@Devs: Our playgroup is really disappointed with the lack of synergies / teamplay and the shallow combat mechanics

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
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Hi all. My friends and I come from decades of co-op gaming (From DOOM 2 to present day) and I wanted to share our dissapointment and suggestions for Vermintide 2. We currently play amazing team-play focused games such as Planetside 2, Deep Rock Galactic, Satisfactory, Apex Legends, and DOTA.
TLDR at bottom.

  1. Teamplay

The biggest issue for us is the lack of synergies and other team-oriented elements that Vermintide should have. Currently most of the play is just you killing enemies and very little consideration for supporting eachother and special synergies that help two classes work together better. Deep Rock Galactic is a great example of how each class brings strong teamplay elements to the game. Half of your equipment is for helping eachother in that game. Planetside 2 also has very strong support / teamplay elements that are essential to success. About 2/3 of the classes and 1/3 of the vehicles are support oriented. DOTA is also a fantastic example of team synergies and cooperation being essential for success. But Vermintide 2 seems much more about just killing enemies more effectively and positioning is more important than synergies. Please consider improving the teamplay / synergy aspects of the game.

  1. Combat mechanics

In every game, there’s a pretty simple concept: the gameplay is more rewarding when you learn the nuances of the game mechanics and use those skills to succeed. A low-skill game is a low-reward, mundane game that gets old quickly. Our group all agree that Vermintide 2, being primarily about melee combat, needs more nuance to the combat mechanics. The current mechanics are quite simple and don’t require much thought or skill to be effective. Take Mount and Blade, a game that’s been out since 2008. That game has parrying, directional strikes, counters, etc. Many other melee-focused games have fatigue systems for running, blocking, and weapon use that add depth to combat pacing. Currently in VT2, it’s mostly just swing until they are all dead, rinse, repeat. [removed comment on melee physics] The obvious top of the line example of in depth melee combat is Kindom Come Deliverance, which I would not suggest to emulate in full. But VT2 needs MORE DEPTH to its melee combat, because learning the nuances to your class is what makes playing that class rewarding.

And we MUST say something about the silly ranged weapons. A witch hunter that can rapid fire 12 flintlock pistol shots guns akimbo? Bows that shoot instantly and THEN you draw the bow back? It’s far too arcade-like and takes away the rewarding experience of pulling back an arrow while lining up a shot; making every flintlock shot count due to long reloads, etc. The simple fix is to make them more realistic but tweak damage values and other aspects to keep them relevant. Perhaps even worse is that EVERY class gets a ranged weapon, and nearly every ranged weapon is very accurate, which severely hurts the concept of class differences. When everyone can shoot enemies at a distance, it diminishes the value of classes that specialize in ranged combat. In our opinion, only classes that specialize in ranged combat should have ranged weapons, while consumables like bombs can be available to all (but even then, bombs really should be restricted to certain classes like the witch hunter, but then have alternate consumables for other classes).

  1. Level design

Part of the rewarding nature of playing as a team is decisionmaking as a team which includes where to go. But VT2 has such an on-rails system, there’s none of that. While all the levels are beautiful and very fitting for WH, the design of the levels is far too strict and narrow in our opinion. It’s pretty clear that the reason why you can’t jump higher than your own kneecaps is to prevent players from treating the areas more like a sandbox. So many sections are ridiculously constrained while visually seeming open and that’s more of a fault on game design choices than to improve the play experience. Consider Deeprock Galactic, which is very sandbox, where you are free to put yourself in a really bad situation and suffer the consequences. This game would benefit greatly from allowing your team more freedom to make tactical positioning decisions by opening up the environments more.

  1. Waves and enemies

Our cheif complaint with the wave mechanics is that every enemy is acting with complete disregard for the situation. Enemies won’t regroup, fall back, flank; they don’t show any evidence of AI whatsoever. They all just follow a pre-programmed agenda of approach players and engage players, even when they are alone with no hope of survival or even causing much harm.

