemies around them, that’s their intended role and you’re supposed to prioritize their banners. Some careers will have a better time than others, that’s what makes it good game design.