Item Power Infusion

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
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I am a huge fan of the perpetual endgame that we see in games like Diablo 3, and would like to see some of that carry over into Vermintide. It sounds like winds of magic will achieve this from a challenge perspective, but I wanted to make a suggestion for equipment progression. The concept of breaking down many items for an incremental increase in power of a target item has been used often, with varying degrees of success. I’m not attached to any numbers below, but a number must be chosen for a discussion to be had.

I would like to be able to upgrade a single stat on a piece of gear by 5% of the maximum value using 10 dust. For example 20% health on a neck would change to 21% health by infusing it with 10 red dust, essentially allowing us to create powerful weapons of lore. If you were so inclined you could invest 200 reds (20 infusions at 10 dust each) to enhance your weapon from 10% vs Chaos to 20%, or 5-10% attack speed. That is a massive investment that results in a substantial gain, but gives the player choice over how to invest their resources which we do not have currently.

Additionally I would like to see this same method applied to orange gear to allow it to be taken to max value, but not above. That would enable to people to “create” red values with a substantial investment of orange dust. For example a 5% chaos, 3% AS sword could be maxed at 10 & 5 by investing 180 orange dust (10+8 infusions @ 10 dust each).

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It’s important that there is a cap on what you get from your equipment, so you can start to develop and continue with your own skill.
This is especially important if there should be leaderbords like FS intends to do.

You can get far in this game with your skill alone unlike other games. This is in my view what makes Vermintide a special and brilliant game.

Allowing players to use such crutches will hurt it immensely just as already implemented ones such as temp hp and power creep have.

About upgrading stats and hero power etc. (but not over cap). It’s all about the bad crafting system. You can find lot’s of topics about it but it’s an inherited problem that V1 already suffered.

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This is simply power creep.

I’d much rather see an entirely new moveset for each character. There are some weapons that just require more skill to play. HM 2h sword, Kruber Sword and Shield, Kruber Longbow, Conflag Staff…

OR a rework of a load of the traits to make them viable and different options for your build.

increasing the skill level required by the players is always going to add more depth to the game rather than just GIMME MOAR POWAHHH!

Next thing you know we’ll have a class that can survive on 1hp, max out THP and go postal into a patrol with little concern… oh wait…

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You’re right, it is powercreep. When we’re adding additional difficulty levels and a scaling end-game does that really matter though? Diablo has power creep that enables people to do rifts one level higher or 1 second faster than before. It’s a reward for mastering content, which makes that lower-tier content easier in the future. Creating gameplay that requires more skill is certinely a path for players to feel progression, but sometimes depending on a persons mood, fulfilling a power fantasy is more enjoyable.

An infusion system would provide another path for players to feel progression beyond a loot roll for a red, or checking an achievement box. Yes there would be power creep, but I believe it would be minimal and inconsequential to game balance.

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Modded realm is where you can get that.

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Any form of % improvement is a little out-of-bounds. +1% damage to Chaos would be… ridiculous on top of our +10% we were already getting.

I agree that going on a power-trip feels awesome (going absolutely ballistic and cleaning out a Chaos Patrol feels good, right?), but I think it’s somewhat senseless if you also raise the difficulty. The artificial buff of a Strength Potion is awesome because it’s temporary; getting permanently stronger and then raising the difficulty of the game… means nothing changes. We already did the power-creep from levels 1-30 and slowly incremented our gear. Champ is to a level 30 what Recruit was to a level 10 with slight spawn changes.

I’m a fan of the version of the game where the end-game is the same as middle but requires you to have learned. More of that gets an A+.

EDIT: I do, however, think an infusion system for orange items makes sense. I would be happy to see a world where you can upgrade them (for a very hefty cost) to raise their stats up to slowly advance a gun you’ve had for 5 months towards it’s better version, but I’d still cap it at the same point a Veteran item is capped at. It’d provide some more worth to the crafting system… but hopefully the system is overhauled anyways.

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While I’d love to have a resource sink for my thousands of Scrap and hundreds of dusts, this isn’t the way to do it. As you admit yourself, it’s blatant power creep, and there’s been enough concerns about that already with turning things more reliable in the game (allowing for more consistent dodging, for example) and with the latest set of weapons.

It matters, a lot in fact. I, along with others, have raised my concerns about the promised new difficulty and raised level cap. If the latter adds more Hero Power, it makes the earlier difficulties (particularly Legend) even easier than they are now, and will probably effectively make the new difficulty feel the same as Legend is now (depending how it’s actually done, of course). Your “infusions” would have a lot of the same effect, and as people already have way more resources saved then I do, including possibly 100+ Bright Dust and saved chests, they could (and would) jump in power immediately. Also, even a 1% increase in, say, any Power Vs. Property could allow reaching new breakpoints, which in turn could effectively double the power in the particular situation, if that breakpoint is for 1-hit kill.

No, it isn’t. While it does make tho lower-end content easier, it’s a reward for grinding, not mastering anything. I also don’t feel any particular reason to make old content any easier, especially because people have actually asked for FS to add more difficult stuff. It won’t be any easier for the people that would need that ease, anyway.

