Me and my friends won't play until Demonhost is gone or changed

I like a challenge, I have more time than I care to admit in vermintide 2, I like playing with mixed skill friends and just having a good time.

The Demonhost is the worst designed enemy I have seen in a video game in a long time.
After three games of watching friends and randoms try their hardest to play defensive but still be chased down, stamina outed then insta killed was unfun for everyone and we collectively just decided to play a different game.

It needs to be blockable or dodgable for the majority of players.
Swapping target every few seconds, being slow enough to sprint away from and open up some space, removing the insta kill, slow the attack rate.
Any of those would help and honestly it needs all of them or perhaps just shelfing as an idea for the future.

We were all keen to play today but as the title I don’t think we will till this is seen to.
If there are ‘get good’ comments then might I point out that sort of toxicity is a sad start to a game that all sorts of people should be able to enjoy.
We have difficulty levels for a reason.

I hope to hear changes or something of the like soon, we are keen to play when this has been resolved.

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I agree if it purely targets one player, it needs to be more telegraphed in its attacks. This also helps the player experience because it makes the targeted player feel like they’ve done something cool. I thought however the damage the boss did was fine.

My main gripe with this game is that the ‘difficult’ content, is best beaten with as little skill expression as possible, run away, hide, get into cover, shoot from afar, don’t engage with the combat system, hope for the best.

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I’m fairly sure that it only shows up on missions with the power outage modifier, so you can just not select those and you’re fine. It can also usually be completely avoided by not getting close to the Demonhost and going around it instead.

Also, fwiw, I think it’s fine. It’s an interesting challenge which at its worst only kills two members of your team. The remaining members can recover from that if they play carefully.

The best strategy my group has found is to make sure to engage it first with your tankiest character, like an Ogyrn with the slab shield, and it will focus them leaving the DPS free to do tons of damage to it. Melts pretty quick that way.

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Seems over tuned to the extreme. It’s one thing to say “Just avoid it” but most of us are playing with 2 to 3 automatched random people and chances are one of them will trigger the boss. (So far every match I’ve run into a Daemonhost someone triggers one.)

Right now the only defense is have high Stamina and Block Reduction and hope your team has enough DPS to kill it. Which isn’t really enjoyable content.

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No it appears in all missions power outage or not.
Secondly first hit doesn’t garuntee being fixated, thirdly accepting a two person down means goodbye grims, fourthly a challenge for a co-ordinated group of decent players is not good design to add to standard public lobby content.

Now if Demonhost Presence, was a map condition? Then quite understandable, people who want that extra reward for challenge could go for it.

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I agree, it should be tweaked a bit for it to be viable for most players. Otherwise it will kill all the fun for people, specially because even if you manage to kill one, you can still find up to 3 of them in the same mission. Crazy stuff.

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No it appears in all missions power outage or not.

Ah, didn’t know that. That is rather silly then. If it were only on the power outage missions I think that would be far better, as people tend to avoid those if they don’t want a challenge anyway. Plus, it adds to the spooky atmosphere, which the demonhost is definitely suited for.

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Daemonhosts should be a rare event that have a reward attached to them, like a Crassus Detonator in Deep Rock Galactic.

Having up to 5 or 7 in a mission is stupid unless they’re only doing it at the moment to force feedback.

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It’s a witch.

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Couple of points to make here:

  • We’ve had several appear on missions with no modifiers whatsoever
  • We’ve had it spawn like 40 metres away, untouched, and suddenly aggro to the group
  • Most randos go “haha gun go brrrrrrr” towards anything that isn’t a player
  • We’ve had it spawn literally in front of people, with zero chance to react in time to “avoid” it
  • Having an “at worst” scenario like that, coupled with multiple Daemonhost spawns per mission, means that at least two of your players at almost all times simply aren’t allowed to play the game
  • Burblespue Halescourge and Nurgloth the Eternal from VT2 were hard as hell to fight, but still made for interesting and, more importantly, fun challenges.
  • You can’t just take an Ogryn with a shield on every single mission and hope that the DH targets them first

Terrible design for an enemy. And if it was avoidable, I certainly wouldn’t add it to a game that is still in Beta, and still has gameplay issues.

