Everything and everyone are OP, so now what?

All that tells me is that he either forgot he came in swinging with the unpaid amateur comment or he’s stunningly unaware at how that statement and his current lack of ill will are difficult to reconcile when on the receiving end.

And you’ve a tendency to be condescending and/or dismissive, intentional or otherwise.

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I would rather FS started with the busted stagger system that makes the stagger talent row feel really wonky.
I mean changes and all that are all well and good but if you don’t start with the core problem and try to fix everyround but the problem that causes alot of randomness you are just beating about the bush.
Seen a post on this forum and I think this has been discussed multiple times that the overlapping stagger stages create weird situations sometimes.
For example when enemies get thrown out of a blight storm into a wall, they should be stagger 2 but any source of lower stagger input will transfer it to a lower stagger stage.
I don’t know if that is a good indication for it but in Deathwish with the higher stagger values this almost never happens, self-explenetaory why it doesn’t.
I would argue that if you compare Deathwith with normal official stagger values, the former makes it feel more balanced in a way that enemies don’t get tossed about as much and therefore don’t create as many random situations.
Feels to me that flactuating damage output could be attributed to the busted stagger system.
Which is also partially SotTs problem she just staggers to much to quickly.

You never in your life said something “rude” in a heated situation?

You should take the now-state and how he decleared it. Cut people some slack. If someone says they bear no ill will give them the benefit of doubt unless he has shown to be scheming.

I marked clearly for this post that I will be rude. Not sure where you would read condescending behaviour otherwise. But maybe we can agree that we could both behave better.

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God what a world that’d be

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Nope, but this is as Adelion says a natural (but correct still) answer. In a vacuum, we make things we think or hope people will enjoy, with varying degrees of success.


The topic of balance in a game like VT is reaaaally wild. A lot of ‘horde coop games’ have different skillsets to those you find in Verm. Most are predominantly shooters with shooter balancing mechanics. Those are generally easier to balance. The skill comes from positioning and headshots. In Verm, there’s heaps more depth and mastery compared to your average L4D-like, and what that results in is, simplified, a reeeeally broad spectrum of skill levels in the player base.

The vast majority of Verm players are a bit like myself actually. Decidedly average. Nothing special. Not highly skilled. They understand the game, on the surface and what it expects of the player, but overwhelmingly we aren’t ‘pro’. The majority (by no means all of course) of forum go-ers are typically in the top 5% of Verm players, in so much as their skill level, understanding of every mechanic and their ability to harness the tools they have at their disposal to the maximum effect.

In the case of SOTT being P2W, it was (I promise!) never the design to ship something P2W, and honestly for your average player, SOTT isn’t P2W. It’s different and interesting and another tool to use to bash rats in a different way. But in the hands of the upper brackets of the community it’s certainly very, very strong, to the degree that it can render the game un-fun for the others in the group.

The unique challenge I see with Vermintide that other similar games don’t have is that making content that feels great at all levels is truly difficult. Not impossible by any stretch, but not as simple as it would be in a similar title that doesn’t have the very intricate systems in place in ours.

It could be argued that Vermintide is too complex for it’s own good, and in some ways I might agree. It’s so intricate that we struggle to even explain a plethora of mechanics via the interface or tutorialing or onboarding, and players have had to deconstruct it through trial and error or even pulling apart the code to really determine how things work.

What I want to see though, and what is helpful, are threads like Velsix’s. Results aren’t always immediate, and may not manifest. Best I can do is pass them on and let designers know about topics of discontent.

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Gotta say, as a ‘normie’ player I find this discussion more of a study in argumentation and reasoning fallacies rather than something substantial or useful. All this digging into laundry that noone really can relate to and arguing about completely subjective matters all the while hoping that the game developer would listen is just an exercise in futility in my eyes. Just an outside opinion if you care to want one.

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I mean yeah that’s pretty much it and all it ever ends up being 99% of the time when this happens

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Whether or not the BBB balance changes influenced future weapons doesn’t really matter now.
A lot of this back and forth is just stubbornness and probably why a portion of the community, especially on discord, think the forums are a joke.

Still gonna chip in… I personally care more about weapon identity overlap and whether or not said weapon feels good to play. Weapon identity overlap is especially important imo…

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This is cool and all but was there no veteran player testing the career before it went live? For me just reading some of the numbers in the kit immediately told its going to be extremely over turned and i really doubt I’m alone in this assessment.

I understand early balancing work can be quite difficulty but Radiant inheritance and moonbow are in my opinion just pretty inexcusable mishaps that should be noticed pretty early on.

Anyways honestly at this point I really don’t even care that the career came out in a way it did, its the fact that it seems to take ages to even address it.