It’s never inconsequential. There are already a few breakpoints in the game that require playing off the synergies in how Properties stack, and that’s only worth a couple of percents at nest. Also things like making dodging more reliable for everyone, while seemingly a small change worthy of one line in patch notes, has made some aspects of the game a lot easier. Everything affects game balance. Besides, if WoM will have some sort of leaderboards, everyone will need to be on the same starting line for it to be fair in any way. With your suggestion, the people who have played for a long time already would have a huge edge beyond even the simple experience and skill, and one that wouldn’t be going away at any point. It would be bad design from the start. This isn’t Diablo. And don’t say “it could be disabled for that”, as making a new system that needs to be disabled for a gamemode isn’t a good idea either. It would effectively say “we did all this work for a new system, but it creates imbalance and we knew it already”.

I remeber starting from nothing in VT1, climbing my way there up the difficulties, to still losing my first run in VT2, to making the jump to Champion and then Legend, and now I’ve been playing Twitch Deeds and hypertwitch. How’s that for progression? By looking back what you’ve struggled through you can appreciate what you’ve learned, and your own skills improving is really the most significant progression in this game. It was nice to have some sort of power curve so that I didn’t need to learn everything at once, but my own skills improving is what has gotten me to the level I’m at, and it makes me feel a lot more awesome that getting to grind for another small increment to my character’s damage.

I also happen to think that power progression that is uncapped, or with an arbitrarily high cap, will end up being a crutch, as it has in many other games. Why try to improve my skills when I can just grind for a while and gain an edge that way? This also reminds me of what I dislike about certain kinds of bragging rights rewards in games… “To get this ultimately powerful weapon, you need to prove that you don’t need it.” Cosmetic bragging rights rewards are okay; that kind isn’t in my book.

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This is a game about challenge and skill, not progression. Progression is nice, but if it undermines the challenge, then it only hurts the game in the end. Power creep is absolutely the worst possible thing that can happen to V2.

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All the power creep points raised (by @Torantolis @Yzneftamz @RandomLurker ) are valid, and after thinking about it more I agree completely. Being able to one shot a chaos warrior with a sword could become a real possibility and that diminishes the skill aspect of the game, as well as enjoyment of team mates when everything gets one-shot.

So I will retract my desire for above current max level rolls, but I still believe that allowing orange infusion up to max would be a good feature to have. It can allow new players to get themselves on the same footing as a veteran, equipment wise, through creating a path to a max rolled orange rather than the randomness of waiting for a red to drop. It would also enable collector types to create their own armory of max-rolled oranges with purple skins.

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If only Exotic-quality (and lower, probably) items were to be able to be enhanced, something else would need to be done for the Veteran items to separate them from Exotics. Which, in all honesty, I’ve been asking for before. After all, apart from visuals, having automatic maximum rolls is the only thing that separates Veteran items from Exotics.

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I put a lot of hours into D3, enough to say that there is no “mastering” that game. It’s a slot machine pretending to be a videogame.

You know that a L80 rift feels exactly the same as a L8 rift. It’s false progression.

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The proof for mastering vermintide is playing bounty hunter with 2h sword and x bow at legend with less than 150 damage taken. Having a +24% power vs chaos is only going to make lower Skill people feel they’re better than they are.

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What changes would you have in mind? Is there an improvement to strength/style?

My first thought would be to add an additional feature to it, but that would actually throw the game out of balance IMHO (unless the feature was insignificant/useless… then why add it?). Making Veteran weapons any stronger further lengthens the statistical gap between a player who plays casually and a hardcore gamer… earlier in the thread we stressed how this is bad. We don’t want to have to sink 1000s of hours into the game to get the best gear; what’s the difference between “Grinding to get components for crafting to get items above normal maximums” compared to “Grinding to acquire items above normal maximums”? They seem identical to me.

My second idea would be to give them some kind of expanded ability to pick your properties/trait for no additional cost. When crafting with them you would be able to select A, B, and C and then you automatically get them at maximum strength (as normal) in a single crafting attempt. It would make them designed for convenience as a reward; I rather enjoy this idea because I don’t think we need additional firepower at the moment and it really stresses that the Veteran gear really is meant to just be the capstone… no different from the other work you’ve done, it just has a big name and flashing lights.

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What if the stat cap on reroll values were limited for each item quality like 3,5,8,10 for green, blue, orange, and red (using +racial power as an example).

That way a reroll of an orange would require further material investment (infusion) to bring it up to the 10% max. That would give some utility to red items since a property reroll would always be maxed.

It makes reds more convienent, but admittedly I rarely have to reroll then after initial setup.

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This is a difficult thing to answer. I too think that adding more things isn’t the way; that’d throw balance as much off as the stat infusion. The thing is, the red weapons in VT1 had (at least usually) property combinations that weren’t possible on orange ones; that made them feel different and valuable even if they weren’t directly stronger. I’d like something similar here, but how it could be done is a different problem.

As I said, I’ve thrown this out before. At that time, I only had one serious idea: Add a few Traits with similar power levels to the current ones, but that would play off actual player skill rather than easy activation or pure luck, and make them available only on Veteran weapons (and jewellery). I think this could be achieved either through activation that requires skill (headshots, for example) or tradeoffs (add DoT but reduce initial damage or another attribute).

I still haven’t come up with any other ideas, either. I’m reasonably confident that other methods exist, but they require somewhat different thinking to realise.

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