Moonfire Bow is Overpowered

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
284

I did factor elites and specials. Melee weapon damage doesn’t affect ranged damage so I question why you’d bother to mention it. Quick math using bloodshot to absolute optimal gameplay in absolutely ridiculous target rich environments, such as modded, true solos and cata twins:

Hagbane 75%: 7998
Hagbane 50%: 4204
MFB: 7950

If you want to start factoring in the additional impact of melee uptime it’s significantly lower than you would expect. Melee weapons cannot hit approaching targets, nor do they have massive area damage.

A slight on-paper nerf. In practice a single Crit on Shade that guaranteed a hunter proc could lead to ~250 bonus damage from that. The single boosted hit adds maybe 500 damage in the first place. Overall a ~30% nerf to Shade’s damage. Or the loss of guaranteed crits for fours seconds means no backstabs. Let’s say SV patrol on cata, killing 10 SV for ~900 damage. Loss of that in exchange for boosted damage to the faces of +300. A ~70% nerf to Shade’s damage.

Let’s just do damage math based on power level: 650*1.225(Isha’s Bounty, EP)*1.046(Radiant Inheritance (10% uptime, 20% attack speed, 20% power, 20% Crit power))*1.25(Murder of Spites)*1.2(Morai Heg’s assuming a 2x finesse modifier coupled with enough ults to sustain 10% uptime) =1250

How about comparing the melee prowess of Slayer? 650*1.15(Wielding 2 2 Handers)*1.075(EP)*1.225(Adrenaline Surge making ult uptime 50%, innate attack speed) =985

But muh Slayer is weak! Pick Grail Knight!!!

650*1.1(Knight’s challenge only affects the first target hit)*1.475(Virtue of the Ideal, EP, power quest)*1.05(Attack speed quest)=1105

buh buh buh buh but Slayer and GK have better temp health and damage reduction! Slayer can get 50%, GK can regenerate 50% of the damage taken if he avoids hits and potentially roll grim healing, but in this example I gave GK power, attack speed, and strength pots. However, SoTT has 25% increased team healing that then returns right back to her as overhealing. Something like a single Merc ult can heal her to full if she does something stupid.

But GK ult, that’s so good! Slayer has no damage on his ult, and can’t stagger monsters. Grail Knight has a delete button, can stagger monsters, but only in melee. Sister has 2 of these nukes, and they can hit many times the amount of enemies, all from the safety of range.

SoTT is ridiculously busted. So busted I think if she lost every level 10, radiant, every level 25, and thorn nuke, that she would still be a very strong choice for the team.

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285

Headache is that the 25% healboost and normal melee would already make her helpful for the team…helpful but probably dreadfully boring to play.

Those walls are * by default, only the blackvenom one can have some fun use but it´s also really limited by topography.

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It’s a stupidly powerful boost, one that doesn’t require a talent choice, one that doesn’t require being within range of the aura, one that works even while she is captured after dying. And yes, those walls are terrible by default. But it isn’t my fault that FS made such a terribly imbalanced hero with many bad talent choices and many broken overpowered, so much so it would infringe on being exploits in a normal game.

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287

Because when running hagbane, it’s usually pretty typical to run sword and dagger to deal with armor. When running moonbow, the bow deals with armor so you can run spear which has much higher horde dps. Also, you get to run loaded bow which means more ult damage and you don’t have to hold ult for elites to maintain ammo. How are you accounting for that? You’ll have to show your math before I could put any value at all into a hypothetical battle score or anything of the sort. I can’t imagine any theoretical formula that will give you a score that is actually indicative of in game performance.

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Hardly. If that would be the case, all you had to do is remove that to push her in line. It wouldn’t.

You pick her for her on demand wave clear and mass stagger, that is easily placed where you need it. You pick her up for the killing power she gets, from passive, Inheritance, and doomsight. Doomsight makes Hunter procs an on demand damage boost.

She is a bully that lets your team play like buffoons, since you always can free a team mate with her ult from anywhere. No need to charge there. No need to fish for the special. Just aim in the general direction and press F. Someone is stuck? Press F. You are Stuck? Press F. F is on cooldown. No it isn’t. Radiant!

