Current meta and why it sucks

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
1

I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times but since you keep ignoring us, here I go.

One of the main selling points of this game was VISCERAL MELEE COMBAT, right? See the issue here is that it is virtually impossible to enjoy any kind of melee combat in vast majority of the games you join now because everyone is spamming their ranged weapons and basically playing mindless COD ripoff set in Warhammer universe. In fact, whenever I try to go melee now I’m just losing half my HP bar to friendly fire and I’m told to “not stand there if I don’t wanna get hit”… what happened to this game, seriously…

The two biggest offenders, without a doubt, are Scrounger and Sienna.
Where is the “skill” in spamming left click and fishing for that one critical hit during a horde to get all your ammo back?
Why is one crit roll the difference between being out of ammo or getting 20 ammo back and spamming some more? How is this in any way rewarding player’s skill?
As for Sienna - the careers themselves are not really the issue, her staves are. I’m fine with her magic being potent and making a difference but she should never be able to just mindlessly spam it, then tap R and vent for free (temp HP buffer) and continue spamming and trivializing all the content into a complete joke.

SUGGESTIONS:

  1. Either remove Scrounger or make it so that it only ever gives 2 ammo per proc, no more. Regardless of how many targets it pierces through. The crit alone is a huge bonus due to more power=dmg=cleave you get from it.

  2. Make it so that Scrounger doesn’t proc on melee hits with Grudgeraker and Blunderbuss.

  3. SEVERELY nerf Sienna’s ability to constantly spam her staff with no downside to it whatsoever… overusing magic is bad for you in Warhammer universe, correct?!

  • Make staff attacks generate more heat in general.
  • Make it so that manual venting hurts… A LOT.
  • And/or make manual venting drain GREEN HP only.

Both ammo in general and Sienna’s staves are way too strong and solve every single situation in the game and as such their usage should be limited, these should be a valued resource that you save for when you really need it … not something you just mindlessly spam all game long and essentially remove any reason for the rest of the group to even use their melee weapons.
Despite what people will probably claim here, Sienna’s melee weapons are perfectly viable, even for horde clearing… it’s not like she needs to spam her staff in order to be viable, at all.

The current ranged meta completely sucks all the fun out of the game for me, this is not what made me buy it in the first place. Not to mention that it promotes some absolutely disgusting playstyles and habits and it brings people who would previously struggle with Champion to Legend and they further ruin the game for anyone who is actually decent at it. It now requires absolutely no skill whatsoever to delete the entire horde solo as a ranged spammer or a Sienna (especially with beam staff) and it makes them believe that they are ready for Legend… all they do is spam their ranged weapon/staff while dodging backwards… until a handful of trash mobs or couple elites make it into melee range and then they instantly die because they don’t even know the very basics of melee combat. And of course I lose about 30 hp per minute on average due to friendly fire as well. I’m actually installing Vermintide 1 again at this point because if I wanted to play COD, I’d be playing COD and not Vermintide 2.

6 Likes
2

Yeah, I’m not sure why they moved the traits that allow you to use more ranged. In V1, scrounger for ammo and earthing for heat dump were melee weapon traits. So there was a natural shift to melee even if you had the ability to never need to touch an ammo pouch.

5 Likes
3

But hey, I don’t wanna play melee, I’m a fсkn ranged career, stop forcing me to go melee! I don’t care that ranged weapons are stronger than melee, I’ll just say “gitgut” to those idiots not playing ranged and go back to my pew-pew stuff. Ah, almost forgot, there is no ranged meta™ Kappa.

4

Tired of hearing that. I’m playing only melee career’ and have no problems with “stealing fun” ranged players. Doesn’t matter who I’m: Saltz, Keri or Bardin-slayer. I’m always in the avangard, with most kills, with the least taken damage, with most supports etc. Or, for the tests, I was playing ranged career’, and I had not only most melee kills, but ranged aswell. Only way, when ranged can “steal all the fun of melee combat” it’s if you’re hiding behinde their backs. Otherwise, you must be really bad if you’re rushing and still crying about “ranged meta”. Or, maybe, you wanna say I just didn’t met “the real range abusers”? 400 hours and I never felt that ranged players shift me anywhere. Yes, sometimes, ranged weapons a bit easyer than melee, but so? Wanna use melee - use melee. Wanna use range - use range. If I want, I’ll take melee class and have fun with it, without care about “ranged meta”, because here is none of such. And if I want, I’ll take ranged career and have fun with totally different playstyle. Another way to play became something evil?

