Elf weapon feedback

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
1

Hello!

So having played around on legend for a while on waystalker and a little on handmaiden i have a bit of feedback i´d like to share.

So first up, due to horde density most elf weapons are straight up nonviable or even outright terrible, the second issue would be how good they are at dealing with special melee like stormvermin and chaos warrios which cause many weapons to just not do well.

Exceptions to this are as most probably know, Spear and Glaive.

Spear works well on hordes, its first heavy can hit a lot of targets and its block is powerful, as is its push-swipe, its downfall is shields and armor though…it feels just purely terrible to use against those, no matter how you try its almost impossible to deal 2 shieldvermin on the spear.

But you retain a great deal of mobility for it which is a +.

Glaive is weaker against hordes as it can only hit like 4-5 targets on each swing, but its 2nd heavy attack can oneshot stormvermin quite easily and it hurts chaos warriors badly too which helps.

Every other weapon the elf has simply doesnt do well with hordes at all or they are much too bad with armor, which means that despite there being 7 options you can in reality only choose 2 weapons, and out of those 2, you either become able to deal with hordes/groups or armor.
’
Honorable mention for the 1 handed sword, it has swiping attacks and its charged ones are actually surprisingly good, but it falls short because it hits too few, the push/swipe is weak and the range is bad.

I urgently request buffs to just about every weapon the elf has and probably weapons for the other heroes as well that most likely suffer the same fate.

As for career options…shade doesnt even work, at all, squishy melee vs horde in which the weakest can straight up 2 shot you and they have charging attacks? Doesnt work.

Handmaiden? You´d think the dash is good vs hordes but due to the weapons issue you constantly get screwed over in melee because of how many enemies there are of all types, you can clear all lesser ones and have 5 armored targets left…unless you play like a damn pro 1 of them will hit you and instantly down you…and thats ignoring all the specials like packmaster or leech,…,…those tend to kill my handmaiden the most.

If you bring a weapon to deal with armor you cant handle the many lesser enemies.

Waystalker thus ends up being the best by far, and i actually have a fondness for hagbane bow.

The ammo is currently on 25 for waystalker, its enough that you can often recharge enough not to run dry and your damage on hordes is massive, you can from a good spot solo an entire horde as long as the wrong specials dont show up.

Then when the “survivors” actually reach you the glaive can often easily finish them, or you can stand still, wait for enemies to finish their charging attack before pushing them back and switching to hagbane to finish the clustered bunch infront of you…works wonders on the skaven and kinda well on the rotbloods but with more effort needed.

Shortbow doesnt work on legend at all, the damage is faaar too low.

longbow is simply too slow and hits too few targets and is much too bad with shields and multiple targets.

Thus, in my very own personal opinion, there is only one actually good setup for waystalker elf, only a single combination that lets you compete with the bounty hunter or pyromancer, even if your F is worlds weaker than theirs.

Waystalker with hagbane+glaive…this setup and nothing else at all.

(Seriously though,Pyromancer and bounty hunter make everything look effortless, hordes? no problem, armor? not an issue, chaos warrior? Eat a special ability and be done…meanwhile elf F may or may not kill 2 storm vermin depending on its mood.)

@Fatshark_Hedge could you please share your thoughts? Am i just doing it all wrong or what´s up?

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Elf has great weapons but I don’t like how low the melee damage is on armoured targets and how little damage the hagbane does with headshots. The hagbane bow also seems to have an extremely low base crit chance from my experience.

I don’t agree with what you’ve said about melee being terrible with hordes. Dual daggers, SD, dual swords all destroy hordes. It’s only the glaive which does badly vs hordes and a big part of that is due to the targeting bug right now.

I think the main thing that needs tweaking is the armour damage on non piercing weapons because it shouldn’t take 30 hits to kill a chaos warrior with melee or a full hagbane clip with headshots. It would also be nice if the dash ultimate applied bleed to armoured targets to compensate.

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I actually found the 1h sword to be surprisingly good too, but still lacking. If you spam a 1-2 or 1-2-3 >push-slash combo it works quite well. Power attacks with it are nice too. I started running Arcane Bodkins for more sustained and less bursty damage with it which felt better.

