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

[Drakonhammer]

@Voidq

actual reasons

Yet they never give those, ever. They get offended instead because it’s just easier and all they can produce is “its just bad, dunno why, revert everything FS” - is that supposed to be constructive?

That hasn’t been my experience, though it doesn’t help the beta forum threads are inaccessible now - there was a lot of good, in depth discussion there. @flisker and @BizarreSalp among others have also posted a lot about what they don’t like about it specifically.

Likewise people who say they like it but can’t explain why aren’t be constructive either.

But they’re entitled to do that, as are people who don’t like it, it’s a game after all, whether or not it ‘feels’ good to them to play is, at the end of the day, what decides whether or not they keep playing.

@Voidq

Melee stagger being extremely important was always a big part of why the game felt completely different if you had at least one good teammate you could push with and cover each other’s back.
So arguably, it was a good habit to have considering it made every encounter so much safer and easier to deal with for everyone around. Anyone who played anything above Legend before knows this.

Apart from the post-BBB dodge meta yes, pushing was always handy and having a knowledgeable teammate to keep your back clear makes things even better, but the problem I have with the blanket damage mechanic form of it is that it turns it from a pure combat mechanic into a balance one.

And we were pretty near to having balance there pre-WoM (mainly shielded weapons and certain heavies were lagging behind), now we’re back in the wilds.

@Voidq

Wouldn’t a mechanic (stagger dmg) that, in theory, should push more people towards understanding this be a good thing? Strange tooltips aside.

The problem is it doesn’t push people toward understanding it imo. Even ignoring the tooltips. It’s not tied to animations or anything.

I’m all for more difficulty but not throwing weapon balance out the window.

@Voidq

Meanwhile you could also watch 3 bad players just blatantly wipe to a harmless Skaven horde because all they did was stack atk speed and crit and kept dodging backwards from enemies. It’s not the difficulty level’s fault that they never learned the basics but felt compelled to queue into Legend 24/7 and just ragequit after each death instead of learning anything from it.

Well, there’s always a chance you’ll get people like that. But imo having the highest 2 difficulties be harder is the easiest way to handle that, and that can be done by means other than stagger.

Don’t get me started on item properties, I hate how AS/Crit chance/Swift Slaying are the default (excluding the odd breakpoint, and maybe parry on occasion). @scottz0rz had a good thread on fixing that.

@Voidq

But of course, give us at least one or two logical points as to why the “new” combat is so much worse. Explain what is so fundamentally wrong with it and suggest a solution.

I mean most recently there was this thread which you were in? There were also others earlier on but I don’t have a link to them on me right now, and I might be thinking of the beta forums for some of them… Again, it doesn’t help that they aren’t accessible, there was a lot of good discussion in there.

Here’re a few I can remember and/or find via search just now: Stagger mechanic is just DUMB! ..period, The stagger system is just solving the problem with a sledgehammer, Stagger is convoluted and repetative - #6 by Nilter, WoM Community Poll - #10 by BizarreSalp, Winds Of Magic Community Blogpost - #159 by flisker (you have to sift through the last three but I’ve linked you to some of the most relevant posts).

[Drakonhammer]

Can you say how the mechanic has increased teamplay for you in particular?

imo that’d a lot more constructive to the discussion than saying it has without explaining how/why.

[BizarreSalp]

@Voidq, this conversation stops being constructive the moment one side believes the other side is just “whining” and has no points, because it shows a lack of good faith and willingness to engage. This stuff is being put out there, you literally just have to read these posts.

