Skaven are nothing more than cannon fodder. The only challenge is Chaos hordes, and with the glaive or S&D on HM I have no issues. Two cleaves followed by a block push as new enemies come in and repeat. As you said, perhaps this is because of her ult, where I lose agro. But I have no issues running right into a horde on legend and slaughtering them. You will ofc have to dodge dance and block/push to stagger them and carry on. But as long as there’s no heavies in the horde. I’ve never had an issue taking an entire horde by myself in melee.
The majority of the time, the skating enemies you’re talking about are CW or Maulers/Executioners, w/e they’re called. Big S&M dudes with axes.
As for legend not cleaving that much, I’m not sure what to say. I pretty much only play legend with the elf, and I have no issues. For lower difficulties, I don’t even bother stopping. Even on champion you can steam roll everything. And if you’re geared for break points, even heavy enemies you make short work of.
I think compounding any melee issues is that sound cues are still off. Not just packmaster sounds, but the normal backstab woosh is still spotty and still easily overwhelmed even by ambient noise, not to mention hordes.
Mainly just the backstab noise, it doesn’t seem to play for elites (berserkers, stormvermin, maulers), patrols don’t make patrol noises unless they are moving, armoured units can be really silent when moving and jumping down 3 storeys. It’s not consistent which is another killer.
I also think there being no callouts for maulers, berserkers and monks is a bit disappointing, as well as the fact that maulers and berserkers have no unique audio at all… until you get hit.
Sound is used to great effect to convey information in the game, but the inconsistency of the cues and simply missing audio information for some enemies makes it irritating to play.
Anytime you’re about to get hit in the back where no reasonable person could anticipate the strike based on any other audiovisual stimuli, you should get the warning. So if you stroll into a horde and walk past something and it stabs you, no sound should play but if you’re fighting a horde and something sneaks up on you from behind that you haven’t seen yet, you should get one. Check out VT1 to experience it when it’s actually working and you’ll understand how broken and frustrating VT2’s system is in comparison.
Thanks to everyone for the responses and constructive criticisms. Also thank you to Fatshark_Hedge for bringing this to the Dev’s attention. I hope something positive comes out of it. I really think it is due time that we got answers to a lot of our questions behind many of these design decisions. I’m hoping that more transparency from here on out on the Dev’s end will help quell the negative attitudes plaguing the community right now and allow us to actually work with the Devs on creating solutions to many of these problems, because after all its easier to complain than to fix something.
I do want to note a few things. First I am in no way advocating that we nerf Ranged classes into irrelevancy and strip them of their unique functions, simply that they are TOO GOOD at what they do and it is a detriment to this game’s philosophy. I simply want want the playing field for melee to be fair just as it was in V1.
Second is that while I agree skill and intuition is crucial to navigate difficult situations, the threshold for how the player succeeds at the moment is very luck based on Legend. One thing to mention is that the AI director needs to challenge a lone surviving player appropriately by rewarding them for surviving a difficult situation by lessening the frequency/number of spawns and disablers. I main melee-classes and have played with very exceptional players who also main melee-classes and though we played smart we still had runs where we wiped due to the points I mentioned or an overly aggressive AI director. A seasoned player who mains a melee-class and plays smart will indeed have less issues, but if they mained a ranged character they would have an even higher success rate.
Third, I do agree that some of the points raised are client-side issues, but they also fall under the poor coding that I mentioned. In fact, these issues should not exist in the first place and I’m curious as to how difficult it is to successfully fix these issues, if even possible.
Range will always be inherently better than melee, so the talents and mechanics being used to make range more interesting really need a lot more consideration and tweaking. Crit and ammo sustain are the biggest offenders here, as you’re able to bypass certain breakpoints and do it more often from range.
polls tell us for coffee people like a rich dark roast , On tv they watch Documenteries and current affairs and new coke tasted a lot better than coke classic. of course none of which matches actual behaviour.
the two main problems those polls have is that people always answer the question what do you want others to think you do , not what do you actually do.
and then you have the pool of players that accessed it , they all came from the same 2-3% of players that actually go to the games social media, which is not exactly representitive.
but i dont entirely disagree , i dont think ranged classes being overpowered is the actual issue or really the truth. my personal anecdotal experience is that 4 tanks have a way higher legend success rate than than 4 “overpowered” ranged do.
for me its more about just how utterly annoying and boring it is to play with these classes
it may sound fine to the player to have one class or player deleting all secials and elites at range but the game needs everyone to be doing that thats the gameplay loop dealing with these mobs.
its not just mobs being flinched out of range of your kill shot as someone fires through you to try and race to the kill its not just trailing behind waiting/hoping for them to run out of ammo , when the hoard comes and there would in a tank group be met by 4 weapons in a line its now just you with three reversing ranged so now the melee part thats left got a lot worse to.
i am really not sure how they balance it , the nerfs they will need to implement to ranged to bring its dps down to melee levels will be incredibly severe and i dont think they have the stones for that. they could go back to actually limiting ranged ammo pools or even limiting the number of ranged slots in a group but nothing is going to be popular.
and one thing even a ranged hating die hard like me has to admit however its come about this ranged meta is very popular and a lot of people want to play this ranged codtide. maybe the answer is to split the game in two , make a ranged focused que and one for the hand to hand guys. because i dont think the issue is balance the two simply do not play well together.
