Starting boons provide a strong early advantage, even in harder events.
Mission Modifiers, Curses & Progression
Some modifiers (e.g., +Monsters, Beastmen, Tzeentch Eggs) snowball excessively. You can expect 2–4 minotaurs + Trials monster vs. Adventure Mod’s ~2 Monsters a mission.
Early Chaos Wastes missions feel harder than high-difficulty Adventure due to starting with nothing alongside compounding modifiers/curses.
Suggestion: Add a first shrine with rotating weekly boons and some starting coin ~500 to offset the early difficulty.
Curses (gas, lightning, skulls, tornadoes) + specials force unavoidable damage. Suggestion: Add a few boons to significantly reduce AoE damage, curses, or damage from specific sources.
Boons & Weapon Upgrades
Many boons/talents/weapon upgrades do nothing or conflict with builds, unfairly penalizing players. Fix: Better logic for Belakor/Random Altar rewards.
The high number of situational boons (bombs, barrels, potions) in the boon pool makes it so that difficulty too often outpaces player progression as you can end up 4 missions in and have almost nothing but item-specific boons.
Boon tiers often misrepresent actual value.
Belakor Veteran Boon pool is small; frequently awards Khaine’s Fury, which cripples vulnerable builds.
Good Boon Idea: +1% damage/attack speed per boon. Expand: Add similar for health, healing, cooldown, power, etc.
There’s an absurd number of bomb boons, and almost every play-through, whether I like it or not, I’m a bombardier, and so is everyone else. The effects of these boons are often absurd the way they stack as well (1000% attack speed or cooldown, etc.)
The boons that only benefit the teammates near you (damage/stagger) are useful, but they’re not particularly fun for the player that picks them.
The barrel boons are overly situational, and cause a lot of team damage, especially with the Slaanesh Glory to Greed bubbles.
Weapon Traits
Many Adventure Mode traits appearing in the CW are useless, especially on high-tier weapons.
Suggestion: Assign traits to appropriate tiers (weak traits for low-tier weapons, strong ones for high-tier).
Some traits are weapon-locked arbitrarily, making them overly rare.
Grudge Marks
Vastly improved, most combos make sense, and appear at a reasonable time and place.
Rampart probably shouldn’t be impervious to bombs, particularly Morgrim’s Bomb. A player that buys Morgirm’s Bomb Miracle before the final mission, only to find the grudge mark is immune is not happy.
Vampire/Regeneration combined with Invulnerability/Rampart/Mighty can make a team that has less damage unable to reliably have a fair shot at winning.
Potions
Many are too short-lived despite high potency.
Invisibility (5s) is nearly useless; Agility makes dodge radius absurd.
Suggestion: Lengthen duration for Wrath, Prophetic Strike, Life Share/Steal while reducing their potency proportionally. This makes the player more likely to get some use out of them in return for risking popping them in the middle of combat where they may not last long enough to do anything.
Level Design
Excessive cliffs/ledges (some instant death, no ledge grab), especially on levels with lava.
Narrow areas hinder teamwork, bombs, and ranged play; worse during boss fights.
Dash abilities (Zealot/Slayer/Handmaiden/Battle Wizard) can clip into unreachable spots, falling endlessly.
Other Issues
Can’t view boons on Holseher’s Map; only mid-mission.
Anti-cheat update often blocks connections on Holseher’s Map (only works in-mission).
Isn’t that the point? Random boon altars are cheaper, but you’re gambling on what you might get. The fix is to only use the shrines if you are picky. I enjoy the chaos of trying to make random boon builds work
Agree, this one makes me so sad. There’s a 2H hammer for the dwarf (and maybe Kruber?) that has massively increased stagger. I forget the exact details, but I was home-running rats into orbit like nobody’s business. Sadly I’ve only ever gotten it twice, and both times the team wiped shortly after.
For real this would be such a nice QOL improvement.
I’d also add, if players join a campaign anytime later than the first map, they should get some bonus coins. Something like 300 coins per whole map missed, that way they can catch up with the team somewhat.
This disproportionately disadvantages players with specific careers, using specific talents. A few examples:
Merc/Zealot: No random crits negates all crit boons. Slayer 1h/2h talents does nothing if you don’t meet the criterea. Ironbreaker’s drakefire does nothing without a drakefire weapon.