Shade works, but you need a good melee frontline. Without that you’re too squishy to push for elites/specials. Only Dual Daggers seems to be worth using right now. Sitting behind your melee and clearing what you can while getting flanks and ults on elites. (give this playstyle a go btw it’s quite fun with good people) A tank like Bardin is really good. Wait until he taunts a patrol and you solo clear 3-4 Chaos Knights. :heart_eyes: With the 15% power increase and 5% attack speed I can imagine a nice 2h build, which will give it a more reliable melee clear. The main issue with Shade is 1h and 2h weapons do less damage than dual weapons on ults.

You’re running hagbane too :slight_smile: People trying to badmouth it is beyond me. “A horde? errrm lets take it by this ammo box, guys.” Also does great boss damage.

Spear and 2h Sword feel underwhelming vs armour, which is a huge reason they’re not getting used in higher difficulties (great vs unarmoured tho). Dual swords are great for clearing infantry, but really lacks in Legend and some Champ where elites and armor soak all of your damage. Two power attacks in a row with Dual Swords and you get a long animation that has caused me to get hit too.

Swift Bow can be ok, but I’d rather use longbow, hagbane or xbow for Legend anyway.

I think the power talents working with Shade and Handmaiden will make melee work better for them. Basing your ideas of balance on the two most op builds isn’t really a good idea though. (BH/Pyro)

Waywatcher’s ult feels strong atm and the cooldown feels ok too imo. Playing Pyro with 30% reduction talent, 10% reduction on trink, cooldown reduction trait on melee and Concoction trait on Charm feels REALLY broken tho.

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IMO and from my experience, if you aren’t using double dagger or double sword, you are playing the elf class wrong. You should rely heavily on the swift bow and only use your melee weapons when the trash mobs get too close. With all of the properties on weapons and other gear, you should have +10% attack speed. The double daggers do really well vs chaos warriors btw and can kill a storm vermin in 2-3 hits. The elf needs crowd control because of such a low hp pool. The glaive is just not good enough, and elfs that use the spear typically take the most damage in the game and its just a third player blocking the ranged attacks of a typical sienna as a fourth player. So, IMO, elf is exactly where it should be, the glaive could use a buff so that its first swing would go for decaps like the executioners sword, but other than that its fine. Double daggers is probably the most versatile because it penetrates armor well, and has decent crowd control, but I would likely still prefer the double swords and let other teammates deal with the armor. However I have red daggers so I use them, they arent as good at crowd control, but they can solo a chaos warrior and storm vermin. The glaive’s first attack doing no damage and having to charge a second makes it pretty useless imo, and the spear is so bad at consistent crowd control I can’t be bothered to use it.

TLDR; use double sword/dagger, 10% attack speed, 10-15% crit chace, crits reduce career skill, use your ult to deal with armor. EZ

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Dual daggers and swords both hit too few to work well against hordes in the way i´ve been using them, daggers only hit 1-2 at most which is a absolutely massive flaw almost regardless of attackspeed.

The heck are they going to do when you are being charged by anything between 5-20 rotbloods of various size? Enemies have some funny charging attack that has “phantom” reach, daggers is a terrible option against that kinda enemy when all it takes are 2 hits to down you.

Dual Swords cleaving feels awful too, a single bigger mob and they are suddenly incapable of doing much, and you struggle like hell with amor.

Sword&dagger are better but they also hit too few and hurt too little to really feel good.

Glaive does better infact, because each swing does a lot of damage and always hits at least the ones directly infront of you…but indeed, its slow speed becomes a burden infront of larger groups…but its extreme armor penetration might make up for it.,…if the weapon was made a little better with stormvermin shields.

The reason i love glaive and find 1 handed sword so surprisingly decent are their heavy attacks which hit heads so easily, it actually lets you take down chaos warriors at a quick and reasonable speed respectively.

Sword might do less damage but its faster than glaive which is why i sometimes swap the two around.

I dont even bother shooting them, even longbow needs like a full 6-10 headshots or 2 crits (also headshots) and a few shots in addition, simply much too inefficient when something like glaive takes them down in a few good hits.

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…You are not playing on legend, or are you?

Swiftbow doesnt kill anything, you need 2 bodyshots or a headshot just to kill a single beefy rotblood mob, you can fire your entire quiver into a horde and barely kill a third of it, and you wont have the time to even shoot that much on legend.

Daggers hit too few targets and double sword cleaving is bad despite that being supposed to the main virtue and the anti armor is awful ontop.

Spawns are also almost always all around you so you constantly end up in melee with 10+targets, you have to build assuming this will happen frequently.

Most elf players take the spear and think its OP rushing off into melee and get wrecked when they find a armored target.