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Yea, it’s a bit hard to defend against. Only defeated it once. I don’t like that it takes people out of combat essentially.

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Guess you never played Left 4 Dead then?
The daemonhost is just a which. I’ve only done three games (all three were in the dark) and I died once to the host, and killed like eight of them. They aren’t hard.

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I like it. You hold block and time your dodges right and you can kite it plenty long enough for teammates to kill it. Just don’t panic. The longest attack string is three strikes plus if it does down a player it gives you tons of time to kill it while it’s finishing that player.

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Yeah, the deamonhost just killed three runs. Because my friends are new to this genre they don’t know advanced tactics so we can’t deal with it. So we are basically just stuck with everyone rushing ahead when we find a host

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I agree on this one. First you introduce dodge nerf (which is fine by me) and then you add a boss/event that totally wipes out anyone not using 1h high mobility weapon.

Surpassed mutant and clipping dog in the most idiotic design.

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They don’t know advance tactics

Yeap this is the way it is with all tide games imo. They had the same issue in Vt2. The learning curve is huge.

If there’s one thing Fatshark does really well. Its making very frustrating encounters for really bad rewards lol. Nothing difficult feels worth it in the long run. Probably why retention in Vt2 was so poor. You’d do these things a couple of times and its just like “Well ok thats that”. Darktide is even harder than vt2 because of all the ranged. There’s mob spawn doors literally every few feet. They seem to do significantly more specials. Ontop of there just being significantly more ranged specials. Then you’ve got the giant bosses that may randomly appear in certain locations. Pox hounds that have some of the worse animations I’ve ever seen and should be taken out of the game until fixed. Now you’ve got these demon hosts that guarantee at least one person will by fully downed in pug matches most of the time. There’s just so much…“ha in your face you died and there’s not much you could’ve done” situations.

The strategy from what I can tell with the demonhost is you either need to let it down someone so you can get easy weakspots or you get an ogryn or someone with a block melee weapon + stamaina stack build to absorb as many hits as possible.

First game I played since the patch was on a blackout. 4 level 30 veterans. All of us have cleared a level 4 difficulty at least once. Half our party wiped at least once. We were pretty much none stop at one wound the entire game. We killed 3 demonhosts because they were impossible to avoid. The difficulty? Level 3. The rewards? Our “special condition” was 1500. That’s it. It’s just like, why? Why bother doing higher difficulties when the rewards for losing are worse than the rewards for winning a lower difficulty match? It’s like the secondary objectives. The amount of time you spend trying to find these + the higher chance of losing in the way of things like grimores…its just like why? Yeah “the gameplay is the content” sure. But I’m going to be far less likely to stick with a game in the long term when its super difficult and there’s not much in the way of rewards. I’ll do it a few times then move onto other games.

They have so much work to do on the difficulty vs rewards structure of the game.

After a few runs against them, yeah it’s pretty annoying playing right now. Someone always triggers them and it’s not always in a calm moment where they’re easy to defeat so 1 to 2 players often go down.

An Ogryn even with a knife can tank them just fine. A Vet with a low dodge range weapon can’t for very long, even with some Block Cost Reduction thrown in their build. Usually when a Vet gets targeted they melt and are in time out because some random player doesn’t pay attention to mechanics and triggers a spawn hazard. So I get people not wanting to play with these on maps.

It would be nice if instead of spawn hazards if they were retuned into another boss, because boss variety is always nice.

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Yeah, the “witches” are pretty frustrating right now, they’re way too common. I did some missions earlier and every mission had like 2 or 3 of these “witches”.

I think the demonhost needs to be rare (see one every 4 or 5 missions or so) or have its own mutator that can show up.

Another thing, nerf its HP, it’s way too much. Even spamming multiple bolters at the damn thing takes ages to kill it. The only safe way to kill it right now is with a shield ogryn on your team, but if it ignores the Ogryn and targets someone else instead they’re probably dead since the demonhost has insanely fast attack speed and you can’t block forever.

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I’ve only seen that Demonhost spawn on paths where you can take a different route to bypass it.

We just avoid a fight all together.

Don’t listen to this guy. The daemonhost is perfect.