I wrote a post not long ago about a frustrating mechanic with the crossbow in which taking the slightest bit of damage will widen your cross-hair to half-way across the screen and completely throw your aim off. I now have video evidence to show just how awful it truly is, and to perhaps help get the ball rolling with changing this.
Exhibit A: Just look at this and tell me you wouldn’t be frustrated too. Look how long I stand there aiming, waiting for the damned crosshairs to return to normal. All of that from like 2 damage of friendly fire, which happens all game and is otherwise mostly irrelevant and worth the trade-off for control.
Exhibit B: I just want to shoot the crossbow and have my aim rewarded or punished based on skill, not this. Lined up the shot, got hit once by who-the-hell-cares-what, and my aim literally goes across the screen and makes the weapon unusable.
Exhibit C: This is perhaps the most egregious example, as it appears to have resulted in the death of my teammate as well as my endless frustration. I observed the threat at hand, I responded as quickly as one could reasonably be expected to, I jumped as to avoid hitting my teammates, I lined up the shot perfectly as to at least stun the target (if not outright kill)… and then I was struck by one bullet, and all of that was for nothing… and also Sienna gets hit by the stray bolt and dies (from what I can determine).
I love weapons like Crossbow and Longbow which reward a skillful shot (1-shot-head-shot to most specials and elites), but I can’t even express how dismayed I am by this particular mechanic. This applies to Longbow as well, although to a (anecdotally) lesser extent. Again, I just want to shoot my bow and have it go where I aim. This mechanic is totally unnecessary and only works to detract from my experience of Vermintide (which I love ).
Having aim gimped for 3 seconds because of incidental FF will always be the primary cause of heart disease and spousal abuse. Been wanting that to get way the heck toned down for ages.
FF is annoying yes. I think I’ve recently mentioned this in some other thread around here too, but trying to shoot a freaking machinegun operator with a crossbow standing in the open is not something commendable.
My point is that this is a poor and highly frustrating mechanic intended to balance ranged weapons which isn’t necessary as they are already balanced on skill.
Your aim getting shot (hah) when you take damage is something that’s annoying, but very much part of the game, and it does make sense. I do agree, though, that its amount, recovery time, or both are likely overdone. I wouldn’t want it removed (for a couple of reasons), but the whole thing could certainly be toned down. A smaller effect (that is, aim not going as wide when hit as it does now) would allow countershots more easily, especially against Flamers and close-up Gunners; faster recovery would just give any single hit less effect and would mostly affect far-away Gunners. Of course, both would also reduce the annoyance of Friendly Fire. I think the effect could also be staggered so that a single, light hit (like from a Gunner’s bullet or a single tick from a Flamer, or one instance of FF) wouldn’t do much but heavier or multiple hits would cause a larger effect (maybe up to the current). That’d reduce the effect of single hits enough to allow sniping (very) far-away Gunners even from the middle of their line of fire, and reward quick reactions closer up, but wouldn’t make it sensible to stay in the LoF to keep aiming and trying to get a lucky shot (and would also help mitigate incidental FF hits).
I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. My point is that there should be no factor other than skill that determines the efficacy of these weapons, and that this mechanic feels absolutely awful and only detracts from the experience using them without a meaningful purpose.
Did you look at the first link? Do you really want to try and bring logic into this when I clearly had the crossbow aimed directly at the flame rat for eons and still missed. Where’s the logic? Why did the bolt fly off to the side instead of logically going exactly where I pointed it to go? It’s a crossbow, and I was a heavily armored Dwarf who took 2 damage 4 seconds prior to shooting.
I genuinely do not understand how you can look at this and argue for it and not against it.
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if it was at least changed to only be a momentary thing. Like, instead of it lasting 5 miserable seconds, only last a third of a second, just a quick flash of aim being thrown off after being hit instead of this lethargic mess. Maybe even balance it depending on the amount of damage you take. Having my aim ruined by little splashes of flame or hagbane doing 1 or 2 damage is infuriating.
You could scale it proportionally to the amount of damage you took.
