Hello Fatshark team, I am a player of Warhammer: Vermintide 2 with 2723 hours. Out of all the games I’ve played so far, Warhammer: Vermintide 2 has the best combat feel. I would like to share some balance feedback for Bounty Hunter and Outcast Engineer.
For Bounty Hunter: The big nerf to ‘Double‑Shotted’ makes this career feel really disjointed to play. Instead of the current massive cooldown increase, I suggest reverting the cooldown refund to its old 80% value. To compensate for its high burst potential, reduce its overall damage against monsters (bosses) by 30%. This way Bounty Hunter still keeps its fast‑cycling career‑skill identity, while its boss‑killing power is brought down to a more reasonable level.
For Outcast Engineer: The Trollhammer Torpedo is currently overperforming. It outputs massive burst damage to bosses and elites at very low risk, and patrol groups can also be handled effortlessly. I suggest reasonable nerfs to the Trollhammer Torpedo, such as lowering its damage, explosion radius or monster‑specific power bonus, to bring it in‑line with other strong ranged weapons. It should remain viable but no longer be the brain‑dead best option for boss damage outside of career skills. These changes would make both careers feel fair and
distinct, without completely ruining their core playstyles. I also believe these adjustments could help boost Vermintide 2’s player population. Thank you for reading my feedback.
Engi is the current class that is a bit too good at everything (used to be SoTT, before that BW and so on). Engi can be great at Ranged/boss killer/patrol killer/special killer/ deal with hordes (axe and shield FTW) and an ult that doesn’t even need to fully recharge. Running Armour Piercing Slugs is disgusting as you can just use your “ult” and kill SV, stagger CW, mow down Patrols even without Trollhammer or recharging bombs. Engi needs some fairly serious nerfs to something, as he’s just too good at everything.
Bounty hunter is a bit more nuanced, as the 80% recharge, coupled with the trait that extends pot duration meant you could pin a monster against a wall and Ult it five times a row until dead, and even with the damage nerf it’d still be a massively overpowered way to delete bosses. I actually think one of his lvl 30 choices (where its a shotgun rather than a sniper) should be a boosted version of the griffon foot pistol. A huge shotgun blast that might even level CW - same way as FK charge might be fun.
I agree with your opinion on Outcast Engineer. I did mod testing and found a 30% damage nerf while keeping the 80% cooldown refund is too conservative.
Against 4000 HP bosses like Rat Ogre on Cataclysm, 7 headshots (571 dmg each) with mixture potion kill it. Cutting damage by 50% would make each shot 285, so 7 headshots only deal 1995 damage, leaving more than half the boss HP. This forces teammates to participate; it feels fair and still rewarding.
Also, below Cataclysm, other classes can get similar burst: Huntsman stealth ult + mixture + headshot talents delete bosses risk-free, and Bright Wizard can stack high crit + Beam Staff Huntsman trait + potion + ult + charged beam for comparable burst.
Feel free to share your thoughts if you have other ideas.
it was never a problem to begin with, oneshotting monsters wasnt something unique to BH and the requirement of consistent headshots is harder then trollhammer spam, hagbane, shade or grailknight ultspam, or frankly any of the meriad ways of throwing bosses of a cliff.
so id say they easily could give him the CD back no problem, as i said never was a problem to begin with. it is a pure dmg career with nothing else to its name really, where as most other of the classes that deal high burst or good boss dps have plenty other things going for them.
could argue that huntsmen is outdone dmg wise and huntsmen doesnt really get much only really has stealth as a defensive mechanic with a high cooldown, and the rest is dmg oriented too but lets be honest huntsmen could use some buffs (even tho in good hands he can perform)
Strong disagree.
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That is not the Bounty Hunter’s identity, as that is merely the byproduct of heavily stacking cooldown reduction and how unprecedentedly easy it turned out to be to cheese monsters with endless stunning headshots. This is only a possibility with the selection of a single Talent at the end of their line and thus impossible with all other selections, this is hardly an identity so much as an unintended exploit BH players used as a crutch. It’s way too easy to trivialize all monsters before and it was a good change. Even now the skill has the function of heavily reducing cooldown, letting BH pull off several more of it’s shots.
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The BH’s identity is a fighter with heavier emphasis on using ranged weapons more often than average. Its a bit basic but thats a consequence of being a release career. It’s only real issue is the fact that it’s other max level talents are kind of pointless. 1 is a negligible but less conditional cooldown reduction, whose main benefit is that it is the only talent preserves both shot types, the other is a piece of trash that fulfills a function that a party never needs help fulfilling.