It’s cool if some people are enjoying it; enjoyment is subjective, after all, and we all play to get enjoyment. But we can and should make actual arguments as to why it’s good, and when those are challenged we back it up. I have yet to see anyone actually show how stagger promotes teamwork, or show an example of one party member doing staggering, and his allies taking advantage of it. Certainly it’s not even necessary at the absolutely highest difficulty levels; if you watch videos like the recent Fortunes of War Cata run, you’ll not see them having someone stagger and someone else exploiting that. In fact, they’re almost always focusing different targets (and notably they did take Sword and Shield). People are using the stagger mechanic for their personal damage boosts, which basically invalidates the whole teamwork idea, adds an additional unnecessary layer of obfuscation to the damage formula, and breaks the existing balance. People’s engagement with the mechanic only exists to bring their proportional damage essentially back to where it was before this mechanic was added. It’s just the same thing with additional steps and confusion.

I would argue that what is actually creating more team work is just the higher difficulty (like the tightening of enemy timings, increased aggression, stagger resistance, et cetera); this occurred in the highest-difficulty modded game modes, too, like Deathwish Onslaught, where control weapons were already good (and notably, shields are pretty good now not because of Stagger but because they have decent mobility along with their control, IMO). I’ve never seen a run of DWONS that didn’t have something like a Slayer with 2H Hammer. Such control weapons just weren’t necessary in default Legend.

. . . and honestly, teams splitting up CAN be a part of team work. When one player is kiting, say, a boss, or a half dozen Chaos Warriors away from their team mates, so that the others can focus yet other threats, that is team play. No, that Waystalker running off ahead and getting downed instantly isn’t, but team work doesn’t just simply mean “all huddle together”. And unfortunately, stagger mechanic actually punishes kiting (even when kiting is the right thing to do). Other changes, like better enemy tracking on running attacks, is actually what is making kiting have a higher skill floor (and that’s good).

Can stagger be balanced eventually? Yeah, probably. I just fail to see any gain out of it, and will eat up a lot of time and resources. Ironically, it’ll also probably end up close to where we were before this. But I mean, Fatshark seem determined to keep it, so eh.

[Voidq]

I mean I agree with most of this actually. You clearly understand why melee stagger was already important before and is more so now. I’m speaking from my own experience and I don’t have time to read every single post that drops here but whenever I do I fail to get anything other than empty phrases aka “I hate this but I have X hours and Im definitely a good player so yeah definitely not whining about difficulty not at all its just boring and clunky and repetitive…”.

As to how create difficulty, that’s a great topic on its’ own but if we started by ‘What is making the game easy’ instead (as Legend before was way too easy), the biggest offenders would probably be:

• Hordes being harmless filler, walking medkit. Players being able to just spam left click and dodge sideways. = boring.
• Nearly everyone running attack speed and crit regardless of their weapon or career because that’s all it took to clear Legend before = not exactly encouraging build variety.
• And finally, THP being way too easy to maintain. Taking any hit that doesn’t oneshot me means nothing because I can simply just play less aggressively for a bit and recover easily.

I’d like to think that at least two of these 3 were at least touched on in the WoM update. We still have ways to go tho.

[BizarreSalp]

Fair play; I have seen posts that are like “this sucks; i have a bajillion hours”.

[Voidq]

@Drakonhammer

Can you say how the mechanic has increased teamplay for you in particular?

imo that’d a lot more constructive to the discussion than saying it has without explaining how/why.

All it did is that bad plays are punished more severely and good (team) plays are rewarded more than they were before. Push, block, heavy attack and push-stab all exist in the game for a reason (obviously), use them. As long as you use those properly and actually take full advantage of your melee weapon’s potential, you will do just fine.

@Drakonhammer

I mean most recently there was this thread which you were in?

Which simply discusses the possibility of implementing stagger dmg natively instead of via talents.

@Drakonhammer

Here’re a few I can remember and/or find via search just now

Yeah I’ve clicked on a few, all I see is “this is bad” with no logical reasoning behind it WHATSOEVER. I’m sorry “pushing enemies is repetitive?”. Well how about hitting them with light attacks? Is this it? This is the pinnacle of reasoning? Every single one of your hobbies is repetitive, that’s actually the point.

I get the feeling that people see “stagger” as something that makes the game harder or forces them to play defensively (which they call boring and I agree). It actually makes the game easier if you use it properly and it makes me play more aggressively if anything.

