Halberd combo changes are going against weapon design philosophy of Vermintide

tbf everything in here is subjective barring dps numbers, pick rates and whatever stats there are on positive feedback vs negative feedback numbers.

This whole thread honestly boils down to 20 people liking a shirt in red whereas 3 people prefer it in blue, and that’s ok, but a company is gonna lean towards providing red shirts based on that.

I’m curious, if we see a rework to weaves that causes their popularity and positive feedback to skyrocket, if we’ll see threads complaining the new weave design goes against the philosophy outlined for them over a year ago on announcement

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I understand what you are saying, and ofcourse fatshark will listen to the majority of players as they are a bussiness, even if they do agree with me (for example), they will never change it back, and i understand that.

Following popularity isn’t always good though. Didn’t they nerf fort brackenshruke because alot had issues with it, the convo thread is probably also leaning towards nerf and i’m a bit wary they will nerf enemy numbers instead. The majority doesn’t like difficult or grindy stuff, especially not in a game like vermintide where casual is what it’s about.

About your weaves example: there are many ways they can improve weaves, i’m not sure they will make fundamental changes to it. Weaves will still be weaves even if they add qp or bot support, or make it less grindy essence wise, or nerf some winds. If they made weaves into something different and more popular then the majority will like it, but the old weave players will be sad, even if they still have fixed enemy spawns but it’s intiarilly different then you wont say to and old weave lover ‘but they still have fixed enemy spawns! It’s the same’ when it’s probably not anymore.

yeah although I think feedback on Fort shifted to it being too easy now

I’m not saying that doing everything the majority wants is inherently a good idea but I find this thread a tad holier than thou due to citing things like design philosophy (despite things clearly having changed) and then claiming people who like the changes simply aren’t in touch with the “true” identity of a weapon.

Like…if we wanna get egotistical I’ve got thousands of hours logged in the game and I clear the hardest content on offer in both official and modded realms. Does that justify my opinions on its own though? no, it doesn’t. However I would like to think after investing this much time and developing a provably high skill level I’ve got a solid understanding of the mechanics, design and identities of the tools I’m using. And if not me then the large swathe of other veteran players who like the changes AND the developers who clearly approved it, do.

And yeah the weaves example I brought up because obviously it’s a matter of scale right, but also maybe it comes down to FS deciding their initial philosophy was wrong, and that’s their prerogative. Thing is I didn’t change the fundamentals of Halberd outside the ordering of heavy attacks, everything else is still intact. If some people have more fun intentionally using a weapon in a sub-optimal manner I’ve hardly prevented anyone from electing to do so.

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Developers will approve what the majority likes. Unless it’s changing halberd in something goofy and removing from warhammer fantasy.

The change in heavy attacks is exactly whats bothering me xd
I would of rather seen the halberd go into a different direction instead of this one. I understand the majority likes this so there is not much i can do, except still voicing my opinions just in case. I know i’m one of a few on this forum not being 100% behind the changes but i do appreciate the dodge change and heavy sweep change i know that gets lost when discussing sometimes.

The halberd still needs work in my opinion, but increasing it’s stats now will be a fine line, it could make halberd very very strong. Block cancel light is still here (we have bandaid light heavy sweep for now). I agree mostly with another person who said it’s the best baindaid we could of gotten, and i agree.

Lets also agree to disagree, as i’m repeating myself alot :slight_smile: i also think alot here are getting triggered because they don’t understand how it’s possible i have any critisisms against such a change, but i feel like i’m mostly getting missunderstood.

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Nah I get ya, and it’s absolutely fair enough. Tbh the only thing that bothers me is various posts from OP implying that essentially anyone that disagrees with him is simply wrong even though the argument really boils down to “I liked it more before” which is perfectly fair and reasonable

but trying to hide that under a thin veneer of design philosophy and everyone else being supposedly not privy to some sort of hidden true nature of halberd is just…it’s just silly

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I suspect that’s the reason of our ideologies clashing: you play hardest difficulties, that will affect the game&weapon balance no matter what, and for them its beneficial to have weapons with easier, more accessible controls (aka every attack you would need can be started immediately and chained indefinitely). Whilst i enjoy the difficulty in the weapon handling itself, it what makes Vermintide Vermintide and not a CS round with knifes, it gives the weapons more distinct feeling.

not wrong, but not seeing the beauty of halberd that it had. And it’s totally expectable, i mentioned several times already that it takes a certain build, and trying to adapt to clunkyness, developing different approach to combat. For me it’s an undeniable loss in weapon combat variety. For you it was one bent fork among 4 others, for me it was all way around - one thing that shined while others were bleak. It wasn’t ideal ofc, it needed heavy stat tweaking.

i mean, don’t you see the pattern in everyone saying they’ve used 2 simple combos before and that’s it? That it was boring AF? If you use 1/3 of available weapon’s moveset and base your experience and comparisons on that - then it’s not far reaching for me to say, that people missed a lot of potentially interesting gameplay (while i used all combos available).

