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

It’s funny, I tried HM on 2.0 release with spear and it barely did anything. If it wasn’t a headshot, normal attacks didn’t faze fanatics and push only lead to stalling rats and letting others come in and you ended up fighting double amount.

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The primary reason for the stagger-damage mechanic wasn’t promoting teamplay. I’m paraphrasing what FS said here, but they introduced it to add a way to increase difficulty without simply upping enemy hitpoints, and to create another mechanic - another “dial to turn” - to affect gameplay / balance in ways they couldn’t earlier. The buffing of underused weapons and the potential for more teamplay was merely a positive side-effect. (And I admit the strategy if having one stagger while another damages has some practical problems, as stated anove.)

FS also obviously saw how some weapons would be disadvantaged by this, so they added a row of talents to either take more advantage of the mechanic, or ways to avoid it for a big part.

So, if you take FS’s self stated primary objectives of the stagger-damage mechanic in mind, the current iteration actually succeeds in that somewhat.

Now, here’s an honest question I have, because I haven’t had time to try a lot of different stuff yet: Which weapon - that used to be good before 2.0 - is now in now in no way good / viable anymore?

Because as I see it, the stagger-damage system is not nearly as influential on the game as some people make it out to be. The game has changed a lot in 2.0, with tweaks to a lot of game mechanics and the introduction of new enemies. That’s why it feels generally different, and for some a lot more difficult as well. People just seem to attribute all of that - unjustified - to the stagger-damage mechanic.

My hypothesis: If FS would disable the stagger-damage mechanic (with talent row) altogether (and lower moster HP a bit to compensate), and change nothing else at all:

  1. The meta would only narrow; some weapons would still be great, some weapons would be less good than now, while no weapon would suddenly go from bad to good.
  2. The game also wouldn’t feel much different than it does now, and not a single bit easier for the people currently having difficulties.
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This is personal opinion, but damn axe and great axe on Bardin feel bad, like really bad. Been trying to do 100 games as RV and I’m running into more disappointments with them every time I try them.

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Alright, interesting. I had some succes with 1H axe actually, and I remember @Flisker saying the 1H axe is actually really good even. (On Elf though, but it’s basically the same weapon…) I can’t say I played much with greataxe, so I believe your word for it.

Here’s the next question though: Why would the Greataxe (or 1H axe) be better in the hypothetical scenario stagger-damage is removed? Is the problem with stagger-damage, or with the Greataxe (that was always outshined by the 2H Hammer anyways) itself? I mean, it is a heavy stagger weapon after all…

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This topic is getting abit tedious to be honest with you all but I just wanted to point out one thing and mainly flisker saying the stagger system is somewhat pointless.

Did you try and look at it from a different perspective. I don´t know which level talent it is from the top of my head but there are talents that benefit you as an individual giving a massive damage boost to you when enemies are staggered which could pontential mean that not the whole team has to stagger constantly.

You could split the mechanics of first hit counting as staggered and adding damage to the talent where dmg is being increased solely on staggered enemies by a big amount, splitting the option 2 by 2 on teammates.

Also stagger means by bombs or bosses themselves when they charge attack and stagger nearby elites.
Important to note enemies that are climbing up a ledge count as stagger if I am not mistaken and have increased damage taken by 40%

I am just saying, maybe we should wait for mods to be updated so we can test and investigate thoroughly.

Great axe is actually my favorite weapon on Slayer at the moment. Can’t really say why, I would say it’s mostly because of the slayer talents that buff him for using two handers and charged attacks and not the weapon itself but still.

It needs a voice. 2.0 has NOT had a positive effect on the game. The point here (and my hope) is that FS just READS this and considers that this direction was not the way the game should have gone

Stagger to damage = a BAD thing - simple

Wait for mods? Just voice your experience with the current game, and let them know. Thats a GOOD thing

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Why is it a bad thing? Can you say with absolute confidence that it is a bad thing or does it just feel bad to you?

As I said there are more mechanics to it then just stagger to damage, bosses that overhead for example stagger them, enemies getting into blightstormers cycle and thrown out get staggered.
It just puts emphasis elsewhere then it was is all I am saying.

I still believe people are to hasty on their decision making

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Assassin stagger talent (the headshot/crit one) is also pretty solo oriented I would say.

Since the update from yesterday, the game feels much better.
The main problems was that all, - even skaven - hordes were able to put displacement pressure on you due to the stagger threshold that was reset yesterday.
Most of the bad feeling came from “why is this rat third my size ignoring my hit with this weapon? Why can I no longer stop the skaven/chaos horde in it’s track and why are the gors constantly in my face like a meat wall and hitting them is futile?”
Now trash feels and more importantly behaves like how it should.

