Elf careers shade and handmaiden low risk high reward

[Nova]

Ah nice to see someone playing shade at least somewhat regularly reply, glaive feels like trash on shade currently; and I don’t even mind as it incentivizes different weapon play styles. I’d argue it’s too weak om charged attack atm though for other classes, it can be clunky to use. Yet people are still asking for nerfs, do they read patch notes? ><

Are people expecting a dd users to have weapons that can’t even defend yourself against a horde when you’ve learned how to dodge weave? Should the shade just sheathe their weapons and only take them out for bosses and elites so the ranged meta can do the rest in a melee game? XD

I was about to quote parts of your post when I realized I was selecting the whole post.

@SmokerT69

The glaive has been nerfed a lot already lol. Even with a shade using her ult, you have to time it so the second hit of the heavy swing connects with the target for around 19-23k damage. Meanwhile, sword and dagger or daggers hit massive amounts of damage, I can’t even count it all. The glaive is in a good place right now, jack of all trades, master of none. Krubers halberd wrecks hordes just the same, if not better. spear is actually better for horde clearing but lacks heavy damage, which is the opposite of daggers. And if this whole argument is about “skill”, then why don’t we remove the beam staff from Sienna? She can just stand still and keep the entire horde at bay.

But yea, this.

I think if you were to count effective unique actions per minute between dd shade and other classes you’d notice the nuance better, but alas that’s not a thing. Sure you can do less to survive a horde while ranged and tanks mop up but guess what you’re not meant to, everyone’s meant to be able to participate in hordes. More often than not im desperately peeling stormvermin off of our ranged anyway so they don’t spend half the match on the floor, and even then in forced to dodge weave and push stuff constantly as well as look out for overheads.

Meanwhile you’re okay with ranged being able to single bodyshot or headshot kill elites from a distance when I need my ult or two swings to do it and face all the risk?

[jego]

The balance of this game is lopsided. Elf is in a special spot because while Sienna can kill and pressure things in ways that Elf can’t, she can’t do pretty much everything like Elf can.

If it’s a co-op game, why are some classes blatantly more effective all the time than others?

The balance issues can be summed up by asking one simple question “What is the downside of this character?”.

Huntsman has a weaker ult, some buggy ranged weapons, lower always-on melee potential.

WHC is squishy, his ranged is either ammo hungry or middle of the road, has a somewhat underwhelming ult on a long cooldown.

Zealot has bad burst and weak range sustain which is particularly bad against bosses.

BH has no melee or defense buffs, which seems big, but his ranged potential makes up for it as does Saltzpyre’s melee weapons.

FootKnight has low offensive output, made up for a bit by halberd and combining the ult/conc combo.

Battle Wizard has a weaker ult and lacks the sheer offensive abilities of other Wizard classes, though is by no means weak. All Sienna classes are a bit squishy and Sienna’s melee options aren’t really effective against armour. Not really much to say. She’s the other superpowered character in the game.

All Dwarf classes have a huge hitbox, high aggro, slower weapons across the board across weapon roles, and slightly shorter reach. RV has middling ult, and no damage resist excepting pounce talent. Slayer has no ranged to speak of and must do his melee with that hitbox and aggro combo. IB lacks melee utility like the rest of Dwarf, though does have high damage, and has middle of the road ranged potential due to low ammo in the case of his non-drakefire options, and middle of the road damage in the case of his drakefire options.

What’s Elf’s downsides? Constrained by ammo? Sorry, no. Bad against armour? Nope. Low survivability? Not with that mobility and all those defensive options. Shade has weaker ranged capabilities, but who cares with that melee output. Handmaiden doesn’t have damage output abilities but does have access to some hard-hitting weapons, Elf’s aim benefits, and has the best mobility in the game.

The other day I was in a match where it went sideways and the elf was the only one left standing. I watched as the player kited a full horde with elites and one CW for something like 5 minutes, slowly whittling it down and killing elites and specials as they came along (and they kept coming) with ranged and ultimate. They would have gotten out of that if not for getting tagged by a straggler creep while they tried to use a medkit.

The whole time I was thinking to myself that this likely wouldn’t be possible if it were any other class.

[Nova]

@jego

shorter reach.

@jego

IB lacks melee utility

Dwarf 2h Pick would like a word with you! My mate absolutely demolishes hordes with it while I can only imagine the grin on his face, massive range and good enough versus armour.

@jego

What’s Elf’s downsides? Constrained by ammo?

Only waystalker, and elf has always been the archer of the group.

