NEW Topic - CONTINUED discussion - Fatshark needs to LISTEN to customers

Well you dont get anything much from veteran and recruit difficulty. And tell me which 1.6 legend player wants to go into veteran?

If champion 2.0 had the same rewards and difficulty as legend 1.6 it still wouldn’t be good enough? So, people just want to think they are good enough to be legends then. An ego issue.

I wanted to specifically reply to people, but since my last post about a hundred posts or something were made (don’t worry, I read them all) making that hard, so instead I’ll just say what I wanted to say in no specific order here:

  • As far as I remember, the stagger bonus in the much lauded weekend build during the closed Beta was equal to the current stagger damage bonus, not less as some people said.

  • Right now, for no one, stagger is mandatory to do adequate damage. You can either push and attack twice doing 0 - 140% - 140% damage total 280), or attack thrice and get 3 x 100% = 300 total damage, assuming none of your hits stagger, which they definitely will since last patches. If the stagger damage with corresponding perks and such was removed right now, the hitpoint decrease of enemies would have to be huge to not make enemies even tankier as a result. Stagger-damage is not causing the feeling of enemy tankiness!

  • The actual reason some weapons felt weaker / enemies felt tougher was the (only tangentially related) cleave reduction everything suffered, and the stagger resistance enemies got, and all this already has been reverted for the biggest part in the latest patches. The reason the game might still feel harder is because the other changes like dodge, and enemy slotting / agressiveness, or attack speed, or beastmen, and such.

  • Stagger has always been used offensively as well in Vermintide 2 as staggered enemies always were easier to cleave. Pushing a horde before attacking them with your cleave weapon was always a good strategy. Also, stagger made space for getting hits in. You’d always use it for that as well, not for just defensive reasons. The introduction of stagger-damage hardly made us use stagger differently, in practice.

  • I repeat myself, but there is no weapon currently bad because of the stagger-damage mechanic. None. If a weapon is currently bad, scrapping the stagger-damage mechanic won’t help it the slightest bit. The weapon probably requires other buffs (like cleave, stagger, attack speed, base damage, mobility, armor piercing, bugfixing, etc.). In fact, some weapons that are currently viable in specific situations, are only viable because stagger damage (related) mechanics. For example: Shields are now better since they can now offensively take advantage of the stagger they’d generate anyways a lot better. Or even unexpected stuff like the Rapier, since it can now take advantage of assassin perk + the stagger bonus damage for a sweet +40% headshot damage it wouldn’t get otherwise (and you always needed headshots with it anyways). This is only one example of the effect of the “dial to turn” Fatshark wanted. Summary: If stagger-damage was scrapped no current bad weapon would become good, while there certainly are weapons that would become worse.

  • The grievance that some weapons are now less skill dependant to use, like spear with relatively less effective headshots because the enemy wasn’t staggered before it, as was mentioned before, is kind of true. However, like I said in my Rapier example, some weapons can actually now be more effective with skill because of interacting with the stagger-damage mechanic. Handmaiden, who lacks the assassin-perk, is indeed less fit for pinpoint precision enemy deletion than Waystalker or Shade. That fits the class however, as Handmaiden’s class flavour was always more controlling hordes and superior maneuvring, which she can still do with Spear. And headshots are still rewarded with more damage and stagger, so skill is still rewarded.

  • Someone said Rat Ogres died too fast because of stagger damage bonus. What?! They hardly stagger, so if they die faster (not my experience) it’s not because of that…

  • (Personal opinion:) It is intuitive that staggered enemies are more vulnerable, or that staggering them makes sense offensively. Compare it to boxing: You don’t start with a haymaker, you start by leading in with jabs or something to open guard before you go for the K.O… And like I said above, in Vermintide 2 stagger always had an offensive component in it anyways.