As for the 1H axe, I played it on RV and it one headshots a gor with charged attack and I used the 7% power talent. 2 light attacks - with one HS - dispose of any 2nd tier unit. SV and mauler die also fast, the stagger avoidance mechanism is working correctly.

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I don´t know if it really is one could argue that it still benefits the team to an extent if you stagger the assassin there is a chance that your team won´t get rebounced because of it or that it won´t teleport away immediately so in a way you did your team a favour by staggering it if that makes sense

Read my posts. I have explained how I feel about that

I am speaking of the stagger talent called Assassin, “count headshots and crits as full stagger” or some such.

Oh yeah that seems pretty solo oriented.

I mean every talent that benefits a particular class can still be beneficial to your team in a way but that is very situational of course.

This is notably a great example of the failure of the stagger mechanic. Thanks to increased health, Spear cannot one-shot headshot Marauders (unless you use Assassin to BYPASS THE MECHANIC, and Handmaiden [the class meant to be the spear-user] doesn’t have access to that) . . . which means the skill portion of the weapon is now significantly weaker, and the boring-ass push-attack spam is now stupid strong.

This is terrible balance.

And if we, say, increased its headshot multiplier, that will just make the weapon crazy strong in general, way too good. I hate using Spear now - not because I “can’t adjust”, but because an anti-fun mechanic has been implemented that lowers the value of skill while using it. This also shows strongly how pushing was fine before; the strength of sweeping push-attacks has always been great in the game. There was no reason to make it a more central feature.

You’re right, I do recall them saying that. I think “teamplay” gets brought up because Bulwark seems like a team-oriented one, and it’s just been a common “pro” argument.

Regarding FS’s idea, though; I don’t see how it’s actually done anything beneficial. If stagger threshold was weighted differently than just the general rise in difficulty/health/armor class in enemies, I could see it. “Oh, this guy has a lot of HP, you have to stagger him to get in good damage*!”, if it required you to engage with it, I could see that. And maybe this is their plan, but I have yet to see it. Instead, it’s just a straight progression, like enemy HP. “This guy is already tough? He gets high stagger resist”. The only enemies who don’t follow this progression are berserker-class enemies, and it’s their armor-class that makes them this way.

*Wouldn’t this have been a good way to feature this mechanic and put in Pestigors? I know they’re usually depicted as heavily armored, but imagine if it was a giant, bloated, diseased thing with a hefty chunk of HP, and the way to get around that was by debuffing it by bullying it?

I think this issue has been somewhat mitigated/solved at this point, through successive patching (namely, nerfing the impact of stagger changes in general, so kinda what the community wants). There remain problems with it, however, like how I talk about Spear above and how stagger works as a skill-punishing mechanic, the way it generally obfuscates an already-confusing damage calculation, and a lack of information/the additional confusion of all the interactions, combined with its general pointlessness, since they have (yet, at least) to actually do any interesting balance with it. If they do have some plans, they should really say that now.

I think this is true. I think folks are underestimating the tweaks to enemy aggressiveness/animations. I love it, but it has heavy effects in gameplay. Of course, the other big factors are just enemy HP increase in general, stagger resistance(which has been toned down, but many 1 target weapons that were able to hit 2 before were hit hard by this), and then finally talents.

I feel like the only weapons that were genuinely under-performing before (in default Legend) was 1H Hammer/Mace, 2H Hammer, DD, and Shield weapons*. 2H Hammer and Shield would be good based on their buffs they got. Dual Daggers just needed one of their nerfs undone to be good in the pre-2.0 setting. All of these (sans DD) would be natural candidates to be the ones to specifically get the stagger damage effect as a straight-up timed bonus. If you made the duration 3~ seconds, with a way to tell it is applied, it might be useful for team play in some scenarios; at least as a passive buff. In general for 1H Hammer/Mace, just an increase in attack speed would help a hell of a lot.

Maybe you could say 1H Swords on Kruber/Sienna, too, but there are small stat tweaks that could be made that could give them a niche. A crit chance increase could be interesting, or you could go the full nine yards like how FS re-did 2H Swords and give them some unique new attack, like a murderstroke or half-swording attack.

*Probably some of Sienna’s weapons too, I honestly don’t know because I hardly ever play her.

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Haven’t tried the 1h Axe, won’t for what I imagine is going to be after a month of patches, but I exclusively use the greataxe. The reason it feels more bad is that during chaos horde the third strike is awful for actually killing things and requires two low cleave overheads, or a low cleave charge attack to get to it.

