Can Lingering flames tick rate go back to normal please

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
21

Fire Walk Kaboom is the second strongest DOT source in the game for lingering after beam staff’s 5th LMB tick. (We’re not counting flamestorm staff)
It normally ticks 3-4 times without Lingering which is the highest number of ticks Sienna has access to outside of Coruscation staff.

IIRC Lingering Flames practically has a higher DPS than Famished for almost every DOT in the game except for Coruscation staff and when you’re holding down Beam staff LMB.

I’ve tested it some more. Famished Fireball spam can also momentarily deal slightly higher single target DPS than Lingering and Famished Flame Sword heavy spam deals slightly more single target super armor DPS than Lingering flame sword heavy spam does. Every other use-case I can think of Lingering would deal more DPS.

Basically, Lingering is really busted.

22

I finally got around to trying the LF Conflag, on a Legend CW run. Then I tested it with the Creature Spawner against Volcanic and Famished Conflag.

In the CW run I got a lot of green circles, but wondered how much I’d really contributed.

After the testing, it seems the answer is likely, “Quite a bit.” Based on the testing, I likely wasn’t simply stealing Elite kills by doing the final bit of damage, but heavily damaging or killing them with a single blast.

On Legend, LF has about the same TTK as Famished. Volcanic kills significantly more quickly, but you spend all that time on that target (or, really, group of targets.) With LF, as has been noted, you can move to other targets or just defend.

Tough to balance. Enemies often don’t last long, obviously, so weakening LF could quickly make it effectively do nothing most of the time. But 1.5x doesn’t strike me as too much of a nerf - I think it’d still feel like something of a luxury. I expect it’d still use it at 1x, for the fire-and-forget utility.

I might keep pairing LF with Conflag, but I wish it did something else entirely - more impactful with each use, rather than just spreading DoT like some super-easy Coruscation staff.

23

I mean… I can’t keep repeating myself too much lest I go insane but Lingering Flames was already a good talent before its buff and it currently is so strong it straight up invalidates Famished Flames. Nerfing it from 2x to 1.5x is an effective 25% DPS decrease on DOTs only which isn’t significant enough for how strong it is in practice. I’d much rather bring it back down to earth again with a 1x rick rate. And if it deals less DPS while fighting than the other talents that’s a good thing! That’s how it should be given how Lingering Flames enables you to perform. Before it was buffed to have double DPS my performance with LF on Legend/Cataclysm games was still very strong and consistently higher than what the rest of the team outputs. The value from Lingering Flames scales directly with how many enemies are present, the higher you go in difficulty the stronger it is.

24

I agree. I just added a note to my post above about use at 1x - it’s still fire and forget, which is interesting. “Interesting” is excellent, and doesn’t need massive DPS.

25

I might’ve changed my position too soon. Kaboom is quite a bit of damage, like in the video, but it’s not 12 seconds to take out most enemies when using other weapons. A fairer comparison would be testing staves with lingering vs. Famished Flame. I think 1.5x tick rate and it’d be sufficiently weaker than Famished Flames.

I don’t mess around with the enemy spawner, but if somebody could do side by side for each staff, I’d like to see enemies with AI turned off just take burning damage from staves and compare.

I’ll add that, in practice, with other teammates as I said before, things aren’t even lasting long enough for lingering to have a major effect. If I’m in a clutch scenario, it helps quite a bit, but it’s not going to stop a horde, monster, and specials if you make a single mistake. I was using Kaboom and it wasn’t saving my bacon.

26

This is once again one of those “nerf this” takes that completely misses the point.

You argue that Lingering is overpowered and outperforms Famished in DPS on most staves, and then you present modded, isolated test videos as proof. But those scenarios do not reflect real matches. I play this game every day on the official realm with random players. I regularly see Lingering Battle Wizards try to replicate those setups and simply die. In real gameplay, under pressure, Lingering is not some broken talent that carries games on its own.

If you believe Lingering does too much DPS with certain staves, then the real question is: what is the intended damage over time tick rate, and for which weapons? On some staves the ticks are clearly too fast. Flamestorm is an example, and Fatshark has already acknowledged that interaction as a bug. That suggests the issue is not necessarily the talent itself, but specific weapon or ult interactions where the DoT ticks faster than intended. Before labeling Lingering overpowered, you first need to define what the correct tick speed should be on each staff. On Coruscation, for example, the tick speed does not appear bugged and Famished is clearly stronger there. In that case, Lingering is not the dominant option.

