Brief feedback on enemy moves

This feedback is inspired by all those hits i took, that step by step made me salty and angry enough to write this.

I’m speaking from ~700 hours of legend experience, playing as client only, on relatively stable connections, and ping is estimated to be 80-120.

If enemies will continue to have some stupid combat maneuvers that are inconsistent, too random, hard to read, badly represent actual hitbox, that sometimes leave little to no counterplay, then ranged will continue to be a better choice, and melee wont be as fun and rewarding as it could be.

I think @Ratherdone should see this.

/

Slaverat and clanrat.

  • They remember running attack trigger for far, far too long. You can stop moving away, and after 2-3 seconds a rat will happily do a running attack, often already being close, at 1m away. First, it looks silly when they run on the same spot and doing the stab, second - it’s too punishing for players. For second point - remember Vermintide 1, the timer there was more like 1s, 2s tops, and the rats were much less numerous, in result you could lightly exploit AI, fights in general felt better and more fair.
    —Now in V2 you often get 10 slaverats in contact, should you give them a running atk trigger - they will all do it in a series of stabs, forcing you to block and stand for considerable time, or risk having a poke through your attack. You have to be too defensive if you want to engage after moving away. And the rats feel inconsistent as their danger level jumps immensely between fast running attacks and slower standing attacks.
    —While i perfectly understand the reason behind implementing the running attacks, currently they affect normal, head-long style of combat (with rats), and too much at that… you need to be at constant alert, be paranoid of your movements, like “did i gave a running attack trigger just now? should i block or be active?”.
  • Running attacks, more often of spear wielders, are harder to dodge sideways, than in V1. I think its due to rats not closing distance enough - the further the rat from you, the wider its attack cone is, so your dodge need to be both faster and longer. And often its straight impossible to dodge these running stabs with weapons like 2h hammer(“low-tier dodge”), or 2h sword (“mid-tier dodge”), even with perfect timing.
  • Rats downward attacks are incredibly fast, you get them fighting on stairs or hills, facing the enemy up. Side-dodges dont work against them (because you expect a much slower standing attack). These downward attacks are so fast, that you just have to read the terrain, in order to predict its possiblity, otherwise its close to impossible to react to these attacks (and block / dodge back).
    —Again, inconsistent and frantic level of danger.
    —The animation of this attack is also very misleading, - it have ghost reach, a rat strikes the ground a meter away from you, and you get hit.

Fanatic and marauder.

  • Their standing attacks have so much variation in speed, and the fastest attacks have lightning speed, in result engaging them in melee - is risky no matter how good you are, you dont know what attack they throw(slow or fast), so you’re afraid to do anything: your attack might not reach them before their hit you, or it might reach (who knows), same with dodge - you might dodge too soon(and they’ll adjust their aim), or too late - no way of predicting or reacting really. The fastest attack animations that they do - is the 80% hits i take from them. I rate my reaction as good, above average, and playing on some1 elses host - makes their attacks extremely hard to counter, which is weird how fodder troops are so fast and lethal.
  • Sliding running attacks aimed at you. Because sometimes their legs dont represent actual movement, after a dodge back you cant tell: “this guy wont reach me”. He might slide on still legs towards you and hit your astonished face. Or not. It seems also, that on final lengths of the slide, a fanatic/marauder gets a speed boost in movement. So its another too random element, which counters a skillful play.
  • Fanatics attack reach is much higher than their animation+weapon model. Its just another element, among many others, that split the visual representation of enemy moves, from what is actually happening, and it hurts melee combat fun, feel, immersion, and you get surprised (in a bad way) by enemies again and again.

Plague monk.

  • After getting close with ~3-4 m away from you, he almost teleports into melee hit range, so engaging them you have to make predictions and be lucky. Predictions… its too much of them in melee combat in general, imo.
    —They’re much more dangerous than Savages due to that. And also because their heads are harder to hit.
    —Slight nerf to teleport speed (the speed of closing the gap to attack) would be good.

Stormvermin w/ halberd.

  • Running attacks are often undodge-able, unless having 20% longer dodge on 1h or dual wield weapon, and still you’re not guaranteed to evade with good timing. They’re just too strong imo - fast, drain lots of stamina or health, interruptable only with powerfull stagger(normal pushes wont do), track you precisely with great running speed (a SV becomes as glued to you), and have very wide hit arc, in result both sidedodge, and backdodge simply dont work 90% of the time, no matter the timing.
  • Running attack - with stab animation - completely misleads about resulting hit arc, which is as wide as standing horizontal swipe.

