What difficulty are you playing on? The way you describe combat as being “simple” makes me think you’re playing on champion or lower. Teamwork is essential on Legend, if it’s not you are either playing on a low difficulty or the people you are partied with are really good and more than carrying their weight.
Also none of the games you list are a fair comparison. Vermintide is a melee horde survival game, it’s closest cousin is Left 4 Dead and if you’ve ever played that you’ll immediately notice the similarities in each game. Vermintide is pretty much Left 4 Dead with swords instead of guns, you have a group of survivors (heroes) trying to survive the zombie (rat) hordes, with the occasional special enemy mixed in to increase the challenge and then the tank (rat ogre) shows up at the finale to try and stop you from escaping on the chopper (shadow gate) etc. Vermintide 1 and 2 accomplish exactly what they set out to do, trying to mix in terrain deformation from DRG or selectable attack direction from Mordhau would make it into a totally different game.
There is already plenty of nuance, each melee attack has a different pattern, level of cleave and level of damage vs different armour types. Weapons will perform the same attack pattern every time but you can use attacks of different types in combination to create new combos. For instance the halberd push attack is a downward strike that leads directly to the third light attack. Or if you do a halberd light slash, then a light stab, you can skip the first heavy attack go to the second one to perform a double-stab attack. That’s two examples for one weapon and some of them have even more hidden combos you won’t ever perform if you just spam the same attack chains over and over.
I dance through legend on V2 easier than cataclysm on V1. With a expansion close by with a new higher difficulty it might change.
However in V1 Bloodlust on a melee weapon made it so easy. Especially on say Sienna with her Bloodlust/Berserk combo available on her sword.
V2 is more fast paced and I don’t mind that. Honestly a part of me prefer it. Temp HP is strong if you know how to use it properly. Just as the options in V1. Not to mention in V1 having healing share trinket was near mandatory. Which in V2 it is not.
The closest thing to V1 Cataclysm in V2 is Legend deed with double HP/DMG elites, roamers are elites and any third roll available. Especially on harder maps like Athel Yenlui. Then you have a slower pace vs harder enemies.
Weapon traits, as they offered more freedom and indeed more choice. Traits were given as passives to careers, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve now a lot fewer viable choices, and perhaps more importantly, fewer fun alternatives when it comes to swift slaying… wait, oops - I mean weapon traits.
As you say, the music and atmosphere were much better in V1. I would include voice acting quality here too, as it is not up to the standard set by its predecessor.
Longer/shorter missions and some in between added variety
Loot delivery, issues aside(both games have issues here), watching dice roll will always be more fun than watching a bar fill up repeatedly
However its also important to say that the pacing of each game is very different, and I think a lot of disagreement comes from somewhere in that ball park. Perhaps it only feels so, but encounters in V1 always seemed more important to me(probably because it was slower like someone now mentioned in later posts), especially now when you compare the amount of enemies thrown at players. Is it a good thing we’re fighting more enemies or has each individual, even elites and specials, become less imposing because of it?
Can’t say I agree at all, not once did regrowth or bloodlust allow me to play even anywhere near as aggressively as I do now simply(and often without the need to kite!) because it isn’t anywhere near as reliable as temp health which practically constant, especially certain setups.
I cannot remember the last time a horde was announced and it brought even the slightest worry, because temp health is now en route, its in a state where it allows you to recover from mistakes within seconds compared to bloodlust/regrowth. (There certainly were mechanics that could be cheesed or used to get a similar effect, I’m not saying that - bombs + bloodlust, Sienna swapping weapons before things burned to death and more I’m sure)
Basically the current state of temporary health means hordes will make it easier to survive, despite it being meant as a difficulty multiplier to increase pressure. It is one, giant mess right now and likely one of the, if not the biggest balance related issue the game has.
In comparisons of V1 to V2, we all have to remember as well that we’ve likely all improved greatly in skill. V1 had a different kind of challenge in some ways; it demanded near-constant perfection, by heavily punishing small mistakes. V2 is more forgiving of small, isolated mistakes, but also has much higher peaks of difficulty.
V2 offers option for removing temp health with healthshare talents. So comparing these games would be more fair balance wise after playing w/o temp health.
After playing V2 for me V1 personally feels slower as if you’re under the water. Also enemies imo less reactive to your actions .
To OP I can say that there are a lot of game mechanics that are fun and viable in a context of particular game but it doesn’t mean they will work out within another game as they are.
And this is first time I see anyone complains about combat in Vermintide because combat is actually the main reason people stay and keep coming back.
You’re not wrong, but very few opt in for those healtshare talents simply because temporary health offers up so much more individual survivability, and that in the end is one of the most valuable things you bring to a team, pugs especially.
But temporary health isn’t just a problem when compared to V1 even if it isn’t fair, its a problem on its own. In part because some have access to so much of it. (see slayer dual hammers or even axes, zealot with talent, shade with sword/dagger). Bloodlust/regrowth allowed you to make up for mistakes over time(yes there was cheese), where as temporary health lets you recover within seconds, and some can just keep generating it.
I think this is a multi-layered problem at this point, in part since we have SO FEW weapon traits.
I, too, am a longtime gamer (Quake 2). As a multi-year player of Vermintide I can tell you that your judgements here are almost entirely simply mistaken. I deeply suspect your playgroup is only 20 hours or so into the game.