So instead of calling for a blanket nerf to Lingering, the focus should be on fixing problematic combinations between Lingering and certain staves. If some interactions are bugged, they should be corrected. Nerfing the entire talent because of a few flawed weapon interactions is the wrong approach. Fix what is broken first. Then evaluate the talent under proper, intended conditions.

I am tired of constant nerf demands. Fatshark has shown repeatedly that adjusting Lingering can introduce new bugs. At the same time, many of the loudest balance advocates seem disconnected from how the game actually plays in normal official Legend or Cataclysm matches. Players with thousands of hours should not expect standard official difficulty to remain a challenge forever. If regular Cataclysm feels too easy after that much experience, that is not necessarily a balance failure.

27

I beg you to actually do the math and testing yourself at this point. Perhaps do some Cata runs with and without lingering. Here’s the creature spawner mod you can try out in modded realm.

The result is the same, Lingering has a higher DPS than Famished does for all staves except for Coruscation staff naturally and Beam staff but only against single targets. I question your understanding of how this game works if you expected anything else.

I tested it anyways to show, yea I’m stupid for doing the testing for you but I like testing things.

Famished Conflag

Lingering Conflag

Famished Fireball

Lingering Fireball

Famished Flamestorm

Lingering Flamestorm

Famished Beam

Lingering Beam

What’s the purpose of this paragraph? I’ve read these exact points plenty times by now through discussions when people don’t want an obviously strong thing nerfed. “My team kills things” & “you die if you mess up” aren’t points worth considering unless extensively elaborating with real examples. This seems to just be an argument from user error.

Hilarious it’s the exact same argument again. User error.

That isolated test video was specifically engineered to massively favor Famished flames, if Lingering is still outperforming it then we have a problem. And… it is evidence. Which you do not present.

28

My apologies, I’m not trying to gang up on you here with @Bib. In-game experience can be unreliable, and should be questioned. It’s not enough. That’s why I was sincerely asking for something more tests to compare (also, because I’m not invested enough to care to test it myself).

Your tests, plus some more Cata quick-play, pretty conclusively show Lingering is OP, and for the morepart, it’s made Famished Flames obsolete. Lingering is the clear winner in most match-ups.

I play a good bit of Sienna, but I mostly play Kruber, Bardin, and Saltzpyre. I’m not exactly heavily invested in whether this gets nerfed or not. My interest in the game over all is dwindling.

My point was that during a game, if something’s broken, it’s easy to steal kills and hog glory. Lingering is different.

In-game, trying out both some more, I could tell Lingering was performing better than Famished overall, but not by a wide margin. The point from earlier being, if your allies are outputting damage, and doing their job, Lingering isn’t game breaking in the state it’s currently in.

I recall Lingering being a bit too niche and weak before. Almost nobody used it. I’d say smaller incremental changes. Walk it back to 1.5x and see how it affects the game.

29

It was niche before but definitely not weak, when Lingering Flames was first introduced players were fast to point out how incredibly strong it can be with some even calling for nerfs.

I’d be totally down for frequent smaller changes but… this is a Fatshark game you know :laughing: they last changed it 27 months ago and haven’t touched it since, apart from the stacking bug fix. And it took them like 4 years to fix Bret SnS push attack?

Understandable this game is almost 8 years old now. Same for me here, I’m nearly at 4.1k hours I still play the game every Sunday to host large player lobbies but outside of that I don’t play regular Vermintide often, instead occasionally.

30

That’s true, but I’m holding out hope for a 2026 weapons DLC and maybe a couple more balance passes after. Perhaps sometime around a holiday event or skulls later this year.

alsozara 31

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1 Like
32

You still refuse to address my main point: you do not actually know which staves have the intended DoT tick rate and which do not.
Turn on the damage numbers mod and look at it yourself. The speed of Lingering’s DoT ticks varies significantly depending on which staff or ability applies it. The differences are so large that I seriously doubt all of them are working as intended.
I do not know which interactions are bugged and which are correct. Do you? Has Fatshark ever clearly stated that the different Lingering tick speeds across various sources are intentional?
If I recall correctly, there are different types of fire damage when using staves, such as direct hits, explosions, DoT ticks, and similar effects. Your videos do not clearly distinguish between these damage types, which makes it difficult to conclude that the results you show are caused solely by Lingering’s DoT ticks.
I stand by my opinion that Lingering itself is not overpowered. I see it every day in actual lobbies when I play. I am tired of the blind hate toward Lingering in the community. Nobody really seems to know what is actually happening in the Lingering code, maybe not even Fatshark, yet people keep claiming it makes the game too easy. I do not see that in real matches. What I see are very experienced players optimizing every detail of talents and weapons and making the game look easy.
So if you have the time to provide video proof for your claims, maybe you can also provide proof that these Lingering interactions are not bugged.
If anything, I would rather see the old Famished damage profile return. But in the end, everyone has their own idea of what balance should look like.