Just recorded this, after the last update so it’s not like it took me 25 games or something to get lucky before you even try going there. THIS is all it takes to clear Legend, me and one random Elf for majority of the map, with both of us arguably making some terrible plays here and there. We ain’t lvl 35 yet either.
Somebody point out to me exactly what’s so wrong (or basically unplayable according to Steam forums) with the combat as seen here, I’m genuinely curious:

Warhammer 69k: Vermintide 2 - Legend too hard reee

[KKND2]

can’t say i like the changes (any to be honest) but i dont think fatshark will listen to me. they live in la la land and won’t hear any of us lol.

i also didnt buy the dlc, i will grab it when its on sale for 10 bucks. i hate d3 so i probably will not play weave. and paying 20 bucks for a map and some new weapon is kindda rip off.

[Chaos5715]

I find champion quickplay to be more difficult than solo legend. Solo legend post 2.0 I win roughly %80 of the time, but bot survival is like %10. Pre 2.0 I won full book runs almost every time.

[Drakonhammer]

@Voidq

Can you say how the mechanic has increased teamplay for you in particular?

imo that’d a lot more constructive to the discussion than saying it has without explaining how/why.

All it did is that bad plays are punished more severely and good (team) plays are rewarded more than they were before. Push, block, heavy attack and push-stab all exist in the game for a reason (obviously), use them. As long as you use those properly and actually take full advantage of your melee weapon’s potential, you will do just fine.

The first part is true, but I think that was due to the other adjustments WoM brought rather than that mechanic. I’ll quote what I posted in the other thread to explain why I don’t think the mechanic itself works particularly well in promoting teamplay:

@Drakonhammer

The problem is that it doesn’t promote teamplay. Teamplay in VT2 with its weight of numbers enemies means often hitting different enemies coming in from different angles and having good situational awareness so you don’t get swamped, the only time you’re hitting the same is if you’re in a chokepoint (which anyway trivialise hordes) or there aren’t that many enemies around (not much danger either way).

@Voidq

I mean most recently there was this thread which you were in?

Which simply discusses the possibility of implementing stagger dmg natively instead of via talents.

Yes and I don’t agree with that solution as I don’t think it fixes any of the inherent issues with the mechanic, but our posts there also included gameplay reasons why we don’t like the mechanic.

@Voidq

Here’re a few I can remember and/or find via search just now

Yeah I’ve clicked on a few, all I see is “this is bad” with no logical reasoning behind it WHATSOEVER.

I mean yeah those responses are in there too, but you’re intentionally being obtuse if you’re ignoring the posts that do explain why they don’t like it.

The repetitiveness aspect I concur with in one major area and one major area alone, and that’s combat initiation. It isn’t a problem on weapons with automatic CC or an inbuilt modifier (which FS has added to 1h axes now afaik?), but to maximise horde DPS on other weapons without CC you need to initiate with a push. That is limiting, I like being able to throw pushes in naturally in the middle of combat for CC and not having to worry about that.

Does that make the game harder? No. But again, if you’re concerned about playing optimally it limits your flexibility in how you enter combat and that point it’s less tedious to take a CC weapon instead.

Again I prefer throwing pushes in where the CC is actually needed (and you could argue that the game was lacking in that before), not to take advantage of an arbitrary damage boost. They’ve always come in handy for taking aggro off of a party member.

@Voidq

Somebody point out to me exactly what’s so wrong (or basically unplayable according to Steam forums) with the combat as seen here, I’m genuinely curious:

Well I haven’t tried the latest version of WoM (can’t atm) after the nerfs, but one thing I do have to say from skimming through the video, a lot of the time you and the elf are hitting different enemies, so the damage boost from stagger isn’t even taken advantage of. That’s why I don’t think FS should rework combat around it as much of combat/teamwork involves covering different approaches and so on, like in my quoted post above.