Another point, and i see some agreeing on this, that the sweep attacks from the same direction one after another - are ugly, and now even endorsed by the design (Light sweep ↔ Heavy sweep).
Can you imagine a medieval fighter doing these attacks one after another, it would remind me of a robot, an automaton getting a command to smash.

I get that but honestly

Everything before and after this line is pretty irrelevant. You could’ve just said this and the overall value would be the same and it would’ve just been an agree to disagree scenario. I fully understand that we have different ideas of what the art of the weapon is and that’s a-ok. Differences in opinion and feeling are perfectly fine by me. Also

I interpret this as combos/movesets need to exist, not that they need to be set in stone

i dunno, i’ve been pretty detailed and argumentative in my posts, so as to explain how i feel and how it all ties to the developer’s idea at the beginning. I have values, and approaches to this game, and i believe that it was the game’s weapon design that attracted me to it. And when i see a change that contradicts their design philosophy, i want to point it out.

Its okay to disagree on our views on what’s the intended game design is too, you know.

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I like the new halberd, but I think I totally get where OP is coming from. The changes made to halberd were all about making it stronger and better to play with, and introducing new combos to utilize the previously underused attacks. Question is though, is halberd supposed to have those combos available to it? Is halberd meant to have a dedicated anti-horde combo like there is with L1 -> H2? It’s possible that the devs originally wanted you to use the light attack chain to fight hordes, even if it was inefficient with 2 single-target attacks, cause it’s not meant to be great at hordes, therefore not meant to have attack chains made up of high cleave sweeping attacks. Same with the double overhead chop - it was a strong attack chain, but locked behind a stamina cost. Heavy stab locked behind a bit further in the attack chain is also meant to hamper its ability to deal with elites effectively cause it’s meant to be as a jack-of-all-trades weapon, not excelling in either category.

I never used L1 block cancel myself, cause as someone else put it in this thread, it felt like ass and didn’t feel worth the micromanagement. You could just do light attack chain and probably be like 90% as effective. I used the weapon in a similar way to how OP said he used it, and I tried it out in higher tier content as well with FK. I enjoyed using the weapon back then, just using a L1 -> L2 -> L3 -> L1 combo, weaving in double overhead chops together with the light attack chain both before and after it for killing elites and destroying shields, H1 as an entry for hordes and H2 stab as a substitute for the second overhead chop. But being honest, the weapon just wasn’t that great. It wasn’t terrible either, but I was definitely underperforming in the team compared to everyone else, and while I used all the attack chains and attack patterns I could, there never really was a reason for me to do them. Like, why would I really bother with the heavy sweep, or the heavy stab? As a fan of combo weapons like sword & shield, the heavy attack pattern of the halberd wasn’t being utilized because there wasn’t really any point.

Another point is that the previously aforementioned design decision by Fatshark to have intentionally imperfect attack chains hasn’t really been kept up with. A lot of the simpler weapons to use like greatsword or executioner are strong and don’t rely on combos in any way, and don’t have any imperfect attack patterns, meanwhile they outperform Halberd. New weapons like billhook don’t follow this design either, with heavy attacks being for pure single-target, and the push-attack -> L2 combo being sweeps for hordes, with only push-attack -> L2 -> L1 -> L2 being imperfect with one single-target attack, but even then that’s mainly if you’re just saving stamina. They could have made halberd stronger while still keeping it an imperfect weapon with imperfect combos, but I suppose it’d feel out of place being one of the only weapons to follow this type of design, when most other weapons in the game have ‘perfect’ combos to deal with whatever scenario you need to deal with.

Another thing with old halberd that I had a problem with was thematics. It’s a polearm weapon, but hardly used any sort of stabbing attack, when in real life it focused on stabbing and chopping, with stabbing taking the more important role, which is why I love the new attack pattern with the double stab attack followed by an overhead chop.