33

I don’t bring it up because it’s not relevant. Different DOT sources have different damages and tick rates, shocker :scream:, this is how the game works. Did you know that DOTs have a slightly randomized tick rate in this game? Apparently a -25%/+25% variance for each tick? That’s why Warrior Priest bubble can sometimes (not) kill a cata hookrat from full HP or kaboom has 3 or 4 ticks.

I’ve got a little sheet for Lingering Flames DOT DPS from 2020 before its DPS was doubled.

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Flamestorm staff has higher DPS than expected and is considered to be bugged, that’s it.

34

Fascinating, all staves averaging ~10 DPS and melee ~15 DPS explains why Flame Sword’s DoT feels strongest with Lingering, it ticks faster.

“it might be bugged”: that’s essentially an argument from ignorance. The absence of proof that something is working as intended is not evidence that it’s broken. This doesn’t shift the burden of proof.

@Harridas has provided evidence Lingering provides higher DPS than Famished Flames. The data presented so far indicates that Battle Wizard DoT sources perform better with Lingering. If the counter-argument is that these are all bugged interactions, that needs to be substantiated.

The Flamestorm interaction has already been demonstrated as bugged. I haven’t seen comparable evidence showing that other interactions are bugged, so there’s no reason to assume they are.

As for the broader discussion: this isn’t “blind hate.” The concerns raised are based on observed performance and testing. Personal lobby experience is anecdotal; controlled comparisons and demonstrated results carry more weight.

35

But it’s still not anything like an in vivo study. I think Bib’s requirements could be met by a several dozen Lingering Flame Cata games (larger sample size than usual for this sort of thing, because of the random nature of the participants) and no more than half as many control games. The games would be analyzed not for total damage, but rather for TTK, damage taken, and (maybe) overall success.

Of course, we would need a separate effort to study the code, and some interviews with FS employees, to determine what’s actually happening in game and if it’s intended or not.

If Harridas starts putting together a grant proposal now, we should have some real data in a couple of years.

36

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37

Which one of you is substantiating their claims with significant quantities of data and who is just referring to their anecdotal experience (without even bothering to record any games as evidence mind you)?

You are obviously entitled to your opinion on this matter but you are NOT entitled to accuse (implied or otherwise) @Harridas of “blind hate” when they have put in exponentially more effort than anyone else here to hold their judgements up to actual metrics rather than vibe checks.

If it is bugged somehow well that doesn’t change the practical outcome at the moment. Whether it’s overtuned intentionally or bugged it clearly needs to be addressed.

38

I ran controlled comparisons between no talent selected, Volcanic Force, Famished Flames and Lingering Flames against a Rat Ogre.

The testing method was straightforward: I either repeatedly applied the same attack until the Rat Ogre died to determine real DPS (time to kill), or I executed a single isolated attack to measure Damage per Attack (DPA) for direct numerical comparison.

Test Target: Rat Ogre C1 with BW 650 Hero Power + Enhanced Power and no properties vs. Monster/Skaven

Metrics:
DPS = Damage per second (time to kill)
DPA = Damage per attack

DPS Results (Time to Kill)

Beam Staff :

-Famished: 41s → ~97.56 DPS
-No Talent: 75s → ~53.33 DPS
-Lingering: 118s → ~33.90 DPS

Clear result: Beam scales massively with Famished.

Coruscation Staff:

-No Talent: ~101s → ~40 DPS
-Volcanic: ~102s → ~40 DPS
-Famished: 50s → ~80 DPS
-Lingering: ~8 DPS

Coru benefits heavily from Famished. Lingering is capped

Fireball – Short Heavy Spam:

-No Talent: 78s → ~51 DPS
-Volcanic: 73s → ~55 DPS
-Famished: 72s → ~55 DPS
-Lingering: 82s → ~48 DPS

Minimal difference between Volcanic and Famished here.