  • The grievance that stagger makes it harder to determine how many hits an enemy needs to die is legit. However, breakpoints are harder to calculate but not impossible. Also, in the frantic fight vs. a horde (especially when more people are involved), you never had a good idea of how many hits an enemy needed anyways. The stories of being stabbed from behind by that lone Skavenslave you thought was dead after a hordefight are as old as Vermintide itself. The uncertainty and chaotic nature of combat have always been a part of this game. And it’s also a personal preference of wanting this game to be perfectly predictable in a spreadsheet with breakpoints. If you can just let go of that, the gameplay still works.

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Mate you should read the topic chain before posting such stuff… this comment shows that you read last couple of posts only.

And to your point - 2.0 champion is comparable to 1.6 legend deed with one easy mutator. But simply difficulty is not the issue here, but we have post this stuff already here with more detail…

Wait, but there wasn’t positive side-effect of buffing underused weapons caused by this mechanic.

Shields are more viable now mostly because they got more mobility, can block unblockable attacks, there is higher difficulty where it helps a lot and there are new talents. I don’t think they are suddenly better because of stagger mechanic, that prolly plays very low role there, if any at all. Since other weapons have ways of getting that bonus also.

It needs to be retested again probably, I was arguing about this on discord yesterday, and I decided I will get mods again and check the actuall numbers to be sure information I got in beta is correct… and it turned out… that it is not. For example the implicit bonus is not there on heavy attack and this has been explained during beta by dev… but than nobody noted that they removed it in some version of the beta or 2.0 or who knows what happened with it…

I also tested Dual Daggers yesterday quite a bit and those are strong now, pretty strong on Shade, while those were complete garbage in beta…

But it is also narrow now.

They are not going to do it anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter now.

Yea, most probably not, since big part of difficulty are beastmen, dodge/tracking changes and still screwed up temp HP talents (can’t get crap on FK w/ halberd for example).

There is Assassin talent , that lets you avoid the mechanic on headshots & crits, giving you the full damage instantly on those hits.

That is correct. And that is great imo, since it makes sense that those should take more damage while they are more vulnerable.

We can now, I started a bit yesterday and was kinda surprised by the results. Didn’t have too much time, will continue today.

There was lots of testing during the beta, which is why those people who were there and played a lot aren’t really new to this. But there seems to be some shadow changes that wasn’t in patch notes, so it prolly needs someone to spend weekend on modded realm, test the stuff and create video explaining how it all currently works and what are all the interactions.

Exactly.

As for Dual Daggers, those are actually strong now, but if you try playing them… you will notice different issues. For example, you don’t have stamina to do much vs Minotaur, you will often get destroyed unless you can go invis or something. And enemies in Cata and higher are so agressive and also broken (the running attacks turning fu… mid way…) that you can’t really handle bigger amounts of enemies, since you can’t out dodge them lot of the times, especially not if you want to keep attacking and you can’t really do push attacks, because then you can’t block and get insta murdered.

So those do look good when doing testing in keep, but than in action one better bring hagbane do do CC or just run around like chicken.

Yea, but those people would quickly notice in Cata (without the stagger mechanic), that they can’t do it anymore, especially now with much more agressive enemies, strongly nerfed dodge and tweaked/destroyed temp hp.

Yes, people take weapon that works well with it, or take talent like Assassin to avoid it etc. but it doesn’t alter my gameplay in some significant way, when playing hard content.

We can’t say that, since we don’t know how it would be tweaked without the mechanic, if they decided to remove this, they would need to rebalance HP etc. They can’t just remove it and keep everything else the same.

That is just trolling, it’s much harder now.

Yesterday I got guy @ level 20 join me in pub Cata run :smile: , insta kick… this always happens when there is something new or there is some sale going. But even if this wasn’t the case I agree that it still got significantly harder.

There certainly is threshold in skill of average casual player. To go with metaphor, probably every adult male can do back squat with 50 kg, than those people sure can train and do like 100-150 kg, but if you suddenly want them to do 250… well that’s not going to work, they won’t get better. Some might, sure. Some hardcore guys might, but that will be small %.

