I can't help but notice that Rampart still exists for some unfathomable reason

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
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rampart is terrible
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So, I continue to hate Rampart. Before any of you cretins tell me to just get good because you personally don’t find Rampart a big deal, first of all feel free to leave a reply and I will not read it, and second of all, the issue isn’t one of difficulty, the issue is one of Fun. If you think ‘get good’ is an appropriate answer, you may not be aware that Fun is a thing that some people seek when playing video games.

To support my position, a thought experiment:

Consider a hypothetical player who is highly skilled at fighting monsters in melee. The sort of player who can go toe to toe with a chaos spawn and not take any damage. Rampart is meaningless to this player; it contributes nothing to the experience. It may as well not exist. In other words, it is not fun.

Next consider a hypothetical player who loves ranged weapons. This is the kind of player who specifically plays almost exclusively as heavy ranged careers, IE Huntsman Markus, Waystalker Kerillian, Ranger Bardin, Engineer Bardin, Bounty Hunter Victor, and Pyromancer Sienna. In other games they’re the Sniper, they always get the longest range gun they can, they love nothing more than getting consecutive headshots. To this player Rampart is the worst thing in the game. Even if it isn’t cripplingly difficult to fight against, it hacks off half or more of their entire class. Every class ability or talent related to ranged damage is rendered moot, and whatever skill this player has built up with ranged weapons that they are presumably proud of becomes unusable. This is boring and infuriating, and likely makes the player feel singled out and bullied because Rampart obviously disproportionately affects players who pick the range heavy careers. Great, what a waste of time. Why even bother picking Engineer Bardin if there’s a pretty good chance that one or more of the monsters you’ll fight in the chaos wastes is just going to arbitrarily say no screw you that thing specifically you like doing doesn’t work at all. In other words, it is extremely not fun.

In summary, if a player does not rely on ranged weapons when fighting monsters, they get nothing from Rampart, and if a player does rely ranged weapons when fighting monsters, they get shafted. This is a game mechanic that is either ignored or hated. Being crippling for one set of players and negligible for another doesn’t balance out and make it interesting. It just sucks. Please make it do something else.

I mean especially if my bots are all going to very consistently get ruined by walking into every single exploding skull.

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git gud lol

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well difficulty is a substantial part of fun you can’t separate it, its about finding the right amount.

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Your whole argumentation contains a lot of open flanks.

Take your first hypothetical player. He can go toe to toe with a chaos spawn and not take any damage. He can feel the thrill of meleeing the most gruesome monsters to death. And now comes a bounty hunter around and simply nukes the monster out of existence. He has lost his thrill and fun. Rampart makes a world of difference to him as he is finally able to use his skill instead of just watching monster being laughed at from range. Rampart makes his experience a better one. To be fair, there is a heavy argument that there are other career skills which make a similar depressing experience of removing monsters without much hassle. And I would like to see this tackled as well. I think Shade and Grail Knight are the ones to be mentioned here. However, what I have seen from the code you can’t simply block the damage from career skills that easily. But I would totally support GK’s career skill to be counted as ranged attack just for the giggles and him no longer having an advantage against Rampart monsters and also him no longer getting THP from career skill similar to Bounty Hunter. For Shade I would like to see this too but her career skill is a “mode” so I am not sure if this can be done in that manner.

Other than that melee heavy players are more affected by: Crippling, Cursed Aura, Frenzy, Shield-Shatter and Warchief. All these marks are more dangerous for melee players and less consequential for ranged players. That some ranged player continue to whine about the single mark which affects them more than melee players seems kinda weak and spoiled.

Also, fun is subjective. A lot of people on higher difficulty get their fun from overcoming challenge and Rampart is part of that.

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Nearly all the grudemarks affect some more than others, like a shadowstep mino vanishing in the middle of his combo right as you dodge only to appear in the direction you were escaping. And thus landing a perfect overhead right on you, or a ogre/troll doing the same but instead doing a home-run sending you flying over a cliff to instant death. You think it´s particularly fun to be melee into that? Its death all the same.

Or when you got a relentless/Crippling shieldbreaker not-a-stormfiend, good luck not getting your ass smacked to oblivion.

…

Comparatively, a monster that´s just immune to ranged damage feels pretty mild, sure you wont kill him with a minigun but you are not horrendously dead from going near either.

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yeah, I hate a lot rampart.

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Because rampart for the most part is not some unfathomable challenge that you cannot overcome. Every single monster enemy in this game is soloable with just using a melee weapon. (Yeah ranged careers also have those)
Good portion of people at this point don’t really care that 1 boss out of maybe 5, won’t be getting instantly deleted by some ranged powerhouse without it being able to do anything meaningful.

You got mods like Warchief that require significantly more from the 4 player party than rampart ever will.
Just because ranged careers have 1 mod that they need to give a crap about is not a issue.

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I used to think that rampart was ok but as time has gone on I definitely see why people don’t like it, I think it definitely targets a few classes maybe a little too harshly and making them significantly less useful and less fun to play. However I also think there are definitely better ways that rampart could be implemented rather than completely removed from the game.

Instead of completely negating damage it could have resistance instead, therefore not completely nullifying ranged characters damage whilst still giving somewhat of a challenge.