Fireball – Charged Heavy (Volcanic)

-Volcanic: 109s → ~36 DPS

Charged-heavy playstyle favors Volcanic, but overall DPS remains lower than short-heavy spam.

Firesword Heavy 1:

-No Talent: 255s → ~15.69 DPS
-Famished: 144s → ~27.78 DPS
-Lingering: 259s → ~15.44 DPS

Famished nearly doubles the burn contribution here.

DPA Breakdown

Beam Shotgun:

-Famished: 3.25 + 12.25 = 15.5
-No Talent: 3.75 + 6 = 9.75

Large burn amplification explains DPS spike.

Fireball Charged Heavy:

-No Talent: 72
-Volcanic: 103.75
-Famished: 75.5

Volcanic clearly dominates charged heavy attacks.

Fireball Uncharged Heavy :

-No Talent: 34.75
-Famished: 38

Marginal gain only.

Conflagration Full Charge:

-No Talent: 19.5
-Volcanic: 27.25
-Famished: 26

Volcanic slightly ahead. Famished does not meaningfully outperform.

Conflagration Small Charge:

-No Talent: 6.75
-Famished: 10

Some burn scaling, but explosion portion remains dominant overall.

Conclusions:

Famished Flames meaningfully affects Beam, Coruscation, and Flamethrower-type burn stacking.
Volcanic Force is primarily designed for Bolt Staff, but supports Fireball charged-heavy and partially Conflagration.
Lingering Flames provides stable DoT uptime and fits a hybrid melee–ranged Battle Wizard playstyle, but shows strong diminishing returns on Beam and Coru.
Fireball and Conflagration are only weakly affected by Famished, because explosion damage represents a large portion of total output and is reduced by the talent modifier.
The data shows clear weapon-specific scaling. The row is not universally competitive across all staves.

Errors are very possible, if you find something pls just reply to the wrong portion with the corrected numbers to inform others.

39

I tried to meassure numerically the lingering burn DPS. All tests were conducted on Cataclysm 1 against a no-AI Rat Ogre (4000 HP) under controlled conditions: 650 Hero Power, Enhanced Power, and no Monster or Skaven properties. The purpose was to isolate Lingering burn damage and calculate real sustained DPS based purely on time-to-kill through burn attrition.

Average DPS by Category:

-Beam (max stack): ~25 DPS
-Flamestorm: ~24.7 DPS (bugged interaction)
-Kaboom: ~15.7 DPS
-Melee burn weapons: ~12 DPS
-Most staves: ~8 DPS

Interpretation

The majority of staff-based Lingering applications sit around 8 DPS against a 4000 HP monster. Even melee burn profiles average around 12 DPS. Only Beam max stack and Flamestorm exceed 20 DPS, and Flamestorm is already acknowledged as having a problematic interaction.

Notably, this burn DPS is very similar to the numbers Harridas provided from 2020, suggesting that the current state of Lingering is not meaningfully inflated compared to earlier data.

In my view, Lingering is not structurally overpowered in normal Cataclysm 1 campaign play. It becomes strong in the hands of experienced players who position well, kite efficiently, avoid taking damage, and spread burn consistently across large groups. However, those same players would make Cataclysm 1 feel trivial with a wide range of optimized careers and builds. The perceived dominance in those cases is driven by player skill, not by the talent itself.

For mid-experience players, Lingering does not trivialize encounters. It does not compensate for poor positioning, weak heat management, or bad decision-making. It rewards control and patience rather than enabling explosive damage spikes.

The numbers show that most Lingering applications sit in the 8–12 DPS range in realistic conditions. That is stable and consistent damage, but not meta-breaking damage. Its strength is primarily in extended engagements and scripted high-density scenarios such as Fortunes of War or Weaves, where sustained pressure over time has more strategic value.

The widespread perception that Lingering is overpowered likely stems from earlier bug interactions and from the strong visual impact of persistent burn effects, rather than from current numerical dominance. Based on measured DPS and practical application, Lingering is a controlled attrition tool that scales with player skill, not a fundamentally unbalanced mechanic.

40

I’m sorry, I wrote that it was for lingering flames but lingering flames isn’t actually mentioned in the original message I grabbed it from. It was a chart for DOT DPS without additional info other than the numbers. I’ve corrected my earlier post mentioning this chart.

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