Mauler and chaos warrior.

  • Same sliding problems as on fanatics.

Mauler and stormvermin.

  • Their pushes are a bit OP in some cases, because they do it in an instant (almost). The only way to protect yourself against it - is to constantly be out of their push reach, but not too far so you could still hit them. This requirement is very hard to follow in mixed, chaotic fights with many enemies (especially with many of those elites). You’re likely to get pushed no matter how cautious you’re. The pushes drop your guard for quite a long time for incoming deadly attacks.
    —Now, i suggest adding some wind-up time for a push, or a signal - so you could see it coming, then react by dodging, or pushing enemy yourself. For example, a Mauler rises his arms to get in some kinda block stance, he then waits like that for a 0.8 second (fixed delay, no randomness), then does the push, that reaches you with same speed as now.

Bile troll.

  • Running overhead power attack (chop) - have a ridiculously wider hit area in width, than what is represented by animation. You simply can’t reliably dodge it sideways, nor backwards (obviously), unless having 20% longer dodge talent, with 1-1.2m dodge on a weapon.

Chaos spawn.

  • Insta-hit 4 strike combo of ground slams, with advancing on a player. It’s a dirty move, no reaction will save you, you have to be ready for this attack always, which means that whoever takes aggro of spawn - gets to play mostly as bait, which is boring. Also the first attack in combo seems to have ghost reach, and hits earlier than the animation suggests.

Lord Skarrik and Bodsvarr.

  • Just cheaters with speed hacks, makes fighting them a boring affair - a targeted bait cant do anything, as Skarrik/Bodsvarr are much faster, with longer reach and wide hit arcs, uninteruptable. Even those who hit them in the back - can get a surprise strike from them, done in a split second after an insta-turning.
    —I’d prefer if they had more depth to them. Overall having much slower (about normal stormvermin speed, or even slower), and more telegraphed attacks. All attacks should be slow enough that you can react against them. A different set of moves that require certain actions to avoid - a dodge sideways or a dodge backwards (otherwise you get damaged through block), a simple block. Right now you can’t react to anything because all is lighting fast, and you can’t effectively counter the lords in melee, so the gameplay is poor.
18 Likes

Also, all of those things are totally inconsistent from host to host. I have a love hate relationship with slayer as a result. Sometimes none of those things happen and other times you get cheesed nonstop. It’s weird and frustrating. The troll chop is a huge tell. Sometimes it hits where it should and sometimes you eat it when you’re 5ft away laterally.

8 Likes

All solid points. When faced with a hyperdense chaos fanatic horde, it doesn’t matter what weapon I have there’s just no way to take them on in melee without eating a lot of unavoidable hits.

Vermintide 1 it felt possible (just very difficult) to make it through a cata run with 0 damage; vermintide 2 it feels possible to make it through without getting knocked down, hopefully, until a gutter runner spawns on my face (or some other unavoidable RNG damage). Heck even j_sat mentioned it on stream, someone asked his opinion on nat bond and he said not worth it because there’s just too much unavoidable damage with the current state of the game.

I definitely agree with @Avar that sometimes these things don’t happen at all and I have great runs, then suddenly they start again and I just get my face stomped in for no apparent reason. Gets very frustrating after awhile.

9 Likes

Argree. In V1 trying cata without getting damage always felt doable. absolutely miss that in V2.

2 Likes

Something I’d definitely disagree on. If you finish your game with around 150 to 200 damage taken, bond is a valid pick. Though I’d agree that there is too much unavoidable damage, both intended and unintended.

5 Likes

Also it’s heavily class dependent. Some classets just work better with it. If it wasn’t for all these inconsistencies and issues, any class could pick it but right now it’s a huge handle on classes that grabbing rely upon melee for temp health (except WS thanks to Amaranthe).

3 Likes

And thats why melee, in this “melee based game”, is a chore.
Just look how viable Ironbreaker gets alone trough his passive and health stacking with is basically a workaround for all that shoddy fighting. You could strip him of his active and he would be still a better melee choice than kruber. The only melee class that can reliably run natural bond is the melee class that negates random dmg.
You are either IB or a dodger if you want to play melee.

But I think even with them, facing bosses in melee is not worth the ~400dmg you will provide in the fight, even if you only reach less than 200 with your sidearm. Ranged will provide that dps anyway and it might take five seconds longer but you wont get in the danger zone of 180° turnaround-trough-block-twoshots or flying across the map. Slayer (as long as terrain and boss-type are fitting) and Shade are exceptions here. And the scripted ones. Nah. Just nah. Its so ridiculous that their strongest defense gets triggered by the weakest form of dps. Lolmanglr being the worst, just swooping the arena with his 20m telescope ghost hit spear even if you just look in his generall direction or instaturning if he has his swords out. Try to dodge that combo with a 2h hammer if you were just right behind him, not gonna happen.