@jego

The other day I was in a match where it went sideways and the elf was the only one left standing. I watched as the player kited a full horde with elites and one CW for something like 5 minutes, slowly whittling it down and killing elites and specials as they came along (and they kept coming) with ranged and ultimate. They would have gotten out of that if not for getting tagged by a straggler creep while

This is literally possible with any of the other classes if you don’t get disables breathing down your neck constantly. Especially on “squishy sienna” and “bad melee utility ironbreaker” it’s simply a lot of effort and gameplay knowledge/hours put into the game and mastery of finer mechanics… I’ve seen every character clutch games like that over the course of both VT games…

[SmokerT69]

@jego

The whole time I was thinking to myself that this likely wouldn’t be possible if it were any other class.

Except this just shows your lack of playtime or general lack of experience with the elf. That same scenario I’ve seen happen with multiple other characters. I’ve actually seen a Pyro kill an entire CW patrol, 6 CWs and a horde while the rest of the team died. It comes down to skill.

@jego

What’s Elf’s downsides? Constrained by ammo? Sorry, no. Bad against armour? Nope. Low survivability? Not with that mobility and all those defensive options.

The only elf not constrained by ammo is the Waystalker. You can very easily run out of ammo on both the HM and Shade. Even with the WS, you will not get ammo like the BH unless you take the lvl 25 talent and lower your overall damage output by losing out on the 30% cooldown.

The elf has to be built to take down Armour, unless your taking the daggers and going for headshots, which you still need to roll stats for. Meanwhile, BH and Kruber huntsman annihilate stormvermin with body shots and heavies with headshots. Krubers block-push swing repeat attack is way more powerful against a group of stormvermin than anything the elf could do with her “OP” glaive. Again, you seem to have a serious lack of experience with the elf and other classes in general.

[Nova]

Not to mention longbow is currently bugged against chaos warriors where handguns and kruber manbow deal massive/respectable damage.

[SmokerT69]

Not to mention, nearly every single game, the mage or BH takes the majority of the green circles. So I don’t know what all these green circle chasers are crying about. Against a semi-competent Pyro or unchained, the elf has no chance of getting most kills, most damage, etc. Against a BH, he’s going to take all the special and elite kills. Every class has a role, I really wish people understood that. The elf generally seems to be a jack of all trades, master of none. I personally built my elf around monster damage %. So I can burn down bosses. Many times I have to get 2 heavy swing combo’s on a stormvermin to kill it. Sometimes up to 4 heavy combo’s on a CW.

[Nova]

I think a lot of the behaviour comes from not (wanting to) understand that classes have different niches and that an ironbreaker isn’t expected to perform like a slayer or a bountyhunter and a slayer not like a shade and a zealot not like a footknight etc…

[Diablos84]

In Legend run you rarely face a single CW, a lot of time they are 2/3.
One shotting one of them makes Shade a good carreer.
About Boss damage I agree, it needs a sort of CAP.

Remember that Shade was uselless before 2 patch ago, now is in God Tier.
Some tweeks on boss damage will make her balanced

[jego]

The shorter range is smaller compared to the other downsides. I mentioned it for posterity.

Do you seriously believe that Dwarf’s weapons are more useful moment to moment than other classes’ equivalent weapons? They are much more risky and less general use.

If Elf is the archer of the group, why is melee still so strong?

There were disablers. The ult and ranged was taking care of that.

Honestly it’s stuff like this that probably helps the bad balance in this game along so much. I like the game, I think it’s a pretty good game, but it didn’t take me long to see that balance was lopsided between classes and between classes’ own sub-classes.

Finer mechanics? In a 2-button combat system allowed a variable framerate. Many of those finer points to the mechanics didn’t even work a month or two ago. What ones still do not? Hit registration is unreliable at best and enemies surf around at will. I have literally seen a creep hit me from just inside middle-ranged distance without even taking a step. It just moved its arm downward, and I took a hit. This is a distance of at least 5 of its body lengths. I can only guess there was some kind of massive packet loss and I didn’t see the previous one or two seconds of it running to me but I’ve learned not to trust this game’s hit registration especially when there is any deviation in y. I have seen a CW literally do a U motion in a surf. Are these the finer mechanics?

You’d swear this game was Chess, or at least Street Fighter or StarCraft the way some people talk about it.

I’m not trying to dish on FS. I think this is a good game. I think it’s a fine or even legendary indie game. Its balance, however, is bad. “Finer Mechanics” notwithstanding.

[Kitten]

@OenKrad

That’s the point of Shade as a career.

I don’t mind that. With the cooldown reduction builds she becomes far too versatile and makes big enemies trivial.

@OenKrad

We must be playing two different games. The typical map has so many chaos warriors you can’t practically kill them with your active unless you wait for it to go off cooldown. You can spec towards CDR and gain it back faster via attacking enemies, but that’s a spec.

