Rather than flattening performance, I believe TmanDW wishes for there to simply be less of an extreme disparity. Sometimes having excessive extremes in either direction can reduce the skill ceiling for everyone involved, rather than raise it, and make a match less engaging.
There can and should be strong differences, just not as much as there is now when it comes to boss killing.
I think we’re in agreement on this.
What would this entail?
That much I can agree with, but some of the suggestions put forth really come off as flatten boss damage by making everything do similar damage.
As far as making the game less punishing for suboptimal builds some simple changes to make it easier to clutch could go here. Something like enemy spawns are reduced for ~20-30 seconds while players respawn, you’d still need to clear what’s alive but the game isn’t going to throw 3 assassins at you solo; rescues are no longer interrupted by anything except player death, makes it easier to run for your team and even though you’ve got a stack of enemies at least you get your friend/s up; rescues take less time, same as the previous, just a different angle; player respawn being quicker overall would help fighting monsters and lords the most since a large portion of the rescue time is the team fighting to come to you, whereas the boss arena forces spawns to be closer.
Hmmm, if that’s your takeaway from this post I really hoped I made my stance clearer then. Velsix had what I meant right: It’s totally fine if some setups are significantly better than others at a certain thing (like monster killing), but the difference between good monster killers and decent or bad monster killers is completely ridiculous right now. And this difference is causing balance issues.
It’s not at all an overstatement to say that certain classes can kill a monster up to 20 times faster than other - otherwise overall equally good - classes in a realistic adventure-map scenario. Compare - just spitting out an example - Shade vs. Mercenary: Merc is great vs. hordes and mediocre vs. monsters, while Shade isn’t the best vs. hordes but ridiculous vs. monsters. Now, you’re not going to tell me however that Merc is anywhere close as superior in killing hordes as Shade is at killing monsters. If that was the case, playing Shade would feel atrocious because trying to chew down a horde would take longer than it takes for the next one to spawn. Merc would one-hit Marauders and Shade would need 3 strikes against a Slaverat. In that hypothetical scenario everybody - including yourself - would raise this as a balance issue, and advocate for the difference in horde killing speed between Shade and Merc being smaller. But that’s exactly the situation with monsters right now, and the reason I made this topic.
As for monster killing: There absolutely is a lot of room between the current situation, and everybody doing equal monster damage. I’m not advocating everybody being equal against monsters at all. And I also can’t exactly say where the balance should be. But I’m 100% certain that it should be somewhere between those scenarios instead of where we are now.
Nonsense.
The answer to the “problem” you’ve presented is party management.
You chose that wonderful flamethrower IB with A&S - well, sorry, you’re not exactly a boss-killer.
You’ve chosen ASS with daggers - you’re not going to be effective against multiple targets (let’s just put the notion of moonbow, which delets hordes, aside as it is broken and should be nerfed ).
A very important issue is that V2 is a coop game.
Making all careers similarly effective against everything will destroy careers.
Loooots of pple have issues with kerillian’s new career and those weapons for exactly this reason. SoTT is effective against everything and has very few downsides.
I don’t understand how you read a detailed thread discussing how differences are generally good, but too large a disparity can be detrimental and make balancing certain aspects of the game next to impossible, then decided OP just wants IB to be a boss killer?
The emphasis is on bringing boss killers down, because the difference between them and non boss killers makes the matter of balancing bosses impossible. Is this an objectionable idea to you? It seems self evident to me.
I think there are two important things to consider here. Firstly, I haven’t seen anybody in this thread argue there shouldn’t be distinct differences between careers. The problem here is that in regards to boss killing specifically, the variance is far and away larger than in any other aspect of the game, which leads to an absurd fluctuation in the difficulty of bosses based on team comp. Like the difference between a 20 second joke and a 5-10 minute slog.
The second thing is that QP is a thing, in fact it’s arguably the primary game mode for the playerbase as a whole, so control over party comp can be very limited at times. Of course you should have a harder time if you get a party comp that all do the same thing and leave important roles unfilled. However the difference regarding bosses specifically is, again, on a while other level compared to every other aspect of the game.
Surely we can agree there’s a middle ground between some setups being 10-20x better at boss killing and all classes being homogenous?