5

This again?

6

I actually don’t see a lot of Sienna players (on xbox) I notice Kerillian tops the “circle jerk” leader boards but I wouldn’t say its a ranged meta…but that just been my experience with the game so far.

7

play legend then

8

lol all the greats , it doesnt happen , its a case of git gud , this again and play legend , thats a full house!

op its not going to happen its been too long all the people that wanted vermintide as a melee game have gone its no wonder it was down to 1.5k players before the DLC. back up to 5k eu prime time so we shall see , if were right those numbers will drop back down soon enough

2 Likes
9

Wasn’t there something about Pyro, beam staff and cooldown reduction on crit? I’m sure I am missing something here.

I almost exclusively play melee heroes now, having a blast and I am still here. Once you get used to the survivability of carreers like Handmaiden, Zealot, Merc or Slayer and their absolutely devestating melee abilities (especially now since Melee is actually meaningful and quite fun against bosses. They die to melee now as fast as they should and it is very satisfying just beating the living Sigmar out of them) and then go back to playing the “ranged” heroes and how squishy they are… I don’t know, maybe I am doing something wrong since I have alot more fun playing melee focused heroes and still capable of topping score boards (well… in any regard other than ranged kills, that is :wink: ).

1 Like
10

I do… and it’s a complete joke.
Of course we got a sample of “special Joe” players here claiming that I must be playing on lower difficulties because they are still, somehow, struggling in Legend despite having infinite ammo.

Maybe one day they will get matched with a half decent player who decides to abuse one of the many broken loadouts and they’ll see how dumb the game has become… or maybe they won’t, because hardcore players already moved on when Fatshark decided to surrender to the masses and made Legend accessible to casuals who are not capable of anything more complex than holding down W and spamming left click.

I can literally just run a Fireball/Beam Sienna with one movement speed roll and clear the entire map with next to no effort while the rest of the group fails miserably at even just keeping up in terms of movement through the lvl, let alone getting to actually fight any enemies themselves… that’s how FUN and CHALLENGING the hardest difficulty is currently.

11

Yep, pretty much this.

Vermintide used to be a game I was always so happy to come back to after getting bored of majority of other games in a day or two because, inevitably, they are all being designed to appeal to casuals and to make bad players feel better about themselves.

It’s sad to see that yet another one of the handful hardcore games we had left now surrendered to the masses and concepts such as “highest difficulty being actually difficult” are frowned upon and casuals will pull out some of the most absurd arguments to justify themselves. Getting punished for bad plays is a no go, infinite ammo is perfectly fine and makes sense to them. I wonder what all the ammo pick-ups and ammo sustain talents are for then, when every single career has infinite ammo now, must be a bug.

Back in V1 majority of the community was perfectly fine with playing on Nightmare and you only really played Cata with either a premade or with a random group that worked well on Nightmare prior to that.
Now this generation of “gamers” is entitled to playing the game on highest difficulty by default (because they are the best at everything, in their heads) and if it doesn’t work - it’s obviously the game’s fault and so the game gets dumbed down.

Sad.

1 Like
12

You simply haven’t played with anyone who actually knows what they’re doing yet.

The current state of things allows for a ridiculous degree of abusement and cheese but I reckon majority of us Vermintide veterans simply moved on or aren’t playing pub games currently because of it. So all that’s left are casual players who are either new to the franchise or simply bad at the game and so they struggle big time even while using the most broken loadouts available to them. Nothing is more telling than seeing a Beam staff Pyro die to a simple Skaven horde repeatedly…

One half decent Sienna or ranged spammer can clear the entire level before you even get close to any enemy, you might get to melee a slave rat or two that they ignored while cruising through the map.