The push attack has low cleave on a weapon with low shields even when opted into as many of the things you get and stamina recovery, and it’s boss damage, while decent, is particularly low on anything that’s not a slayer. It performs its lot in life as an elite killer but in a game where hordes are the most dangerous occurrences in this game, because you often need to make clearings to deal with whatever special shows up, it’s simply not in a really reliable place.

Don’t get it twisted, I have gone at lengths to make it function. But you’re kinda shoving that square peg into a round hole by continuing to engage with it. Changes to stagger thresholds help it somewhat and assuage the often present problem of things showing up between your push and your cleaving push attack (or previously infuriatingly enough, right after your third swing), but not by much.

This topic was started to hear your view on the effects 2.0 had on your game experience, and to hear your thoughts/experiences on why/what happened to Fatshark in the feedback/results loop during WoM beta

Discussing balance ties into how you feel about your v2.0 experiences… if you explain how you feel about it

So @TmanDW thinks that stagger-to-damage is not the only culprit with respect to difficulty increases experienced in post 2.0 – I tend to agree… but identifying what exactly makes the game more difficult is less important to me than simply stating that the stagger to DAMAGE mechanic shouldnt have been implemented in the first place. The question then becomes why make that change? You can still have a patch that raises the difficulty in some form or another. Dodge changes, enemy health/resistances etc… without adding that silly mechanic at all.

Stagger was always important, but never before has it made its way into the damage meta.

It has no place there.

Peroid.

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I see we both agree that the combat of decent players looks identical now to what it was before.
Yet many others claim its COMPLETELY DIFFERENT (hence all my points, gave up already but yeah).

As to why stagger is more important now - it is for people who didn’t use it before. Old Legend+ players who already mastered melee combat are simply doing what they always did and already have all the good habits but the baseline for other people has changed significantly now. Previously they could get away with just spamming light attacks and their damage didn’t suffer from it, now it does because they’d be missing out on a lot of dmg that way. Not to mention that any encounter is much safer with proper horde control - lack of which is only amplified by the fact that dodge spam isnt a literal godmode anymore.

And yeah, spear is a God which is why I take it into pub games along with the AOE revive :smiley:
But tbh my combat is still the same it was before WoM with pretty much all the other weapons.

If nothing else, the whole point of this mechanic is that it will eventually force people to finally realize the importance of stagger (which is NOTHING new at all) and as a result, maybe one day, pub games won’t be as horrendous as they tend to be with people wiping to the first wave of each horde before it even gets dense. And for that alone I see it as a good thing. It does have some drawbacks when it comes to initial dmg of some weapons but tweaking of this on a per-weapon basis can and should and probably will be done.
Being able to land more dmg after you stagger your opponent is how many other games work, it’s how actual fighting works, it’s realistic if anything in that regard.

Certainly way better than garbage like Scrounger or Swift Slaying which reward luck instead of skill and encourage spam instead of precision and we all know what the average pub game looked like during the blatant ranged meta.

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All you do is link threads and talk about how they’re full of valid points.

Go ahead and copy them here then, you can do it. I’m not seeing them.

I ask for constructive feedback that looks like this:

  1. EXACTLY THIS is wrong with the combat.
  2. Here is my reasoning as to why it’s wrong and why it’s bad for me and for the game etc.
  3. Here’s a suggestion as to how it could be fixed/tweaked.

Does this offend you or can you provide anything along these lines instead of empty “its just bad” statements? There’s nothing even remotely close to this in that thread, or maybe I’m blind, copy it for us here.

Please tell me if I am misunderstanding, but as I see it… I cant agree… with the ‘or anything else’ at the end of that quote specifically

I agree for sure that people arent changing their playstyle in any regard related to positioning because of this silly stagger-to-damage model implemented in 2.0, but do you really think that this mechanic isnt built for, and abused to its fullest, with the new meta builds/weapons for the simple fact that it makes things EASIER in some ways? I think people may have gotten the idea that I am anti-difficulty or something. I am not

Please dont misunderstand me. I HATE the fact that this RIDICULOUS mechanic eventually made its way into the game, (as stagger should be just that - stagger - not a damage multiplier) but after it has… dont you think people are working it into their game to take advantage of the extra damage it allows when used effectively?

I sure do.

I think the proponents of it are those who milk the mechanic for all its worth, and in certain situations, make higher level difficulty much easier than it would be without it. Some might say impossible. But thats the new meta isnt it?

Stagger.

Damage.

Like THOSE two should be bedfellows…

sigh