Blessing balance

[Keln]

Blessings are wildly unbalanced:
Here are a few elements:

This roll gives me +62.5% power and +50% damage

This one gives +20%power

This one: 4% !!!

Limbsplitter:
LIMBSPLITTER

Same goes for range weapons… +75% power? 100% for T4 pinning?

How is it possible for anything to be balanced when numbers vary so heavily?

Proposition: limit blessings to 1 damage blessing and 1 utility blessing

Proposition: blessings aren’t linearily more powerful.
This would alleviate lower tier blessings being useless while still providing incentives to look for stronger blessings:
Example:
T1:+10%
T2:+20%
T3:+25%
T4:+30%

[zaygr]

How or why they consider something like 20% conditional reload speed or 10% sprint speed increase or 4% extra power based on stamina is anywhere close to +80-100% anything (pinning fire, thrust or slaughterer) or 0% (Brutal Momentum, Decimator) anything really boggles my mind.

[dragomusic]

Oh thats why people suggest Headtaker on the Heavy Sword. I did not realize it was that incredibly busted lmao

[Dyze]

Isn’t all or nothing broken?
Reading it I would’ve thought it would give 4% per stamina.
And as most weapons seem to have 4-5 ticks, that would mean 16-20% power, and can be further buffed with +stamina.
But would also lower in dmg as you push/block/lose stamina.

This kind of makes it on par with perk increases and a decent always on effect compared to proc damage which should be more powerful.

Buuut… Testing it, it does seem to only give the 4%, regardless of current stamina.
So broken? Not actually scaling? Would be my guess, otherwise that blessing just seems like a big waste of time for everyone, even the poor dev who implemented it.

There’s also the decapitator blessing on axes, which also seems broken as I can’t seem to proc it? Doesn’t seem to do anything.

They did “fix” some of the pointless blessings a few patches ago, increased crit chance etc.
So hopefully they will give some of these a looksy as well.

Also, I think some of the blessings are balanced around duration, since with a 2-3sec window it’s easy to miss and lose all your stacks.
Like ogryn with slaughter is 3.5s kill window, but psykers force sword with same blessing is only 2s, which to me is difficulty to keep alive on psyker, but really easy on ogryn.

So I think they may balance them on duration and application, like rampage for instance, does it reapply? Is there a cool down? Imo those multi hits are fickle and doesn’t always seem to proc for me, but I haven’t tested them extensively since I don’t feel like they are forth it, too niche.

I feel like most of their blessings and class feats have really niche proc situations that just makes them wasteful to take/choose.

They should have a lot of experience with vermintide, and know what this gameplay needs or what could work or be nice to add to it, yet I feel like they are bewildered and just throwing feces at the walls and hoping something might stick…

But i guess that is what happens when you play early access.

[alsozara]

@Dyze

Isn’t all or nothing broken?
Reading it I would’ve thought it would give 4% per stamina.
And as most weapons seem to have 4-5 ticks, that would mean 16-20% power, and can be further buffed with +stamina.
But would also lower in dmg as you push/block/lose stamina.

This kind of makes it on par with perk increases and a decent always on effect compared to proc damage which should be more powerful.

Buuut… Testing it, it does seem to only give the 4%, regardless of current stamina.

Its only use is that it’s the last remaining blessing that boosts your whole kit without your melee weapon being equipped. This is still largely not helpful but it does funnily enough allow Psyker to just barely hit a 2 shot break point on Damnation crushers with BB. If it retained this interaction and was boosted to like 10% it might be more broadly applicable for hitting ranged break points.

[Keln]

But again, like a lot of things in this game:
Unintended bugs are a thing.
Working as intended things that are blatently overtuned are another :')

[Nish]

@Keln

How is it possible for anything to be balanced when numbers vary so heavily?

This is and your proposal is pretty… wrong.

Power and damage bonuses are always context-dependent, both situationally and item-wise. You can’t just say a higher numerical bonus on a blessing will have a higher impact than a smaller numerical bonus on another weapon.

I’m not saying blessings are balanced, just that both your proposal and the direction your arguments come from a dismissable at best.

[Keln]

Well, I can easily say that 15% power per hit is superior to 4% power based on stamina
Or 50% damage when hitting 3 enemies is superior to Limbsplitter

A higher numerical bonus means that your weapon is gimped if not using it.
Take away 75% power, 50% damage, and the Heavy Sword is meak. Play with those and it feels like the zealot’s power sword.

Why are my arguments and propositions dismissable?
They are valid game design mechanics that have been tried and tested in other games before.