Her wave control, monster and elite damage are not on par with any other career. Only ONTOP of that you grant more THP for everyone and soak up the overflow.

Look at the tourney rebalance. It looks like she got absolutely shafted and still was picked all over the place.

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289

Math is above. Running a separate damage test for melee at this point would be massive scope creep. If you really want to do a good job of testing open up the modded realm, spawn a horde on various maps, and use MFB/Hagbane to kill those enemies. The more the better. Better yet, do a full game. Better yet, do 50 full games. Better yet, take multiple top skill players, do 50 full games each, and have them report their findings.

Oh, it looks like plenty of top players agree that MFB is completely overpowered!

There is a sliding scale of effort spent to reward returned. I don’t have access to modded, I can’t start running hypothetical scenarios, let alone “real world”, controlled, in-game situations. The best I can do is some basic math, factoring damage dealt on average, based on ammunition supply, estimated time until next reload, and how many targets and what type are being hit. Last thing I did was added a partial application of Lanchester’s Square Law based on a couple of other video games like Star Craft 2, and Age of Empires 2. (I used 1.6 since it was on the lower end of those findings, it may be inaccurate, but it is a start) As enemies dying faster snowballs forward progress and safety. Likewise poor horde clear snowballs the situation out of control because enemies don’t fight 1v1. They gang up on the heroes.

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The theoretical situation you’re using to calculate damage just isn’t accurate to the base game. Maybe if you played Dutch spicy on modded it would bear out, but then ammo becomes a problem because the ult breaks. Much of the damage you do is to ambient enemies while running through the map, where moonbow far outshines hagbane. That’s why the math isn’t super relevant to determining which one is “better.” The match of damage hordes or mixed hordes will always favor hagbane which is a better aoe weapon and a worse single target weapon.

I’m not saying there is a better way to do the math, I’m saying that the math isn’t nearly as relevant as gameplay experience. Especially when the math doesn’t even take all sources of damage with different builds into account. You would also have to account for number of ambients, time between hordes, pacing, intensity, etc.

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Which is why I calculated DPS uptime at a easy scale of 25%, 50%, and 75%.

Damage to ambients does very little to actually making the game easier. Linear vs square law and all.

Math is THE single most relevant criteria for determining weapon identity, and if it can be broken or not. Math is where the balance occurs. Math is where hitpoints, AOE size, DOT tic speed, etc. occurs. Unless of course you mean math in an isolated bubble, like my example. In which case it is still the single most important feature for determining if a weapon is usable. If 1H Axe suddenly did exe sword damage on lights you could calculate its DPS in a horde with near perfect to game accuracy due to lack of cleave.

Funny that many people feel the opposite. Even with proof going so far as to showcase a Handmaiden MFB/S&D Cata FOW true solo. The power of hagbane is severely limited by ammunition. So limited in fact that my example of 25% uptime is assuming you are getting a full resupply every 48 seconds of “in combat”.

Ambient damage would only serve to inflate MFB further, we both know it. If the in combat statistics of MFB are blowing the competition out of the water there is no need to do further math.

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292

You say that, but lots of other classes have exactly the same issues. Just comparing to other elf carrers:

Waystalker? Press F, whole wave of enemies and the specials disappear. Easily the most broken no-brains required OP ult in the game.
Shade? Press F, boss and patrols disappear. You can press F nearly 3x as often as SotT can. You’ll also go invisible and regain half your HP bar from crits.

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Ok, let me rephrase for clarity. Your math is bad because your premise is wrong. You can situationally calculate dps, but you’re using one niche situation to extrapolate dps across an entire map. Also, looking at your numbers I’m guessing you’re not calculating how fast hag shoots with perfect finger rolling. Also, I said I think MFB is better, but so much of your premise is incorrect that your math is pretty much useless. Including the fact that ambient clear speed isn’t important. Faster pacing = less hordes and specials which means fewer chances to wipe.

For example, if you used the same parameters to find the best melee weapon in the game, it’d probably come out as greatsword.