I’m just saying by this that there certainly is threshold in skill. I can work on my butterfly swimming style, but I’m sure not getting anywhere close to Phelps. And this will get compounded when you need 4 ppl who all are above certain threshold.

Not sure where the current Legend sits, but I would say that it’s probably somewhere on the edge. It wouldn’t be big deal since it’s Legend right… it’s 4th difficulty. But problem is that people are used to playing that already for a long time. And now it suddenly got much harder… and people don’t want to go back playing Champ.

Sure reward system is pointless here anyway. I’ve already argued about this. They say Cata won’t get proper reward because people would be forced to play it… lol… like they are not hopping on Legend getting murdered all the time, since I started playing the game, not just now.

So yea we can drop the Emperor Vaults down to the Recruit, so people in Recruit don’t feel like being forced to play Veteran… doesn’t matter since the reward structure is out of whack anyway.

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To that I would like to add the bugs. So many new bugs came after 2.0 and many old bugs that already were fixed before, appeared again. In every single legend game now I get downed due to some bug. Silent enemies (even bosses), enemies falling under ground or in the walls hitting you without being seen etc… This can be really triggering.

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I enjoy reading your posts @flisker, you always explain yourself very well

I think this thread has heard a lot of vaild viewpoints too. I wonder if Fatshark reads and considers this?

Not all of my views match with the ‘majority’ I am sure… but I REALLY think this 2.0+ experience has been a bad one overall

I had a friend come back to the game after a month or two off, a VERY skilled player. He went with me on 2 legend pub QP and I watched him struggle. His experience wasnt a good one. He simply said what we all know to be true. He said he thinks eventually, FS will balance this mess as best they can, and that this stagger to damage garbage is here to stay

Sad

He may come back and check it out in a few months. Btw, he bought the expansion without checking reviews, and I dont think he will be playing much

Anyway…

Thank you ALL for your comments thus far. I TRULY appreciate the time you took to voice your views and experiences. I may not agree with some, and may be totally against others, but we ALL have one and THIS is the place to display it. I hope that Fatshark has read these posts. It might be a little wake up call

Thanks

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I guess it´s time to throw ourselves at some cata true solo.

I am also guessing that horde clearing in corners will barely be possible which means true solo will mostly evolve into kite looping alot especially beastmen hordes.

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Also dont you people find it weird that legend solo runs are possible? As far as i understand most people who play this game a lot and use some meta tactics can run solo. I honestly find it very weird that in heavily coop oriented game it’s possible. It shows that there is some flaws in game balance.

I don’t think I ever did that, unless I was under such high pressure that I really had to, or to make space for heavy attack and taking down elites or something like that. And for that I would often use ult, or someone in the group would. For example when playing Merc I would just shout, rather than push stuff, since it’s fast and has bigger radius.

But enemies wasn’t so agressive and dodging was very strong, it would not work now, now I have to push no matter if I get dmg buff from it or not.

After some quick testing I’ve done yesterday I don’t know anymore , so much stuff has been changed here and there that I can’t say right now, I would have to re-test everything again. And I don’t really feel like it anymore. Will rather just create some strong builds and play.

But one of my main points was that it would be much easier to do some last finishing touches to previous balance they reached after year+ , basically buffing shileds, some strong underperformers like mace/hammers and toning down the obviously OP do it all stuff like F&A.

Some of it did kinda happened, flails got buffed a bit, F&A got nerfed, shileds got buffed mobility and blocking, etc.

I would not be so sure about the quoted statement.

Also as for Rapier I’ve heard that it is op af, so … not sure that it is good thing when you can suddenly crit-one-shot Chaos Warrior with light weapon, that sounds like complete nonsense to me, especially when before it took like 10 well aimed headshots :sweat_smile::shark:

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Thanks, I try. At least here on the forum :sweat_smile:

Yea this makes sense to me. If someone asks me what do I think about WoM. I just reply with something like “There is lots of great stuff, but also lots of incredible fails” and they reply back “I see, classic FS” :rofl::shark:

No way anyone is doing that with non-invis class or some big cheesing strategy. Threat and Intensity levels are juiced up so you would just have run thru hordes while killing of all the specials and bosses, that is no-go.