It is fun playing games with a random risk/reward when it’s fair. I wouldn’t ask you to pay me for a chance to get a random “boon”, and then grant all your teammates something more or less useful, then give you nothing and tell you it’s because you decided to play Slayer. So what you’re saying isn’t applicable here. It’s not about being “picky”. Using boons that do nothing, you’re not going to “make a build work”.
Alternatively they could simply include all talent/boon combos at altars that do nothing, or simply have a chance for a boon altar to take 150 coin and do nothing when you play with a specific talents or career. However, Fatshark intentionally added logic to avoid certain combos of boons/talents that negate each other, or do nothing; but forgot others.
I still play these careers, but it’s frustrating when they frequently get boons/talents that negate each-other, knowing I could avoid that by playing a career better optimized for the Chaos Wastes. I like using random altars, but with something like Drakefire, you’ve only got 2 weapons from a random weapon shrine that fit the talent. It’s far more risk than reward with certain careers. I don’t believe that’s the intent.
Same, another example. I’ve only got Mannan’s Tempest once, and it was on a FUBAR run that we actually barely scrapped by to the end knowing we’d likely get curb stomped. I had 5% crit chance, so it barely proc’d.
I forgot this; definately a must! Please don’t unfairly disadvantage quick play players! I think they should track all coin picked up by the team, and give it to players that join late. Most players simply leave if they join late and have nothing.
So I appreciate every “card in the deck” can’t be awesome so some of the points raised by OP I feel are the nature of the chaos wastes. However…
This is the… weirdest bit for me tbh. Early levels getting a bunch of RotShields can be really frustrating for example and often leads to wipes as it takes… forever to get anywhere and with everything else going on it snowballs often into an early wipe.
This leans in to bombs often becoming meme-builds as even 2 players getting attack speed aura with healing aura makes it the only real thing to care about, bombing the right area. Add in Khalitas Barter and Endless bombs pot. 1000% overkill. (I know its a fairly tailored build but yeah).
Item specific builds (barrels giving 300% as an example) are so situational, but IF you get this, it should probably spawn many more barrels throughout the levels.
This straight up just annoys me. Invulnerable Rampart combo is intensely infuriating and I suspect causes far more end-stage insta-wipes than anything else. Melee heavy have a smaller window to actually hit the bloody monster while ranged are often so squishy they get clobbered into jam much quicker.
Rampart should be affected by Morgrims Bomb at least and I suggest be vulnerable to some ranged stuff. Drakefire maybe? Splitting Rampart into 2 types of ranged immunity might be better. Ignore “projectiles” > arrows, torpedo, bullets, Engi Ult, OR Ignore magic/AoE , flames, moonfire, Hagbane AoE, OR maybe a 75% Chance of Ricochet or something. Rampart (I feel) is a big step up in difficulty that makes me sad when I see it.
And I agree with some weapon traits being too rare to feature really. Hearing about the mythical Home Run style hammer for example, and Drakefire weapons should be insanely more fun to promote people taking them.
On the end stage at least, if you simply survive long enough the gate will open and allow you to take the scroll & win with the boss still alive. I’ve only had a team survive that long once with such a boss though, and it was a very close call. But now that I know it’s possible… it would probably be easier if we were trying to just kite and survive, rather than trying to fight it.
Had that happen a couple times. Just yesterday with a grudge marked mino, we stayed and killed it, but almost wiped; it was just me and another player on Legend with mediocre boons.
The bomb build thing is the most egregious thing by far to me. I’d say roughly 4/5 games most of the team ends up relying almost solely on cheesing bomb potions + morgrim’s and/or lots of bomb boons to hyper buff since they stack like crazy.
I feel like it probably wasn’t the intent that Morgrim’s + Bomb potion turns players into an a grenade launcher. Especially with bubbles of 1000% cooldown and attack speed.
I don’t mind that cheap random boons are mostly going to be crappy. More specifically I’m referring to when they do nothing or penalize the player unfairly for playing a specific career with certain talents. There’s a number of talents you can’t get as boons, and on certain careers because they don’t work.
Check out Royale’s guide
There’s a section for unachievable boons and boon/talent combos. Many of the excluded ones are excluded because they don’t work on that career, break the game, or negate eachother.
Now it seems like the same logic doesn’t extend to certain talents as boons likely because they’d require additional logic as to when they can/can’t be applied; but it does still unfairly disadvantage players using those careers. I like to use Random upgrades, but with certain careers using certain talents/weapons it’s not an options simply because there’s no logic to avoid useless boons for them.
