@Voidq To be fair, it was completely different for awhile, and it has just slowly been tweaked back towards being recognizable.
I get what you’re saying about how this will “emphasize” stagger, but I kinda feel like it’s massive overkill, and bad players are just going to keep being bad. They’ll go the path of least resistance, which likely means utilizing the weapons that benefitted most from this - the ones who have good damage and stagger.
Also, agreed that stagger makes sense in a realistic sense, but video games aren’t generally realistic, and VT is no exception. Though, I can’t think of what games have a stacking damage buff from repeated attacks; maybe I’m missing an obvious example, but most games (and fighting games spring to mind) actually have damage reduction over combos, because of how much an advantage just throwing an enemy off-balance already is.
Also agree that Scrounger and Swift Slaying are rather garbage; scrounger-bashing was never fun to play, it was just overly powerful (though to be honest, it had persisted so long that I just assumed that it was INTENTIONAL design, heh), and Swift Slaying is just a straight-up DPS increase. Maybe if it was connected to something skillful, like headshotting (not that it’s THAT hard to headshot in general) it’d be better.
This is a pretty valid and big complaint, given that FS tend to iterate pretty dang slowly on balance. If a weapon doesn’t get a good pass in one balance patch, well - hopefully they’ll get to it in six months! I still maintain that, if we just had the balance tweaks for 2H Hammer and Shield weapons applied to pre-2.0, we’d have the best balance in the game’s history, and I’ve yet to see anyone show me a flaw in that reasoning. I’d be interested in hearing why you might disagree, if you do.
Clearly, this mechanic is going to be sticking around, but I remain unconvinced that it’s a good thing. I actually suggested a way it could be a good thing in my last post, but we’re not seeing that or anything similar.
Well all I can say to that is I think that’s one of the worst ways to increase difficulty. Just like how dodging shouldn’t be a 100% immunity to damage pass, pushes/CC should be used to good effect to increase your team’s survivability, not just as a go to automatic thing you do all the time to max your damage.
Now, on to your question. Keep in mind I haven’t played the latest version, nor did I have time to test all the weapons before, but what comes to mind immediately at least: 2h axe (now a straight downgrade from 2h hammer, 2h axe used to at least have a nice niche cleaving SV in patrols/taking out 2 elites at once which I found it did better than 2h hammer, and also it used to chop hordes a bit quicker), rapier also got worse (barring WHC thanks to his crit HS OHK mechanic still allowing for fishing).
Saltz’s/Bardin’s 1h axe were bad thanks to the mechanic, but FS realised this and that’s been addressed, they tweaked them directly in one patch.
Daggers also, but they tweaked those too and also buffed bleed hugely. Dunno how they are now, haven’t tried them out again yet.
But that’s not the problem, the distortion is upwards, not downwards. Most weapons got buffed, at least theoretically, as in they can now take advantage of stagger, the problem is not all do that well. All the meta weapons from before are now even more meta (exec, halb, dual hams, A&F (honestly it’s the stupid +20% crit/heavy linesman on pushes on that last one))
Yes, you can still play much as you did before, but pretending stagger doesn’t massively increase your damage output isn’t helpful, at the end of the day that’ll be what decides the meta long term. Shielded weapons still aren’t comparable to eg dual hammers on Bardin as those got the full benefit of stagger too, despite arguably taking less skill than good shield use (and that’s coming from a dual hammers guy).
I don’t know what the meta will be yet, but I still think it’s going to be quite inflexible in terms of weapons or at the very least which weapon combos you use to maximise damage in combat (on Saltz at least: even more abuse of A&F’s pushes for example, also lots of abusing the alt attack on billhook. You end up using it to buff damage not to be tactical and use it at the right times (yes, I know, A&F’s pushes were already overtuned). Dual hammers you can use like before as they have innate CC so they’re spared that at least).
On your hypothesis: there’s one big flaw with it and that’s that pre-WoM was literally like that and most weapons were pretty good (excluding shields and one or two others).
The main problem areas in weapons balance pre-WoM were A&F (it straight up outshone the rest of Saltz’s weapons because it could do it all, not because his other weapons were bad)
and crowbill (because the rest of Sienna’s melee was bad for fighting armor on higher difficulties).
On the difficulty/feeling thing, I think the reviews on Steam and posts on this forum would say otherwise, for better or worse people miss how it was before. Yes, it won’t help the people who relied entirely upon dodge spam and Legend being easier to be able to beat it, but it would feel different.