This way hagsbane and some fire ticks won’t ruin your shots too much, but direct shots from other sources will.
I’m not sure how much damage gunners/flamers do. There’s also fire barrels and troll bile. I’d only guess that if these sources hit at least twice your aim will become extremely bad.
Agreed. And yes, if any DOT hits you, you just can’t aim for it’s duration and a while after it ends… even if you didn’t have the crossbow out. So you can literally take damage, forget about it (because you’re a tank, who cares about a few points of damage), and 5 seconds later pull out your crossbow to shoot an assassin or whatever only to realize it’s unusable. Feels terrible.
I’m arguing that not getting shot while aiming is a skill as well. Positioning, anticipation, proper choice of cover are all skills that serve their points.
Was aimed at the other guy, no idea why the reply wasn’t showing. I was just curious why his argument was basically “realism”, when we are fighting ratmen and using magic.
I agree with you though, i’ve always hated the concept of having your aim disrupted in general, because it simply adds another element of rng.
And to the poster above, no amount of “skill” can prevent you from receiving damage from certain ranged sources, only lessen the chance of it happening. In other words, there’s always the chance of you missing your shot because of something completely out of your control. There’s always a line with these things of course, if suppressive fire is supposed to prevent you or someone else from making easy shots at range, then that’s fine. You getting tapped in the back by something you cannot really play around, having your weapon practically disabled for years, is poor game design.
The re-aim duration is simply way overtuned both in time and effect, as well as being applied by allies.
Oh no, not basically. Any game is a set of simplified concepts taken from reality. Also there are degrees of fictionalisation - it is easy to imagine alien races, wormholes in space-time, chaos gods or ratmen and be content with those things because they are big complex concepts that do not fit in the intuitive “gut” part of your brain. But accepting that a regular person can for example ignore sub-zero temperatures or lift enormous weight etc is harder because it goes against your down-to-earth understanding of the stuff you deal with on a daily basis. Things thrown up fall down, things set on fire burn, people who are shot are shaken, shocked, and in pain - they cannot manipulate their ranged weapons minutely. These are the things you kind of expect to be more real in a physical combat oriented game anyway.
It’s the overall balance of those things and how they seem to fit is what defines gameplay. Being annoyed or not is subjective. I was just pointing out that the rules of the game suggest that you do not try to aim while you are getting hit most definitely by design. One can get annoyed by any so-called mechanic present in the game - dodges getting shorter the more you do them and then resetting by jumping, stamina running out, being helpless after a gutter runner is pushed off of you etc. These all are rules. It’s like getting annoyed that a knight can jump over other pieces in chess.
Chess, however, is way more proven and tested than VT, and the more rules there are to tweak the greater the allure to start tweaking, so every other thread on the forums is like “what’s wrong with VT” etc. Personal vision is alright, I’m just trying to politely draw your attention to possible other ones.
Ah yes, allow me to anticipate every insignificant bit of splash damage I receive, as if that is realistic in the slightest. As if that somehow justifies making you arbitrarily miss a shot based on a ‘lack of skill’ (getting tagged by a teammate’s AOE friendly fire for 2 damage 4 seconds before you take a shot). If you experienced what happened in the first clip, you would be siding with me.
Did you watch the third clip? Are you seriously going to try and argue that that is justified? That a perfectly aimed shot with consideration to avoid friendly fire should instead hit my teammate despite it being aimed nowhere near them, all because I took ONE stray bullet? You’re going to tell me that it was my fault Sienna died in that clip?
Crossbow is certainly the worst offender of this problem. Longbows and such have a very small bloom from taking damage to where your shots are still 90% likely to land if aimed at the target. Some staves have this problem too but to a lesser extent, i.e. shoot some fireballs, vent, and have the next 2-3 fireballs be off target because of the bloom.
so should our melee weapons also deal friendly fire damage to our teammates? Because when I swing a big metal object around in real life, I expect it to impact the first thing it comes in contact with, you can’t use realism as an argument for everything experienced in games. That also wouldn’t explain why most other ranged weapons do not respond to this mechanic in the same way.
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