It seems you’re basically locked into ranged in order to deal damage to it. For anybody trying to hit it in melee (especially the weakspot) you are severely hampered by multiple factors:
The snail trail constantly slows, corrupts, and interrupts you if you are standing next to it.
The huge tail prevents you from standing directly behind it to hit the weakpoint.
Standing in front of it too close will get you hit with an instant grab attack. Avoidable when it’s just you and the boss but sometimes not due to terrain or other enemies
I’m pretty sure it moves faster than we do so you would have to waste stamina catching up if someone else is kiting it. This isn’t even considering the snail trail that makes staying behind it impossible in hallways or walkways
Then there are the issues that affect everyone.
There’s no head weakspot at all. The stormfiend from V2 had a head weakpoint that was just armored heavily to encourage people to hit the backrat instead, which I think is a better design overall.
The grab attack is way too fast and has no cooldown. If you get vored and spat out right in front of the beast, there is a chance it vores you again before you have a chance to do anything. This is really silly in my opinion.
Why is Ogryn the only class that can free a vored character with grenade or ult? I’m all for Ogryn being useful in specific circumstances but this one feels a bit arbitrary. Although I’m not sure whether Vet grenade is able to free trapped teammates, so if Vet players want to chime in on that feel free. However I know for a fact that nothing Psyker or Zealot does can actually stagger the beast to get it to spit someone out.
Overall this makes for a pretty uninteresting boss to fight. One person kites, other 3 shoots it in the back. It changes aggro, ad nauseam. Melee classes have a really rough time hitting the weakspot in most circumstances due to how high it is and the other reasons mentioned earlier, so Veteran again shows up as the ideal class to play if one of these fat fellas shows up.
I much prefer the Plague Ogryn, and he’s not even that interesting.
I agree. The mechanics feel like they’re creating an arbitrary difficulty. I tend to avoid melee due to the corruption damage the snail trail does. A character with high corruption might not be able to melee it at all due to this, and following it the many corridors (due to kiting) is very punishing.
It was also a mechanic that allowed players to reliably trade aggro and force it to charge in (and stop using the warp flamethrower).
The worst part is it tends to fixate on one person for an unreasonably long time. I’ve had games where I’ve been yelled at by squadmates because… I’m kiting it. Yeah, that’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it? I’m pulling it away from the group, so you can all shoot the weakpoint, while throwing a few rounds at it myself.
Not my fault the damn thing chased me to one end of the map and back again.
Honestly at least mutants have a windup where they moan before charging. It’s usually not dodgeable in a thick horde but at least you can hear when you’re about to be thrown around like a football for a minute straight.
The beast has the fastest grab attack in the game despite being built like a literal mountain of poop. When we finally get the armored Chaos Spawn, are they gonna have their old grab attack with an actual windup when this new boss has powercrept them already? lol
Sure. But dodging mutants is awkward at best and if they spend their time charging, tossing, charging again (before you recover) you be in for a real bad time.
If only I could dodge a mutant as an ogryn, size makes that damn impossible. I have a rumbler and that alone generally made fighting that thing a pita, sure it takes nice damage from the hit itself but it requires me to time my shots when it stops moving to vomit, while I run away while kiting it.
Now of course I got lucky when I golded my rumbler and got sticky nades which is just all hilarious against bosses.
I can outrun it with a high mobility force sword, and there are faster weapons
Then you can also trick it into the terrain, go up, jump down, waste a lot of its time
If you do have a slower weapon, nothing wrong with that, just try to waste its time as much as you can before getting swallowed or before it changes target
The biggest difficulty to me is indeed the slime trail that limits your kiting options, can’t do the same loop over and over unlike with the Plague Ogryn
And it does get hectic when the game also decides to spawn a horde and a few specials at the same time
I don’t think it’s hard, but it’s harder than Plague Ogryn for sure
Still fairly easy to manage with competent teammates, unless you get two veterans who decided they were going to do their no shoot penance and ruin the run
I’m most concerned that the Beast of Nurgle doesn’t act “happy” enough when playing with the PCs. I was looking forward to a giant diseased puppy of pestilence.