But you’re right, FS have adjusted it to the point where the differences aren’t as stark. I don’t think anyone can say they don’t notice the extra damage they get against CCed enemies though, and that alters the feel of combat.
But I mean, they’ve had to work it back more and more to recapture that feeling. That tells me it wasn’t a good blanket addition.
Missing the point. Yes, we know it’s mostly used to buff your own individual dmg, not as a team thing. We said as much above. Again, that turns it into a weapon balance mechanic.
Yes, we are aware of those other things. And we’ve played with a lot of different versions of it since beta 1.
Wouldn’t that make your positive view of the mechanic equally irrelevant? I believe you are too hasty in saying it’s good
I mean… this is a game. Feeling bad can be equivalent to a thing being bad, they’re not always mutually exclusive. In VT2 the feel of the combat is very important, I’d argue it’s the game’s main selling point (beyond the top notching voice acting/dialogue, atmosphere and so on).
I mean… There are other, imo better ways to force teamplay than this mechanic. Difficulty/the AI director is a good one, as was the dodge nerf. FS are kinda limited in that each character can more-or-less do all the different roles in combat, it’s not an MMO or RPG where you have tanks, DPS and healers.
You already could land more damage by virtue of the enemy being incapacitated and thus you not having to worry about getting countered, but now enemies have had their resistance buffed across the board anyway.
Excluding the moments where CC send them tumbling back and other enemies instantly fill their slot.
Except ranged had to be buffed to bypass the mechanic and is doing even better again now
Ah yes, the old goalpost shift. It went from they aren’t explaining why they don’t like it, to now they need to provide solutions on how to fix it in the same post. Agile.
That thread isn’t a good example imo but you opened by poisoning the well, attacking everyone who doesn’t like the mechanic and painting them as noobs, so I’m not surprised at how it turned out there. Nilter’s reply was good, he gave his reasons for disliking it. You just disagreed with them.
I think stagger is getting a bad press more as a result of everything feeling a little harder purely because so much other stuff is having an impact on the difficulty too. Some of it intended and some not.
…
I think they probably should be spending MORE time fixing class-breaking bugs or having a good look at whether Beastmen are overtuned (they are,) and how to fix the dozens of big bugs, but they’re reacting to the customers plague-monk screeching about the Stagger and Difficulty.
Your post perfectly encapsulates how I feel about things as well. I don’t have a huge beef with stagger directly. However, Legend feels a solid 35% harder across the board for me, and that increase is the difference between a 90%+ success rate Pre-WoM and a sub 50% success rate (and much lower on some maps like Dark Omens or others with crazy end events).
As I’ve thought more about wipes, I think more of the spike in difficulty comes from the chaos and wild cards introduced by the increased frequency of specials (double warp fire, double blightstormers) combined with other minor or major broken stuff. Beastmen are over tuned for sure. I’d like to see them work on that and stop messing around with stagger mechanics for a while.
So you think the difficulty hike comes from things OTHER than the now core mechanic that is directly related to your ability to efficiently kill an opponent?
Well I think, at least in part, you are right. Some have listed things like the dodge changes, and others, that are no doubt impacting survivability across the board
And some have even said the opposite. Things are EASIER. Sounds like they are playing a different game to me, but, to each their own I guess
Very true. No matter how obvious FS makes the good habits some people are just not interested in any kind of learning curve whatsoever because of “I already have X hours, I should just fly through Leg/Cata now automatically!” attitude.
However mechanics that prevent people from just spamming their way through maps could be a start.
Most MMOs and ARPGs will have some kind of CC combo system where you do more dmg to enemies affected by stun/knockdown/whatever but that wasn’t really the point here. It was more a counter to how many people claim that pushing/stagger feels dumb and not natural and whatnot and that doing more dmg to a staggered target makes no sense… but it does.
Agreed, literally anything other than “spam left click and hope for crits” would be a better trigger condition for all the crit traits and talents (we have way too many of them still). Reward people for headshots, big cleaves, fully charged attacks, cycling different melee strikes etc. instead of rewarding mindless spam and nobrainer builds. Stagger at least rewards and forces a certain degree of melee comboing instead of using one attack only but all this in general still has a lot of room for improvement.
I don’t disagree, I mean for me the combat would still be nearly the exact same and without the HP buff I wouldn’t need the stagger-dmg bonus so the final dmg-to-HP ratio (clear speed) would end up being more or less the same again. Of course I would still try to maintain a good horde control regardless because it simply helps everyone around me and makes the run go much smoother and faster, as it always did.
