Nurgloth fight needs addressal

Consistency through difficulties IS important.
Otherwise it would make the difficulty levels kind of pointless, wouldn’t it.
Of course some maps will still stick a bit out, like Skittergate or Nurgloth. They are bosses and bosses should be difficult but still in the range of the other maps. Maps like Against the Grain don’t have a boss or an outstanding event.
So they probably always will be easier.

But Fort Brachsenbrücke or Convocation of Decay have such a spike in difficulty that other maps just pale in comparision. That kind of inconsistency is for me unwanted and I don’t think intentional.
Balance is definetly important and having players who feel like suiciding a map because of difficulty or length is just not game-healthy and shows design flaw, doesn’t it?

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Albeit I share many thoughts of the pro non-“adjusting” party here, I decided I might as well address some issues with this boss fight myself.

Flies:

Plausible, I could definitely see this as an amendment to what we have right now.

This isn’t just aboutmaking fly attack worse, because it still can screw you over if you’re not being careful, but generally makes mistakes during this fight less punishing.

Pubs aren’t exactly the most prominent group of your average QP runs, and things go south more often than not. One person is out, because a fly hit them, and nobody can reach them because for some reason a random wave included like 8 Chaos Warriors? Well, good luck, see you folks on the other side, if you can’t manage it as a group of 3.

The most obvious answer to this would be something like: “Don’t split up.” Try not splitting up when you get heavy elites in a wave and you have to kite from one opening to another, while being surrounded by trash infantry and having to take care of the flies as well, which may be easy or impossible based on your weapon loadout.

I’m not saying this is an issue in general, no, but things like this can happen. This is a combination that gets groups killed, because they’re not prepared to face a random diffculty spike just due to arena chosing this Terror event and not a different one, on top of flies disabling you for like straight 10 seconds or more.

The other proposals I don’t really like, so lets leave it at that. You should be punished for making mistakes, albeit being disabled for 10+ seconds is just silly in situations like the one I mentioned.

Final phase:

This should stay, honestly. Maybe make the delay between each wave of trash a second or two longer, at least on Legend.

There’s the only respawn for the boss fight that’s relevant for all the phases 1-3. Finding an opening between each of the waves is something that should be done and required even, since one person is probably busy kiting the boss (he fixes on the highest dps character and never really switches, but more about that later). Rasknitt has that “issue” as well, so idk why Nurgloth shouldn’t.

Alright, this one is infuriating when you get knocked back into the eruptions, or better yet, get hit by one of the adds mid air after being thrown back into the middle arena on your knees, because you can’t block. I believe making this attack dodge-able is almost mandatory for the quality of life in the last phase. It’s literally a run-ender if boss kiting person is thrown into an eruption and can’t make it back in time.

What makes matters worse is that it breaks your Stamina entirely, so you have no defensive capabilities against the adds that constantly spawn, and the boss will probably chase you anyway since you’ve dealt the most damage to him.

No, of course it isn’t, but we still have CoD and FB endings that are, even after adjustments, outstanding from the rest of the regular levels, and this isn’t a problem for organized, preset groups, whereas pubs… vary very much.

People still want to cheese CoD event by sending one man-thing to the death, and I don’t know why - Is it a design issue? or because of a bug that for some reason still hasn’t been fixed? Apparently the urge to get loot for free is too appealing to some individuals, and I don’t want that to happen to either Fort, CoD, or Enchanter’s Lair (not in a large scale anyway), much like some other posters that have been against nerfing the Nurgloth encounter in couple past days on the forums.

Making the fight managable for people eager to learn the fight in detail - sure, that’s the right way, because it’s frustrating if impossible to accomplish in a pub group, but changing armor types and some other stuff that came up in the last few days? No, please don’t.

With that being said, a good post, OenKrad, so I generally agree that some things could change, but I, like many others, hope, that it won’t impact the challenge too far to the level of other lord fights, which are in desperate need of reworks or tweaks.

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If anything, I find it very irritating how fast this call for adjustment is coming. The map is out hardly a week and the community didn’t have a real chance to spread tactics and approach to the fight. Or to adapt in general.

Calling out people is completely unnecessary and the epitome of unproductiveness. Also, I made several arguments why a variation in difficulty is a good thing. But I will built upon this shortly.

This is not something I am against. But the interpretation of this is a different matter. For improvement in gaming as well as life and for diversity as well as an generally improved gameplay it has been shown that having spikes is helpful if not even necessary (like doing short sprints while doing long-runs).