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Please, let’s not forget that there is politics to be mindful of here, and some questions just won’t get real answers on an official forum.
I mean of course she’s overtuned. They’re running a business here first and foremost.

As long as we don’t know if, how and who is testing it is hard to gauge this correctly. At least for the Moonfire Bow we “could” find an excuse as it was possibly tested alongside CW. Which would skewer the impression on it.

For other stuff. Time restriction? So that final changes will not be tested anymore before being put live? Welp, no point in speculating.

I can believe that your intention wasn’t necessarily to make paid things overpowered, even though I do think that you definitely try to make DLC on the stronger end, but it’s hard to imagine SotT with this line of thinking. All the other stuff in the past, like BtU weapons, WoM weapons, career weapons, even Forgotten Relics like Moonbow? Sure.

But Sister of the Thorn? I am going to be entirely honest, I took one look at Radiant Inheritance, and immediately asked myself “How did this get approved?”, and I’m definitely not the only one. At this point you don’t even need to playtest it to know how ridiculous the talent was. And despite being nuked into the ground by a >50% nerf to its overall stats, it is STILL the most picked talent in that row, and not because the row is super weak.

Let’s just think about it for a bit. The talent used to turn you into a near Goddess. The talent can be activated every 60s, and lasted for 15s. That’s 25% uptime throughout the entire mission. But wait, half the time you’re not even really fighting anything, so it’s more like 50% uptime. Then lastly, not all the hordes you fight are super deadly or anything, the only time you will activate the bonus is when things get even slightly tough with more enemies on screen. So really, it turns out that 75% of the times you ever even possibly get challenged, you turn on God mode.

And then about the rest of her kit? Well, she was marketed as a support career, and yet the only build that sees a ton of use is one that uses all of her aggressive and selfish talents to boost her own power. I get it, you want a support career, but not one that only does support, so you add auxiliary talents for a bit more of an aggressive playstyle. And yet what happened is that SOTT became a pure damage dealing career, and one of the strongest ones at that, with the only support thing about her is the passive 25% Boon of Shallya team wide.

I dunno, I’ve seen a fair few posts and threads on Reddit and Steam forums that certainly don’t paint a picture that it’s mostly just the top bracket that sees her as overpowered.

Here’s a couple that you’ve probably seen:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Vermintide/comments/oh20kz/sister_of_thorn_makes_me_want_to_quit_the_game/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Vermintide/comments/nt11c8/the_sister_of_thorn/

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I just don’t buy some of that. Developing and testing are 2 different things in most companies and have dedicated people for those jobs. So time restrictions should really not be an issue if you can create, model a weapon but somehow cannot even dry run the damage numbers vs some of the common enemies it faces?

I really don’t expect to get 100% accurate answer to this but would still be curious if there was underlying issues with testing.

Edit: Like if the lack of testing is the core issue then there is plenty of players even in these forums who can do that work for free. And for most of us I doubt it even takes more than a day to get a reasonable picture.

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There was a “sign up for beta testing” post many moons ago so I guess there’s some bunch testing things somewhere.

This is why I like greatsword so much, in that it’s got it’s own identity. V good vs plain hordes, Good vs mixed hordes, weak vs armour and bosses. It doesn’t do everything well, and although it can be quite dull to play as the moves a limited, it has it’s own niche and is pretty good in the hands of Merc and FK, WHC and Zealot. I don’t play it on HS or BH though.

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This back and forth bickering feels like the scene from The Expendables:

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Oh sure greatsword is neat.
But I meant “Does this weapon need to exist or overlap with another weapon?” or “Will this weapon disrupt identity balance?”
I think Fatshark should ask themselves these questions when designing new weapons or polishing old ones.

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I think Core’s Tourney rules mod is a good base to any changes. It’s not a wide scale mod but it concentrates on the most important issues.

But the general problem with mods is why I would test x mod? I won’t find many to play with on legend. And what happens if I test it? Nothing. Playing BBB made sense because there were many players and there was a chance devs will consider the feedback.

This really doesn’t compute for me. Sister is not really a career that requires much skill to get absurd results from. Mostly you just have to pick the right talents (the damaging ones mostly) and then pick javelin or moonfire bow (both of which are low skill weapons currently since they don’t need head shots at all, and you don’t have to manage ammo). I mean I’m nothing special as a player either, but I can still see that Sister and those two weapons were busted on release, and remain busted months later. I agree that balancing this game is very complex and challenging, but these things are so far out of whack they really should be obvious to everyone.

PS. Hopefully this post doesn’t come across as unappreciative or rude. I’m very glad to see someone from Fatshark responding to this thread.

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Yeah, it’s right where specialized weapons should be: great at what it’s supposed to be great at, and sub-par but usable against everything else.

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