Another option could be similar to invincible in that it switches between an active and an inactive state, keeping it’s range nullifying properties and making timing ranged attacks during a fight alot more engaging and strategic.

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Monsters already have innate resistance to any ranged damage that isnt DoT(bypass rampart anyhow?) based, any noticeable raise and they are basically immune anyway given melee will just be better.

We already got this, it´s called invincible and it applies to everything when its active. Adding a ranged specific variant feels silly.

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hmm maybe swap it with “Suppression” where periodicly the monster would stop charge up a omnidirectional wave attack that causes a debuff where you cant use ranged and perhaps abilities for a while and get slowed a little, and make it so that you can take cover to avoid this attack

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While i am not against this idea as it is, i fear that the implementation will result in bugs like the weapon swapping shrines were you just end up completely disarmed and it doesnt actually stop unless you die.

Now this bug usually doesnt go so far and instead only last for a few seconds or so, but i have had the permanently-until-dead cases a few times too so i cant help but be worried.

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well instead of literally disarming you you could just get a dmg debuff, and an initial visual indicator akin to getting hit by a flamer rat

but yeah bugs are to be expected, but if we use that argument to dismiss any change we wouldn’t have anything new.

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You are right, doing naught due to worrying something somewhat bad MIGHT happen is silly :sweat_smile:

But i am more for seeking roundabout solutions that indirectly accomplish the goal, like your suggestion of a debuff or such, since i feel like they´d be less prone to strange problems.

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That’s why I like to leave topics like this to a poll.

  • Rampart is fun!
  • Rampart is awful!
  • I’m too cool to care, but I still want to use the poll!
0 voters
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I would give a constructive response here but i feel obligated to use the poll option that you dedicated such effort into :sweat_smile:

No but seriously, rampart or even the other grudemarks do not have to be fun outright, the main point is variance and keeping things from being too same-same. The grudemark does crap on ranged but so what really? Several of them crap on melee just as hard if not harder. Even a skilled melee player wont be able to do much about getting aggro from a shieldbreaker mino/spawn early on without help.

Cursed aura similarly is a death sentence too if you do not get help or get even slightly unlucky.

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well i guess the difference is that rampart says NO!
and these super hard melee modifiers only say NO! …but maybe

in practice im on your side, in effect they make a boss extremly hard to melee

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I think i´ll take “i gotta kills this one slowly” over " i am 'bouta get my ass whooped by a giant angry Rat/beef/tentacle horror on legs" :sweat_smile:

Not entirely convinced that being unable to max damage against a monster is even nearly as bad as having a great chance of dying from said monster running at you. Which they all tend to do nonstop given any choice in the matter.

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Putting a lot of effort into a response doesn’t make it constructive. “Work harder not smarter” is my motto.

I still think this comes down to a subjective interpretation of how fun Rampart is. You’re saying Rampart keeps things fresh, but I think those who have decided Rampart is not fun aren’t worried about how “same-same” the game will be with it gone. If you care more about the variety of grudge marks than how fun the individual grudge marks are, then that’s a subjective value you have.

I don’t care for Rampart compared to cursed aura or the one that makes you hurt yourself when you hit the monster too much. I think the reason I feel that way is probably that Rampart simply doesn’t allow for any kind of ranged damage, it even stops bombs while the melee ones haven’t completely removed the viability of any character’s ult or one of their weapons. I avoid playing characters that rely on ranged-attacks because there simply aren’t as many boons for them. Then upgrading ranged weapons can be a waste of resources when you encounter an enemy you can’t shoot. I often play something like Mercenary with Handgun, and only upgrade my melee weapon. If it weren’t for Rampart and there were a few boons for Ranged characters, I’d be more inclined to choose them.

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Fair enough, though i´d like to believe that my issue with this whole thing is that its question of fairness. Having one grudemark that´s a bad for ranged is nothing much at all compared to having multiple ones that are relatively worse for melee. Then removing the ranged mark because some babies cant stomach some difficulty? That´s just setting a bad precedent while also being biased. Not cool.

I really cant say i support that idea at all, its just saying that some people complaining is enough to remove a grudemark, then the next one, and another one. Then they are all gone and we are back to not having em at all which to be fair, some people do want.

As for playing ranged or not, i think its just entirely a matter of preference, sure a ranged boss killer takes a bad hit from rampart being in play…but on the other hand, that should be a relatively small part of the chaos expedition given how rare grudemarks are these days. Kinda like how there might be fewer directly ranged centric boons than melee ones, but on the other hand, its hard to go wrong with more power&crit& cooldown which helps with anything.

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True, more power and crit will help range too. Grudge marks are also less common now.

I think the worst thing about it is that it’s just entirely immune to ranged attacks. Perhaps if it had a similar function to other melee grudge marks it wouldn’t seem so unfair. The worst combination is when you get Regeneration on Rampart, and nobody has good Melee DPS or you’re down a few players, so you can’t overcome the regen.

Most cases the meta favors Battle Wiz for taking out grudge marks now. Not much it can do against stacking fire damage. I’ve had one Lingering Flames build slowly take down a grudge mark without much help from the team. They just defended against the shield-breaking, regenerating, warchief minotaur until it burned to death.

Oh, also seen people cheese them with the burning flames while downed and Morr’s Protection.

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