This spike can come in two forms either as an increase in threats generated by the A.I. director or by design of the terror Events from the developers. The result will be that there are maps of different difficulty which we had all along. Maps like “Into the Nest” or “Warcamp” are on the easier side while a map (or specifically the finals) like “Convocation” or “Old Haunts” are on the harder side.
Aside from the gain for the variety, there is also the benefit of a more organical growth of the difficulty. With the maps of different difficulty you generate not one rigid discrete niveau of difficulty but a band with a certain treshold up and down which can partially overlap between difficulties. The chosen difficulty like Champion will hereby describe the average difficulty middled over all maps. This leads to a less stark gap between difficulties (which for Vermintide is apparently rather large). So people can grow themselves in a familiar difficulty with the harder maps and then make the jump to easier (either intentionally by chosing directly or by chance through quickplay) as between two defined and rigid discretes states of two difficulties. So they do “Convocation” on Champion and will then do “Into the Nest on Legend”. It is illogical to keep the gap artificially inflated by aligning the difficulty of all maps.
A problem arises ONLY in the Moment if the difficulty is reaching over the treshold of its band into the AVERAGE of the next difficulty (meaning that a map on Legend would be as hard as the average Cataclysm map). This is currently NOT the case for the last chapter of Drachenfels. In fact (no, that is wrong, more like in opinion), the Nurgloth figth is easier than “Convocation”. If you are comparing end events, you have to compare over all end events and not just the lackluster Lord fights.

Aside from the benefits and the win-situation for both the developer and the community as well as the overall Vermintide gameplay there are also other points to regard. If I chose to play quickplay, I chose to take a risk. Willingly. In exchange for a reward. Asking to reduced the risk while keeping the reward seems …. slightly greedy. However, I am not strictly against adjusting the mechanism as I have written before. Only that I say, keep that risk but change the reward.
That this is possible has been demonstrated before. And it was for an example mentioned mutliple times already: the so-called Skippergate. Frankly, I am not sure if it was ever the difficulty of Skittergate what caused the suicides. Because if that was the reason half of your argumentation crumbles in itself as the difficulty of Skittergate has remained largely untouched. What Fatshark has done though is the introduction of Loot dies for bosses and Lords leading to a far higher reward for Skittergate so people were more willing to go the extra effort. For argument’s sake I think it was the length of the map which was the main complaint, for easiness let’s just bundle time and difficulty under the term effort. So the suggestions I made above would be very well suited to adress this “problem”.

In addition to this comes another problem that after people were willing to try the map, they noticed that it was not as “hard” as the thought. Because a lot of events considered hard are mainly so because it is “community consent”. Give them the time (and even force them a bit) to adjust to the so-called difficulty and we will see that it is not as bad as some claimed. Which brings me back to this discussion being far far far to early. The map is nearly out a week and we don’t even have much telemetric data to make any meaningful claims. Give this three months and let us then look at how the community handles this map.

Overall, I am not to far concerned that FS will nerf the final event. They have shown repeatedly that they are willing to have a bit more difficult events and keep to them while also having easier events. “Hunger in the Dark” final event is still very easy while “Old Haunts” is still harder (and actually got buffed recently). As explained above, variety in difficulty around an average brings only benefits to the game. I see no reason to ruin this for arbitary excuses like “player expectation” (which we can’t measure anyway, the outcry in the steam forum was rather tame actually). Although I think in a try to adress all sides we will see some minor changes, especially to the third phase either in the form of a reduced knockback or adjustments to the fire ring.

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Have to agree with this statement somewhat. It was exactly the same deal with bosses like raskknit until people realized you can literally ignore the final phase by proper spreading. I personally feel like most of the mechanics around the boss can have similar effect as time passes on it just gets easier and easier.

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Having read all of that has been written regarding this boss fight on multiple threads, this is the general consensus:

  • The flies are annoying - decrease number of flies
  • People do not feel the need for specials/elites to be introduced - We already have 1 wave of elites, which can be bad enough
  • In Phase 3: Either ring frequency needs to be nerfed, the knockback removed (ONLY IN PHASE 3) from the rings to allow for revives, make the scythe swing dodge-able or remove its knockback.

STRATS AND MY THOUGHTS

Quite a few, with good reason, draw parallels between the flies Nurgloth and Burpee send out. Burpee too sends out flies, yes, FLIES, plural, not one, but 2. I’ve seen it send out only 1 and I’ve also seen it send out 2. For easier comparison here is what I know of the Nurgle-Gurgle flies and the Burpee flies:

  • Nurgle-Gurgle flies - Only takes 1 hit, they are also quite fast. It seems to me that the closer the flies are to Nurgloth, the faster they are, hence they slow down quite a bit by the time they get to you and can be quite tricky to shoot from the sides due to their initial high speed.

  • Burpee flies - Multiple hits - Don’t know how many from the top of my head. These flies are rather slow. Not sure if it is possible to simply outrun them but dodging will definitely keep you out of range.