We also noticed that the enemy spawning mechanics are very simple and not well designed. Waves come primarily by passing waypoints or aggro prompting, which is generally fine. But the specials are on some sort of timer and just show up from time to time regardless of what is happening. Sometimes the timing is good and they support the wave. Other times they are just on their own and die pointlessly. And this segways into straggler killers…

It’s pretty obvious that several of the enemies in this game exist solely to punish and kill stragglers. While this is a good concept to have in the game, to me this is more the developers going cheap and even further controlling where your team goes and limiting your freedom. Characters like the life leach are SOOO useless in the presence of more than one player, and most straggler-killers act so quickly you can’t stop them even if you are aware. Stragglers / solo-players are always at a disadvantage, so the over-the-top tactics of straggler killers are unnecessary and silly. Basically all of them completely abandon their interest in living to catch a single player and then be killed shortly after with no escape plan. It’s an obvious mechanic and silly. The Packmaster is an excellent special because they tend to appear with support, try to remove the player from combat, and generally work with the group of enemies to enhance their effectiveness.

TLDR:

  • VT2 is weak on synergies and teamplay support elements and needs much work here.
  • Melee combat needs more depth to add more skill and make combat more rewarding.
  • Make the ranged weapons more class restricted and less silly.
  • Open up the levels for movement more, allowing for more tactical positioning decisions. On-rails = bad.
  • Give the enemies some tactical AI for Sigmar’s sake!

Thanks for reading! Please share your thoughts on how to make a better Vermintide.

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While I can understand all of your statement, sadly this couldn’t go into the game, mainly cause it would makes it totally unplayable for anyone who isn’t part of a party of four coordinated players.

The gap between players that communicate and random groups is huge, and even more if the said players know eachother and have played together before.
Anyway
-I do aggree that Vermintide should offer more teamplay synergies between careers, but it can’t rely entirely on that. A really good player should still be able to simply “kill every ennemies” and save his team, and not depends on his supportive mate that can sometime being terrible at the game, or even worse, being a bot (like a game AI, not somekind of exploiting or something else).

-You’re actually the first person I see complaining about the feels of the melee combat. Not saying you’re wrong, but I’ve seen so much VT veteran, including myself, finding the melee combat satisfying that I just assumed it was satisfying.
About the depth of the melee combat, I feel like adding too much would hurt the game… We already have sort of directionnal attack with the attack pattern (I know it’s not really depth, but it still something you gotta learn if you want to avoid taking damage by playing aggressively). Fatigue is replaced with the simple stamina for blocking, which can be used to push, and deplete more when external blocking. Parry is a trait, so even if it doesn’t have a cool effect or anything else, it’s still in the game as a sub mechanic.

-Nerfing reload speed and increasing damage of ranged would basically turn every of them into a boss killing weapon, and the teammate with the fasted ranged weapon will be designated to kill the specials. Right now, every weapon can have it’s own place, with elven shortbow being extermely good at thining hords, same for flawethrower, etc…
And, while I don’t have strong arguments on that, one melee and one ranged weapon, plus a heal, pot and bomb slot has been the heart mechanic of VT since the beginning, really don’t want it to be changed as it works perfectly fine imo (yeah told ya I don’t have any arguments on that).

-While I’d like to have deeper level design, it’s already hard to get all people to go through the same path in some maps, I’ve had countless mates running alone thinking they can solo this, ending up being grapped or pounced in a minute… So yeah, deeper level design would works out fine for good groups, and would be terrible for randoms. Tho we still have a small feel of positionning, where people will tend to prefer fight bosses on an open space, wait for hordes in a narrow space, avoid being surrounded by too many walls in case of globadier, and avoid at all cost fighting in stairs.

-Improving AI would be a good idea overall. Except I don’t think making solo/small groups of ennemy run away to regroup be healthy, considering the amount of wandering mobs. They’d just all flee when you approach, basically giving you a free space to walk through, until a hord comes and then they would come out. Would turn the game into “walk through the level while fighting waves of hordes, with sometimes specials and bosses”.
And I like specials trying to go in while we’re not fighting anything, cause it prevent player from going to “Fight mode” into “walk mode”. You gotta be careful at anytime.

If I can ask as you didn’t precised, how much did you played the game, and at what level were y’all playing ?

