I've got to admit Legend's getting better

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
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I’ve been pretty critical of the difficulty spike in Legend since the beta launched - and fully recognize the difficulty increase is due to combination of bugs, overturned beast-men, changes to the AI director/events, and changes to the core combat system.

I also think the flood of new players into the game meant there were a lot of people wading into the water’s of legend who were really, really under prepared for legend period. There were also likely many returning players who were either a bit rusty or not up to speed enough with the changes.

The above means that the QP environment had people that were under-leveled or had weak builds (without the skill to compensate), or you had well-geared players that were simply trying to force play in the old-style and not working well as a team - principally by not paying any attention to positioning and team cohesion. I can trace the majority of wipes over the past few weeks to not working more closely together as a team.

So among all of the various factors, I think the biggest factor affecting the failure rate of legend games were other players in QP not being “ready” for it in one way another.

Over the past two-weeks, I’ve been running periodic legend games with just bots (all well-geared and equipped per the cata-bot guides) and I’ve had great success. I know the bots have a good/effective load out and they stick close to me, which is a large improvement right there.

Also - over the past week or so QP’ing into legend, I’ve also felt like the player quality has noticeably increased.

Maybe the hordes of newer players and/or most salty veterans have stopped playing? Or maybe enough of them (and/or the rest of us) have figured out good builds and realized that teamwork matters more. I’ve noticed an uptick in the use of voice chat again (finally) now that the sound issues are improved - which is very helpful for keeping a team coordinated.

The incremental bug fixing is likely helping to smooth out the gameplay as well, although many bugs still exist (with the most egregious being mobs spawning literately 5 feet in front of your face. I had a mauler spawn right before my eyes last night). At least the backstab sounds are working more reliably again.

Beastmen are still overtuned feeling compared to the other factions. However, they are slightly less of a problem now as people seem to be utilizing high stagger weapons more consistently, which makes dealing with the beastmen easier. The biggest challenge is having to deal with ranged enemy specials (gunners, warp throwers, gas, stormers, etc) during beastmen fights. Having someone really focused on sniping specials and calling when to change position as a team is really helpful. Saving ults to take out a special or rush a banner is really important, and people seem to be figuring this out more as well.

All in all - despite my legend success rates still being quite a bit lower than in 1.6, so long as the trend of player improvement/quality continues I think the difficulty increasing will be mitigated and overcome. It is still definitely harder than it was (and I fully admit that dodge meta was brain-dead easy once you got it figured out), but I do genuinely like the greater emphasis placed on teamwork and coordination. It’s nice to hear people chatting on voice again and trying to coordinate. With more fine-tuning of balance and bug-fixing, I think it will turn out okay.

For those that are finding more success on legend, here’s my advice: be a leader.

Many people are newer and less experienced. Help them out. Get on voice and give them pointers during/after missions. We were all operating in 1.6 with a shared set of norms of how legend runs would go, and that’s not the case anymore, for better or worse. We can either stay salty about it or be a part of improving the experience (and win rate) for everyone.

On a side note, I’ve received my 4th red blunderbuss and no other red ranged weapons on Kruber. Somethings never change.

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I wanna point out that “sticking together” can be a big issue now more than ever. I’ve tried to stay near my allies but when overwhelmed by a horde, self preservation will cause everyone to dodge away from each other and eventually the group separates. This is not anyone’s fault but when we eventually wipe, we blame it on the team not sticking together.

That’s false, we tried to stay together but the flood of garbage forced us to separate. Any number of factors can cause this no matter how hard we try. You might argue “Get better teamwork,” but good teamwork comes mainly from static groups, good class synergy, and communication. QP doesn’t do well for any of those, you’ll be lucky if you have 2 of the 3.

Players in QP are left with personal skill to compensate and the current difficulty spike can be too much to handle. I try to offer advice on play style changes but I hold back in case anyone takes it the wrong way thinks I’m being an elitest. This may add to no one wanting to offer unwanted advice and skill stagnates when no one is willing to change or improve their play style.

It’s an unfortunate reality atm.

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Good points - and the situations you describe are certainly still occurring.

I think players are slowly realizing that dodging is no longer the catch-all defensive tool. For one thing, enemies have more mass and will inhibit dodging. in 1.6 you could dodge right through the middle of a horde and you simply can’t do that anymore.

Dodges should be used in a more localized manner to minimize damage taken while still remaining in some sort of formation/position/coherency with the rest of your team. If everyone dodges around to different sides of the horde then your risk of wiping does indeed go way up.

Coupled with dodging is having a player (ideally two) with a higher stagger weapon. Things like Kruber’s new spear can stagger SV’s on a push-attack which is huge for making space and crowd control. That needs to be part of the combat mix as much as dodging.

As for the teamwork thing, in cases where the group does get split, having voice can be a difference maker. If one person can say, “hey, everyone dodge/move/adjust left towards the elf that’s split off” then you can pull the unit back together. Without any guiding voice/leader then people will just do whatever they think they need to do, which is often bad for the group’s survival.

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<3 Wraithwalk and Barge talents

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Sitting at around 2000 hours played, and today I think I’ve finally just hit my limit. After making no progress on a Slay 3 daily after over an hour of lost games on both legend and then champ… I just can’t anymore. I’ve been forcing myself to play because up until 2.0 VT2 had been my #1 favorite game in years.

