A lot of people are angry about some of these nerfs, and I think rightly so, because some of them feel like they came out of the blue, and some nerfs (looking at you, FNP) don’t feel deserved at all.
A lot of this could have been avoided if the developers had simply communicated what the upcoming balance changes were going to be, as well as their reasoning for making these changes, before the update drops - so we don’t have to play with the gimped versions, and can discuss as a community what we think of them.
Overall, the lack of developer communication is extremely disappointing, and we are only relying on the rare words from CMs about what’s vaguely happening within the studio. The developers need to talk to us more, no more half-assed apologies, no more “we’re working on something”. Give us something we can use to see a hope for Darktide’s future as a better game.
This has been discussed to death already, but my irritation has only grown with these most recent balance changes.
Personally, I’d much rather the experts (the devs) take the data they have (which, whatever it may be, has to be more than what we have…and we know it includes feedback from many heavily-invested players) and make the changes they feel are appropriate to move closer to their desired design goals.
Complaints are going to happen no matter what.
I don’t think this is a matter relevant to Fatshark’s communication issues, which I do think exist and are significant.
Oh yes, all evidence does seem to suggest that Fatshark and the influencers they use for ‘player’ feedback are gorram experts at balancing.
Certainly Fatshark has never done balancing, or say, released entire new systems, that was hated by everyone and never touched or played ever again.
Not that it would matter if they did ask for feedback before releasing something. They are incapable of understanding feedback, or realizing their own vision might be flawed. Winds of Magic and Weaves says hello.
Yeah this is a perfect example of where usage data can be misleading. I wouldn’t be surprised if they saw stun had an eh pick rate and that informed the buff. If there is a low pick rate though that’s just because right side crit talents are very powerful so many will path through throwing knives, not because they prefer them to stuns, but for point efficiency and to get other talents they want.
Best case for me would be that they put planned balance changes in a beta branch at least 2 weeks (preferably more like a month) before putting them in the game and keep a beta branch of this forum open to get wider feedback on balance changes before pushing them live. They’ve done this a few times in the past for big balance passes in VT2 and to my mind they were extremely effective and lead to a much better balance state than what would have been pushed live otherwise.
One of the infuriating things about FS is having good ideas then never utilising them again.
Edit:
See my above examples of VT2 big balance betas. Also they literally did listen to feedback on WoM update and dramatically scaled down enemy health bloat post update, amongst myriad beastmen changes etc. Most of what was left (eg dodge nerfs) were pretty universally accepted as the right call in time. I really think you’re just being a hater here TBH
Yeah, with the way talent trees are, there are a lot of ‘forced’ picks.
For instance I am sure Loner is picked a lot, but no one is picking it because it’s a good aura. It’s a trash aura. No one wants to pick Loner.
It’s all data driven, and it’s obvious they don’t play their own game. Just look at how many of the new penances wants you to play classes in incredibly stupid ways.
I’m not being a hater. Weaves was dead on arrival, and never fixed. Beastmen was universally hated and incredibly buggy. Even after nerfes and bugfixes, most people don’t enjoy them.
The stagger and dodge changes were hated by almost all. It took them eons to undo and fix most of the stuff they did with WoM. This is not an opinion I am unique in having.
I was referring more to the base game changes that came with it, not the DLC content itself. Weaves themselves were also tweaked several times but the base concept wasn’t really salvageable. I’m not arguing they aren’t slow to respond but there were a heap of patches following that addressed a lot of things directly complained about, saying they never respond sensibly to player feedback is insane, I don’t know how anyone who actually played through that time period could reasonably say that. Again see the big balance betas that widely addressed complained about weapons and brought general balance state to a much better place.
I really think the issue here is the lack of facilitating timely feedback, not their inability to actually parse said feedback.
Ogryn is crazy good, probably most nerf worthy class in the game. I’m not sad they nerfed the ability to get ridiculous levels of DR. Dominate nerf was probably unwarranted but also pretty inconsequential. Ogryn changes may have been the least dubious things this whole last patch.
Buffing OfB and Stun grenades are huge head scratches. Nerfing IJ makes little to no sense when martyrdom and crit builds are both crazy.
Mwh perhaps its more to do with them being bugged now than the nerf really. Neither keystone seems to he working properly. As in, blocking still loses stacks in fp and heavy hitter stacks for some reason do not seem to stack while in coherency. Or maybe im just tired lol.
I’ve been trying right tree Ogryn since patch so can’t comment on potential bugs. If you’ve found some that haven’t been reported already please report them!
Normally, you would have been right… but honestly I’ve always suspected that Fatshark has never been that good at balancing. In 6 years of Vermintide 2, the best balance patch ever released was the one that just copied a mod made by the community
I have had no problems with getting Heavy Hitter Stacks.
How has that been going? I have a lucky bullet post I kind of want to make about my (overall negative) opinions. Especially now that the penanve tracks how many bullets you get for free you can get a meaaure of how “effective” it is.
Paradox actually does exactly this. They have a beta branch and they communicate changes ahead of time. They’ve been doing a lot to rebalance Stellaris recently because of this.
I’ve exclusively been running it with gorgonum because stubber is still the only gun with enough synergy for it to make sense. I think it’s good there but definitely still needs improvements especially to make it worth with other guns. There’s already a BLO thread floating around since the update with some ideas, so I won’t reiterate what I said there suggestions wise.
Had a thought about this: obviously I’m not privy to the data that FS collects server-side, but it seems feasible to me that this decision could have been made because zealots are picking stuns but aren’t using them. That would sync up with my anecdotal evidence (rarely feel I see zealots use blitzes), and would make sense to me!
I fully agree. On the bright side, I think the next major balance patch will be very interesting and maybe in a very good way this time. If they are tracking data about builds in the background then the penance farming will open their eyes a bit as to what sucks and what does not on a massive scale.
I agree that they should just beta branch most of their balance changes but seemingly they have given up on that idea. Or for some reason just don’t have the resources/time to do it.
At any rate whatever their closed testing is doing its not enough or the feedback like in v2s case(sister ptsd in full force) is not taken seriously enough.
I doubt any of the community testers really advocated for stun grenade buffs but who knows.