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@Frostysir @Sleezy @FrivolousWizard

Honestly who cares at this point which is better between hagstalker and Moonbow. Straight DPS comparisons aren’t going to tell you which is “more broken”. Moonbow allows classes with a full melee kit to also put out ranged class level ranged DPS on top of everything their melee kit brings.

To me that is what is truly broken with moonbow, not how it performs specifically on WS (though obviously it performs extremely well there no question).

So really do we actually gain anything from pitting hagstalker against moonbow? Maybe establish that hagstalker is still a top performer. But again Moonbow doesn’t even need a dedicated build so surely we can agree it’s the bigger issue and not waste more time on this comparison?

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295

There are a lot of good suggestions in this thread, obviously since there are nearly 300 replies it’s hard to condense that information.

There’s this comment (Moonfire Bow is Overpowered - #36 by Philip) that considers changing the damage and number of shots in a bar.

This one (Moonfire Bow is Overpowered - #87 by Maranovski) suggests changing it so that it must be actively reloaded (instead of passively), which I think is a great suggestion.

Personally, I’m not sure changing just the amount of damage or amount of shots is sufficient to fixing this bow. Ultimately it’s still an infinite ammo weapon, and I strongly believe infinite ammo weapons are a mistake unless there’s a strong associated cost to using it (think Sienna/Bardin fire weapons – causing slow, causing overheat+death), otherwise you’re still going to get players firing at literally every clan rat and elite on the map.

One thing that I haven’t seen suggested yet is removing Moonfire’s ability to stack DoTs. Then you have a weapon that is low maintenance, but cannot kill quickly. Additional hits would just ‘refresh’ the DoT timer. So there is real difference between it and normal ammo weapons. It’d still need nerfs to initial damage and DoT damage (and probably would still be boss DPS king, but likely not compared to Hagbane which can stack), but then you’d have a strong case for taking longbow over moonfire.

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296

I’ll be brief because so much has been said, but I do think a simple nerf to those attributes would fix the weapon.

If the weapon did 70 infantry /50 armor damage total on a partial charge shot it would still be exceptionally strong on legend. It would be 1SBS on all specials without property investment.

If there is a need on cata to kill 6 specials in a minute then a full recharge time of 60 seconds/ 10 seconds per partial arrow, solves that.

MFB would be a fairly strong weapon on cata while being ridiculously strong on legend.

~60% less damage, 60% less recharge speed.

I wonder of course if the weapon should be hit even harder so that it cannot be used extravagantly. Like 75 seconds for a full recharge with the ~60% damage nerf.

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Honestly I think the weapon is dumb as hell and that sounds kinda extreme even to me. Especially when you consider what the reaction of the average player would be to a nerf that heavy. FS already has a rep with a large portion of the player base of “nerfing things into the ground”.

@Incandescent I would be curious to know what the values for the onslaught tourney mod were exactly, since from my play testing that felt roughly right to me. The patch note doc only gives a rough idea.

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don’t have them on hand myself so I’d have to do some digging but I would note that what we did to moonbow was very much a bandaid solution even though it did fix the balance issues

We’ve been tossing around ideas on how to tweak it in a way where it’s actually got something a little more unique going for it than being a ammoless longbow

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Of course, I wasn’t trying to suggest that should be directly implemented, more get a feeling for what kind of number tweaks do make it feel reasonable in practice. Agreed establishing a proper niche would be a better way to go about balancing it.

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Good thing you’re not moderating this forum then. So relax and try to have fun. :grinning:

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“Lowered dot especially against armour

Increased headshot damage and increased direct armour damage slightly

Roughly doubled the heat cost on the weapon

Increased the time you have to wait after running out of heat before being able to fire again“

Direct from the document for the tourney mod.

Doubled heat cost is a more significant nerf than half recharge speed. Both take the same amount of time to recharge an arrow, but one also has half the maximum ammunition.

As far as reduction to MFB damage goes I’m curious to see what changes actually happened.

How about no more AoE splash in exchange for infinite, or absurd, pierce power?

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I feel that’d just be replacing one problem with another problem

304

I mean we could do it like you and spam reports for known bugs with added snark against fatshark but that seems about equally productive so we settled for this.

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