It’s not a problem that the godbreaker is not a monster killer, but rather that some careers delete monsters in Cataclysm before they’ve spawned in properly and had a chance to move. it’s the main reason why Grudge-Marked monsters were introduced for expeditions in this update, because generally the monsters there were a joke that got yeeted off a ledge within 2 seconds of spawning or got melted down by a crankgun/deepwood staff/taffing repeater pistol with exploding crits in the same time-span. They should have some impact on the game beyond being an audio effect followed 2 seconds later by the victory sound.
This applies to the base game as well, particularly to unfortunate souls like Skarrik who tends to die the instant he lands.
All I’m hearing is that players like you want to punish other players for finding successful builds.
What’s the point of experminentation and build perfection if your class or build is just going to get nerfed or evaporated for being “too good”?
This is a co-op survival game, like with L4D. Nobody complained in L4D when you could simply crown witches with a shotgun before they attacked the party, or setting tanks on fire and then run away while shooting at them, everyone just agreed that that’s the best way to fight them.
I would understand it if VT2 was a multiplayer PvP game, but we’re all on the same team here and I don’t really understand if or why you want all enemies, monsters and bosses to become damage sponges.
Well, to put it simply there’s a spectrum of nuances between 4 people playing together and 3 people running behind a deepwood staff with guaranteed exploding crits that kills everything in sight before it or the rest of the players get a chance to move. There’s ample documented footage of this happening. It’s one example, but there are others as well. To a fair extent I am a min-maxer myself, I like to play effectively and I like playing with people who play effectively, but I think it’s clear enough that some things are unreasonable and unhealthy for the game long term.
I wanted to type up a response to this point by point, but it would have side tracked into a general balance discussion buffs vs nerfs yada yada very quickly.
So let’s focus on the key points. Do you agree or not that there are a significant number of setups in the game that trivialise adventure mode bosses? Do you agree or not that the disparity between high boss damage setups and low boss damage setups is too high?
If yes to that last question, what approach to tackling this problem would be palatable to you? Personally I’m of the opinion that the upper echelon should be brought down (in a way that ONLY lowers their boss dps and nothing else), but the lower echelon should also be brought up.
Which is why it sucks you never get to properly deal with a monster. Either somebody deletes it before you can even melee it, or you have to fight it long past its expiration date as your attacks don’t really feel impactful. The exact issue is that monsters rarely really feel co-op. You don’t fight them with your team, instead somebody just ults them a few times and that was that.
I never played that, so I can’t comment. But I suppose that “tank” was the equivalent of a monster in that? What you describe isn’t like the current issue with Vermintide at all. It would be alike if one character or weapon could just oneshot them. Like, you’d need to shoot them 373492 times with bullets, unless somebody brought a bazooka in which case it gets exploded two seconds after it got in sight. You’re not going to tell me that that would be a good balance, are you?
No, I don’t at all. But if your “succesful build” makes the game a lot less fun for other players because they don’t get to interact with the monster when you’re around, or they have to keep hacking at the monster for ages when you aren’t because the monster’s hitpoints are balanced around that huge “success” of yours, it makes the game a lot less fun for others, which is exactly what I’m taking issue with. This is supposed to be - as you just said yourself - a co-op game.
What? This is the exact opposite of what I’ve been arguing the entire time?!
Did you even read the discussion or did you just pick up a vague notion of “your crutch classes should get nerfed” and swiftly replied?
I merely glanced through the thread, apologies. But I get the argument you’re making 
Yes, and I can even tell you why that is - because ‘crowning’ (killing in one shot for those who haven’t played the game) a witch requires only these two things to pull off effectively:
It does not require anyone to buy a premium DLC career or grind red drops from chests to max out stats etc. In L4D every character was exactly equal to any other in terms of all of their stats. There were no ‘successful builds’ (which is a dodgy term itself, and I can expand on that if you like) simply because there were no builds at all. If the Director spawned an M60 anyone could pick it up. Anyone could pick up any shotgun and crown a witch, set the tank on fire and run if he or she is familiar with the map and can deal with specials while the tank slowly burns away.
That is why I think L4D is not really a good example here.