Chaos Wastes feedback

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
1

I’ve played a couple dozen games on legend and I feel I have a grasp at the new game mode, here is what I feel about it:

The Beastmen are way too powerful in this mode. I normally play in twitch mode legend with books or cataclysm with maybe a couple tomes with about a 40/60 success to failure rate on average with any class and weapon combinations with about 80% on my main setups. But when there are Beastmen in the last three mission nodes, it goes from a mild challenge to an almost guaranteed loss.

The Khorne bloodstorm is the most heinous modifier I have ever seen. Fix that now, it is so bs. The second a storm ends, another starts and it deals like 70 damage per second, ridiculous.

The ‘greed’ Slaanesh mod needs a soft random. I’ve had 2 lit barrels spawn and simultaneously explode on me and other times where we’ve gotten 2 pilgrim coin drops until the last drop down.

Tempering and exchanging weapons is a poorly executed idea. The properties and traits isn’t something to even consider, it is just about power level. A far better mechanic would be to have temper shrines allow you to reroll if you already have the rarity, drop the price considerably, and move power level to shop nodes where they can be improved teamwide by anyone like the other team boons.

Many of those team boons are rancid. I don’t know why many are one use only or have a penalty attached like having to fight a super boss for something you already paid for, that’s bull.

The maps are mostly ok. I had a crash when a troll got hex buffed. There was a final Slaanesh event that had instantly ended. Then there is that one event in this donut arena where an orb needs to be charged convocation style which is waaaay too long. I very much like the thirst modifier, reverse curse of comradship, and egg modifier.

The mode boasts having this path system but it’s actually super linear. It has the bare minimum required to call it ‘paths’. Half the nodes are required and the other half are two choices. Really disappointing.

What I expected was something where you would pit various chaos gods against each other in some way and maybe clearing new paths towards good gods when you successfully do so. Either way, it’s free and I’m not complaining, just hoping this helps.

3 Likes
2

Beastmen have and always will be ridiculous. Something about how easily they flank you, either your weapons hit them left and right a ridiculous amount or they dodge out of the way. Just about every team I’ve been with actively avoids any maps with the Beastman faction combo. Unfortunately, there’s only 2 faction combos available, so there’s not much choice in that matter.

The blood tornadoes are also ridiculous. There’s a 2 second delay between tornadoes, there’s not nearly enough windup for a player to escape in a reasonable amount of time, they deal ridiculous damage, and they don’t even affect your enemies. Much of the time the player doesn’t even know a blood tornado is about to spawn on them and they get ganked unfairly. It needs some serious nerfing.

The Slaanesh one isn’t bad. Nuke the orbs with ranged fire and you won’t get affected by the barrels. The fire barrel could use with some slight nerfing though; the DOT on players is really, really high.

There’s only 2 team boons that have a malus attached to them. Miracle of Grimnir, 20% max health increase but you have to kill a monster, and Miracle of Smednir with 50% more coins but take 20% more damage. The other 7 team boons have no maluses attached to them. Furthermore, after the first couple of maps, bosses get melted like butter, so the Miracle of Grimnir really just means more coins even if said boss has more HP and deals more damage. And the other one doesn’t matter as much since making it to the end of a map removes wounds and puts you at 50% HP, so as long as you can beat the map, no real loss.

Bugs are par for the course, unfortunately. We can only hope they’ll get fixed soon.

3

[beastmen]
This faction is ‘broken’ from the beginning, and recently I understood why:

  • whenever you stagger a beastman, it falls in the reversed way (if you push it, it staggered as if you pull it and vice versa).

[Chaos Curse]
The worst one I experienced is the Nurgle curse. Limited moving area, one fighting player less, bad visibility, and damage over time outside the safe area…

The common approach is a race towards the map exit, skipping exploration, altars, shrines, challenges, …

[quickplay bonus]
Quickplay final result bonus isn’t working.

[equipment]
IMHO this will be a controversial point, that should need some more work.

Up to now, the only thing to care about is the weapon power level. As ‘last-option’ you can get a random one.

Item powers are random and cannot be changed.

The actual workflow has 2 main problems:

  • players joining into middle-final expedition phase are heavily punished because their items are not aligned with the others, and they don’t have collected the previous challenge boons.

  • killed players may skip challenges shrines, and or item improvement alters, keeping them one or two steps behind the others for the whole expedition.

My overall impression is that of driving a car with flat tires.
After 4-5 expeditions, switching back to normal mission is a pure relief.
Your character with your selected equipment working at 100%.

Naturally the most equipment specific classes are the most punished in this new game mode.

[rewards]
Up to now, the rewards are extra loot boxes that are useless in this mode, because you cannot use the found items in the expeditions.

4

I have enjoyed Chaos Wastes quite a bit so far. My main problems are:

  1. The mission length:
    It can take an hour to complete an expedition but the first couple of locations are really boring - there aren’t enough enemies and they pose no real threat. You just walk around in a depopulated landscape looking for coins and challenge chests.

I’d suggest making each expedition one location shorter and simulatneously increasing the threat level and coin/chest/anvil density on each level, so that we are at the same power by the end of the game. This way missions will be a bit shorter but more challenging and fun at the early stages.

  1. Some of the locations just tank my FPS. Particularly the lava sections of Cinder Peak and the Tower in the snow where you have to wait for the gate to open to fhe descending staircase.

Overall, I think this is a fun mode but a bit too easy compared to the equivalent difficulty in standard maps.

6
  • when getting a backend error at the end of an expedition, you lose any reward… This is something occurring not so rarly and it is very disappointing.
7

I have more observations:

It feels too long for a single sitting. It’s in an awkward place where it takes too long to comfortably start whenever you’d want and too short for you to really go ape with certain combinations. Solution: Cut out the first mission node because it is way too easy anyway or make a more involved short campaign where players work their way to the center finale in a chinese checkers-like (or chaos star) map that can be recontinued at any time and progress is measured by the number and difficulty of completed missions for a complete collection of rewards. ((Concept: Say it takes 2-3 easy missions to get up to a commoner’s, 2-3 normal to get a soldier’s, 2-3 hard to get a general’s and progress beyond those chests can only be achieved by doing missions of that difficulty or higher. Maybe completing certain threshold missions could unlock the ability for gaining extra chests, limiting lobby exploitation. Should net to 12-18 mission nodes per campaign.))

Most everyone I’ve played this with has been disappointed that there’s nothing special at the end and I have to agree though I expected as such. I think this could be a good chance at repurposing lords like Spinemangler, Bodvar, Deathrattler, etc into the wastes with their numbers rebalanced at appropriate levels to make them comparable with any lord being in their place. I’d always wanted to see something like a lord with boss bodyguards - like bodvar with a couple champions and when those champions are killed, they transform to chaos spawn, making it a decision as to when to deal with them. In twitch mode, bosses during a lord fight happen all the time so it’s totally doable.