Making combat more dangerous if you don’t use all the abilities in your arsenal well (dodging, pushing etc.) I’m all for, but I don’t think the blanket stagger damage boost is the way to do it. Again, it becomes a weapons balance mechanic then, rather than a pure combat one, which brings a whole slew of new problems. And again, I wanted Legend to be harder than it was pre-WoM, and I still want Cata to be a lot harder than Legend.

If stagger’s adjusted on a per weapon-class basis it might be balanced but then the question becomes: why didn’t FS simply buff the underperforming weapons from pre-WoM?

[Chaos5715]

I am just not understanding the drama around stagger. It has been in the game since day one. Except now, you have an option of getting extra damage out of it to make blunt weapons better, or you can take increased power if you don’t want to utilize the extra damage mechanic. They added another row of talents dedicated to it, so nothing is being taken away from you.

They increased enemy health, but if you take increased power then it doesn’t make much of a difference in my experience. However, beastmen mechanics are quite different and I think most people are dying because of them, not stagger mechanic.

Most of what I said in this other thread below still holds true. Except now I understand the stagger system and I like it. In the gameplay video in that thread I fight almost nothing but beastmen the entire map.

Liking the changes so far

I haven’t played a whole lot yet, unlocked the new weapons and played a handful of legend games, but haven’t touched weaves as of yet. Of the classes I’ve played so far I am quite happy with the talent changes. I haven’t noticed a difference in the dodge or stagger mechanics. Although, I have never been overly concerned about breakpoints so stagger isn’t an issue, I just hit things till they die. I’m not completely clear on the new stagger talents (do the damage buffs apply to the hit that cause…

[Drakonhammer]

@Chaos5715

I am just not understanding the drama around stagger. It has been in the game since day one. Except now, you have an option of getting extra damage out of it to make blunt weapons better, or you can take increased power if you don’t want to utilize the extra damage mechanic. They added another row of talents dedicated to it, so nothing is being taken away from you.

This is incredibly flawed… That’s like if FS added an energy source to Bardin’s hammers which you can turn on via alt-fire to instead have a WH40k power hammer and people complained they were OP, then someone turns around and is like: c’mon guys, the hammers have been in the game since BtU, it’s not like it’s anything new or different. You can ignore them.

It’s not a minor damage buff either. You could always ignore THP in the past too, doesn’t mean the AI director isn’t designed with it in mind. Ignoring mechanics by definition makes your play less optimal and that cannot be avoided.

@Chaos5715

They increased enemy health, but if you take increased power then it doesn’t make much of a difference in my experience. However, beastmen mechanics are quite different and I think most people are dying because of them, not stagger mechanic.

Yes and yes, but for a lot of us from the beta forums the concern is not increased difficulty, it’s the balance implications of the mechanic and which weapons it promotes. Again, blanket mechanic, not great when weapons work in different ways and thus need individual balancing.

In fact back when FS did the 1st beta where enemy HP was increased to ridiculously insanely high levels the problem wasn’t that people weren’t able to beat the game then, it was that it took almost 2x as long and the enemies were tedious meatwalls. It was the tedium that was the problem, not the difficulty. Hell, most of us wanted Cataclysm and wanted it to be hard.

Anyway I’m glad they made elites tougher. On hordes I’m neutral, I kinda like hewing through the heretics and having the main goal be not to take damage from them, having them give too much THP for their strength was indeed a problem.

I don’t like that combat changes so much between the lowest and highest difficulties and with hero power (cleave, damage for the latter, enemy stagger resistance for the former), I like consistency, but at this stage I’d worried that if they took that away it’d become too easy.

I do wish you got more enemy variants and enemies (namely bosses) had more moves on higher difficulties instead though.

[Chaos5715]

Are blade and blunt weapons not more equal now than they were before? I have never used blunt much.

[Argonaut14]

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.