Speaking of those new combos, while I like them in theory, the execution absolutely feels off to me. The L1 -> H2 sweep combo I’m mildly positive about, and don’t think it’s too off, but while I love the H1 -> L2 combo, it is absolutely wonky. It’s a lot faster than any other combo on the weapon and is clearly lacking in animation delay. Another thing is how weird the second stab looks, it comes out too fast and doesn’t even look like it lines up properly. Looks completely out of place with the first heavy stab. Get that sorted out and I’ll be fully content with the weapon.

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honestly the only weapon that remains with “imperfect” combos would be flail and even then it’s less the combos are inherently bad and more that the attacks themselves are clunky…which makes sense for a flail I guess

Anyway when it came to Halberd my intent was provide a design in which the full breadth of the weapon has purpose AND it doesn’t require hamstringing your dps to do so. The old moveset really wouldn’t have allowed this (believe me, I tried) as for animation timings, yeah I never managed to get around to cleaning those up unfortunately. There were a few things that needed some more polish but just never managed to get that final update out

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Not only flail (which i quite like). There’s some more

sword+dagger
sienna mace (which i didn’t liked)
sienna dagger
glaive

to a lesser extent:
axe+shield and sword+shield
kruber+sienna 1h sword
edit: and elven spear

True, there’s more weapons with best attacks that can instantly be launched and repeated. But it kinda proves my point that the arsenal as a whole needs more diversity, not less. There should be place for everything: easy to use weapons, and difficult to use weapons.

well, a term “polearm” and even the “halberd” itself could mean anything really. By these 2 words alone you can’t say how this weapon is supposed to be used. There’s short and long polearm/halberds, there’s polearms designed for more thrusting or more chopping or in-between. Personally i lean towards the idea that the weapon ingame isn’t a typical halberd, but a pollaxe. i’ve made a thread for this even. Is our "halberd" actually a halberd? Or is it a poleaxe?

some things can’t easily be fixed with animation timings, when the order of attacks gets changed that drastically. You need to redesign the whole animation - in case of Light sweep ↔ Heavy sweep chaining being from the same direction.

You give examples for Sword / Axe & Shield having imperfect attack combos (and I assume as an example of weapons with “better” attack combos, if I interpret correctly), but they are very similar to the new Halberd, actually. You have effective combos for every situation, that are very easily accessible all the time.

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I’m also bit baffled by sword and dagger since cancelling after 2nd light is pretty common practice for horde clear and the heavy chain is perfect for single target. Maybe i missed something.

i didnt like halberd before and i still dont now. i rarely see anyone use it too so i guess it isnt worth the extra work for roughly the same result as exe sword or bretonnian sword.

keep in mind i said these 2 have “imperfect” moveset to a lesser extent:

sword+shield - you cant do a heavy stab right away. And its biggest single target damage of this weapon, especially vs armor. Its either after Heavy 1 which takes some time, or after push attack which is stamina reliant.

axe+shield - you cant do a charged axe attack 2 (a horde clear attack) right away. Its either after Heavy bash (which does less crowd damage), or Light 1 (single target damage). I’m a big fan of Light 1 ↔ Heavy 2 sweep chain btw.

these weapons are unlike new halberd, which has all the best attacks available w/o any prerequisite action, and also easily repeatable.

its only about heavy combo, 2nd attack being much better damaging than the first one against single target, especially against armor.

Fair enough.

This is actually a fair point. If we changed combo’s of those weapons they would also be more effective, how come we don’t do that? Is it because they are already performing relatively or very well?

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Perhaps they have the necessary innate attack speed, so their more complex combinations can be reliably pulled off and enjoyed? And there’s a suitable reward (damage) at the end of a combo?

Sword and Shield, and axe and shield already perform well enough in their roles, in addition “stamina-gated” attacks don’t really mean a whole lot on a shield let’s be real, same deal with weapons like billhook where typically the users have some sort of built in stamina regen

the problems halberd had were not the same problems as these other weapons

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What are your thoughts on these :

I don’t agree with that. Stamina gated attacks do mean something on billhook. Yes it gets circumvented by properties and talents but this doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean alot. Negative dodge also was a rather big downside of the halberd before, but it also got circumvented with dodge talent on merc. (Yes stamina is more accessible then dodge range). I do agree about the shields.

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