Fatshark, the bots are completely useless and need immediate fixes

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
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They are completely incapable of managing any sort of lobby at Legend, Cata or Chaos Wastes with any configuration.

I’ve spent a good 2 weeks bashing my head against a wall trying every single possible bot combination, from the classic HM-IB-MERC-WHC-UC to the oldie but goldie IB-SOTT-WP-UC-MERC.

I don’t understand why you have unsanctioned Bot Improvements on PC; it made bots somewhat less potato-ish and more aware of their surroundings, especially on Legend.

But now it’s a complete shitshow; they chase specials across the map, hold block against hordes of pinks (and go down to them), charge monsters head-on like the most ashamed Slayers in the Old World, completely disregard sightlines and walk into your BH\WS ults all the time, chug heals like there’s no tomorrow, and teleport randomly, leaving people behind (they don’t follow the host, that’s a lie.), especially after being rescued.
They can’t even complete the new map released a while ago, Devious Delvings.
They get stuck and die instantly in the water or in a random terrain\map asset.

We appreciate you finally fixing, 7 years later, the annoying zealot healing mechanic. Better late than never.

Could you fix everything else, please?
Better yet, could you just sanction what the community has done already a bunch of times?
There are plenty of mods in the Workshop that do exactly as requested.
There are Replicant Bots (made by the same people that made DiffBots in VT1), several forks of Bot Improvements, and I’m sure VernonKun and Xq have their own non-workshop experimental branches somewhere.

Do it for console players too. I can’t imagine what it’s like for them to play with such hilariously incompetent bots, since they never had any access to the Workshop and the modded improvements.

It’s absolutely disheartening and annoying to deal with this trash now that the PC community is shrinking, with Cata and Legend lobbies becoming rarer with fewer people by the week. No one wants to wait in the keep for 30 mins just for some poor sod from the other side of the planet to join a 300ms lobby.
At least with Bot Improvements, assuming you had a bit of mechanical skill, you could start a lobby by yourself and bruteforce the bots in certain positions, helping you deal with most of the stuff.

This is impossible now, as I said.
As soon as you are not looking, they go down to a mixed horde, holding block if there is a single (1) SV in a sea of pink rats until they eat an overhead with their guard broken.
Or get stuck, hyperdense with each other and all die in one cleave from any elite\CW.
Cataclysm is straight up unplayable without real human players. It wasn’t the case before.

Please fix, thanks.

TL;DR: Bots bad, very bad, fix asap pls.

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They are not so bad. I usually do full books on Legend with bots with like 95% success rate.
But yeah, they still need improvements to be able to shoot specials like rattlings and warpthrovers and do not chase them with melee. And upgrade weapons in CW.
Maybe my guide can help you: Steam Community :: Guide :: Zin's ultimate bots guide

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So, yes and no.

Iv cleared Legend on most maps with bots only on PS5 where hordes are smaller but everything has more health!
When treated with kid gloves and setup correctly they perform very well.

But also, they still habitually run face first in to fire and gun.

I would say they are far from being completely useless, but also have very limited scope in what they do well.

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No offense, but the guide while being useful is completely worthless for cata bots.
No configuration will work, they will just die over and over again to trivial stuff.

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Yeah console has smaller hordes, but the damage values are the same.
Still kid gloves or not, they still make mistakes typical of recruit-veteran players; which is completely unacceptable on Legend and Cataclysm.

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Console enemies have more health as far as Iv been told.

Regardless, Iv entirely cleared the base game on Legend and a few levels on Cata with bots only, and a good few other DLC levels too.

I generally put shields on my bots iirc (its been a while) and I think I use the IB and Kruber Merc. Healshare is awesome on bots since I can just eat heals and heal them all.

If you really want, I can go to the trouble of going on my PS5 (Iv not used it in a while) and give you my bot setup?

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I’m sorry and with all due respect, but your personal anecdotes are not a good argument.
It doesn’t matter if you did or did not clear Legend with whatever bots and whatever builds, bots are still as stupid as they have been for the past 7 years.
The only thing that kept them in check was Bot Improvements, and Fatshark axed it.
It’s crazy that it took them 7 years to stop bots from healing zealot players.
On PC, bots usually get shredded by mixed hordes and special spam on Cata, and patrols and\or monster + horde encounters on Legend.
They need to be improved, not as much as making them into walking terminators like DiffBots used to do in VT1, but a small bump in expertise would be greatly appreciated.

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They do counter the title of the post i.e. that bots are useless… and “They are completely incapable of managing any sort of lobby at Legend, Cata or Chaos Wastes with any configuration”

My personal anecdotes are verifiable, these games are all Legend bots only:
(sorry for the terribad sound on the shade game)

I do, however, agree with you that bots could use a serious improvement. It would be nice if they could use a variety of weapons and still be Legend+ viable and it would be nice if they didnt walk in to warpfire and rattling gunners.

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Not gonna lie, those hordes look completely alien to me, I guess it’s a console thing. :person_shrugging:
Very well, please fix the bots on PC then.
We have twice the spawns and the mass, to the point where enemies will often hyperdense themselves.

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I do not agree. I did all maps on Cata with bots, some even with books and I am not good at true solo playing so they are far from useless..

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Just no. 7 years ago bots jumped of the cliffs and did other very stupid stuff. (and even in that state it was possible to do Cata full book run with them) Now they are much better. Not perfect, there is still a lot of work for FS, but they are definitely better than 7 years ago.