All that just encourages the player to cheese out every single aspect of combat and skills. I replayed V1 after I got enough of this randomwipe loot generator and its so nice to be able to engage in melee combat without surfing on a tsunami of actives and augmentations to beat the map, experiencing it and my task story /gameplaywise instead of being focused on slaughtering trough 800 mobs, horde after horde on different coloured backgrounds for 20min.

I think that the extremely broken hand to hand combat in this game also killed the depth and diversity of playstyles because careers and builds arent used as tool focused on creating one of many ways to finish a map but as a tool to even out all the disadvantages players have to face. Not good. If players start to spend more time on finding/using the best workarounds for your gameplay instead of moving freely in the given enviroment, you should rethink whatever you created.

A problem is of course that changes which interfere on such a vast and significant scale are terribly hard to implement after the game already is “done”. Especially if its a multiplayer. Thats one of those reasons why devs back in ancient egypt (as hieroglyphs on the walls of long abandoned studios tell us) actually had an alpha and a beta going on for testing purposes instead of having an alpha as goodie for pre order and a beta as release without any testing or consideration of feedback but thats another story.

4 Likes

I really have to say, that the most things are host/clients issues…

I started to play every char for the challenges on legend and i play every round another career/ map (so i won´t get bored). I give a **** on the quickplay bonus and play the map i want to, so i´m host.

I feel godlike with it. Never at so much fun, so much reaction time, so many beast-blocks and no sliding-enemies in the games. I played Into the nest on Battlewizard with 820 kills and 13k dmg, never died… Skittergate on Slayer with 450 kills and 10k dmg… and and and (btw Zealot main).

I really never played those Careers that much, i just went for my playstyle and it´s just so much fun AS HOST.

As a client i got (like you told)

  • sliding enemies
  • hits from nowhere
  • enemies in the air or in the ground

etc…

It´s really ridiculous… client = hard handicap and worse as the host connection is…

And btw i play bond on every character /career

2 Likes

A good deal of these issues are noticeable as host at times as well however, and sure you can play around them and avoid taking damage from most of them - but they do cause you to play more in anticipation of situations that shouldn’t be occurring in the first place, which backwards from how it should be

4 Likes

I can´t speak for all here yeah, but it really feels like another game as host for me.

I don´t have got any issues , where i´ve to play around as host.

  • No “block is up, but i get a hit”
  • No sliding enemies
  • No teleporting monks

etc.

I can even “outrange” monks/berzerks with my axe…

1 Like

Some hosts are definitely just better than others. If I see janky “director says die now” bs on a host it happens every run and more balanced runs tend to always occur on the same hosts. I avoid hosting for this reason.

Here is another strange thing

At 0:11 the rat outreaches my push. Killed me today so i recreated it in the modded realm.
Is it intended that they can outreach youre push?
It would make sense but i still was very suprised.

Thing is, enemys attack sometimes too much longer than player’s attack or push or dodge.
I dodged 2 times with WHC and use charmed life
What happened? Slave rat was so far from me and it started its running attack before i dodge and it succeed to hit me after i dodge twice.

In my display that rat’s spear was far to hit me but i got hit. And even i was hit, i had to go to it for killing it…

1 Like

All spear enemies are incredible inconsistent in their attack range, might be host depend or just garbage coding, its incredible frustrating though, especially noticable on ledges.

when he do that go inside him(go to him and side doge inside him. 100% miss hit)

2 Likes

tray to make 1 more video and dont fight-push on stairs. stairs are the worst enemy in VT1 and VT2(never fight on stairs they have different attack pattern and is faster)

I know. This requires direct attention to troll, needs time and space to do it. If its a naked troll - staying safe isnt hard, but when other enemies distract/block you - you’re not always can be in time, to run up and hug the troll.

Which leads to a perpendicular side dodge that visually evades his axe head by a good margin, but you still take the smashing.

1 Like

Don’t worry, they will fix that after the Xbox, PS4 and Switch release!

5 Likes

Vermintide 1 was about being good at killing rats.

Vermintide 2 is about hoping something random doesn’t kill you.

4 Likes

But how can we have a sequel if we don’t make them fight twice as many enemies and specials whilst keeping the netcode of the previous game? /s