The trick to use the spear well, is to charge a heavy attack, block-push cancel then go for another heavy, like this you will have extremely consistent crowd control…its just you are so damn weak with armor.

And the trait you mentioned, the one that refunds 2% of remaining cooldown time on a crit? Its terrible.

If you have 40 seconds CD left then it refunds 0,8 seconds…if you have 30 left it gives you 0,6, this trait might have been worth something if you had insane constant attackspeed and crits but reality is cruel.

And whats more…daggers as i mentioned, fall extremely short infront of hordes, if you try to kite the enemies will initiate charging attacks which always gain “phantom” reach, you have to block these attacks rather than trying to dodge them because they can also curve and go sideways.

Spear works out nicely there because if you dash back and load a heavy and move forward to release it then your heavy will interrupt the charging mobs and your block after will stop any remaining ones.

Which is all great until a stormvermin or two or three pops in, then its not so great.

So, i currently have no melee weapon that i particularly favor, but longbow is serviceable as a anti special and anti armor weapon and hagbane is glorious against hordes, i can solo entire waves with it as long as no shieldvermin or chaos warriors are charging in the front.

The hagbane also staggers all targets hit by the poison cloud burst which is priceless for stalling, i once kited a stormvermin patrol around with it and killed all the ones without shields with only normal shots.
…Still almost died to the shieldcarriers until team came around after having dealt with a boss though.

So i tend to roll glaive or 1 hand sword for anti armor and hagbane for everything else, issue with hagbane is however that it doesnt do quite so well against the higher health rotblood hordes, you end up shooting the “walking dead” frontlines while the backline remains safe if your spot is even slightly bad.

But the merits are high enough so i still do it. after all , even if i cant kill all of them i still get enough that they either become soloable in melee or easily cleanable for 2 people, the horde density which is such a problem for melee becomes a extreme merit for hagbane.

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I find it interesting you say swift bow doesn’t work against hordes. In my experience you are correct that it takes 2-3 arrows to kill the trash mobs, but you get 2-3x the amount of ammo and your basic left click arrows can penetrate targets. 2-3 swift bow arrows can be fired in less time than it takes to fire a single charged hagbane shot. Add in a couple of crits that you are sure to get firing so many arrows and it will perform without issue against hordes.

It seems more likely that you are not firing the swiftbow properly against hordes which is to spam non-charged left click into the horde as it charges in a tight group.

You can check out this vid in which a very skilled player uses swift bow to mow down hordes (On v1.04)

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Swift Bow is very strong against hordes, although its use might go down a bit with the Trueshot fix/nerf.

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Swift bow is possibly the strongest weapon in the game against hordes. However 1.0.4 information is outdated. By then it was barely doable to sustain arrow hose spam, now a few nerfs are in place.

Hagbane isn’t very good for WS atm. It’s arrows won’t proc Scrounger and they don’t actually kill anything by themselves, more like they stagger stuff as a charged Conflagration.

@topic
Kerillian possibly has one of the best, most complete weapon sets in V2. Weapons have minimal dodge penalty and a mix of wide attacks and strong ones. Every weapon is quite good although the spear and glaive shine a little more because they have unique properties.

The spear is a weapon with good wide sweeps and generous range. It’s hard to get hit using it.
The glaive is a weapon that pairs wide fast light sweeps which mows hordes with strong attacks to beat armors. At a minimum it’s on par with the Falchion.

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I agree with the OP and @birdman

Elf does have the most diverse weapon sets that have some great combos and utility. However most of them are only good at what they do. To elaborate, the dual daggers do amazing single target damage and can bleed which is brilliant sustain damage versus armour. However if you choose dual daggers then you can ONLY do single target damage effectively. There is no horde control and you can often get overrun by 5 chaos fodder if you get caught in their run attack spam as the stagger is weak. Glaive is amazing anti armour but again has little control and feels slow despite what the weapon description says.

My honourable mention would actually go to Sword and dagger. The 1st charge attack has great crowd control and stagger especially when paired with light attacks after, and the 2nd charge can kill SV when combined with the 1st. It crits reliably and is very fast.

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it feels slow since it flat out can not attack cancel for some reason. the second you click LMB you’re stuck with it, so if something scoots in out of the corner you’re boned. it’s a strong weapon but it and wardancer have this same issue and makes it feel clunky compared to other 2h weapons

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Everything from that patch is obsolete with damage, stagger and nerfs having gone through. . The most damaging for that build would be the drastically lowered ammo refund and lack of stagger and cleaving in melee.