[Nish]

You conflate underperforming blessings on the same weapon and different bonuses on different weapons.

It is generally agreed upon that limb splitter and all or nothing are underperforming, but comparing headtaker on heavy sword and axes is entirely different.

I find your proposition dismissable both because your arguments are wrong and because if we would want to increase the situational distinction we would actually go the other way around (bonuses increase exponentially).

[Keln]

Why not:
increase or reduce the base power of a weapon
increase or reduce the base power of a blessing

Let the blessing complement the weapon to reach breakpoints.

Brutal momentum(or any mass ignore blessing) has the same issue as Swift Slaying. It becomes a fire and forget perk that doesn’t have any active gameplay.

I am not conflating. I’m pointing out that some stuff is objectively overtuned while some others are pretty much ignorable.

Blessings right now have a huge impact, but a lot of them are just… overshown by a few select ones.

When there is only 1 optimal blessing selection that’s so far beyond anything else… eh.

Why would you NOT have headtaker on both swords and axes? It’s an easy (axes don’t get 75% but still get 25%) way to generate power creep.

[Nish]

@Keln

I’m pointing out that some stuff is objectively overtuned while some others are pretty much ignorable.

I agree with this. Still, the direction you are coming from is wrong and your proposal doesn’t really help.

@Keln

Blessings right now have a huge impact

This is a good thing.

@Keln

but a lot of them are just… overshown by a few select ones.

This is a bad thing.

And you aren’t going to fix it by making the numbers similar.

Edit: Just to make an example for you. Limbsplitter if the penalties would be removed and the bonuses reduced somewhat could become something widely used. It doesn’t matter it gives less total bonus than axe headtaker if it enables you to one-shot enemies on the first strike without pre-stacking some other buffs.

PS: You are conflating btw. In your original post and your reply to me. You have now just shifted the discussion somewhat to something that is saner than OP.

[Keln]

“I agree with this. Still, the direction you are coming from is wrong and your proposal doesn’t really help.”

You do not tell me why I’m wrong.
Numbers are all over the place.
Weapons should be balanced without blessings.
If they are, and blessings are so wak, then they become unbalanced.

Limbsplitter still wouldn’t be used if they removed the penalty.
Why would you get 20% on the first hit, when you can get pernament 20 after 4?

The idea is to make the numbers similar, but the obtention and activation different.

Conflating:
combine (two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, etc.) into one.

My initial idea is that blessings are widely unbalanced which creates an optimal meta that is laughably stale :')
Everything works. But some stuff works better than others.

[alsozara]

@Nish

Edit: Just to make an example for you. Limbsplitter if the penalties would be removed and the bonuses reduced somewhat could become something widely used. It doesn’t matter it gives less total bonus than axe headtaker if it enables you to one-shot enemies on the first strike without pre-stacking some other buffs.

I kinda disagree with this and other takes on limbsplitter I’ve seen in this thread. I think in many ways it’s one of the more interesting and better designed blessings. It has a clear strong benefit over other blessings in being active the moment you draw your weapon. It has a clear down side, but one that can be played around in many cases through cancelling, and may be situationally more or less impactful depending on your intended use of the weapon (can be entirely mitigated and is little drawback at all for elite deleting, harder to play around and more impactful when dealing with hordes).

Similarly I saw it compared to heavy sword Rampage by @Keln, but there they are well differentiated by one being instantly active and being a power boost (multiplicative with Zealot’s RC and Psyker’s warp siphon), as well as Rampage requiring cleaving 3 enemies that becomes much less realistic if say duelling a group of crushers. Of course no weapon has both those blessings to choose between, but ultimately I think having a different condition to what the majority of damage/power blessings have (hitting or killing things) is generally good for blessing variety, it makes activation condition and how you can play around that in different scenarios an integral part of the decision making process in picking your blessings.

Going back to the comment I actually quoted, removing the downside while lessening the bonus just reduces the extent to which blessings are diversified. I’d rather the limbsplitter bonus be increased and there still be the aspect of how you try to play around the condition to avoid its negatives. In general having negative trade offs to strong blessings is probably a design element they could implement more widely in balancing blessings against each other, though it would admittedly be a bit of a tight rope walk to get right, one I can’t say I would especially trust FS to get right.