BH Ult at 80% also had the effect of deleting lots more of the CW as part of the run, and increasing the frequency that a BH could remove CW Shieldbro would make those enemies more trivialised so it’s not just about the boss stun-spam, but increasing the very high powered ult that works at ranged.
I agree a thoughtful rework of the other two lvl 30 talents might be a better way to go as currently double-shotted is the de facto choice.
As for HS, I think the discussion around him might change significantly if he (and Kruber in General) got a wider range of ranged weapons. Currently no Crossbow, repeater crossbow, hand guns, and so on. Giving him a heavy crossbow might change the way the character gets used/played before even touching talents, although any movement speed talent on any character is a wasted slot in my opinion and should be removed - possibly it’s useful for GK, WPOS or Slayer, but the other talents on that line always feel like a better choice. I think before changing the talent tree, maybe a slew of ranged weapons might change his frequency of use. I happen to really like HS as he is, and enjoy the high skill ceiling build. A little smudge more damage during ult wouldn’t go amiss but he’s pretty good as-is.
This approach seems awful to me. Just polarises the ult to hell and back with the difference between hitting the headshot or not. Either chain headshots perfectly with a conc pot or don’t even bother shooting. Would much prefer it to stay how it is over a change like that.
i dunno, as long as GK gets to kill a chaos patrol singlehandedly with a single ult activation with low enough CD he can reuse it if it doesnt hit em all, i dont see how the difference between now or the old 80% is that big a deal especially if it requires a bit of skill.
and dont bother with the whole but “thats a pure melee class”,he gets enough compensation as is.
imo BH also suffers from a disfunctional gameplay identity that pushes people into pretty much one remaining playstyle due to having so many talents that are tied to it.
there are talents like weight of fire, that give bonus the more ammo you have in your weapon, this suffers because it pretty much is absolutely useless for the crossbow.
the bonus you get is also not consistent and and realistically is much lower on average.
so it rewards being fully reloaded most of the time with highcount weapons, but the repeater crossbow for example has very long reload time. so if you want to make the most of this talent you be reloading a lot. not particulary fun
then he has guaranteed crits, on ranged attacks, which as we all know are most useful against armor since they ignore it entirely and dont overkill the target.
but his temp hp skills are tithetaker witch also rewards killing elites in melee and blood for money, witch is too awful in the current implementation to be pickable imo.
so what happens is BH eats away at his own temp HP options. that is an anti-synergy.
both steel crecendo at 5 and salvaged ammunition at 20 both are duds, the idea that you agressively shoot away your ammo and then crawl back by killing elites sounds cool on paper but in actual gameplay even with it lasting a decent 15s and providing sizeable buffs the realistic uptime of it is waaaaay too low for the huge drawback of loosing your secondary slot and the inate ability of dealing with threats in range only to become a budged slayer or GK for 15s who have similar power boost much more reliable AND retain their secondary slot even Ranger Veteran makes better use of “no ammo” thing, and “salvaged ammo” providing ammo ONLY if your EXACTLY at 0 left, makes it way to unrelible, there are most like 3 other players who will kill elites far easier and quicker than you and gambling on getting one swiftly after using your ammo is much too high stakes given that you be defenseless against far off specials. yes you could always have your last shot use it when there is a elite ripe for harvesting, but thats just a headache.
and then to top it off, BH as a ranged career has the passive “ammo pouches” you know 50% more ammo like all ranged careers. why does that matter? it runs contrarian to the idea of using up your ammo to recieve the steel crescendo buff and “salvaged ammunition” granting more because its a percentage of your total ammo so effectively it delays the
use all ammo—get buff cuz you ran dry—kill elite with buff active—regain ammo —and repeat
so by getting more ammo back you are punished by a longer loop cycle because you have to reload more and spend more time shooting your ammo away again, this is anti-synergy again
admittedly not a huge deal but it raises the question, why not simply invest in talents that dont put rocks in your way and give you a boost period?
I think that’s a problem with the GK ult, and there’s an argument that if FS nerfed BH to stop him stun-spamming bosses as it trivialises things, GK ult could be looked at for the same reason. That’s another thread though.
