Not fond of Grudge Marks

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
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I just came back the other week after not having played for several months, and before I took a break I exclusively played CW and absolutely loved it. The first thing I did after coming back was to play a normal solo legend mission for practice. It was a walk in the park as expected. Then I decided to QP CW…

First map in we activated the chest and got ready to fight the boss. It quickly wipes out my teammates then heads for me and smacks me around as if I’m blocking with a paper plate. I figure maybe it’s lag and my block wasn’t registering or something.

QP number 2 plays out the same way except this time I notice the boss icon is different and he has a shield breaker title. I assume it’s some kind of event, I’ll look into it later.

QP number 3 a troll that is immune to ranged attacks shadow clones himself and covers the entire room in puke. The clones plus horde finish us off quickly in the sea of puke… Time to look into these bosses, and I read about grudge marks.

I haven’t played CW since. The bosses felt cheap and just not fun for me. I feel like you would need to select all the most OP characters and weapons in stead of playing what you want.

So, I’m curious if people are actually enjoying the grudge marks, and if so, how do you deal with them? Especially when it’s a small area near a cliff and you can’t kill it before the next horde comes.

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It’s difficult to say what the overall impression is. A summary of my perspective on the community’s take is that it’s an overall good idea that needs a bit more polishing, but I could be missing out on the bigger picture. Some issues were addressed in a rather heavy-handed way in a recent patch. We used to get combos like shield-shatter + crippling or relentless on minotaurs and chaos spawns and you can imagine how fun that is. Now those combos have been removed from the game, which imo isn’t the best solution but it was probably a simple one. A lot of the marks and mark combinations feel like they’ve never been tested on difficulties beyond Veteran tbh.

If you’re playing expeditions on high difficulties (Legend & Cataclysm) with randoms, you probably want to consider always bringing in a heavy damage dealer. Without a lot of focus on monster damage you end up leaning too heavily on good luck in order to survive the run. In a pre-made group you have more freedom in running less optimal stuff versus monsters, but it’s never really an effective choice in the new environment. Ledging is very difficult as marked monsters have a lot of knockback resistance.

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Grudge marks are great in concept but need some tweaking. They addressed a real problem: CW being too easy compared to the equivalent campaign difficulty.

The downside is that this change has put even more of a premium on picking boss-killing classes. It would be nice if the Chests of Trials had a chance to spawn other types of ‘events’, not just bosses. A great example of this was the recent Ritual Skull event at Halloween, were you got a horde of buffed trash and elites. The addition of more varied spawns like this would allow us to move away from solely picking boss-killing classes in quickplay games.

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I love the grude marked, but some combos of buffs and map location are a bit insane. I think it would be awesome if they could rate the combos and boost the boons accordingly.

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I’m enjoying them personally. I enjoy how they flip the gameplay and force you to improvise more. It’s the kind of challenge I personally feel the game needed, as monsters lose their bite a bit when you learn their weaknesses and movements. They are a bit difficulty to get used to, and that more-so for some grudge marks over others. FS do have their ear to the ground for ones players are particularly despising, as there was a recent balance pass with the release of the WP that removed some combinations or marks from specific monsters.

I’d suggest either playing with friends/ forming a party to communicate with over voip if that is something you’re comfortable doing, so you can go in a litte more able. Otherwise, you just need time to get accustomed to them.

They can be hard, and threaten my team big time, but the most cruel and unforgiving combinations of marks have been removed, so prepare for a challenge beyond what you have been used to, but where there’s a will, there’s a way.

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Whats the point in bringing a FK? Even Grudge Marked Monsters that are not Relentless are borderline impossible to ledge.

There are boons that exponentially benefit damage careers, but will do mediocre on everything else. A Engi needs to roll either double shot, potion into double shot, crit explosion, or lightning to instantly win the run. Same goes for Sott with a staff. Thats a 4 in 62 chance to roll armageddon (12 missing Talents plus about 50 CW Boons). Rolls that get better with every boon bought.

With careers like Merc you would need the 100% crit for three seconds, lightning, and a reliable source of incoming damage that doesnt kill you to even come anywhere near close to that dps. Lightning strike alone does jack. There is no Boon that would exponentially scale up his support abilities either.

Before doing anything to Grudge Marks again, those “hyper carries” need to be nerfed by changing the boons that break them. Lightning Strike needs an internal CD. Explosive shot needs its stagger removed, and most likely a nerf to its damage. Double shot needs an internal CD too. Having a single boon turn you into a dragonslaying abomination that would kick Manfreds ass is lunacy. This already got discussed endlessly in this forum.

After that taking a look at HP, and Marks would be meaningful. Before that we just run around with tape and scream it can fix anything. (Which is what happened already with the Shield Shatter Mark.)

On Cata you run into the first Grudge Monster on the first node. If you don’t bring anything that deals absurd amounts of damage from the get go, without any boons, you are not surviving Crippling, or Illusionist. You will have a really hard time to kill a regenerating Monster, or an invincible one. Just a troll with no specific Mark can turn into… an evening filling endeavor.

That all being said. I love Grudge Marks. Those without ones are gone in four seconds. I just despise how they are the Berlin Wall to everyone but high damage careers that already are extremely desirable thanks to how they scale with damage boons. The scaling of “non damage” careers is hardly noticable.

(What I also have to add is that apparently, the devs are aware of Marked monsters being borderline unkillable with three marks. Every Chest, guarded by a one, two, or three Marked Monster, will unlock after a short time automatically and in the end nodes, the arena ones, you don’t need to beat them for the gate to open. Kill the trash, survive, end the game. Love that too.)

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I think that was the case even before the update, at least for chests. Chests and final arenas are on timers which unlock the exit once they expire. It wasn’t as noticeable before due to rarely being in the situation where you had to outlast the timer to survive as opposed to killing everything. But it still happened with chests now and then if you ended up with a bad monster+curse+map properties combo.

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Unfortunately this system greatly magnifies the imbalance between classes that annihilate a monster’s HP bar in 5s and classes that take 5 mins to whittle them down. The former doesn’t care at all about monster modifiers unless it’s rampart and they are ranged, the latter quickly turns a 5 min easy but lengthy fight into a 15 minute fight where even the smallest mistake means instant death.

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Some trial chests aren’t worth opening on the first maps because the Boss can just be absurd. That definitely needs to be tuned.

Also for the billionth time, an issue that will never be fixed, the bots suck at fighting them. They’re bad for Chaos Wastes in general, as they just get stuck on everything.

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How to fix Marks: remove illusionist.

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Illusionist stormfiends should not exist.

By sigmar multiple stormfiends with actual fire from all of them is absurd.