So it was said many times that if you liked your old builds you’d be able to recreate them. This is 100% false for the Vet. By far his most useful ability from his capstone active at level 30 (imo) was the instant mag reload which paired very well with long slow reload weapons like the bolter. This skill is completely gone which I just don’t understand. I loved playing with the bolter in large part because of this feature and now it’s just gone? Why take things out of the game when you’re trying to add ways to play?
Further more, the veterans active ability used to start its refresh timer right away, meaning that if you kept stringing out elite/specialist kills to extend the time, you could have it ready to go again before it cooled down. This was not easy to do, and definitely took skill to pull off, but rewarded good timing and skillful use. But now this feature is totally gone too, making me feel like I have again lost a massive part of my old play style.
Overall these two big changes to the Vet really nerfed him into the ground for me. Probably one of the weaker classes now sad to say.
Base toughness reduced to 100, there is 100 toughness spread over 6 nodes, but it’s so impractical to reach them all that, for all intents and purposes, it’s a nerf.
Ammo reserve bonus is deep within the exclusionary trees and reduced to 25%.
You’re getting less ammo back due to changing always rounding up to 1 to rounding on 0.5s and giving that ammo back every other elite/specialist kill.
Overall it’s making low ammo reserve weapons much less ammo efficient and while you can get like 75% of an old veteran’s performance you are making pretty big trade-offs in some aspects.
Veteran has more stat nodes in their tree.
Also counter fire is still bugged/badly designed/inaccurately described.
And was precisely what made the bolter exceedingly OP in the hands of the vet, among other problems. Now its hard to measure that against the insane power creep we got this patch so i’m not necessarily in either camp on this change but thats likely the reason it was removed.
For me its too early to weigh in on the state of each class.
The Veteran is still a great class, they’re just not suffering from “main character” syndrome anymore.
You can still get absolutely busted builds with it, but the meta has shifted.
Previously Lasguns were inconspicious at best (Kantrael Lasgun, Helbore) and meme tier at worst (Recon Lasgun).
This has changed. A well-equipped and slotted Lasgun Veteran is very high in the meta now.
The Plasma Vet is also strong.
The old options are still viable, too. Perhaps not as strong as previously.
I think it’s too early to cry foul on behalf of the veteran. The meta has shifted, but there seems to be a decent selection of good builds emerging. I won’t cry over the loss of the instant reload mechanic, it makes the class much easier to balance.
But some readjustment is required for sure. And it’s true that you can’t recreate the pre-patch veteran in its entirety. IMHO that’s actually a good thing, and the tradeoffs you’re being asked to make are generally reasonable.
having lasguns and autoguns performing better than bolter or chain weapons performing better than the power sword on a warhammer game just shows how deep in the balancing vicious circle a game has gone
my best performing build on my Vet right now is chainsword and laspistol with krak grenades
its cool and all and makes me good looking as a cosplayer, but it makes zero sense to me that its a stronger combination than power sword with bolter with every possible talent build i can conceive
dont think theres anything wrong with the vet , my first build i tried two tap crushers on damnation and dropped everything under it in one burst of the vraks mk 3 , and you could do the second part out of class ability if the other buffs are up.
so no the class is lethal and still specialised in probably the most important job that of clearing enemy shooters fast and efficient.
being able to roll the vets class skill i dont think took any real skill it just required enough targets . and they seem to have moved away from that and gone to more ways of actively reducing cooldowns.
i should think removing the auto load from vet was down to it causing some problems with weapon balance. which i bet is going to sting as slabs have picked it up at the same time , there is still alot of relaod you can hit 70% ish? being able to negate the one serious downside of the bolter could well be the exact reason it was removed.
i can certainly understand people not liking change but i think these systems work better
The auto reload allowed you to mag dump twice in a row with a bolter, which was able to trivialize what would otherwise be interest, tough, hairy situations. It let the vet deal with an acute threat situation pretty on their own, leaving the rest of the team without much left to do other than mop up.
I really think that sort of burst power skewed the gameplay and undermined some of the gameplay potential. I totally see why it went away.
You can also now stack a bunch of reload buffs and even have passive reload speed increases if it’s really important.
A single, incredibly narrow build (entirely dependent on a specific weapon type and blessings) shouldn’t be used as a barometer to define whether a class, with 89 nodes at it’s disposal (minus a few that are excluded by taking another), is problematic or not.
re: your build that you keep posting and omitting critical caveats:
hit reg issues
headshots only
crits only (not everything requires a crit, but its obviously preferred for Deadly Accurate)
and you’re dropping maulers in a single burst outside of your ult?