I was possible because Legend was too easy for end-game difficulty.

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Maybe someone who thinks the stagger system is the root of all the 2.0 problems can tell me why this is way slower and more difficult…
(2.0.6)

Than this.
(1.2.2?)

I don’t understand the question, the 2.0.6 run is 20 min long (faster, not slower) and 1.2.2 is 26min (and why would u even compare it to so old patch as 1.2.2 ?)

Because so many people complain about 2.0 being way harder, and it feels easier to me for the most part. It’s an old version because that was the last time I uploaded a video.

It is objectively harder, because beastmen are stronger than other 2 factions, bosses got way more HP & there is no more insta poping them with Shade, dodge got massive nerf & enemies are more agressive with better/somewhat broken tracking.

Also comparing 2 runs like this doesn’t make much sense unless those are seeded runs, with same seed. Because if you get 2 chaos spawns in one run and than 2 patrols (you avoid) in other one… than u get very different results in terms of times and similar thing can go for spawns. For example sometimes u can get like 20 monks at start of Atg, sometimes you get basically nothing except for few Stormvermins and some trash mob here and there.

Also difficulty issue is not about speed, it’s about the difficulty itself imo. Yes it is still possible to steamroll map super fast, but it’s not exclusive with map being harder to finish for average player.

edit: also depends on what class & weapons you’re playing, I see you got rapier in the 2.0.6 vid, which from what I’ve heard is op af.

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This is my biggest cause of complete bafflement. So much work, so many changes, so many patches and finally getting to a point where the fine tuning needs a scalpel rather than a Battle Axe, and here we are somehow - making huge changes to a fundamental mechanic, getting the most basic parts of the combat changed with no hope in the near future of having any kind of fine tuning of weapons or talents. Before we even get to that point there’s the whole Stagger mechanic, the Massive changes required to Beastmen, the complete car-crash of Weaves Muliplayer joining games and the massive Bug List before anyone even considers looking at whether Rapier is stupidly OP or 2h Axe needs some tweaking.

This is like launch all over again. Bug infested, massive balance problems, customer dissatisfaction. We are currently in a 3 month Early Access of the unfinished WoM/2.0.x without being asked. Again.

To have a change of outcome in their actions a person needs to have a cognitive and behavioral change. Fatshark appear to be thinking, and behaving like they did a year ago - with the same disappointing outcomes.

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What’s wrong with invis classes?
I was thinking about giving it a try with Shade
I am not one of those who cheese but it does give options and I wasn’t planning to do a half true solo half speedrun

Beastmen are definitely tougher. Time to kill on all enemies plus bosses and dodging and blocking seems the same to me. Without seeds this is about as close as I can get it, 2 chaos spawn in 1.2 and 1 spawn and 1 troll in 2.0, avoided all patrols and pretty much the same type of enemies all the way through. I haven’t been using the rapier much for 2.0, just did it for a closer comparison.

Edit: Besides, I specifically said “stagger system”.

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Define easy please. Easy how exactly?

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In terms of true solo runs, I could do true solo onslaught with handmaiden or shade, but I would get absolutely demolished with every other class. Because the threat and intensity systems are near disabled or even disabled. So if you solo that kind of difficulty (similar to Cata, but bit different) than you won’t have time to kill hordes and specials, they will just keep coming. So you need invis class, to just move thru map, you kill a bit dash, kill kill, dash, purple pot, dash, dash, dash… kill kill, dash… etc. And than you can do it.

If you take like Merc… than you get overrun somewhere and you’re not dashing anywhere.

In Cata and after the nerfs to invis and jacked up special spawns, you would prolly have very hard time trying to get thru it even with Maiden/Shade.

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