I want a Class that doesn't revolve around "i'm good at killing in this way"

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
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Hear me out. I don’t mean to suggest adding a healing class. I just mean what we have now in terms of classes really boils down to “I"m good at killing these types of enemies” and that’s being generous. Many classes are just killing everything and just do so in a different way. That’s all well and good, some classes should be able to be decent at everything. But, what I do think would be cool however, is something with more variety. Example-- class capable of laying stun mines. Deployable cover or barbed wire. Heck, flashbangs, anything except a simplistic weapon. A pysker with a stun, or sleep, or something. Sure, we get stuff like Kruber’s Mercenary class. Let’s be real though, that class is, in practice, a damage dealer more than a utility class. His knockback and Bardin’s Ironbreaker ability are some of the only active abilities that are mostly about providing utility aside and not simply aiding in more killing.

Waywatcher: Kill stuff.
Shade: Kill stuff. (Trying to clutch when 3 others are dead and just using it as invisibility doesn’t count :P)
Handmaiden: … One of the least useful abilities in the game, saved only by its “sort of” useful synergy with +crit and lower cooldown.

Mercenary: Fairly useful utility skill
Foot Knight: Generally utility as well
Huntsman: Kill stuff.
Grail Knight: Kill stuff.

Slayer: Help to kill stuff. Its + attack speed buff and the knock over solidifies this one as a “now go kill stuff” rather than Kruber’s knockback.
Ironbreaker: utility! Very good one too.
Ranger: Utility, but imo a rather poor one.

Sienna: Everything about this character is about burning stuff.

Bounty Hunter: Kill stuff.
Witch Hunter Captain: Help to kill stuff (again, usually when you use this ability it’s when you want to push forward and kill faster. The other times are if your frontline can’t get you out of a sticky situation with their active, which shouldn’t be happening regardless).
Zealot: Definitely kill stuff.

I’m no “solo cata expert” at all. But to me, the class system could be so much more than what it is now. We have: 5 characters, 16 classes. Out of that, really about 4, maybe 5 if I’m being generous here, are what I would personally consider dedicated utility skills.

If they decide to really take advantage of this game’s gorgeous visuals (one of the few things I can confidently say is still top notch) and add a dynamic lighting system where instead of a fairly abstract and irrelevant “bell” sounding, you actually need to pull out a flashlight with your buds and keep an ear to the ground even more than usual-- unless! there’s a class that can generate light for your team.

A class like a tech priest, with multiple different gadgets (4-5 probably) could be awesome. Of course a tech priest usually has actual hardpoint-grade weapons, but for the sake of the game, perhaps they would be gadgets. This way you could have a class that has many, many combinations that offers deep customization that is more than the rather simple stuff we have gotten over the past ~4 (?) years.

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You want a career that relies on their teammates and vice versa? In a coop game? That’s crazy!

In all seriousness. I like the idea of having a career that is more supportive or even entirly support. I always envisioned sienna to have some kind of support subclass. The issue is that a new ‘suuport’ sienna would clash with already existing careers, like battle wizard has crowd control ultimates, unchained has ‘enfeebling flames’ which is dmg red for team. Another issue is that it’s probably very hard to implement, especially in the current state of the game. Why would 3 players need a support hero if they can just kill everything before you could ‘support’ them?

There could be a class that is like overall more support, and i always liked the idea. Ofcourse not a healing career, unless it’s very, very well balanced.

Edit: i don’t know anything about lore, but like a sienna that has access to multiple elements. That would make it so she is difficult and has depth, but idk prob not correct lore wise.

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I’ve been wanting a class that has multiple ways to manipulate the battlefield for ages. Buffs and debuffs, temporary barriers, interesting effects. Make use of the special attack button to allow more versatility on everything.
It might not appeal to the kind of players that hop into quickplay and always have to be prepared to “true solo” next to unreliable teammates, but we’ve got enough of those already.

Even if you just made another basic Sienna class, you could imagine things like

  • Temporary fire barrier (flame wall) that enemies can’t pass through (it would even splat assassins)
  • Fire buff that gives teammates a temporary DoT fire effect on ALL weapons
  • Trapping/Disabling a particular enemy (below monsters/lords) with flames for a while so they can be picked off or don’t become a threat temporarily

And that’s not even a particularly creative concept.