You make a good clear point about the BH being funneled into a set play style and talent choice as the others feel that by choosing them you’re hamstringing yourself somehow. I still think reintroducing the 80% wouldn’t fix the class and would just put us back into stun-spam territory without bringing much else.
you could have just given bosses stacking stun duration reduction. that way you remove the “simple” boss deletion of BH, but also tackle the stunlock torpedo or BW shenanigans
something like after first stun a boss gains 30% reuduced stun time for the next stun for 10s which stacks so if he were to get stunned again during those 10s it goes to 60% and then 90%
even with 80% CDR on his ult a shade was still the better option giving the conc pot to shade is much more consistent at boss killing than bh ever was. sure bh does stun but again it never was the best way of killing bosses simply one way of doing it quickly amongs many.
i brought it because you mentioned low CD was trvialising shieldbros amongst other things. that begets the question why a whole bunch of other things get to but not this ability in particular?
anyway i think we can all agree that BH is currently in a wierd place and many talents could get a touch up.
I think reducing the cooldown by 80% when hitting an enemy in the head, and progressively lowering the boss’s stun duration with successive hits on the boss, would be a good option. Slightly nerfing the damage at the same time would also be a good choice. This way the boss cannot be kept under continuous stun. After all, focus potions spawn far less often than other potions on the maps.
The massive disparity in monster damage is ridiculous, especially noticeable in Chaos Wastes and Twitch Cata, where you can end up fighting 2–3 monsters alongside hordes and specials. It’s no wonder you almost always see the Shade/OE combo.
It’s feast or famine. Either the team melts monsters with the anti-monster meta, or you’re riding the struggle bus, relying on ledging, cheese tactics, and slowly wearing them down.
Most careers and weapons slowly chip away at their health bars. Good luck if you’re playing Foot Knight with a mace and your team needs you to clutch vs a monster. DPS comps with careers like WHC, Necro, and Slayer can take on monsters at a respectable pace, but otherwise it’s a bit of a slog.
I’m not keen on nerfing one of the few careers that is ideal vs. monsters without also buffing the ones with absurdly low monster damage. Huntsman and Bounty Hunter’s monster damage was overnerfed (Huntsman a long time ago). You have to chain headshots to do decent damage, which, unless you’re cracked, is only really viable against Stormfiends and Trolls. Even then, they can’t compete with Shade or OE. Grail Knight’s double strike is mainly good for ledging, pitiful monster damage now.
There needs to be a better middle ground where you don’t immediately notice the absence of Shade or Engineer.
fully agree
Three facts:
- BH can still chain stagger monsters using purple pot, Spawn will break out of the stagger animation for a short moment, but with practice it can still be locked in place pretty easily. Nerf patch didn’t actually change the staggerlock interaction almost at all. It mainly affected the dps.
- Power of BH’s ult actually used to lie in how it functioned WITHOUT the potion.
- Infinite ammo griffonfoot remains a massively OP problem child.
Regarding the power of BH’s ult, this is because on a 7s cooldown (80% talent +10% item) BH was a strong monster and chaos warrior dps even WITHOUT a potion. Now with 21s (if not 28s), BH is SIGNIFICANTLY weaker vs both of them.
At 7s CDR, monster was staggered for a big part of cooldown’s duration. At 21s, it’s a tiny fraction. Never mind the dps.
At 21s CDR, you kill 1 chaos warrior, while old ult killed 3 in the same time.
It’s a GIGANTIC difference.
While I understand the idea of wanting to nerf monster killing during that patch, Double-shotted nerf was actually a nerf to BH’s elite (especially CW) killing, and it was particularly felt for Twitch players, where BH massively fell off.
Which is all to say, I think that nerfing its monster damage to an extent and increasing cooldown back up would be a good change.
Although this would swing the balance of Just Reward and Double Shotted back into the latter’s favour by a wide margin. These days, Just Reward is actually a very solid choice for normal (non-twitch) adventure mode.
The cooldown on both is basically the same, and they perform basically the same vs stuff that doesn’t have a health bar, BUT Reward is much easier/carefree to spam+has the shotgun part vs zerkers and some crowd control.
Considering how many monsters show up per run in base adventure mode, these two are actually pretty well balanced.
That said, the recent patch actually made BH quite better, because Volley Xbow is now a very viable choice for twitch, allowing BH to at least be a strong monster killer (without needing a potion), instead of just crossbow elite(non-cw)+special killer, which was a mediocre identity because of the lack of anti-cw dps.
