Oh no, not another bloody thp/stagger discussion!
In all seriousness:
Stagger THP would be fine if it gave just 1thp on killing blows and toned back in other areas
(shields, shotgun bashing & flamesword.)
On Kill doesn’t really make sense on ranged careers. (Huntsman can make it work with Repeater + burst) Plus, some enemies give too little while others are seen as health packs.
Crit/HS THP is a lacking right now.
Assassin could do with a nerf (probably just the crit portion of it)
Mainstay is garbage
Bulwark + EP could be combined and actually serve as a decent stagger option with some number tweaks.
Mainstay is just mathematically bad if you test with it. Essentially a 20% damage loss as compared to smiter on single target enemies like elites/monsters. Outperforms smiter against hordes by 5% or less on average with horde clearing weapons. It has to do with the duration of the stagger debuff and the inability of most weapons to actually apply the stagger 2 debuff regardless of the weapons stagger power (2HH for example). The reason I’d suggest a slight buff to ehp is that it would essentially replace mainstay as the horde clearing option which actually gives you a useful option and takes out a talent which allows talents to be more uniform across careers.
I was starting to think that THP talents are used as intentional limitations on some careers, but then I remembered what game I’m playing.
Could straight up switch the level 5 & 15 rows between WHC and BH and they would look more “correct”. THP on crit and Assassin is still wrong on BH just because the only high crit weapon he has is 1h axe, but whatever, I don’t care anymore.
Removing enhanced power from a career could lock them out of very important breakpoints so i would say let the stagger talents like they are.
And i agree that bh should have THP on cleave instead of the crit headshot one.
So there’s no situation where one teammate could stagger a group of enemies for another to benefit from this talent? Just asking, I never tried to engineer that.
That said, I’m not sure I want the classes more uniform. Might be better to just buff mainstay, in that case. Maybe increase the damage bonus for every staggered target hit after the first, or something.
… I guess that’s nothing to do with BH thp, though. Well, let’s leave that for another thread.
I agree that Bounty Hunter with Rapier using Headshot/Crit for THP is the best option but still very mediocre.
I could see Headshot/Crit and on kill THP working for Bounty Hunter if he had one line of talents devoted purely towards GOOD melee options and then buff the later ranged options with perhaps removal / changes to useless talents (movement speed buff for example).
One problem is that a lot of Saltzpyres weapons are crappy or simply too skewed in favoring one weapon (rapier / griffonfoot - other weapons for zealot). Once again - balancing is left to the wayside too often in Vermintide 2 or system left to gather dust as Fatshark pursues juicy new things to gain more money options (which makes littles sense since they literally have a cosmetic shop so having modelers/texture artists continue to pump “premium” cosmetics out would give them a ton of possible revenue - though I dislike the pricing comparative to other DLC).
Possible Talent options to support melee for BH.
-Passive can effect melee attacks and when used in melee, lowers the cooldown on the passive - ranged cooldown stays the same. This would give BH controlled thp on crit for melee thp.
-Raw stats when it comes to more critical hit chance with crit damage. Perhaps the crit chance effecting melee only and crit damage effecting both melee and ranged. Supports both thp on crit and kill using crit chance and crit damage to hit hard or secure kills.
-Charge system where ranged crits build of charges up to say 6. Melee attacks consume two stacks for higher damage so you could build up for 3 heavy hits which could help with melee thp on kill.
Recent classes that have been released show a greater cohesion of build possibilities for a given class while older classes are definitely showing their age in this respect.
edit: Other ranged careers that have Stagger or Cleave THP have far less of an issue with gaining temp health. Waystalker you have Cleave which is the better of the other options. Huntsmen has Stagger and with Spear / Shield - that is really good for generating THP during a horde. Veteran Ranged and Outcast Engineer both have Cleave which is really good with dual hammers or cog hammer.
On headshot or crit / kill THP is by far the worst combo unless the class actually has good melee centered around critical hit chance or high melee damage which Bounty Hunter is most certainly not about - really boneheaded idea to shoehorn those talents into BH which is why I would rather use the Heal Share though Sister of the Thorn just laughs at having to pick zero thp talent.
There are theoretical situations where mainstay can be better than smiter, certainly. However, the nicheness (for lack of a better word) makes it that it would be sub optimal to pick mainstay over smiter.
Having said that, the stagger talents don’t change the functionality of your gameplay at all. They are simply damage multipliers. Some are mathematically better than others. To that end, if you want to play a cleave-heavy playstyle, you could just take 10% power. It’d do essentially what mainstay attempts to do now but it would actually improve your horde clear.