Increasing the terror events, changing up the special spawning rate, spawn positions and routes of enemies and altering the talents are all intended tweaks to difficulty that have nothing to do with the actual mechanic in game - although talent lines do add stagger talents.

Unintended changes; Beastmen. Magical teleporting headbutt. Telescopic arms Ungors, Bannerboi’s in a corridor in the distance behind a bunch of indestructable Gors. Weird damage attacks not changing depending on whether they’re horde or solo. Ultra-ninja Gors silent sneaks to shank you.

Completely broken talents on many classes simply not working, or not working as intended, or not giving accurate figures for damage and things like slayers leap just plain not-working and BW fire walk straight up failing half the time, and you get very skewed perspectives on difficulty that are being almost completely blamed on Stagger.

Back to the OP, Fatshark are reacting to the emotional responses of players by patching the stagger mechanic and fixing the Talent Unlock that caused much gnashing of teeth. The patch 2.0.5 is the first time since beta 1 I’ve seen such a direct change as a result of feedback.

Problem is, there has been weeks and weeks of feedback by some well researched people on the fundamental problems of the WoM/2.0 build that wasn’t acted on for the whole of July - or that’s how it feels to many.

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.

Let it be known I really don’t like the current state of the game(and have done more than my fair share of screeching), but it’s here to stay by the looks of it.

HOWEVER;

It is a vast improvement over the 110k damage EACH player did on Legend runs in Beta 1. Doesn’t make it lovely now, but by dint of a horrible slog we might actually end up with something people are more comfortable with by Christmas. IF there’s anyone left of course.

[Drakonhammer]

@Chaos5715

Are blade and blunt weapons not more equal now than they were before? I have never used blunt much.

Can’t comment on the latest versions, but the problem is that weapons that already dominated (exec, dual hammers) got even better, so shielded weapons weren’t really getting taken over them and the 2h hammers anyway.

Yes, WoM shielded weapons are in a better place than pre-WoM shielded weapons right now, but I’d argue this was due to the mobility/boss defense/stagger duration buffs to them directly and not the new CC damage bonus.

1H axes have at least been addressed directly but again, FS could’ve just buffed the underperforming weapons specifically rather than make 1h axes terrible then need to buff them back up to being good again.

Meanwhile, while the 2h hammer is in a good place now, the 2h axe has completely fallen by the wayside.

Again, blanket mechanics to balance diverse weapons aren’t great. THP can bad enough at times, even ignoring that certain professions (like Zealot) always had way too much of it, Crowbill is by default gimped on BW as BW has THP on stagger and THP on cleave but no THP on kill, despite the fact the weapon lacks both stagger and cleave.

[Voidq]

@Drakonhammer

one thing I do have to say from skimming through the video, a lot of the time you and the elf are hitting different enemies, so the damage boost from stagger isn’t even taken advantage of.

It’s just two of us and two BOTs, of course we are trying to cover different angles whenever we can in order to not get surrounded. With 4 decent players we’d simply probably split 2-2 most of the time.

And I am absolutely 100% taking advantage of stagger damage with every single push-stab. For cleave and to save stamina I cycle between charged and quick attacks so after each charged cleave everything is staggered, then I stab a priority target (who is also staggered), then cleave again against already staggered enemies…

[Bankrotas]

@Voidq

But of course, give us at least one or two logical points as to why the “new” combat is so much worse. Explain what is so fundamentally wrong with it and suggest a solution.
I hope asking for anything of substance isn’t too offensive but I’m not really sure at this point.

Hell you can straight up copy those from those other people’s posts because I must have missed those.
Unless of course you see “I hate most of the new changes” as a valid point or anything even remotely close to ‘constructive’.

Ok. I’m awake. Let’s go back to the topic you created and was locked.

Let’s go with @Nilter 's comment which you instantly dismiss. And you’re being called out entire thread for it too down to it being locked.

And before you start, you not agreeing with him, doesn’t make his points any less true.