Hagbane becomes priceless just because it clears clustered waves extremely well, and even if some survive they’ll go down in a single melee hit many times.

As for ammo, the low shot count but high power for each shot makes ammo regen potent and so you can opt for lower f CD for all the good it can do.

This are only my thoughts and opinions though having played around a bit.

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@grimmochov Yeah that’s a very good point. With spear you can cancel at almost any point of any animation which is why I like it so much, keep forgetting that key difference …

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IDK, I’ve found all of the weapons to be viable if you actually take the time to learn how to use them. This usually means drastically changing your entire playstyle, so if you’ve got a certain way you like to play then some weapons and careers just won’t work for you.

For example: I main Shade, with dual daggers + volley crossbow. I’m specced mostly for +crit chance, +crit power, +power vs monsters, and a few other random things. My playstyle is one of insurance: I hang back, dancing around behind and between my teammates, darting in to take down elites or flanking to take down specials that everyone else is too busy fighting to notice. I can absolutely destroy bosses by firing volleys from stealth and then using backstab, and I can also use my stealth for clutch saves of what would have otherwise been a team wipe. And if sh** really hits the fan, I have enough movement speed bonuses to run while holding block and not get taken down from behind, so I can sprint ahead to the respawn point and then use stealth to pick up my teammates.

I never get top marks or green circles for anything on the scoreboard except boss damage (and sometimes for elites / specials), but I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve saved my team by being patient and waiting for the right moment to strike.

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Sure I get your point, but most of the time as Shade in legend hordes I feel like a third wheel unless team comp is perfect

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Fair, I’ve definitely had a few times where my teammates mopped up the horde and I sat with my crossbow covering the back entrance and nothing ended up coming behind us.

The cooldown on infiltrate was also frustratingly long. I see that they reduced it by half in the patch today and added more dodge range, so I’m stoked to give it a whirl!

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Yes! The CD is such a nice buff. Means we can use it more liberally and not feel guilty popping it for an elite, and the dodge is definitely noticable with daggers. The mobility really helps to avoid shet as u may expect.

I tested the distance versus a pyro with sword, shade can dodge at least 50% further

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insurance is the right word. the shade’s ability is severely underrated because of it’s ability to disengage from anything. if you’re being chased by a chaos patrol or boss or massive horde, u can kite them far away and use the ability, saving your team precious time to clear up. it’s good stuff and i am liking it more and more.

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Legend is all I play, and I can make do with any of the weapons really, I just don’t particularly like the spear. With 10% attack speed I can clear the majority of the trash that comes my way with daggers or swords and I use it to farm cooldown with my 15% crit chance. Seeing as the weapons hit multiple targets etc, the cooldown sees decent progress during hordes. Between pushing, blocking, dodging, and general movement, I don’t really take damage when using the double daggers. The glaive is nice for its range and because it has actual push back potential, but what aggravates me is that the high damage overhead swing is locked behind a relatively crappy first charged swing. I would prefer if it operated more like the executioners sword. I find myself wasting the first swing alot just to move forward to go for decaps. It’s also tedious timing it so that you don’t get hit by anything in between 2 consecutive charged swings. The glaive could definitely use a re-working. I appreciate that different weapons have different swing types, but it would be nice to have control over them, or atleast not have the actual useful attacks time gated behind a relatively worthless swing. As for the swiftbow, I do get alot of headshots and don’t particularly like the long reload time of the other bows. The swift bow does penetrate so, I can fire into a streamlined horde and kill all of it in a single lane, coupled with the ult and the 2% reduction per crit when im hitting multiple targets and then using daggers when they finally close the distance, I never have any issues. It also allows me to be more useful vs monsters/minibosses with a strength potion due to the fire rate.

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Have you played the game since the damage nerfs went through?

Daggers cant stagger anything, need like 3-4 attacks just to kill a single beefy rotblood and you can only hit one at the time.

Stormvermin dont get staggered at all, ever by either daggers or swords, heck even normal mobs hardly ever stagger from them, only slaverat and equivalent ones do.

My greatest issue with shortbow is probably that if a single mauler or stormvermin appear along with a wave then i need to dump tons of shots or waste a lot of time to kill them, with hagbane i can instead just shoot as usual as it staggers on direct hits and the AOE is unaffected by the type of target as long as it isnt a shield.