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Vermintide 2 has little in common with most of the games you listed. If you’re going to compare this game to anything, use a co-op game, like Left 4 Dead, Payday 2, killing floor 2 etc.

Also in regards to your points.

  1. Pubs would be unplayable if you had to solely relie on others for combat effectiveness. Would be nice if there was more support oriented roles though, like how merc is the medic and RV is the ammo guy.

  2. Combat is good and satisfying, it’s easy to learn and hard to master, it’s probably one of the best FPS melee systems made. Realistic ranged weapons would be barely useable, who tf wants to play a 20 second animation to reload their musket. The answer: Nobody.

  3. Level design is of a linear nature, like many other games of this nature. The levels themselves are well designed for the most part.

  4. I think the enemies are varied enough to keep the gameplay interesting and the addition of the beastman will vary this up even more. Regarding the simple ai, i think the game would run like a slideshow if fodder enemies fought with actual tactics.

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If you play below champion you mostly will not recognize how important teamplay is in this game.
If you go up to legend you will understand the mechanical necessities you had to learn to really win within this game. [Or just play a horde deed on legend + more special spawn]. Everyone has to be a killing machine otherwise enemy amounts will overwhelm you. Thus you dont need tactical thinking AI.

Fatigue system is there with the Dodge and Block mechanic which you probably havnt recognized, yet. Melee skill can be something like hellebard push-attack with a time left click to skip certain animations in the attacks to double hit stormvermins in the head and kill them with only two hits…

As stated by others level design is functional for this game. If you play the pit for the first time you will get lost in the city, which on higher levels will get you killed, because the faster you are the fewer enemies you will get. One thing which actually a lot of players do not know but you can understand if you watched Fatsharks streams about their level design, is that these maps take a tremendous amount of work for them.

Waves mostly do not come at present points but are on timer, which will get way shorter in higher difficulties.

There is so much to tell you, but lastly this game is not balanced for recruit or veteran.

Have fun

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I generally suggest to you to play V1 then you will see that many of the systems in V2 are shells of what they used to be. V1 was more basic but the mechanics worked much better together, the game had a real survival feel and hence great use of team work. Every fodder was dangerous and every mistake was punished on every difficulty.
Lot’s of things V2 added just simply cheat the original design and don’t really work, with temp hp as the prime offender. Another thing is that all weapons are so versatile even with almost every attack and the cleave values are about 5 times what they used to be… I could go on and on about subtile differences that where not handled well.

I completely agree on giving some more ai dough. At least elites should have some attack plan on higher difficulties and ambients could mobb up once they spot you. Retreating would really fit the skaven and could work if it isn’t too common or it they still where like their V1 counterparts where letting rats group up could mean a wipe since a horde of V2 size with V1 strength would be quite the challenge.

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I was just talking to my wife the other day about how this game has kind of ruined other games for us.

Going back and playing borderlands or another fps feels wrong & unrewarding without the responsiveness of the melee & dodge systems.

You can make synergies in your group by selecting different classes that compliment each other and fill team needs (horde clear, special snipe, etc). It’s not DOTA, but it’s also not a moba or setup that way.

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I appreciate your views, but I’m surprised to see this comment. Compared to many melee focused FPS games, Vermintide is at a 3/10 when it comes to combat realism / depth. The 10/10 is Kingdom Come Deliverance. I think you just haven’t played many other of the better games with a good melee system.

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Since I haven’t played Kingdom Come, how many enemies do you have to fight at the same time?
Does it have distinction between them like the range in V2 from slaverat up to bosses, and the amount of elites/armor you get in V2?

While I understand the argument about deeper close combat, would you have time to perform them in V2, where you can have up to dozens of enemies at the same time? Especially when the sh*t hits the fan and you have the whole range to fight because the boss horde pulls in the ambient armor? Or when you do a HBFS+Vanguard deed where everything is armor and one-hits you?