[Viber123]

@Bankrotas

And before you start, you not agreeing with him, doesn’t make his points any less true.

I second and third that

The bottom line, we all have different likes or dislikes of the 2.0 changes…

I am saying something I think is true. Overall, the ‘fun factor’ is less than it used to be. EDIT: I should restate that I believe the whole stagger-to-damage model is the sole culprit

As I stated at the beginning (whether anyone likes it or not), is that I have no answers. I am just the consumer. All I know is the game I used to enjoy SO much is now nowhere near as fun to play. I am not equating fun with difficulty, though, difficulty at every level has gone up a notch as a result… I am saying that it dosent feel right. Stagger to DAMAGE? I love the idea of staggering to stay alive in a tight situation, and honestly the dodge tracking going down is a GOOD thing. How much? I dont know. I DO know however, that pre 2.0 the game felt right. I know thats not what you want to hear. You want to hear a viable solution. I dont have one. All I know is that 2.0 (no matter how many revisions of it you get) changes the core game experience. In a BAD way. At least for me. Though I am willing to bet that I am not the only one.

Listening to people complain about 2.0 in a game is a common occurrence. Unfortunately I am now among them

Is it steam reviews that will get Fatsharks attention? I dont know. But something WILL be done about it when people start vocalizing all this… and… it hits them in the bank account

[flisker]

@scottz0rz

there are a lot of times where developers push changes they think are for the best, and the users initially react horribly to the change. Sometimes it’s for the best, sometimes it’s not.

But by this argument you could always say “Hey, look, sometimes, it’s fine so … we’re good”.

This time it’s not fine, it’s big messy change to core combat system and it comes among many other huge changes.

@scottz0rz

I think you and I stand on the side of “stagger is intrinsically bad”, but we could be wrong about it.

Yea, but that is highly unlikely. I mean I said it before, I do think that this could get balanced somehow, but since history showed us that they wasn’t able to balance easy system in year+, than chance of them being able to balance properly this … is virtually zero. (not even talking about 100 other things that needs tweaking & balancing) And we can already observe how it’s going in past weak. Where they dropped the stagger resist massively in hopes of fixing this whole problem, just to break the game completely and render the system even more useless.

It’s big signs saying “Man, drop it finally” everywhere, but they are blind.

@scottz0rz

If it was more limited in scope and effect, it could be a decent mechanic.

Yea, but it has never been tested, so here it’s the “Yea, maybe it would be good, maybe it would turn out to be crap also” situation. Here we really don’t know since we did not test it.

@scottz0rz

Design decisions aren’t that simple. People may be outnumbered, but their opinion may have more weight to the decision if they’re more informed on it.

Yea absolutely, you don’t want people with close to zero knowledge of certain issue, deciding about it.

But this is not just mob rule, I’m not clueless about how this works and I did test it pretty extensively.

Plus we never tested running WOM with all the other changes, without this stagger mechanic, which is also mindblowing considering the terrible feedback.

@scottz0rz

Light-hearted example that I won’t link: look up the “Dub the Dew” campaign

Yea, but we got “Fapple” here, even without the democratic system

@scottz0rz

I am reading this as a loaded question. I do not know if that was your intent. I will answer it as a genuine question.

It was genuine question on one side but on the another I felt like there is only one right answer anyway.

@scottz0rz

If a senior developer made a decision and stands by it, you may be reluctant to contradict his design decision. What if the CEO or a game director likes/dislikes something when he plays the game? It’s an appeal to authority fallacy, sure, but it’s a very common one where lower level employees don’t like contradicting their superiors.

Exactly, so it’s wrong in terms of proper decision making.

@scottz0rz

If a person who is no longer at the company made a decision and we rolled with it, we do not have that person as a resource to look at their code. It explains a lot of “legacy systems” that are bad, but it’s hard to justify the development resources to go back and clean them up. In the case of stagger, it’s new, so it’s probably not this. But, it would explain other issues…

Yea, I would understand this.