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I don’t quite agree with your summary of each career, but that’s beside the point when looking at the aim of your post.

Funnily enough I think the new Sienna career is most likely to be formed close to what you wish for. It depends of course in which direction Fs choose to take it.

My personal wish would be a pacifist career that buffs your teammates a good bit by not killing. It would buff your teammates increasingly for as long as you don’t kill anything. It would also buff you with diminishing values if you start attacking after a long time if pacifism. If you start killing you’d be back at zero buffs after a shirt whike, and do damage equivalent to maybe a 500 power character on the higher difficulties. It would be similar to building stacks for certain Bl2 builds.

^ This sound degenerated considering the kind of game we’re discussing, but I would love it. Especially going solo or clutching would make for great gameplay. “I kite stuff in order to make my wet noodle a nuke.”

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I think they should add an inquistor career to victor while we’re at it

I was thinking something like the ‘angel of fire’ painting that you can get. A career entirely focused on melee but they can cast like a fireball for their F that goes through enemies to kill specials, so that we don’t have another GK.

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I want muh warhammer killing machines to be not about killing stuff in thousands…
what?

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I wunt mah woerhammer careers to beh dps onleh.

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Thats why nobody wants to play FK and ranger hmmmmmm

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That’s in every game, dps is always the most popular choice. Doesn’t mean supports shouldn’t exist.

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Yeah thats why support dont work in this game

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It works, just not currently. Take a look at high density gamemodes and support has a place. Everything just dies to fast, that was what i mentioned in my first comment.

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I really liked the design of the Medic in Killing Floor 2. Caveat: I haven’t touched this game for more than a year, so I dont know how his kit is nowadays and to which weapons he has access.

The idea of a utility or support oriented career could be viable for Vermintide. I don’t think of party-wide buffs or AoE buffs - we already have plenty of those in the game. Drawing from KF2’s Medic, I’d like to try out some buffs that are directly applied to a single team mate and that have to be regularly reapplied by the player to keep them active.

Movement speed, attack speed, power increase, damage reduction, etc., there are already so many shenanigans that can be worked with.
The ult can be something like giving a team mate 60 tHP in an instant no matter the distance or make a team mate invincible for two seconds or increase his damage by some amount for a few seconds. It should be a very high cooldown ult, probably the highest, to avoid spammability; or rather, scratch offensive options for the ultimate at all and just make it a dedicated life saver if used in the right moment, e.g. free one (all?) incapacitated team mates at once as long as you’re free yourself etc.

I really liked the concept in KF2 and played Medic a lot. Your own damage output is subpar for obvious reasons but your survivability is quite good. You mostly dodge and kite and focus on your own team and not on the enemies themselves. Only exception might be debuffs that you can apply to single enemies. If your team’s dead, you’ll die, too, sooner or later. It’s a coop-game in the end.

A purely support-oriented career can be very hard to balance, though. It has to have strong enough mechanics to justify losing one fourth of a team’s offensive strength but it still can’t offer insane buffs. Just writing this post, so many cheesy strats and possible exploits of above mentioned mechanics already came to my mind, it made me sad immediately. But I’d give it a try anyway, at least internally.

Edit: I read a meme comment on reddit the other day, advocating a new career with only two ranged weapons. Come to think of it, the support career could actually do this. No melee damage whatsoever, only two ranged options: buff and debuff. Of course, blocking is still possible and some close range damage output has to be possible (like with Beam Staff’s shotgun blasts). It surely would make for a completely unique playstyle.

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Standing around and doing basically nothing is simply not a good concept in a game as frentic as this. Why are weapon traits that are not SS so unpopular? Why was old BW’s shtick of being able to reach 100% BCR just that: a shtik? Because standing around holding m2 and blocking is not a fun and engaging concept. “Manipulating the battlefield” is on a similar level. You wanna be able to kill stuff. Every second you are not killing or damaging something, or helping other players to damage or kill stuff, you are essentially doing nothing.

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You would still have melee and ranged weapons. You’d simply be lacking in personal combat steroids and instead focus on supporting yourself and your team with buffs. Your comment here is a strawman.

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Multiple element magic would work perfectly fine in 40k. That’s what I mentioned above-- a Psyker is basically a magician. The lore is mostly “soft” in terms of how it builds its magic system. There are hard rules regarding the relationship of a magician to chaos-- if you use magic, you’re using chaos energy. But, in terms of what you can actually do with the magic, it’s mostly up to the user. Lightning, fire, and generic “mind attacks” are all pretty common.