Alternatively, there still exists the OP (for more casual twitch settings and base cata) griffonfoot build.
Salvaged ammo is still very well liked by a lot of very good BH players since it allows for a more dynamic hybrid playstyle on crossbow and it’s pretty good for bop/griffonfoot. It’s almost never really used for the ammo generation part tho.
Steel crescendo was changed quite a long time ago now, to only require emptying the current mag, not being totally out of ammo.
If nothing else, Steel Crescendo is a pretty fun talent with good synergies and strong at what it’s supposed to do. Whether it’s a strong identity overall is a different topic.
Yea, that talent should never have been buffed this way, must be changed.
Huntsman is a different, longer topic, but I’d highly recommend post-buff blunderbuss huntsman as well as simply repeater handgun huntsman - both are very easy to play and do very good damage vs their intended targets (which for blunderbuss is now basically everything barring cws outside of ult/pot and monsters).
https://www.ranalds.gift/build/wbwEyf9ApgivyyUxu7UV/view
https://www.ranalds.gift/heroes/2/113211/14-3-4-6/58-4-5-3/2-3-1/4-3-1/7-1-3
Huntsman LB is still absolutely cracked vs monsters and cws, just requires very high skill, but still top 3/4 monster killers in the game.
I mostly disagree with this statement. For more casual and very commonly found settings (at least on Eu servers) of something like 30/30 199% no bonuses, there is no need for a full top-tier monster killer on the team, and every career actually has at least 1 build that can 100-0% hp solo a monster in approximately 1 minute (and twitch monsters also have a bit less hp than normal ones).
S-tier monster killers trivialise such settings (in somewhat skilled hands), but there are lots of builds that, especially in combination with decent teammates, can handle most common twitch settings (at least in adventure mode).
They are often not used, sometimes not well-known, and some of them could still use some buffs (graxe on stuff outside of slayer, somewhat halberd or javelin, to name a few), but they are viable for solid monster killing. And there is a massive disparity between the absolute top, the strong sort of A-tier ones, and the more bottom tier of still-monster-killers - that is true.
Yes.
Overall, trollhammer is just too good, and imo eats pretty hard into alternative builds for both OE and IB, especially for more organised teams.
You can pick something else, and it may not even be that weak, but it is basically always an inferior choice - trollhammer is basically always just a more powerful approach.
You’re missing the point. Shade and OE are head and shoulders above whatever follows.
You have those two: Bomb, (20% more damage taken), Concoction, Infiltrate, Crank Gun. That monster is dead in 6 seconds. No other 2 careers in the game come close to being able to do that, aside from maybe Huntsman with perfect headshots. It’s too much. I don’t like it.
I think the ideal scenario would be moderate a nerf to the Shade and OE’s monster damage, but then take the other two characters that noticeably behind but have a stand-out monster-killer career and bring them up par: Grail Knight (or Huntsman), and Bounty Hunter. Sienna has Necro and Battle Wizard which are kinda good vs everything right now, so I wouldn’t even consider them.
Bounty Hunter was in what I’d consider a great spot with Double-Shotted actually shooting two shots, but I guess double-shotted being double shots was a bug.
Grail Knight’s double strike was not OP against monsters before, now why would even take that when you have the strike that one-shots patrols. That’s better on twitch anyway when you get heavy armor.
I have 4500+ hours in the game, and I’m confident with headshots on Huntsman, nowhere near as good at killing monsters as with Shade and I rarely play elf, but I play a mean Shade. For one thing, a lot of Huntsman’s headshot rate on monsters is hugely dependent on opportunity. Troll and Stormfiend are the easy ones for Huntsman. Rat Ogres, Minotaurs, and Spawns all often switch targets and keep the player they are aggro’d onto moving (because it seems like 9/10 players don’t know how to dodge against spawns and rat ogres). Even in the hands of a skilled player, at that point, it’s mostly random luck as to whether you get clear shots at the head after popping your potion and using ult.
Huntsman is in a reasonable place though. He probably would be a premium monster killer if other monsters simply had some weakspots other than the head for ranged careers to use when they turn around.
I quit playing the game about a month ago, and if I return to Vermintide 2, it will be in modded realm where I have plenty of mods that I’ve made and used to tweak things as I see fit. So maybe I don’t really have much of a place in this discussion. Still, one of the remaining little things niggling me, was the monster meta being a bit lopsided.