This is something that’s sorely lacking across the entire game. There’s none of Papa Nurgle’s joviality, or flippant disregard for death. They’re all just angsty Chaos cultists and losers who could just as easily be exchanged with any other baseline cult.
I once shared the idea of large hordes singing together like Christmas carollers whenever combat starts - awful, droning, groaning, way-too-happy songs - but I know there’s a snowman’s chance in Hell of that ever making an appearance in the game.
I dunno, the Tox Flamers capture the spirit of Nurgle pretty well. And the Dreg cultist mooks do actually have some pretty unnerving chants as they charge into battle during a horde sometimes. I’m all for more Happy Grandpappy worship, though.
That said, my main problem with the Beast isn’t just that the grab attack has no cooldown. It’s that the Beast will keep attempting to eat you even if you dodge it once. I’ve had the Beast attempt to grab me three times after dodging its grab before it snatched me and then proceeded to carry me straight into another tile. Speaking of which, does the Beast release players after taking a certain amount of damage? Because I’ve seen players sit inside it for what felt like around 30 seconds or more.
The saving grace is that the Beast can’t climb ladders. Above all, the Beast’s threat level depends largely on the map you’re fighting it on. Lots of height elevations force it to path around the ramps, and open maps give you room to avoid the slime. Cramped, flat areas, meanwhile, are a complete pain.
The beast will spit you out eventually although I don’t know whether it’s based on time, damage taken, or some other random variable.
@muscarine I agree that it isn’t super difficult. I am mostly commenting on how its design makes it pretty boring to fight against. As you said, all you really do is kite it while other people shoot it in the back. Melee classes are kiting for days or magdumping it instead of actually using their melee focused kit to fight it, which I think is really an indicator that the boss is badly designed.
I was hoping for a more interesting boss but it seems to just be a worse version of the V2 Stormfiend.
I 100% agree with you. Complete trash design and i would be so much happier to just see this boss scrapped and tossed in the trash never to be seen again. Every boss in vermintide 2 was very well made with good counterplay options and this boss is just a walking piece of design trash. One of the worst bossfights ive seen in years of gaming in general. I dunno who came up with this but i really hope they are not designing anything else for this game.
Agreed. It’s very easy to melt this thing if you have a competent team and someone kites it away from the veteran sharpshooter, allowing them to just hose down that weakspot. Barring that, I’ve never yet managed to actually successfully fight that thing one-on-one. It just insta-grabs me and that’s it. Very annoying to fight this thing, overall.
That being said, you can actually make it spit out any eaten players. I just had one match where I saw it slurp someone down, and I chucked a frag at its belly. It immediately spat out our unfortunate zealot.
He doesn’t feel like he has enough attacks. I only ever see tail slam, eat and puke. I guess the slime could be considered its own attack. There is so much penalty attempting to melee him that unless you have a thunder hammer you aren’t ever going to make that interaction worthwhile.
As for grenades stumbling, I really miss the VT2 bomb interaction where they provided that stagger hit on the throw and not seconds later. I had a round where I threw a grenade at the beast after he ate a player and it blew up as he was turning so he spat him out basically inside his model and ate him again in the same frame. That attack could use an internal fairness cooldown like the Bestigores being unable to charge 1 player more than once every 10 seconds in VT2. If a player that was just eaten was temporarily outside of its attack order it would be a lot less annoying.
As far as I can tell, Ogryn charge and frag grenades are the only two things that can make the Beast spit someone out. Maybe exploding barrels can, too? Not sure.
The Beast’s current problem is that he’s trivial and boring to fight at best, and downright oppressive at worst on Heresy and Damnation. This depends a lot on the current map where you’re fighting him; open maps with lots of elevations make the Beast very easy to fight (he can’t climb ledges), while cramped and flat maps amplify his threat factor. Melee-heavy teams also struggle more against the Beast, while ranged-heavy teams with multiple Veterans can shred it before it even gets a chance to eat. Compare to the Plague Ogryn, which gives both ranged and melee builds opportunities to hit the boss from any angle.