I would personally go about this issue in the opposite direction. Melee classes snipe specials and sustain ammo too easily. I know that’s a whole other discussion but wanted to at least chime in and say I don’t really agree with any amount of thp generation on ranged weapons. Having a way to pause decay might be ok but it definitely shouldn’t come default. Could work as a trait perhaps.
Also are you sure rapier pistol can still generate THP? A bunch of those interactions were quietly modified recently, like shotgun bashes proccing temp health talents (probably the only form of ranged weapon THP I’d say is fine along with javelin melee since they are melee attacks in effect).
Which is completely fair.
I just dislike the idea that you have “horde clearing weapons” which essentially loses their entire niche, because that horde could have topped off everyone/yourself to max health (unless you are one of the meme careers with bad thp talents).
Edit: Just to reiterate, I am talking at a severely reduced rate here. It would indeed be incredibly silly if you got the full amount from ranged kills etc.
How recently are we talking here? Can’t say I have been noticing it, but I have been mostly playing CW, and since you pretty much don’t generate any thp there, I might have not noticed.
I think the best overall solution, a part of which comes from the thp mod is:
Replace heal share with on cleave for BH and with appropriate thp talents for all other careers. Make heal share into a necklace trait. Leave thp on crit/headshot for those that enjoy it and maybe adjust it if it’s necessary.
I don’t want to derail the discussion but I run heal share + hand of shalya on all my ranged careers. I feel like it’s both effective and fun and I would hate to lose that synergy.
If y’all aren’t aware, hand of shalya triggers heal share if you heal someone else with healing supplies, giving you +50% of your missing health, your team +20% of their total and your target +100%. Not to mention the 20% every time you heal yourself which covers your whole teams chip damage and still usually leaves a bit of a THP buffer for your melee dudes.
So like, while THP generation is bad on ranged careers, I think people underestimate heal share synergies. It’s harder to use in quick play when people don’t coordinate but, ya know. Give it a shot if you want. It’s been working for me.
That’s not the central issue. RV, Waystalker, Pyro, Engi; none of these ranged careers have significant issues generating temp health with 1 or 2 exceptions.
The problem is that some careers are needlessly, and unfairly, restricted in their weapon choice by what their available tHP talents mesh with.
BH is the most obvious example of this because temp on headshot/crit is the worst talent and he lacks the steroid talents needed to make temp on kill good. But there are other careers with the same problem to a lesser extent like: Huntsmans, BW, & GK.
Honestly, heal share can easily be combined with Hand of Shallya. Neither is exactly setting the world on fire. It would be a great thing to experiment with during the next BBB.
THP on kill works great with axe (mainly see it paired with Griffonfoot or sometimes Volley Xbow) or A&F builds but yeah, BH has very, very bad THP generation otherwise. THP on headshot/crit is even stupider on him as he has no way to boost melee crit chance beyond properties. I’d switch that one out for cleave.
For fixing this problem in general: As I posted in another thread, if FS absolutely refuse to just increase the amount of talents in the THP and stagger tiers, to address the THP and stagger lines I’d fuse Smiter with Assassin and Bulwark with Mainstay. They’d need to rebalanced in doing so, Assassin is by far the best stagger talent right now and most careers that can take Smiter over Bulwark/Mainstay already (if they’re not taking Enhanced Power). Perhaps part even needs to be ditched outright (either the Smiter or the Assassin part, I’m leaning towards nerfing or ditching the Assassin part). Bulwark and Mainstay are weaker so I’d simply merge their functionality.
THP-wise I’m not sure what to do with healshare - perhaps move it to a necklace trait (this might be too good, having THP + healshare, so perhaps as a necklace property forcing players to pick between it and health or BCR/stamina? - maybe with the additional effect of reducing THP gain by e.g. 50% on top if you take healshare) - or just outright remove healshare? - either way all classes should have access to THP on kill, stagger and cleave. THP on crit/headshot competes too much with cleave in terms of niche but is very weak right now so FS could get away with ditching it.
That’d leave the level 5 talents: THP on Kill, THP on Cleave, THP on Stagger, and level 15: Smiter, Bulwark-Mainstay and Enhanced Power, for all careers. Now nobody would be limited by THP and stagger talents when it comes to weapon choice, and it’d make future rebalancing easier since FS would be able to see how these talents work across all careers and pick-rates would be influenced purely by viability not availability.