@scottz0rz

If it was a good design decision, but a junior developer did a poor implementation of it, do you want that same developer to the re-write to fix their own code? Or, do you want to share some knowledge within the organization so that maybe a more tenured dev can take a crack at the implementation to get the spirit and letter of the changes to be more accurate.

Well, I guess it depends on how poor the implementation was, if it was complete garbage than he probably needs help.

But here we saw from the start how bad it is, and they kept “fixing” it, but never really fixed it and didn’t want to test out other options or removing it.

It’s just crazy, no A/B testing at all, on such a major change. And keeping it thru all the negative feedback and not addressing valid criticism. And there is no way of opting out of that.

It feels sort of like what youtube is doing now with their f*cking super annoying large thumbnails on homescreen on some “lucky test” accounts. It’s complete crap… from checking feedback on it, most of the people hate it… but there is no way of opting out of it.

[flisker]

@Voidq

You clearly understand why melee stagger was already important before and is more so now.

It is not, it is exactly the same. People are not significantly changing their playstyle in terms of positioning because of that new dmg multiplier. The FOW Cata run @BizarreSalp mentioned is great example of that. It would look exactly the same without the dmg buff on stagger as it looks with the damage buff on stagger. The mechanic plays zero role here, in terms of teamplay or anything else.

@Voidq

All it did is that bad plays are punished more severely and good (team) plays are rewarded more than they were before.

Good teams are not rewarded more than they were before, they are still doing well. They still do the same thing, no matter if there is dmg multi on stagger or not. They might just switch to more stagger/avoidance meta friendly weapons and that’s about it.

@Voidq

Somebody point out to me exactly what’s so wrong (or basically unplayable according to Steam forums) with the combat as seen here, I’m genuinely curious:

I don’t understand point of the video, Legend is still doable solo. It has nothing to do with stagger mechanic bringing nothing useful to the game and just creating needless problems.

We could clear Cataclysm in beta 1, does it mean that the beta 1 Cata was great and had no issues ? No, not at all, it was horrible.

@Voidq

It’s just two of us and two BOTs, of course we are trying to cover different angles whenever we can in order to not get surrounded.

Which is big part of why the mechanic is pointless in this regard, in hard to crazy difficulties, there is always crapload of stuff everywhere and ppl need to control those, while handling specials, taking down banners, kiting boss… nobody is getting the bonus from other players especially when they most need it, in critical situations. This point should be extremely obvious to anyone who watched some hard content.

@Voidq

And I am absolutely 100% taking advantage of stagger damage with every single push-stab

yy, push meta… and also … spear staggers f*cking crazy hard. That is top tier weapon currently.

[Drakonhammer]

@flisker

It’s just two of us and two BOTs, of course we are trying to cover different angles whenever we can in order to not get surrounded.

Which is big part of why the mechanic is pointless in this regard, in hard to crazy difficulties, there is always crapload of stuff everywhere and ppl need to control those, while handling specials, taking down banners, kiting boss… nobody is getting the bonus from other players especially when they most need it, in critical situations. This point should be extremely obvious to anyone who watched some hard content.

Aye, it’s meant to be a team mechanic but at the end of the day people use it to empower their own attacks and that’s about it 90% of the time.

Even if you try to take advantage of your buddy’s CC, eg using a high damage low CC weapon yourself while they take a high CC one, like some of the people defending the mechanic often argued in the previous beta forums, most of the time it isn’t practical to do so, you’ll get surrounded by the other half of the wave of enemies. Also what if you end up next to another teammate using a low CC weapon? Combat can get unpredictable and with the AI director at times you have to take bad engagements as they are, next to whichever teammate is nearest.

Even FS realised this on some level, else they wouldn’t have put in the talents that partially bypass the mechanic, but again, why take those when you can just run a weapon that does well with the new meta, be it one with decent CC that you can buff to have an even higher damage boost or one that’s been buffed up individually to still be good in spite of it.