If you want, I can make a video showing you how to play with them on Cata.

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Yeah, i also did that and citadel Before patch. Playing huntsman 90% of my time.
Now i can’t do it.
Bots Without bots improvement mod suck bigtime.

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Really? For me they seem to be definitely better. I play all Bardin classes, mostly IB or OE. I miss only tagging enemies from that mod now.

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who is they?

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They are the bots
gfuel

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So do the majority of human players. Just how good do you think bots should be exactly? If the bots are too good, then human players are gonna start getting kicked / more private lobbies to take advantage of easy wins with bots.

Thinking of other co-op games, I can’t think of any where the bots survive very long when playing on the highest difficulties. I think the general idea for co-op bots is to make them decent but not too good, about like the average player.

That’s simply not true, at least not for Legend. You said you’ve tried every single possible bot combination… what loadouts are you running on those bots? Do you tag specials so bots will target them with ranged? For example, you listed Unchained in both of your lineups, but I generally avoid any of the Sienna bots because they struggle with spellcasting.

Fam, lots of people on here telling you they figured out a way to make bots work “good enough” on cata, and you’re just determined that we’re all a bunch of liars or what? Maybe you should consider changing your playstyle to better synergize with the bot behavior.

emphasis on “good enough”, because as mentioned before, I don’t think bots should be so good that they handle insane cata situations competently. Cata is the tryhard difficulty that will demolish the majority of human players, bots shouldn’t be balanced to be good at this difficulty. They should be “good enough” for the normal game difficulties, which they are (provided you equip them right).

Do they do stupid stuff sometimes? Sure they do. So do human players. Bots also sometimes have amazing clutch moments where they rescue you from certain death. This game (particularly on cata) has an insane amount of things happening, so trying to program the bots to be able to choose wisely in any scenario is borderline impossible.

I’d be more than happy to share the loadouts I’m using for my bots if you’d care to try them.

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Don’t “fam” me.
I spend most of my time playing on Cataclysm, and the absolute insanity I have witnessed the bots do is what pushed me into opening this thread.
I’ve tried a few Legend runs for the sake of books, since that’s what most people do, and the same issues apply pretty much on every career.
I’m not asking for bots to singlehandedly carry Cata games, as I have specified many times.
I want them as good as they were with Bot Improvements, which isn’t a lot but enough to make sure they don’t job horrifically at the first inconvenience.
Stop defending Fatshark and stop defending those comically bad bots.
There has never been any reason not to introduce the QoL changes from that Workshop mod into the base game, and the only thing they’ve managed to do all these years (7, to be precise) is to stop them from healing zealot players. That’s it. That’s the only thing that they added after so many years.
How about they stop chasing flame and ratling rats head on?
How about they stop getting stuck in random geometry and refuse to teleport?
How about they stop holding block in situations where they could easily swing their weapons and clear a horde?
How about they prioritize revives when dealing with patrols and\or mixed hordes? If you go down with 3 bots it’s basically game over; they will not revive you regardless of any outcome.
How about they correctly prioritize monsters instead of standing in Stormfiend’s fire or Bile troll vomit?
How about they don’t fail to obey most pickup commands, especially for places that have no pathfinding meshes like the first tome in Trail of Treachery, where they will just keep falling down, teleporting to you, then falling again in an endless cycle?
How about they don’t stand still like morons if they have enemies chasing after them, and rather face them instead of eating a skating CW’s overhead?
This is like the most basic knowledge for every player, they weren’t like this before and I don’t see any reason why we are being punished by Fatshark because they decided to unapprove the mod.
It’s not about any person in this thread being a liar, and it’s certainly not about some super magical bot career that deals with everything it gets thrown at them, it’s about quality of life features.
The current bots are extremely inadequate for full book Legend runs, Cata runs with no books, or Chaos Wastes with any Curse.
It’s even more dissapointing when you remember that for the past 2-3 years, Bot Improvements wasn’t really working very well with every line of code it included.
Over the years, with each update, most of its features were phased out and\or made not compatible anymore by Fatshark, which was an unfortunate outcome since the person behind that mod retired indefinitely. It happens.
Yet they still had proper awareness, proper melee combos, revive priorities, force teleport in case of being stuck, item pickup failsafes, not chasing random specials across the map, and stuck to the side of the host no matter what.
Fix the bots further, thank you.

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You are doing a big mistake. Unchained is by far the best bot.

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Thats just not true. Hyperbole isnt helping people see your point. The truth is you are quite right on most of your points and yes, I have frustratingly seen them stand over my body :sob: with nothing around and not revive me, but it doesnt actually happen often.

I get it, youre upset that the bots have failed you a bunch. I had the same experience on PS5 until I set them up properly and learned how to mitigate their weaknesses. I had to babysit them in many situations and I found they are quite good if you learn how to corral them.

Just stick to the facts, lose the hyperbole and venom. The bots arent THAT bad, but they do have some serious issues, the main one imo being walking in to fire and gun but others you have also pointed out I have come across at times too.

I completely agree with the premise of your post, that they should bring the QoL improvements in and tweak the bots so they dont do the worst and most frustrating things.

That being said, if you are going down and relying on the bots on Legend or Cata to revive you, maybe just accept that their purpose is not to pull you through. The only way to succeed with bots only on Legend or Cata is to be good enough to literally carry them like you would bad teammates. Its why Iv had much less success on Cata, because Im not good enough to carry on Cata.

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Interesting, I’ll give her a try, what staff do you have her use?

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