I was hoping the “stagger is obviously a good thing to do” feature would open people’s eyes and give forgotten weapons a purpose but I kinda knew I was naive thinking it would achieve both At least it did shine some light on a few weapons but they would have to seriously nerf stagger on light weapons now to make it really matter and that would probably not work out too well in the end.
Where are all the “Im a tank I wanna see how much stagger I did on the scoreboard” people now though?
I don’t want to get it twisted, I want to perform well with it, but my experience is what it is. And that’s why I said it’s personal opinion, I can’t tell others that it’s bad but for me it and 1h axe just didn’t work as well as it had before the 2.0.
That said, I don’t intend to just give up on it, axes are my favourite melee weapon type and I want to make it work. And I did specify it was on RV for the same reason. I don’t like the class and hope it will work once I’m done 100 game runs with all the classes. Hopefully I’m wrong and there’s nothing but bad adaptation on my part, but I do want to raise concerns, if I’m even slightly right.
I feel I might have used the wrong turn of phrase! Ultimately I agree with you. It’s a lot of oomph to get some mileage out of it and you certainly feel it now with how relatively the game has changed. I don’t feel it’s particularly bad, I would also need to do another metric ton of games to assess actual game feels.
By all means please provide feedback. The only way for problems to be fixed is to know that they even exist.
I would say that we could have achieved all the good of this patch with basically everything but stagger mechanic, and only fiddling with HP a small amount. So a little stagger resistance on some enemies, elites in hordes, tweaking their aggressiveness and animations, scaling finales, and a small health increase of like 10% on average.
The increased stagger resist is all that is really needed to keep people from merely blendering through hordes. I recall FS did try to implement this change once before, but the community reacted terribly to it. The problem was really that they just start off super heavy-handedly (which is often a good thing for testing, but can also get a bad reaction), and the game felt pretty bad, so they ended up undoing it. I think if they had tweaked it down a bit more, we might have gotten to a good spot.
Since I’m semi proponent of Stagger system, I do believe it could be made better with it. It just doesn’t perform as well as I expected. I do believe issue is with 2.0 in general, rather than Staggers themselves. As a slow weapon it actually is outshone by 2h hammer for a reason, it isn’t (in my opinion) made for staggering, rather cleaving and thinning a line in front of you. Issue it doesn’t and doesn’t have enough to stop mid animation attacks from Marauders. And being too slow it kinda lends to poorer performance (again IMO) .
I was pretty happy with one of the ‘weekend builds’ that basically nerfed stagger dmg to only like 10%-20% or so but still with an HP buff so the result could’ve been close to what you’re proposing maybe? (110% hp enemies and no stagger dmg buff)
Not sure.
That being said it also made the game noticeably harder and while Cata definitely feels easier now and I could see the game still getting harder in general I think we all know how that would be received at this point.
If I was in FS’s shoes I would simply turn Legend into whatever it was before to keep masses happy and I’d buff Cata and add one more difficulty level between Legend and Cata.
Negative. It doesn’t achieve increased teamplay and imo it’s not a good way to improve difficulty.
Does it bother me hugely? No. A lot of my default weapons choices handle it great (exec, M&S, dual hammers, glaive etc), my off meta choices (S&S, A&S) aren’t even that much better now as, rather than get buffed relative to other weapons, all comparable weapons got buffed and thus the former category are still better choices. The changes to blocking bosses and increased mobility I’d argue did more for shielded weapons than the new mechanic has so far.
Part of the problem for newer players is also that, ignoring ‘the people who don’t want to learn,’ as the levels of the stagger bonus aren’t tied to animations/you can’t visibly see if an enemy your teammate has hit is on level 1/level 2 (unless you were watching them the whole time and know what level the weapon/move they used applies) , it isn’t clear or intuitive for them to learn how it works.
(Not to mention it’s wildly inconsistent across the different difficulties but there’re a number of things like that in the game, and the game is so oriented around them now that you can’t alter that without making it either way easier or way harder at any given difficulty level. FS would need to add new enemy variants/moves and other things to replace these mechanics. I don’t think that’ll happen.)
There’s enough confusion as is about the enhanced power talent (people see 7% and think it’s terrible because the stagger talents add eg 40%, 60% damage etc., not realising enhanced power is overall power and the stagger talents affect only the stagger bonus). Breakpoints were beyond most newer players already, but there you can at least figure them out via trial and error, stagger makes that an even more arduous and confusing process for them. You shouldn’t have to leave the game to understand base mechanics, like the new system’s trying to be.
