Just two simple polls concerning specials, out of curiousity. I know a lot of people want to say “It depends”. But for answering the poll simply consider which Special causes you the most problems normalized over your whole Vermintide experience. So which situation you encounter the most to a certain degree. This is also not about unfair design of specials or how broken certain stuff is.
In addition, I will add a second poll concerning how they are dangerous simplified into primary effect: damage and secondary effects (buff, area denial, disabling, etc …
I voted assassin as that is the most common one causing me problems by jumping on me through hordes but, if i had to vote for the absolute worst one when spammed i´d call for the Standard bearer.
1 of these guys during a beastman horde isnt all that bad, even when he gets a good spot, but 3 of them? During a armored beastman horde? Breaks teams.
It’s assassins and I don’t even consider it close, if my multiple threads about assassin problems aren’t making it obvious
They can spawn anywhere and attack you before their spawn sound finished. They can blend into the background and actually get harder to see with higher settings. They can jump you through walls or bounce off them so your dodge doesn’t matter. You will still take damage if you push them when there’s no room to dodge. They will fake out smoke teleports. They will point at other directions than the one they’re jumping. They will skip climbs and jumps randomly by straight up teleporting on your screen. They will glitch inside you and jump you while invisible in this state. They will speed up randomly to the point where you’d have to react faster than humanly possible.
Well to context, I don’t particularly find any of the specials to be deadly by themselves. Even the vaunted assassin’s disregarding some of the more extreme bugs becomes extremely predictable after you have played the game long enough.
But when it comes to specials that cause me most wipes in x or y situation’s its probably tossup between blightstormer and poison wind. Sure assasins/packmasters suck but that’s only 1 person whos getting caught. These 2 on the other hand have caused teamwipes by themselves which is why I rate them bit more higher than some of the disabling variants.
Thing is, I don’t really have a problem with any of them. I’ve learned to deal with them and I rarely get caught by any of them in “standard” situations.
The ‘most dangerous’ specials right now are so because of bugs - blightstormers and ratlings casting/firing through walls and assassins spawning in your face without sound queue, teleporting a milisecond after touching the ground if dodged or pushed, and running aimlessly back and forth for no reason other than making aiming at them a pain.
I otherwise have no problem with the balance of specials and learning to effectively deal with them is part of the learning curve.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but if I start from the classic scenario: wave, grouped team, little space, then for me it is the Globadier. Sure it always depends on the situation, but disablers like assassins, leeches, and packmasters are not a big problem in grouped teams in my opinion, they come (close) to the player, you can dodge them and they are relatively easy to kill. Standardbearers can get nasty by 3, but they need other beastmen and need to get quite close to the player, same goes for Flamerats. Gunners need a direct LoS to the player and also become less dangerous with increasing distance. Blightstormer are sometimes even helpful to escape from tricky situations and do comparatively little damage.
Gas rats, however, throw their orbs all across the map, the gas obstructs the view, does a lot of damage and forces the players to give up safe positions (eventually the team splits up). They are comparatively difficult to kill with one shot and, if you can’t one shot kill them, go on a suicide mission. And it doesn’t take many of them to be effective.
I get Weaves flashbacks rn 65 damage arrows out of the shadows from everywhere…
I do think Globadiers are the nastier ones of the bunch but they aren’t unfairly so. One globadier will never throw more than two globes at once, and then just waddle around for a bit ; and their damage is also applied to enemies, so you can actually quite easily use poison gas clouds to your advantage.
During a horde, I’m more scared of a packmaster behind a wall of stormvermins (of course it’s always situational, one WHC or Merc ability and the hookrat isn’t really a threat anymore).
TAKEN IN ISOLATION : Assassin - even without the various bugs - cause immediate damage on their own as soon as they hit you. No other disabler causes such damage immediately as it’s usually the crowd you get dragged through that causes the damage. A packmaster on his own can drag you for ages before you start getting hurt and the leech is easy enough to dodge and even if you do get sucked( ) there’s time to be saved before damage is inflicted.
Archers get a special mention purely for the adverse and immediate effect on my blood pressure when I get hit out of nowhere by 15 of these things.
Globadiers cause a frown when they Tom Brady Hail Mary a globe 400 feet to hit you in the face but that’s easily avoided.
An assassin is easy to dodge if you know when he is leaping, which can be really problematic given all the layers of bugs on top of AI, netcode, and animation LOD. It is really not a rare sight when an assassin leaps sideways or even back forward. Leeches on the other hand have way simpler AI and they always attack a fixed time after they teleport in. Experienced players dodge leeches without even looking their way because all the information is already encoded in the sound: that thunder-like sound of an incoming teleport, then the crack of him going for you which gives out his position and then a fixed delay later (slightly more than a second), he shoots his spell directly at you - all you need to do is just clear a space for you to dodge laterally to his direction vector.
I chose Assassins because their buggyness but I’d add the Blightstormers with their stupid “get caught in the vortex and take the full damage” mechanic.
I didn’t consider the Standard bearers because Beastmen aren’t a real feature . Instead they are a game bug.
While I despise the weird angles eshin are jumping you from, a stormer that finishes his cast and denies an area completely, or forces you to move is a reason I wipe to alot more than one person getting disabled.
The combination of Stormers and CWs, who dont get lifted and just whack you, or Leeches who pull you out of that storm without you being able to do crap about it puts the cream ontop of it.
I would trade taking a hit to snipe a Stormer every time.
I wish you listed OTHER for the “what makes them dangerous?” section.
I only picked assassins for one reason and one reason only:
When you’re playing client side, his animations NEVER sync up correctly. I’ve been pounced on numerous occasions from a sideways assassin who was targeting another player. Another issue is the seemingly lack of assassin animations during ping spikes. One second you see one but the next he’s right on top of you with no running/pouncing animations in-between.
There’s been another issue I’ve noticed recently where the hero callouts won’t play out until AFTER someone has already been disabled by an assassin.
For a game where a large majority plays client side, this issue shouldn’t be acceptable.
If I cannot tell what direction the assassin is going then I cannot effectively handle the assassin.
I have absolutely no issues at all with assassins while hosting. It’s just a horrific problem playing client side regardless of how low my ping is.
Kinda pointless taking anything less than the body of statistics into account because ofc the most dangerous special is the one targeting you this very moment XD
Eh, this poll just ends up checking which special that ends up causing the most people headaches most routinely. Not that i expect anyone to be terribly surprised should the assassin emerge as the one voted out.
For while others aside from the assassin may cause more wipes when put in a favorable spot but i´d doubt anyone saying that the assassin isn’t one the one to cause the most problems on a individual level. Frontliners get disabled and vaporized when dealing with hordes while backliners get pinned and die from some stray mob walking up on them while the frontliners are busy.
But one person dying in the open doesnt really cause a wipe the way others can do.
65 damage arrows out of the shadows from everywhere…
) there’s time to be saved before damage is inflicted.