1 Like
13

Or maybe I am just THAT good :wink:

On a more serious note, I know how to play Sienna quite well. I know that on certain maps, you can pretty much control every single horde all on your own. Same with WS with the Hagbane. But I don’t buy into that tired old idea that there’s no good players left and that’s the reason why melee heroes get a chance to shine. In my many, many hours into the game, I have never encountered most of the problems people seem to have in the described intensity. Maybe “veteran” players aren’t as veteran as they think :wink:

14

good for you . but enjoying melee shouldnt be relying on being a god like you.
i used to enjoy melee to , ground out the legend armour in pugs for all those careers and i find it frustrating and annoying to play with ranged. i find it turns it into a competition you have to race and try to beat your team not the enemy and thats not the style of gameplay im looking for in a co-op game.
and its not just about thier being nothing left to do (yes even on legend! ) its about how annoying it is to play with them , getting blinded , constant friendly fire , being shot through , having mobs you would of killed with a charged attack saved by them flinching them backwards etc etc.

15

That is definitely something I agree on, it can be annoying if people don’t know what they are doing and yes, I would also agree that you have to play melee heroes very agressively. But that’s not so much a problem of how the ranged carreers work but more a problem that comes from playing with pubs.

1 Like
16

Ranged will be balanced when I no longer see people mindlessly shot roamers because the moment that happens ammo/heat management will have been restored.
I would do the following to accomplish this:
Scrounger, Resourceful Sharpshooter and Heat Sink need to be locked to one proc per shot or removed, Kerillian’s passive ammo regen needs to be replaced, the overcharge wipes need to be replaced or lowered to 50% and venting must deal ~2x dmg to temp hp.

17

I don’t think such extreme measures are neither appropriate nor necessary. I mean, look at Shade. Shade isn’t a ranged carreer and is doing just fine because she has a very well defined role, her melee ability gets boosted tremendously by use of her active ability, which allows for both offensive and defensive use, she can use it to boost both her elite and her horde clearing and overall, she has a good kit. She does have ammo regen on backstab, which is imho a good concept and something that should definitely be looked into as a blueprint for conditional ammo regen.
The problem I’d have with “toning down ranged” is that for one, every measure that tones it down for the ranged characters inevitably does so for the non-rangers, so they are hit probably even harder. The other aspect is that the ranged carreers are so intensively build around being able to mainly use their ranged weapons that they would become a massive burden. They don’t have good kits for melee and forcing them to be as careful with their shots as non-ranged heroes, then why play them at all? You could argue that at least WS and Pyro have decent active abilites. But what about BM or BH? BH is strong because he has, in essence, infinite ammo and guaranteed crits. But the guaranteed crits are only good because you can use them so often. Take that away and you have a squisyh 100 health hero without considerable melee ability that can very occasionally shoot at elites. It would further narrow viable talent choices. Battle mage is quite similar, she doesn’t have a damaging active ability, she doesn’t have a melee kit to speak of, she is absolutely designed around spell-slinging.
I don’t like the idea of starting to completely revamp whole carreers just because ranged is allegedly that much superior to melee.
The problem, imho, is not so much that ranged carreers have ammo readily available (even though I’d agree that carreers like HS or RV are a tad bit more on the “balanced” side in that you cannot blindly spam your ranged ALL the time. You still can most of the time, but ammo management is more of a thing with these two).
a.) ranged is more accessible than melee, which kinda lies in the nature of it. Ranged is point and click interface.
b.) ranged has the distinct advantage of not being bothered with flaws in game design or execution respectively that makes melee a frustrating experience. I am talking about things like getting hit through your block, hyperstacking chaos hordes, sliding chaos warriors and maulers, bosses doing the ol’ 180° no scope on you.
c.) There are specials that are “hard counter” towards melee heroes. If you stand back while Slayer, Zealot and Merc are slaughtering through the hrode, you don’t have to worry as much about getting grabbed by a hook out of the horde or getting pounched by a hard to see runner. Melee heroes in hordes have need to pay attention to alot more, have less space to maneuvre and avoid disables out of hordes. Getting disabled in a horde is also very punishing, almost always resulting in a down or at least losing alot of your health simply because even IF the disabler gets cleared in an instant, your hero takes a long time to get up on their feet again.
d.) certain maps allow for extreme funneling of enemies where it is relatively easy for certain ranged weapons to just obliterate the conga-line that is forming.