My off-the-cuff suggestions to make fighting a Beast feel more fair:
Make its mouth a weakpoint. You could even give it armor like the Stormfiend in VT2, thus making the head/mouth a ‘consolation weakpoint’ and encouraging players to hit the Beast from behind without screwing over anyone in front of it.
Reduce the duration of the slime. This would make fighting the Beast on cramped maps just a little less punishing, especially on cramped maps where Beast slime accumulates quickly.
Give the grab a much longer animation. The difference between the Beast’s grab and the VT2 Chaos Spawn’s grab is night and day. The Chaos Spawn grab hits only one side of the Spawn, which is mechanically interesting because it forces players to dodge in a unique way to avoid it. It’s also slow, meaning that if you get grabbed, you either messed up the dodge or you + your team didn’t clear enough space for you to make the dodge. Plus, the Spawn can only grab once before it goes on an internal cooldown. All of this feels fair. The Beast’s grab, meanwhile, is fast and can occur multiple times in a row if you dodge it. There’s very little counterplay; fighting a Beast is basically playing a roulette of who’s going to get eaten first (provided you don’t kill it before it gets a chance to eat). The quick grab animation compounds with how many weapons in this game have short dodge distances and how depleting your stamina cripples your dodge until you fully regenerate stamina (you probably are out of stamina, too, because you were just sprinting away from the Beast). All of this, in practice, feels unfair if you happen to fight the Beast in the wrong tileset.
There’s a more drastic change we could maybe make to the Beast, as well: turn him into a primarily ranged boss. Instead of constantly chasing players to barf on/eat, the Beast could instead spend most of his time at range puking everywhere, a little like a Stormfiend. When he gets hungry, he could then start following a player, attempting to eat them before giving up and resuming his pukefest. It’d give the Beast a much more unique fight design compared to the Plague Ogryn (who is basically a copy/paste of the VT2 Minotaur except a bit tamer). We’ll have to see how the Chaos Spawn from the intro trailer translates to this game first before we consider unique encounter profiles, though.
Can we throw a grenade into its mouth Doom-style to do big damage?
The monstrosities all feel like alpha state enemies with incomplete movesets. All the beast does is move around, vomit, and vore with almost none of it being impactful. It’s biggest threat is in its death where it can push everyone off the railings.
If no one at Fatshark can think of any moves fitting for the Beast of Nurgle, maybe have Nurglings or Glitchlings mess with players during the fight that rot out once the boss dies. They could be as simple as mobile bombs that detonate on contact with quickly deteriorating movement speed and hp while off the slime. That’s a spawn animation, walk cycle, and death animation. The detonation animation could be the same as the spawn animation but in reverse. The models can probably be ripped from Total War. I know Dawn of War 2 models where ripped for countless other 40k titles in the past.
I don’t mind him as a boss, he’s maybe a little too easy. He’s just a roaming hazard that’s only a threat when other fights are going on. I think the only grenade that won’t dislodge a devoured player is the Zealot stun grenade. The slime trail doesn’t do much corruption damage so dipping in and out of it isn’t too bad. With just a bit of corruption resist even being eaten hardly does any corruption damage. With his slow speed and being a huge target he’s extremely vulnerable to weapons with high Unyielding damage bonuses. One or two people on your team with heavy Unyielding hitting weapons will body Beasts of Nurgle quick.
All reasonable points, but my main complaint wasn’t about how hard the beast is, just how it is very boring to fight (especially for melee classes). The slime trail is wildly annoying because of how much it slows you and makes using your ranged weapon mandatory to hit the weakspot in most confines. I agree that he’s not very dangerous to deal with, he’s just not very interesting to fight at all. Like you said, melee class just kites and your vet just blasts him to death in 10 seconds.