But I’m a solo queuer, and this patch was not built for me. Fatshark have taken what used to feel endlesly fun and just turned it into an absolute slog of cheap hits, behind the back spawns, wildly unbalanced careers / loadouts and elite spam. I’m going to uninstall in order to remove the temptaion to play anymore because it’s just way more aggravation than fun these days.

When I tried the initial WoM beta, there wasn’t a single aspect of it I found particularly fun, apart from the new weapons. It was like the WoM launch date was a countdown to the game being ruined for me, which I tried to brush off as me being melodramatic, but it unfortunately ended up being true.

I’ll check back next year, but for now I’m just incredibly disappointed and angry that my favorite game has been so thoroughly gutted.

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I play a fair bit solo (not true solo; I have bots), and Legend feels only marginally more challenging than before, mostly because of the increased aggression/attack intervals of enemies; this is all fine.

The majority of my legit losses are just from me screwing up once and going down (because bots are often poor at picking you up if things are dicey), and just being tired.

So yeah, in terms of proper balance, Legend feels pretty good. Now, there are a lot of bug-related losses, that’s definitely the leading cause of a failed run for me - mostly silent hordes. If these bugs get hammered out, we’ll be in a decent-enough place.

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I kinda don’t agree that it’s fine for couple of reasons.

First being, Fatshark not keeping their word on retaining the difficulty to pre WoM levels. Legend is clearly harder and I can’t really tell how much others have changed, but WoM Champion doesn’t really substitute pre WoM Legend difficulty. So people who found old difficulties just hard enough to be enjoyable are getting shafted. And even if it did it would be way less rewarding, which leads me to my second point.

Even if the status quo won’t change, this would mean we are required to put in more effort for same rewards. So, everyone is getting shafted by the balance changes. If you up the difficulty without upping rewards, which is our situation right now.

I don’t think it’s ok to devalue anyone’s time or effort and as it stands the changes do so.

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Yeah being a leader is really the only way to do qp in many cases. Just lookking arround regularly and seeing where tammates are has become so important. I now allways try to bridge gaps between players that split off or make sure that there is allways two players together is key.

However you have to realize when some players are pushing too much or are straggling behind constantly isnt worth the effort anymore…

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I had a game last night playing as FK with SnS infinite stagger build. Playing Hunger in the Dark. We got to the mine cart escort portion, pushed the cart to a crossroad area when a horde of cows came in. Saltz and Sienna were ahead with the cart and got cut off from me and the elf, they went down quick, which left me and the elf in the pitch darkness.

I yelled at the elf to camp near a wall with me, conveniently next to an ammo box. Unfortunately while I was holding off EVERYthing the elf just melee spammed with her 1H sword (and missing). I really wanted to type in chat to have them spam arrows since we have an infinite source but I was a bit busy as you may imagine.

After 5 minutes of me basically stabbing everything to death slowly, we moved on. Got to a choke point just before the 2nd tome and another wave came in. I bottle necked the choke point but for whatever reason the elf ran off…and died. Meanwhile I get hooked by a packmaster.

TLDR: If the gosh darn tank is doing his job, stay near them and dps the garbage he’s surrounded with!

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[quote=“Para-Medic, post:10, topic:36093, full:true”]TLDR: If the gosh darn tank is doing his job, stay near them and dps the garbage he’s surrounded with!
[/quote]

The reality is that these changes do mean that having an actual team composition matters quite a bit more now. It used to be irrelevant on legend. 4 dps characters was totally valid (actually ideal). Now having ranged specialists plus a stagger-heavy tank is really key for dealing with the multi-threat situations.

I can see why this is a frustrating, and perhaps this should’ve been something more critical for cataclysm only, with legend remaining more of a free for all. Personally, when the team composition and teamwork does happen, my legend games are more exciting and interesting than pre-WoM. Unfortunately it frequently doesn’t happen, and that can be frustrating. Everyone’s sensitivities will vary on this topic of course.

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For that to work, you’d need way way better QP system, where you queue for a selected role. And that’s only gonna work if people are honest, which ain’t betting on. I also don’t think there’s a population in the game to do that consistently.

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Being able to swap careers after you log in would fix a lot, since you could see the existing composition and change as needed.

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Legend feels shadow-nerfed since a few days…

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Something I’ve always wanted, when joining in progress. You can see what other classes have been picked, so you can choose something to complement them.

Like if I see a FK, HM and Zealot, I’d go RV for ammo sustainability.

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Pair that with a PlayerList+ as a default feature and not just a mod and we have a game :stuck_out_tongue:

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You can already do this when searching for Maps. It shows you what is taken and what is available. I looked at this all the time when completing my Helmgart achievements.

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Correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t show what class they are on? Only the character? Right?

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Correct, Character Only.

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Yea, so I’d want it to show the exact class people are on. As that would affect what class I would pick.

Using the same example as I gave before, if I only saw that kruber, Kerillian and Salty were taken, and I didn’t know they were on FK, HM and Zealot, I wouldn’t take RV. As if they were on HS, WS and BH, I’d rather go as a tank and take IB because they should be self sufficient for ammo.

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Would be nice if you could just change your class before entering the bubble without having to cancel it.