Except that the Ogryn now has it for the Gunlugger tree and I have 232 bullets in my Heavy Stubbers on tap to just pour fire into whatever we’re facing, with the second set of 116 rounds at +25% rate of fire and +70% reload speed should I somehow run out within the 10s. Couple that with my Heavy Stubbers having ‘Blaze Away’ and I only do more damage as the magazine empties. I can shred hordes, monstrocities, and even the Daemonhosts struggle as I make their health bar wilt under the barrage.
It was taken from the Veteran to give it to the Ogryn and that exclusivity by shifting to another class has hurt the Veteran’s ability as the ranged threat.
Nothing like the same as volley-fire pre-update. 50% damage increase, superb increase to accuracy and reduced recoil while firing full-auto, instant reload, highlights enemies, replenishes toughness, reduces ranged damage, and all on a 25 second cooldown. wat.
Crucial point this - Pre-update vet with an automatic pinning-fire bolter or auto-pistol genuinely could manage ALL elites, specials and monstrosities in any regular match. That’s like 80% of the threats the game throws at you, it should not be manageable by a single player.
My main issue with vet now is that they’re just not very interesting to play. The new skills are fine, but nothing we haven’t seen before in vermintide. And volleyfire, while effective, was/is the least inspired ability. You shoot things, press this button to shoot things better. There’s no novel mechanic in there, it doesn’t let you do anything that you weren’t doing before you used your skill. I think they need to look at adding some new class defining mechanic to the vet, not just fiddling around with the same tired mechanics.
I was thinking of the instant reload aspect, as per the OP and the quoted post, rather than the other buffs that came with Volley Fire. The instant reload is the part I remember most vividly from the several hundred hours on my Veteran, particularly with various autoguns, the plasma gun when something big and nasty hove into view, and the Kantrael Mk 12 when I took it out for its time in the spotlight. Losing that instant reload can be a real pain for the ranged Veteran.
I hear you, but you can’t look at a talent like that in isolation, it’s going to be working in tandem with all the other bonuses of the ability. If they just added it back in now, it would still be nearly as broken as before. Executioner’s stance already boosts your DPS as much (or far more with headshots) than point-blank barrage. But I want to restate that I agree the veteran isn’t in a good place. I just think the worst possible thing that could be done is bringing back the same boring old mechanics. Give us something new!
As other have said, the auto reload was a problem with the boltgun.
It was far less of a problem with other guns though. Removing an entire playstyle from the game instead of adjusting the bolter is a perturbing thought. I do hope that’s not actually the reason they removed that feature, because I don’t have any kind words to put around that thought.
I think people should actually check out the current state of the bolter.
Ammo sustain from Scavenger is halved.
Overall ammo supply is lower.
Pinning fire damage boost is 1/4th of what it was.
I don’t think an instant reload would break the weapon now. You don’t have enough ammo or damage on it to manage anything like Bolter Vet was capable of before.
Even the tree is set up in a way that there is little help for Bolter/Plasma/PS compared to how much boost other weapons can get. There is no “new” stuff that these weapons can capitalize on more than other weapons.
I mean middle path is the go-to for Plasma/Bolter, but you then have to give up suppression immunity and +ammo if you want your damage not to be under an autogun.
I wonder why Ammo Reserves wasn’t added as a basic node dotted around the tree in a couple of places (3 nodes at 15%, maybe), to make it accessible and let you take as much (or as little) as you need.
With all the nerfs to gunplay, I suspect you’re right.
Personally, I want them to bring back the auto reload and undo the nerfs to ammo availability. Bringing those back would definitely put the bolter back into a far stronger spot, which again brings us back to that specific weapon.
I was always more of a Plasma/Braced guy on Vet, I just find it ridiculous how much in many ways they nerfed Bolter, and the reasoning that if they would bring auto-reload back that would make it broken again is just plain dumb.
I was all about braced myself. Didn’t really use the bolter because of how easy it was to just switch my brain off and auto-fire down problematic situations. If they added back all the things I’d want to get my braced playstyle back, bolter would definitely benefit from that. A lot.
That said, just adding auto-reload back probably wouldn’t end the world. With everything else that’s happened I can’t imagine any gun is going to be all that strong, outside of lasguns, anyway.