As for the folks who clearly did not read the entire OP, let me be clear: in games, life, pretty much anywhere, being proactive is almost always going to be more useful to you than being passive, yes this is true. However, there’s a big difference between games and real life. And that is that games can curate a specific type of experience. For example, many people are saying “well, this game is about killing first and foremost”. Well let’s see then. A few of my suggestions could make things less about killing. #1: Lighting management. #2: Objectives that must be completed other than “press E on this object”.

But even then-- it’s not true that games focused on combat generally have no need of support classes. Look at MMOs-- raids are similar in nature to Vermintide. Team composition, teamwork, and individual skill all matter. And, you will of course find many players using support classes, even though most raids end with bosses that you must kill.

TLDR, I used to be in the “fix the game, then make more content” camp. Seeing as how that’s not something Fatshark can do at a satisfactory speed, I think what we need to turn to for making the game more interesting is adding content that gives the game variety. Because although it’s true that support classes and many other interesting ideas wouldn’t work so well in the series, who knows what Darktide is really like? Maybe we will get a polished game with a few new features that encourage the above requests.

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Only support or not. Going ranged only used to be good fun with the beam. That would be some of the patches before 2.0 (increased non-track on dodge, bit after wigglemancer).

My suggestion for a pacifist class is not really serious to 95% because it would be too unpopular, but the core fun for me from such a concept is that you have to focus more on other mechanics. Same would go for a range only, with or without support. As Mattie mentioned, the greatest problem is that offence truly is the best defence in this game in almost all situations. Thus killing power > defence.

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Indeed, unusual for a fire mage.

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Na, not really, it’s trying to draw an analogy to something we already had that was, to a certain degree, not oriented around damage output, and it was a gimmick and simply not an exciting concept. The game’s mechanics are too simple and revolve too much around simply around killing, it has a very distinct ebb and flow. In the time you “manipulate the battlefield”, you could be killing stuff or helping your teammates kill stuff. It is not an engaging concept, and it never will be in this game. Killing Floor 2 does a very good job in this regard to showcase this: it is co op, it has different classes, but even those that are - supposedly - more of a supportive nature (Medic and Support) are highly geared towards offensive power or supporting your teammates’ offensive power? Why? Because it is simply not fun standing around and babysitting your teammates or “manipulating” enemies while your teammates have a blast shooting their guns and swinging their swords.
VT2 has very juicy, impactful melee combat and meaningful ranged combat. That is what you have to compete with. All attempts, so far, to give us something designed to a more “defensive” nature has been completely left in the dust and ignored by the majority of players. I see very little evidence that made me believe a new carreer completely focused on this concept would add anything worthwile. We can all accept that VT2 is not a tactically demanding strategy game, but a (not mindless, mind you, on the contrary!) first person hack n slash that is soooo much fun because it knows what it wants to be. Giving us more of the same, but in a different way, is the way to go. GK is true testament to this fact: He falls somewhere between Merc, Shade and Slayer, does something similar to them, but with Kruber’s weapons, quests, and a slightly different approach.

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Such is life for Sienna. She likes it that way though.

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Yea i don’t want a support career that just ignites and stands around waiting. If a career has alot of support talents it would make it engaging to use all of them. Example: imagine a new Sienna career; you ignite teammates to give them a attack speed buff, then you put up a fire wall cutting off a pathway for enemies to pathfind to you, meanwhile you debuff an enemy with melee, gotta re apply melee buff to teammates, ultimate on an ally to make him invincable for a couple seconds, etc… That’s how it’s playing out in my head, a big mechanic f#ck fest where you have to pay attention to alot, just like a real support.

I don’t agree that a support has to be 100% block battle wizard, where i ignite, wait, repeat. It can be made engaging and also be alright in melee and range, just not have ‘melee or range’ boosting talents, like @Rebel mentioned.

I do agree that that kind of support doesn’t really have a place currently, as dps outweighs such a heavy support career, or even careers which have more stagger support or temphp options are already very good and the best support you could provide generally. Like why take a support heavy career, when you could take whc/merc/bw/ib and have all the support you ever need, so u unfortunately i don’t see it working, as you can reach ‘heavy support’ by combining multiple careers.

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