I can use my ult on cooldown as Shade using these builds and have it back up for most of the CW as well as any other Elites. If you scroll up I’ve been speaking specifically about CDR builds.

@OenKrad

Which doesn’t mean much. When there are so many of them throughout any given game, how can you possibly try to even argue that point.

How can I argue that something is trivializing the hardest enemies in the game on the hardest difficulties in the game? How could I ever. Most careers have ways of dealing with them without one-shotting them with an ability on a short cooldown.

@OenKrad

Nothing has changed with armor penetration

SnD and DD. Soon Spear as many people have been asking for Arp buffs to that. And maybe even 2H Sword too. As weapon buffs are put out that benefit all careers, the stronger careers which already work fine are going to become stronger and more versatile.

@OenKrad

Saying that abilities let you bypass stats is a nice distraction from the truth. Everything has its place. Huntsman and Shade actives give massive damage spikes. If they needed most of the character’s gear to be aimed at boosting that alone, then the developers failed at their design. The abilities should, in general, act independently from properties. The properties should be geared towards enhancing general gameplay of melee and ranged combat, not actives.

It doesn’t feel as if they’re having as much of an impact on ultimates. You have breakpoints for light and charged attacks on different enemies, but don’t need one to one-shot a Chaos Warrior.

@OenKrad

You talk about an in-depth gearing process, but then advocate this? By doing what you suggest, that would absolutely kill any customization and “in-depth”. To make a career useful you’d have to make all of it based around what it’s currently set up to do. There would only be one or two viable options. Then you say make the cooldowns longer. Did you not see any of the points about how many elites there are in a given map? Having over 100 isn’t exactly uncommon. And then you have deeds to boot. Elites seem easy when a team is coordinated and players are efficient.

To make a career useful? Have you seen the damage it does? That’s more than useful. By making gearing towards certain roles more necessary I would be killing customization? As in customizing your loadout for certain roles?

As for cooldowns I’m talking about CDR builds. With them you get more than enough ults.

There are lots of Elites and lots of weapons and builds that can be used to deal with them. If Chaos Warriors were such a problem every group would need a Shade for them. They don’t. Others can deal with them WITHOUT one-shotting them. You can actually fight them and have some challenge. If you’re deleting almost every Elite in a second how is there any challenge?

Also:

@OenKrad

I swear there are so many of these threads where people either lie through their teeth or they don’t play the game. Still lying either way, I suppose.

@OenKrad

Before you people post this drivel, actually take a hard look at the game and thoroughly think about the design and the implications of taking certain courses of action; especially when these actions would affect all of the player base and not just you.

@OenKrad

The most amazing thing here is how many people like you or OP are busy pushing insignificant ignorant bile like this

@OenKrad

All this effort to push personal agendas rather than more critical situations.

Some very good points to finish on here.

(CDR builds)

[arknox]

Pretty sad this thread has gone this far. So when everyone was crying about the game being broken and for fatshark to stop looking at balance and fix the damn game they were clearly full of sh¥t.

Instead of calling for more nerfs based on the opinions of tryhards with edge case builds and making the game even more dead of players, maybe buff the careers you feel aren’t living up to the rest? Just a thought.

[Kitten]

I agree with careers filling roles. The implication was that because the ult needs no real build towards it for more or less damage, CDR builds make it too strong and versatile. Without the CDR Shade is exactly the career you’re describing.

Building towards CDR and missing out on other stats while still doing better than them, because of the nature of the ult, IMO, just shows the problem with it.

I’m trying to be a bit more clear about which build specifically I’m speaking about now. To avoid confusion.

@Nova
This hopefully addresses your point on sacrificing certain stats.

(CDR builds)

[Reveria]

This thread is honestly insane, people have gone through complaining about “ranged meta” to singling out classes they don’t enjoy, which usually narrows down to “elf is OP, plz nerf”. Luckily enough most of the more sensible posts in replies are voted up more than the OP non-sense, but it still bothers me that the OP decided to go through the negative route instead of mentioning what his particular class lacks (the one that he plays). Very strange, toxic thread.

[Licious-D]

Pretty much this. People have been going on for hours and miles about the evil, game destroying ranged meta and when melee carreers suddenly become really good and viable, they want that nerfed too. Like yeah, Shade should only do a little bit more damage on her active and a little bit more to bosses, but not too much. Carreers shouldn’t have any kind of profile, they should all be the same and be slightly more pronounced in one, maybe two areas. As if boss fights in this game were in any way exceptionally engaging or super fun, bosses have like 2 to 3 different attack patterns, it’s always the same dodge-dancing and ranged spamming and hoping it’s not a chaos spawn, hoping the horde doesn’t come too quickly or the boss doesn’t spawn in a place where it’s gg anyhow. Yeah, we totally need more road blocks that really stall the game’s flow, CW should take minutes to kill!

