One of the biggest problems of transparency in Vermintide 2 was the lack of way to actually see what your attacks do and hidden mechanics behind them which, in my experience with playing and teaching 20+ people how to play, often lead to new players being frustrated when trying anything above the Veteran difficulty.
I’ve even seen friends that tried out the game themselves drop the game when they hit the Veteran to Champion jump because they didn’t really understand what was happening but after showing them the sanctioned armory mod and a couple of guides that explain the actual mechanics it became one of their favorite games and have racked hundreds of hours into it.
The tooltips on weapons in VT2 and even the new UI weapon wheel are kinda misleading and don’t really allow for new players to start thinking about weapon combos for hordes/armor/berserkers and leads to button mashing which makes the game boring and leads to less player retention because regular player often don’t engage with out of game guides, mods and dataminer that allow them to see how the game actually works which would allow them to engage more with the game itself and get more enjoyment out of it.
It’s no wonder the sanctioned armory mod is one of the most popular mods in VT2 and , although hero power complicates things a little bit, the way that damage/cleave/stagger and other mechanics are shown there is easily readable/understandable and it would be the greatest Quality of Life addition to Darktide if we could see weapon information in a similar fashion ingame for all the new players 40k will bring in.
Yes. Armory and Bestiary mods are currently the only in-game means to learn about linesman/heavy linesman/tank cleave modifiers for weapons, dodge range bonus, dodge count… so many hidden mechanics in this game. And even these mods don’t tell you about the weapons’ finesse (headshot) rating : that’s to be figured out through testing
Probably took me 200 hours and a year to figure it all out
+1.
Detailed informations are needed in a game that allows for breakpoints. Dont want to use third party sites again, though i am quite sure they will soon exist after release.
They’ve stated that they are changing the weapon damage system though. Weapons will no longer all do the same damage. Each weapon type has a damage range and individual weapons fall into that somewhere (sort of like Borderlands, I suppose). Breakpoints can still be calculated but it will be harder to do because it will be on an individual basis.
That may be the case, but even with such a system the breakpoint math is already established. You start with the lowest point and go from there. Thoughwe have to see the potential buffs first i suppose.
I have also heard that we will be able to mod the difficulty of runs, like spawning more hordes but less specials or more specials and less hordes or more of both. I assume this will also determine what kind of weapons will be useful in potentially diverse runs.
Still, the more information is given the better we can prepare.
even if it is on a sliding scale then they can just put up a damage number and a tooltip that just shows the armor class damage reductions against that kind of attack(armor, super armor, berserker etc.), a simplified breakpoint calculator that just shows you the end result. The philosophy since VT1 was that showing data scares off new players but in practice it has been proven that it’s completely opposite, the more data you give to a new player the more he will engage with the deep combat system and it will be much less frustrating