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Simply put, Vermintide is FPS hack and slash with some depth regarding tactics. It is fast paced, most times chaotic with “kill as much as you can” philosophy.
Combat system isn’t realistic, but it is beautifully organic.
The hard truth is that, if you are skilled enough, you can solo every map on legend. That fact alone tells you that no matter how sneaky those gutter runners are, they can’t catch you if you have 100% focus and good enough skills.
As @Palesz said, since we are fighting hundreds of enemies, there’s no time for more finer mechanics. It’s all a dance of dodge, dash, block and slash.

What I personally would like to see is more heavier focus on archetypes, specifically tanks:

Given that VT is an asymetric PvE, there is some balance between the careers, but that’s far from a complete balance. Here we have a game focused towards killing (as @SrRaulCL said, similar to Diablo) that has some tank archetypes but you don’t actually need a tank. You can have a full group of glass cannons and, if played correctly, you will do good and even better than a typical “Tank+DPS” group.
IMO, it is more fun when you a have Kruber who is knocking down chaos warriors, or Bardin pulling the whole patrol and weathering the storm for the group. But again, if you are good, you can do everything w/o tanks.

TLDR: This game doesn’t need tanks/healers per se, and the question is what’s gonna happen with the archetypes and how important role will they have in the future.

The concept of this game is designed around killing as much enemies as possible in order to progress through the level and to heal yourself. There is no real tanking as we are used to that expression from MMORPGs. Sure, from time to time we do “tank” a patrol or a boss, but even that can be “tanked” with dodges and actives.
The way I see it, there’s nothing FS could do to make tanking more important/fun without changing the core of the game completely. But the question is, do we want that from Vermintide?
I personally would like to have deeper and more important archetypes, that would make this game and tank classes more interesting and more fun.

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Well you’d be wrong. I own KC:D and i’ve played it for a good 70 or so hours. That games melee system excels at singular combat aka dueling, but the targeting system can become a bit of a mess once 3 or more enemies are engaging you. I do think KC:D has a superior combat system to alot of other open-world games, like Skyrim for example. Not sure how KC:D combat system is comparable to VT2 though. One is of the hack n slash genre, while the other is more like a medieval combat simulator.

For those who’ve never played KC:D, the combat plays like a more realistic/complex version of For Honors combat, except it’s in first person.

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I always mention Diablo. Currently with Winds Of Magic a system similar to the rift of Diablo 3 is going to be added, it´s great, because it´s the best that could be added to Diablo 3.

But I always say it, the best Diablo is Diablo 2! I explain:

  • Maps: these change randomly, this makes each new run feel like a challenge. Some maps of V2 already have alternative routes, it could be a start.
  • Enemies: each new level of difficulty is a big jump, this makes you find good equipment to jump to the next (farming).
  • Weapons / armor: huge variety, with a system of runes that allows you to create powerful weapons and armor if you can find them.
  • Talent bars: simple, complete and with synergies within their own passive and active skills. Just perfect.
  • Multiplayer Host: when a host creates a game it doesn´t end until “X” time, even if all the players leave. Currently one of the biggest problems of V2, which was already solved 20 years ago.
  • Sellers: in Diablo 2 we can buy and sell objects that we don´t want. Why not add to V2 a couple of sellers (objects and cosmetics) and change our powders and scrap? They could be survivors that we find hidden during the adventure.
  • Final Challenges: the bosses in Diablo 2 can drop elements to create portals to very difficult challenges but with great rewards. Imagine defeating the V2 bosses in legend and they drop an item to fight against a great demon of Nurgle, it would be amazing!

I repeat it again, Fatshark, the key is combine the best of the new (V2) with the best of the old (Diablo 2)

Finally say the usual, adding a couple of new heroes would give variety to the teams. Diablo 2 also did this with his Lord Of Destruction expansion.

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I wouldn’t mind a shop being added. I know we’re getting a cosmetic shop at some point. Why not give us the option to sell items as well. Give us gold or something for completing missions which we can use to buy stuff. That way us long time players can sell our reds instead of just melting them down. I mean, I already have enough red dust for the next 4 expansions of weapons, lol.

But then the problem would be, what could we players who have all reds spend our money on? Give us deeds we can buy, or 2x exp cards for “moar lvls”. Things of that nature.