Seriously, what is it with you folks? Ranged too strong pls nerf. Melee too strong pls nerf. Weapon too strong pls nerf. When folks who pumped literally hundreds of hours into the game complaing about it not being hard enough, it’s like pro-football players campaigning for the goals to be made smaller for everyone because it’s too easy to score for them. If you spend this much time in a game and still expect it to be this super awesome challenging experience, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. This is a pure co-op PVE game, once you master everything and know the maps inside and out, what else do you expect? HM and Shade are some of the carreers any melee hero should be modeled after when it comes to versatility, viability, weapon selection and playstyle. They have clearly defined roles and still can break out of those in certain areas and can be geared towards different goals. Keri probably has the most well balanced carreer setup of all heroes atm, where you truly cannot single out one that is noticably stronger or weaker than the others (MAYBE WS is the weakest, but she is evil ranged meta so f**k her, right?).
Some weapons might need tweaking and some talents need added viability, but other than that, we need to look into carreers and weapons that are just heavily outplayed by other choices (RV, WHC, BW, any of Kruber’s carreers) before we ride the nerf train again.

[Nova]

Boss damage is already capped to a threshold since 1.0.8

[Nova]

Honestly whatever at this point, tired of you people arguing something that doesn’t seem like a problem to me, a lot of other classes need buffs and with all the armour in my games if they touched shade with the current state of the game I’d honestly be done and maybe play unchained once in a month…

@jego

Do you seriously believe that Dwarf’s weapons are more useful moment to moment than other classes’ equivalent weapons? They are much more risky and less general use.

Dwarf has two tanky classes, one of which is essentially a murdering cannonball. Arguing that the game is in a bad state and that’s why shade would be justified for a nerf is just odd, I deal with these same issues as a handmaiden/waystalker/whatever.

As dual daggers you also have to get close to that mob that, as you put it:

@jego

Hit registration is unreliable at best and enemies surf around at will. I have literally seen a creep hit me from just inside middle-ranged distance without even taking a step. It just moved its arm downward, and I took a hit. This is a distance of at least 5 of its body lengths.

And as a shade you eat 1/3 of your health if not more when something like that happens ^^; and people still complain you’re low risk…? Like what… I’m done with this thread, if you want to destroy this game go ahead, I’ll wait 6 months to come back to “vermintide: the ranged times” where everyone has unlimited ammo, mobs deal 1 damage knock you back to give you time to respond and every class has an invincibility and one shot button - because everyone gets their classes generalized to a point where it’s a bland game in which every single class can do anything. Then the only threads will be about how bland and boring the game has become and how little variety there is between characters.

[Lancellot]

U guys just turned a 4 coop fun game into a 1x1x1x1 competitive boring one.

When we have so many destructive bugs, this thread look like stupid

[Noisy]

so, I played the IB for a bit.

I absolutely destroyed everything including chaos patrol. Ran the entire map taking almost no damage.

If we were to balance shade, we have to tune everything down (like pyro) if we wantr oughly equal classes. However, we can keep in mind we don’t have to have equal classes. wizard can be better at others so others need to protect her as a team. I don’t feel either one is a superior option (unequal vs roughly equal characters). the game will still be fun and I will just adapt and play a bit differently. Maybe next patch they do the opposite, fine by me.

Maybe we don’t want shades one-shotting CW, so we single her out and nerfing her. I’m sure FS will get alot of backlash though.

Yeah shade is very very good (maybe too good on the SV headshot one shot). DD vs horde is okay, just not the best, so there is the balance.

I am currently now on the side of not doing anything to shade. She kicks ass w/e

All of us have opinons shaped by our experiences. When i play with a premade group, I think this game is way too easy and everything is too powerful . When i play with pugs, I often am surprised at how much certain classes suck but they actually don’t when i play them myself.

[Kitten]

The problem I’m trying to draw attention to is that OP careers take away the sense of co-op and instead give a sense of 3 people supporting one super versatile one, who does most of the work. Certain builds especially. To a certain extent I think this is fine, but certain careers are able to do this in a way that’s more than simply fitting a role. In a way which also takes the challenge away.

Shade is by no means the only one that does this, and far from the strongest. The thread just happens to be about her. If you opened a thread about bugs I would gladly give my opinion. I wouldn’t go in and ask why you’re drawing attention to bugs instead of class balance though.

(CDR builds)

[Lancellot]

I dont care about “who will be the strongest try harder player” in my matchs.
I just try to help and have a little bit of fun.

You should try it too