Edit: As a side note I do want to clarify that I also wouldn’t particularly want to see limbsplitter buffed to a point where block/QQ cancelling is made a dominant play style for some weapons since the whole thing is a little janky looking and immersion breaking in practice. I’m kinda happy with where it’s at, it’s kinda niche without being useless. Want a good anti single target weapon to pair with Purg or Void staff? A thrust + limbsplitter Caxe offers something with no ramp up that can probably hit very good breakpoints with high consistency. That said for how easy head taker and decimator are to stack in practice I still think limbsplitter could afford to have its bonus tweaked upwards somewhat since it already has a built in downside. A 5-10% increase putting it just a little above head taker but still noticeably behind decimator in total bonus seems roughly appropriate on balance.

You could also have the bonus fall off more gradually with chained attacks rather that disappear and immediately turn into a malus at the second hit in a chain. Like starting at +30% power and decreasing by 10-15% per chained hit till hitting the negative bonus and capping at the current -10% power. Generally more interesting than just removing the negative entirely IMO.

[Nish]

@Keln

You do not tell me why I’m wrong.

I did and we even argued about parts of it, but let’s reiterate.

Your argument is wrong because:

1. You say that lessening the numerical divide is required to make blessing more balanced.
2. You conflate (combine two sets of entirely different ideas) blessings on the same weapon and blessings on different weapons.

What I think you are right about:

1. There are a lot of underperforming blessings.
2. Some weapons have combinations that are mandatory or overpowered on that specific weapon.
3. With the limited set of good blessings on some weapons there aren’t a lot of variations you can experiment with. (Still, more than VT2 ever had.)

BTW I also agree that profane quality items aren’t balanced, but I see this as close to a non-issue. We aren’t using profane weapons anyway (not even while leveling).

[Nish]

I agree with you about pretty much everything you wrote. I just wanted to give an example where far lesser numerical bonuses can overperform far greater ones. I probably went in the wrong way with it tho.

[Darth_Angeal]

@Keln

Working as intended things that are blatently overtuned are another

The issue is, that they tried to rebalance weapons with blessings instead of adjusting the basestats.

Just take this as example:

The bolter does its job even without blessings, while e.g. the autopistol was in an “ok-state”, but not even close to be as strong as a bolter. Then the crafting-patch arrived with dozens of changes to blessings. So for now the autopistol got super powerful with the right blessings, but still isn´t as impactful as a bolter without.

Bolter is kinda broken yes… but the difference between the basestats is real. And since some weapons are weaker in basestats, FS went the way to let them shine through blessings.

Dunno the intention behind it, but it´s just not a good choice. It´s ok to have the same blessings a bit tweaked per weapon to keep stuff balanced since the weapon-behavior itself will do a lot to the performance of them. But overall it just lasts in clear meta-choices and pretty broken stuff which let us faceroll damnation.

A bunch of blessings need nerfs or should be reworked to offer utility instead of +30% more power just because of reasons…

[Keln]

Limbsplitter should do what it says
Boonus damage to bodyparts, but can’t deal weakspot damage

[alsozara]

To add onto your points, some weapons don’t have access to more than 2 damage increasing blessings in the first place, so the reality is even if something like slaughterer was tuned down heavily, you’d still see it picked over other options basically all the time because players will always prioritise damage increases over utility in games like this except in rare cases that a utility blessing is transformative, or functions defacto as a damage increase, both being the case for something like BM on axes.

Of course there are obvious cases like Savage Sweep vs Wrath where you just have to ask why you’d have two functionally identical blessings but where one has twice the bonus of the other, but generally it’s just a really hard job of making utility blessings look appealing over damage blessings without nerfing the damage blessings to the point of requiring precise break point calculations to work out if they’re even valuable to have. It’s tricky.

[alsozara]

Yes that suits the name better, and I think that would be a great blessing to add to the pool. I’d want current limbsplitter to remain though even if renamed to something more intuitive.

[Keln]

Numerical values do need to be lessened.
A stacked pinning fire gives you twice the damage Vet ult gives you.
That rings my alarm bells.
Now it can stack with ranger velt ult’s damage bonus.
All hands on deck, the ship’s going down.
This is pure power creeping hahaha

How do you wish for anything to be balanced when you have such a huge numerical divide between so many elements?
It leads to the following points:

1. Some weapons have combinations that are mandatory or overpowered on that specific weapon.

In game design, you build by blocks. You lay a foundation, you build on it. A strong foundation means anything you build above can be balanced, and the building won’t fall.

At the moment it’s pretty much Rope design: you have multiple strands. If you have weak and strong strands, your rope is going to be super dodgy and inelegant.
More importantly, you can’t untangle it if you need to change one of said strands.