I would love a more MMO feel to the game. Even a lobby where we can meet people and form parties to go do deeds and the sort

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You set yourself up for disappointment if you expected uber realism in a game where you fight 10, 20, 30, probably even more?; times the amount of enemies in the other games you mention. That’s not on the game, it offers a different experience. I also think a few things have been overlooked, though a lot of mechanics are barely if at all explained, which certainly is a problem.

It also gets subjective. For instance, the combat in Kingdom Come, or even Mordhau say, I didn’t enjoy at all. Pretty much the reverse. :^)

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I think there are some weapons that have a more varied and “skillful” method to them. I personally really like the way Kruber Sword and Shield has quite a varied offering of options to stagger/defend/push-stab and other combinations of block cancels to be able to allow a player to really develop a deeper understanding of the Sword and Board. S&S needs to be more hard-hitting (Bring back killing blow) but when you watch someone who understands S&S they are definitely more skillful than say, Slayer.

While some of the OP examples aren’t really a good fit to compare with VT2, within VT2 there are definitely weapons choices that are much more skillful to use than others. I played with a Handmaiden using 2h sword who seemed to really understand the weapon properly, held her own and contributed and demonstrated more “skill” as far as I’m concerned than a DD shade. Green circles? No. Wholehearted respect? Absolutely.

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What difficulty are you playing? Legend is a huge leap up from Champion, even, and arguably where the game starts to become really interesting. Maybe you are on Legend already and just have no problem, but if that’s the case, then Deathwish-Onslaught mods challenge even the toughest players. The game has gotten easier, though, not gonna lie, since they did an update on dodge timings that were meant to help players with bad connections. It did help that, and was important, making the game feel more consistent (in the sense of “I thought I dodged that”), but also easier. Fortunately, they are tweaking a lot of the minor things in the game in the upcoming expansion, along with adding a new difficulty (we don’t know how it will work yet).

Personally, for me, an FPS with a good melee system has always been my holy grail, and Vermintide is the only game that delivers. My rating for it is 10/10 and nothing else I’ve ever played breaks even a 5 - while many other games try to create extremely complex combat systems, they wind up making them feel incredibly bad in the process, with excessively slowed-down movement to let you react that completely removes the feel of actual sparring. These systems are also often “all or nothing” because you can’t really play at all until you learn them decently. I remember first picking up Chivalry, and just getting my face punched in for hours . . . Sure, you can say the people who put in a lot more time before me earned it, but not being able to even effectively use your weapon without hours and hours and play and practice is simply not fun for most people. On top of that, the game STILL felt clunky and floaty, even if the attack system was complex.

VT2 actually makes melee combat fun and fast, it never feels clunky or like I’m swinging something in slow-motion. There is a heft given to weapons due to minute increases and decreases in speed, that make you feel like you are swinging a weapon. From the beginning, you can figure out how to play, and you up your game naturally as you get into higher difficulties, but there is a good amount of depth, since where you hit matters, who you focus matters, the weapons’ patterns matter (and they’re distinct to give different real playstyles), and you really can’t just spam the left-button and win on higher difficulties. While it’s not realistic in how the weapons work, it keeps in the ideas of proper combat, like positioning, and frequently punishes you for neglecting that. Rather than just standing there blocking blows like in most static, floaty, slow melee games, it is dynamic and you should be dodging, like in an actual fight. Frankly, IMO, it is the holy grail of gaming of “easy to pick up but hard to master”, and also, I feel, keeps true to the feel of how actual melee combat works, with the notable exception that there’s no grappling (which would be cool, but honestly not sure how that would work in a game context, at least with m+k). I suppose pushing is meant to be kind of like that, since you use it to put your enemies into a disadvantaged position.

It’s very easy to get fully surrounded and killed, because it’s a game about fighting hordes of monsterish enemies, not duels. The hitboxes on weapons are really tight, which means you can precisely aim for heads and weak points, which does bring more skill into the equation, and each weapon’s attack pattern can manipulated to create combos; as an example, with Kruber’s Sword, you can use two charged attacks, followed by a light will do heavy AP slashes followed by the Armor-piercing overhead for when you are fighting heavily-armored enemies.