All of these issues except a.) could be adressed without even touching anything ranged. The recent buff towards melee boss damage is an absolutely prime example that it does work. Bosses die faster now, sure (imho as fast as they should. This isn’t exactly Dark Souls, guys, bosses have two and a half different attack patterns that they spam out time and again, it isn’t exactly that engaging or fun to fight them for hours and miles), but engaging them in melee is now worth the extra risk of getting hit and being able to inflict meaningful damage on them, seeing how their health bar depletes, is super fun. You just see alot more aggressive melee play against bosses now.

And this is the way to go, as far as I am concerned. Don’t try to make melee more meaningful by making ranged less so and less accessible, make melee more meaningful by making melee more fun, engaging and accesible. Remove the hurdles and roadblocks that stand in the way of a fluent melee experience. Do something against chaos horde stacking. Tone down the sliding on all chaos mobs and especially warriors and maulers. Give “melee heroes” passive damage reduction while being pinned and overall, speed up the animations forgetting back up after being pounced or grabbed by a hook (seriously, is it necessary to have a friggin Slayer, Ironbreaker, Zealot or Knight rub their throats in agony after being grabbed like a little p***y? They are heroes, make them behave as such!). Take a look at map design and certain choke points. Do something about “knockdown immunity” during and after enemies climbing, which also hits melee heroes alot harder than ranged.

I’m not saying that fixing all this stuff is “easy”. It is probably harder than just gimping ranged. But it would be, in the long run, I am convinced, be the more sensible solution. Of course, all these things could and should already be fixed. Could have been done during a proper beta. But no sense in crying over spilled milk, we gotta look to the future.

2 Likes
18

I don’t see any problem with your points and my solution conflicting. I only want to reintroduce ammo/heat management and skill so it’s more fun and challenging.

1 Like
19

Oh, no, they are not conflicting. You could do both. But my suggestion would be: Fix what makes melee frustrating, see if problems persist. If nothing changes, then go for more intrusive and severe measures.

2 Likes
20

Melee is fine, it’s not frustrating on its own.
The main and undeniable problem here is that one busted trait allows people to literally just spam ammo left and right with absolutely no punishment for it and so people do it, of course. Ranged weapons were always strong and solved every problem, every scenario in the game and their use was limited by ammo not being infinite. That concept went out the window now due to Scrounger giving 20 ammo per crit when shooting into a crowd.

Same thing with Sienna - there used to be some degree of skill involved in staying in high OC for bonus damage for emergency situations, knowing when to vent and thinking ahead … now it’s all just spam spam spam, press R, spam some more… absolutely no punishment for bad plays, venting is for free because you get the temp HP back instantly… no skill required = no rewarding gameplay.

Not to mention that this promotes very bad plays in general and it makes melee more frustrating in more ways than just “stealing kills” (as meaningless as leaderboards are). It also often leaves you to be the only frontline. Bad players will keep making bad decisions and have bad positioning no matter how broken their loadout is and as a result you will often be the ONLY melee having to take on 70% of the horde while the other 3 dudes compete in ranged spam kills elsewhere. Unless you have a weapon specifically for that you’ll have to kite the horde and chip away instead of simply having 2-3 people melee the horde relatively safely when done properly (sufficient stagger). Another very common situation now is engaging a group of elites, then turning around and realizing everyone else ran away while spamming ranged into your back instead of actually being helpful and staggering the elites via melee.

It feels like there is no middle ground now - it’s either bad players who are bad to begin with and it’s only amplified by the ranged meta or good players who abuse the meta and essentially remove gameplay for the rest of the group. Any time I actually play with people who are decent and don’t abuse this, the game is so much smoother and miles more enjoyable.

Sadly that’s rare and apparently the only way for the highest difficulty to be actually difficult is when you get 4 people together who agree to not use certain loadouts. Where are the times when highest difficulty meant that you had to bring your best gear and do your best plays in order to beat it … the mentality now is that highest difficulty should be accessible and fun for everyone and as a result it is, inevitably, boring for hardcore players.

1 Like