With the 30th coming up, I thought I would give my feedback towards the general combat systems. No drama, just honest, constructive opinions.
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Melee Clunkiness. Dodges pausing stamina regen just doesn’t feel good; it causes a void in the combat where you have to stop dodging, pushing, and blocking to get any stamina back, creating a situation where players feel like they don’t have any defensive options but to stand still. There are also many weapons with odd gaps in their attack patterns that eat your inputs (LMB inputs don’t always buffer in properly). Overall, there’s a lack of fluidity to the melee combat compared to Vermintide for the above reasons.
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Melee Weapon Balance. This one is easily fixable, and not expected to be perfect out the gate. That said, most of the less iconic melee weapons (regular and heavy swords, some but not all of the axes, etc) need serious buffs; they are just straight up worse choices than any kind of power or chain weapon, though daggers and tactical axes find their niche in one specific Zealot build. On the other end of the spectrum, the power sword is blatantly OP. I would looks towards bringing all weapons towards the chainsword, eviscerator, antax combat axe, etc from both ends of the spectrum.
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Ranged Weapon Balance. Similar to melee weapons, a lot of ranged weapons are simply inferior to their counterparts. The Kantrael IV and Ia lasguns are substantially weaker than the XII. Headhunter autoguns oddly get the same damage as an Agripinaa infantry autogun or a braced autogun, except with lower fire rates, much higher recoil, and far less ammo. Hurting yourself to vent heat on the plasma gun isn’t a viable longterm choice when melee damage chips through toughness to hurt you. The stub revolver is inferior to the shotgun in every way, from ammo count to damage per shot to mag size.
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Toughness. 100 toughness might be too little for any class, with how dense ranged enemy groups get in higher difficulty. Veteran gets 200 toughness and 150 health, for a total of 350, which feels like a pretty good baseline total to balance characters around. It makes sense that Zealot could get the inverse of this at 200 health and 150 toughness, which would solve a lot of the complaints towards the class’ toughness issues when not playing a crit build. Psyker could be looked at in this same vein.
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Talent trees. Veteran has a fairly solid talent tree, while other characters are a bit starved for choice. Zealot has a few out of place talents, like attack speed at 50%/20% health, which isn’t viable to plan around due to melee damage bleedthrough. Meanwhile, half of Ogryn’s tree is worthless; 50% more melee damage against ogryns or improved grenades vs carapace armor are some extremely niche abilities compared to permanently doing bleed on every heavy attack. I’m also skeptical of even trying out Psyker, because the class’s entire talent tree seems to revolve around Brain Burst (or rather, the warp charges that BB gives you), which is pretty monotonous.
Edit: I had another idea on the toughness topic. If the combat designers don’t want to give Zealot or Psyker more innate toughness, what about changing the +toughness curios to a flat value? Currently, Veteran can get to a good 300 or so toughness with three +toughness curios, while those same curios provide the other characters with very little value. So, if instead the curios scaled up to +30 flat toughness instead of a percentage, then the power scales would be balanced by providing the same toughness gains for everyone. Veteran could still get a 290 toughness shield if he wants, but Zealot could also get a solid 190 by dedicating all curios to toughness.