The way armored enemies are dealt with is way better than most games, where armor just acts as extra health or a damage reduction; hitting sparks on armor means you are doing literally zero damage, and you must aim more carefully for a weak spot, or using stronger attacks to hurt them through the armor. No individual enemy is a duellist, but they’re not meant to be; the threat in the game comes from numbers of different types of enemy, and their combinations of abilities.

The game is made in the design of Left 4 Dead, and many of the things you list as cons are intentionally and well-liked designs specific to this genre. Sorry if it’s not for you, but it’s really appealing to a lot of us. Really not trying to just shut you down here, just give you some perspective on what the game is meant to appeal to, and the viewpoints of those who enjoy it.

The behaviour of enemies being rather suicidal is mostly intentional from a gameplay standpoint, and built around the in-universe ideas of how the Skaven and Chaos fanatics work - they’re not smart, they’re thrown into the blender to wear enemies down (in the former case) and want to prove their worth to their god (in the latter). Skaven literally go into a kind of death frenzy when severely threatened (like rats) and become hyper-aggressive, and for Chaos it’d be more about not dishonoring themselves to Papa Nurgle. There could be a variation in this realistically, but it’s all very thematic to the setting, and works for gameplay.

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Not true at all. I used to think like that and because of it the last few days I went back to VT1 and did cata runs with pubs and bots because i thought VT2 didn’t deliver this.
I think I and many others who argument like this are wearing rose tinted glasses here.
Regrowth and bloodlust are FAR more trivializing to the difficulty of the game than temp hp ever was. 10% chance on EVERY light hit to get 5 green (!) health or 10% chance for 10 health for every kill is insanely strong compared to the temp hp system. There were some runs where i didn’t have to use any heals because regrowth just gave me back all my health
But there is an even stronger trait. Killing blow gives you a 15% chance on hit to instantly kill man sized enemies. With the hordes being a quarter of the size we get in VT2 this is ridiculous.
Stormvermin don’t have a running attack which makes it ridiculously easy to deal with them albeit they have more health.
The rat ogre compared to vt2 is a joke, especially when using a strength pot any character can solo him with ranged weapons within the duration of the pot.
And don’t me started on some of the trinkets.
Rack of masterbrew vials can spread the effect of a strength pot to the ENTIRE party. making any boss or stormvermin patrol a complete joke
Pouch of relaxin herbs reduces damage taken from globadiers by 60%. A globadier hitting you with bombs during a wave used to be one of the top reasons for wipes. With this you can comfortably get out of the cloud with minimum damage
Assassin’s skull reduces damage from gutter runners by 80%. If you get pounced from behind while your teammates are frontlining a wave you can literally comfortably wait for them to finish up the wave and get you afterwards and still have enough health left to take some extra hits.
gunnery school guide increases bomb radius by 40% and disables friendly fire so you have an extra panic button in case a wave gets too tough.
Healing charm heals all your allies for 20% when healing yourself and clears any wounds.
If we had this in VT2 everybody would be up in arms screaming OP plz nerf. How you can praise this and say VT2 is a shell of it?
Also you are really exacerbating when you say that every mistake gets punished on every difficulty. On hard difficulty upwards you may be right, but on easy and normal you don’t even have to dodge, you can wade right through.

The thing is that hordes are 5 times smaller in VT1 and you have one wave per time not multiple waves from the front and behind like we do now on higher difficulties. With the combat being much more fluent now the hordes would be unmanageable with VT1 cleave values.

I was on team “VT1 did it better” for a long time. But I was wrong and we really have to take off the Nostalgia glasses. The only thing VT1 actually did better was creating an immersive and gloomy atmosphere with the design of the inn and the levels together with the music that sadly far surpasses anything vt 2 has

And how would that combat system translate to Vermintide? In Kingdom come you usually fight 1-4 people if it’s not a battle but even there you have a lot of people fighting beside you so it evens out. How are you going fight 50+ skaven at a time with that combat system? In mount and blade and kingdom come you are pretty much dead if you have to fight more than 5 enemies at the same time. But 10 times that amount is the bread and butter of vermintide. How are we supposed to duel every skavenrat?