For me, the problem with the “ranged-meta” is not that ranged classes are excelling at deleting specials or wiping hordes, it’s the fact they do it without any kind of skill required. I wouldn’t mind a pyro outstripping me as a huntsman if the screaming head required some skill - currently it deletes specials, and elites, and a bunch of the horde without having a modicum of skill involved. Same goes for those absolute idiots playing machine-gun WS with the panic button ult. Make the ult require some skill to use rather than just pressing F to delete. Also pls stop peppering the back of my head with arrows thx.
Similarly BH ammo pool is comic and it’s a low skill build to simply pump shots into a horde to recover all your ammo.
So how do you prevent the annoying things happening without losing players?
As a broad answer, alter all of the things that remove skill from the ranged game and make shooting require skill and consideration.
As for nerfing Sienna’s various careers, their ult time etc - she has the absolute worst melee in the game. Forcing a BW or Pyro into more melee than today is a terrible idea without a complete rework of the careers and their weapons. [/quote]
Actually no,
Battle Wizard does melee really well, Pyro maybe not, but Battle Wizard does.
Battle Wizard has the same Skill Tree Skill as a Zealot with +5% power per mob within melee range up to +25% power. So yeah they actually melee really well in a Horde if necessary.
And still I see no problem with sienna not venting on crit, with her staves she can build temp HP to vent fast and easy. In fact I play with barrage on Pyro with FB/Beam and have no problems at all.
Too bad you dont see another problem, most ranged weapons have a lot more damage and cleave then melee, in addition to it, ranged weapon deals the same damage to all enemies it pierce, and melee damage decreaces drastically with every enemy cleaved. I undrestand why ranged is designed in such way, but having almost unlimited ammo on some careers make them a lot more potent damage-wise then any melee weapon.
The Dagger isn’t too far off the Rapier, Its faster and does good headshots. Much like the rapier not as damaging to the body but really good damage to the Head. Where they differ is in the Charged Shot… Rapier does a high damage thrust great for headshots… Dagger does a reverse hold Slash attack, that only does 4.25 damage but burns for two ticks of 3.50 additional and hits multiple targets for 11.25 on multiple targets.
The Second Charged strike while not as good as the Rapier Thrust, is actually very damaging to Armored targets while the Rapier does approx. 40 damage on a charged headshot (with Deathnell)… the Dagger does 22.50 on its second downward stab charged attack and ticks for 2.00 twice for 27.50 damage, (without including World Aflame, unlike the included Deathknell).
EDIT: NOTE… the Dagger like the Flail… on charged shots, goes through shields.
Mace much like Axe is similar headshot damage. Mace is weird to define, there’s no real equivalent Saltz Weapon for this one, so I have to describe it…
The first shot is an Overhead strike which does similar damage to the Axe on Armored targets… technically this should make it crappy in a Horde but the 2nd strike is a clearout strike unlike the Axe whose clearout comes on the 3rd strike. Shockingly the Mace has horde Clearing capability block hold + Strike. The Parry Strike is a sweep much like the Two handed sword does.
Yeah they are surprisingly comparable to Saltz weapons which was why it was easy to pick up Battle Mage after doing WHC.
Listing their stats is meaningless and Sienna has nothing that compares remotely to falchion or even rapier. The dagger is half-decent at hordeclear with dodge dancing, but much Much worse than elf dual weapons or falchion or rapier. The charged attack is terrible, not only because you need two attacks to get to the actual attack, but the 2nd charged is wildly unreliable and will end up doing zero damage half the time. Either because it simply bugs out fully, or by displaying shield against armor, and doing no damage despite a clear hit.
The mace is good for armor headshot, and that’s its. It’s complete unable to fight hordes outside of push attack, meaning it can only be used to get out of a bad situation, it can never be used to fight sustained against a horde.
The sword is… Well again half decent horde clear but much worse than falchion, rapier, any elf weapon. Armor damage is terrible.
I do just that with Dagger on BW… and do that on WHC with Rapier. And I can tell you that when it comes to pure horde mobs yes… the Dagger is comparable to the Rapier.
The only time that changes is the Thrust attacks of the Rapier on Armored targets.
But yes, the Dagger is definitely significantly faster than the Rapier. I’ve been doing headshot horde clearing with WHC since Beta, on the Rapier… and I can do the same things exactly the way I do it on WHC on the BW.
Mace I compare to the Axe, but with better Horde Clearing ability.
Except it doesn’t because broken slot system and it doesn’t have infinite stagger. You consider a weapon that requires push push attack as a good hordeclear?
On any other decent weapon, push and push attack are only used to create space now and then, or to break up enemies when they’re stacking too much. It’s also dreadfully slow.