Stagger → CC on the other hand is intuitive. The fact people didn’t learn to push properly before was more down to dodge being overtuned, certain weapons being overtuned (A&F was pure left click spam), certain careers being overtuned (if you only played Shade you never learned how to deal with bosses without having an instadelete button, likewise if you only played Zealot you were almost indestructible AND had great DPS) and Legend not being that difficult overall.
All that said I can agree with @TmanDW in that I see the potential for it - imo if it only applied to eg shielded weapons and things like 2h hammers. It’s also possible FS will manage to balance weapons even with it in, they’ve shown they’re serious about that (based on the tweaks in patch 2.0) though normally they were quite inconsistent/slow to do balance in the past when weapons were over/underperforming. (Perhaps with the seasonal release system that’ll change). M&S got nerfed not that long after BtU came out iirc, meanwhile A&F only just got its first serious nerf in 2.0.
Honestly that’s actually a great idea - I’d love to be able to see: number of enemies staggered, number of elite enemies staggered, damage evaded (via dodging) and damage blocked.
How much damage you managed to prevent your teammates from taking (thanks to pushes/CC) would be neat too but I’m not sure how practical that is for the game to count up.
That might be in part due to RV’s kinda weird place in that he’s an ammo/pot dealer for his team. He’s great fun and utility but he doesn’t get too many cool toys to himself (though smokebomb + the talent that lets you leave it’s area is great for clutch plays), unlike IB or Slayer.
A&S is pretty decent up until/including champion, I should know as I ran it all the time while I was working my way up the difficulties. It does require good teamwork however and you need to use your newfound tankiness to be as aggressive as possible to get mileage out of it. Also forget it vs bosses, that’s why I ended up dropping it. 1h axes handle elites well and most people take AS/crit chance/SS to help even them out against hordes, but I tend to lean toward 1h hammer now as it has AP on heavies but better cleave/control on lights. Dual hammers ofc are also viable (if you have BtU).
2h axe used to be decent vs elites/hordes (less CC but decent cleave/killing power), but isn’t competitive vs 2h hammer anymore post-2.0 as the latter has way better innate CC.
I’m not keen on 1h axe (sans shield)'s playstyle myself so take this with a grain of salt, but in my experience it requires a specific playstyle, and very good use of CC/dodges to not eat hits. You also have to take into account its slow AS, vs bosses that can mean your DPS is pretty bad, especially if you don’t time your hits well in conjunction with dodging their attacks. Without SS you also can’t use it against a horde like you would Bardin’s 2 handers or dual axes on Slayer, again, you need good use of pushes/dodges there.
What doesn’t help me either is I’m not such a huge fan of the grudgeraker’s playstyle, even before the nerfs, it’s good weapon in the right hands, but it’s not for me and it’s a common pairing I see with the 1h axe to cover its weaknesses (barring on IB who could take drakefires instead).
You might be better off running 1h hammer and crossbow/handgun if that’s more your thing.
Wow very in depth and full of description and explanation. Well done, and thanks for the reply @Drakonhammer
So you think that the damage-to-stagger mechanic, which you also believe has a negative effect on the game, has potential to not ONLY be used for CC? I mean, does it make sense and a damage enhancing mechanic to you?
Oh more than half of my RV games I’m Handgun and Crossbow equipped. I try everything in my route to 100 game completion just to see what sticks. So far RV is one of few classes nothing does stick for me.
Let me put it this way, I think it’d be worth testing in a trial build with the damage bonus only being applied by shielded weapons and select others (like 2h hammers). I’m far from the first to suggest this on the forums.
I don’t think FS is going to do that at this point however, as it’d render the stagger talent tier obsolete.
I could get behind adjusting the amount of the bonus on a per weapon/attack basis to reward only good CC (for example, not having dual hammer lights apply it, only heavies/pushes) buuut, that falls back into the problem of not knowing what the current bonus on an enemy is and making it even harder for players to understand intuitively.
Again though, we wouldn’t know how these would work in practice without it being trialled, so atm I think the mechanic’s a net negative like I stated before.
Any luck with the Throwing Axes? I found them incredibly enjoyable on RV in the previous betas (and apparently they work with conservative shooter too).
Other than that I take 1h hammer or dual hammers on RV, they’re great. Pickaxe is decent too but I don’t use it as often.
At least it did shine some light on a few weapons but they would have to seriously nerf stagger on light weapons now to make it really matter and that would probably not work out too well in the end.