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Generally V1 isn’t superior to V2, I like both but I was responding to OPs mechanic question specifically and in that case it is important to remember where the mechanics came from.

But first:

That’s a strawman.
Systems of a game can be shells of their former selves without the current game being bad and the old one superior.
I wouldn’t be here If I didn’t like Vermintide. To understate it in short.

Temp hp vs regroth:
Sry but you couldn’t be much more wrong here. Ok V1 gave you real hp sure but only 10% chance for 10hp (10% of total hp) on kill or 5%,12% (fast, slow weapon) for 5hp on hit. Combined with low cleave and fewer but stonger enemies meant that you usually did not recover much health.
Temp hp on the other hand gives you 2 hp for every headshot/crit, up to 5 per swing, 1+ per enemy staggered or the kills thing but that’s uncommon.
These are not only reliable but guaranteed and enable you to completely live off of them or even deliberately engage in hit trading. All this while you can cleave like crazy, enemies have almost no health and are also much easlier staggered.
This alone does great damage to the apocalyptic survival that V1 was and V2 still should be.

V1 equipment:
This basically transitioned into careers, talents and traits and is about as balanced as ever.
Note: I did not claim V1 to be in perfect balance nor did I claim that silly setups were impossible.

But back to the OP:
As you can see above the game systems were designed for completely different engagements. You seem to like dueling and with less but far more dangerous enemies the game felt a lot less like a horde hack and slash except for the hordes in between that actually could frighten you, not because you would die necessarily but because health lost was not that easily recovered.

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How is it a strawman if you say that legend is a joke compared to cata. In my undestanding this implies that you view cata difficulty as more of a challenge than legend. Since you emphasize the survival feel of vt1 the conclusion lies near that you see cata as superior to legend, therefore you are praising it. You can praise something and still be critical of it as you yourself said. It’s not a strawman, i just took you at your word.

I played Vt1 on cata the last few weeks and hits that take a third of your health can be recovered with regrowth in a few minutes exactly because the enemies are spongier than in vt 2.
I think maybe you underestimate how often it actually procs.
As i said there were runs were i didn’t have to use health kits and i wouldn’t consider myself one of the top players.
That being said, you are right that temp hp enables you to be more carefree in regards to health management. But legend increases the difficulty of the game in many other aspects where cata fails.

it is far more balanced than it was in vt1 imo.
There is no talent or trait that can straight up negate most of the damage from certain specials and thereby trivialize their entire threat.
There is no talent or trait that spreads the effects of a pot to the entire party
No talent that disables friendly fire on bombs.
VT2 traits and talents are in a far better place than they were in VT1, it wasn’t just a transition.

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Am I putting Cata above legend? Yes absolutely!
Am I putting V1 over 2V AS A WHOLE? no.

What do I have to add except that you proved you don’t get it.
V1 mins to recover health in combat =/= V2 mere seconds to recover full health.

I can agree here to some extent.
The careers are a great thing but they aren’t necessarily less broken than V1 things if you look at Zealot and Shade for example.
Those things you mentioned before were carefully overlooked as nonsense (by me) for example: Dmg mitigating stuff exists and is objectively garbage in V2 while the 60% dmg gas reduction in V1 is great but you need to consider that it actually is one of the weaker trinkets equitable, I mean unlimited dodges anyone? :wink:

Were Off-Topic
I will not respond

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This is not only rather condescending, but again heavily exacerbated.
I am not arguing that temp hp is a good thing. All i am trying to tell you is that vt2 puts less emphasis on health management than vt1 but increases difficulty in other aspects. You can see that as a bad thing and i respect that.
But you go on to say that vt1 was an apocalyptic survival game while vt2 isn’t, but should be.
I’m just pointing out, that while health management and it’s mechanics certainly factor in, they don’t make or break an the experience of an “apocalyptic survival game” imo. Many other aspects are to be considered. Some of which I named that Vt2 is doing far better, but you chose to ignore or diminish.
Maybe de-ideologize yourself first instead of talking down on people who have a different opinion.