STRAT FOR PHASE 1 - McFly

If any team wipes at PHASE 1. You can only blame yourself. That is a fact and here is why. If there is a single loading screen tip that applies to any and all circumstances in V2 it’s this: Don’t get separated. Stick together. TOGETHER. During PHASE 1. TOGETHER. The flies are the non-elite equivalent of taking a DOT overhead. Stick to your teammates so that if you do get hit by the damn things, you will not immediately be pummelled into the afterlife.

The strat itself. There are 4 locations where adds can come from. Stay away from the ones closest to the boss. You won’t see the flies coming in time. That leaves you with the 2 pillars closest to the entrance. All huddle behind a pillar but back off till your back is against the wall. Do this in a way to make sure that your line of sight of the boss is blocked. If you cannot see him, he cannot see you. This means that the flies will kill themselves by smashing into the pillar and since you are far enough from the pillar, the explosion caused by the flies will not harm you. Pay attention to the the adds dropping down nearest you and watch out for the adds coming from the other spawns. If you have positioned yourself correctly, your back is against the wall, the nearest spawn location is either to your right or left; depending on which of the 2 pillars you went to, and nobody has their back to the boss. Kind of like so.

Even if a fly does managed to hit somebody, no problem, since you are TOGETHER.

Fire ring time! Simple really. He will cast the rings in a way that keeps you from being able to approach him. There will be an instance where you will be forced to stand at the very edge of the room. You move in after this particular eruption. Smack him 'till he leaves.
If you still have adds when he starts casting, try to push them into the rings. Better them than you.

PHASE 2 - FRONT, BACK, LEFT AND RIGHT

When Nurgloth is off his throne, not in the middle and is not yet swinging, then he is standing somewhere close to a wall at one of the sides, ringing the dinner bell. Adds will only spawn from TWO(2) locations.

Directions are based around the player just entering the room. The back side of the room has the entrance, the front side has the throne and as you come into the room; to your left is the left side and to your right is the right side. There are 4 spawn locations will be referred to as top left, top right, bottom left and bottom right.

If Nurgle has his back to the front side, then adds will spawn from the top left and top right.
If Nurgle has his back to the left side, then adds will spawn from the bottom left and top left.
If Nurgle has his back to the right side, then adds will spawn from the bottom right and top right.
If Nurgle has his back to the back side, the adds will spawn from the bottom left and bottom right.

He is also sending out non-stunning orange-ish flies that do little damage so beware in case you are low but generally speaking they are of no threat. This phase can be approached in a few ways, depending on team comp and player skill. Split into pairs, a pair goes to each currently active spawn location and gets rid of what comes at them. If Nurgle is standing too close to one of the spawns then all go the other spawn location and hold there until he moves his ass.

Depending on team comp/player skill, 1 person can split off from each pair to shoot at Nurgle. Melee is ill advised as he will do an AoE knockback. Probably the simplest phase after his fire ring casting.

PHASE 3 - NURGLE AGGRO = BACK TO THE PILLAR,

Constant spawns, he swings, you fly, and fire ring knock ups. A mess really. I also don’t know what triggers an aggro change. Still testing that.

The most crucial advice, make sure you know how to get to the closest pillar. If you are facing the middle of the room while your back is to a pillar(and blocking of course), doesn’t matter which, then he keep hitting you into the pillar and the eruption will not harm you(most of the time). The positioning is quite tricky as his continued hits can move you little by little and the eruption will hit you if you are not in the correct spot at the pillar. To avoid this almost certain eventuality, after an eruption, move or let him knock you away from your current pillar and move onto another one so that you can once again get into the correct position and hold for a little bit. Like I said this can be tricky to do so some practice is in order. This is not foolproof by the way. His knockback swing lifts you, briefly, into the air. Truly short duration, probably less than a second. But a well timed swing from an add can get through your block because as we all know, you cannot block while flying through the air due to a knockback. Even if your stamina shields are shown on the screen, even if they are full, there is no blocking.

If he is not on you then deal with adds, then do boss damage. Kiting around the outside then pushing in before an eruption will kill the adds in the ring allowing you to damage Nurgle. It is easy to screw this up and get stuck in the rings so play carefully. But once again sticking together is still a good idea. One person scratching their back on a pillar while Nurgle is swinging away at them and the other 3 are TOGETHER doing what have you but at the very least you are alive.

LAST MAN STANDING?!?!? Pray to Sigmar. What I have outlined above has little to do with skill, therefore it should guarantee survival until PHASE 3.
So, one person left, PHASE 3. The pretty constant knockback swings, the eruption knockback + the damage, and the adds make this one hell of a boss fight to clutch. Even with invisibility, if timed incorrectly, the revive will be interrupted by the eruption. So I propose one of the 3 following changes:

  • Option 1 - PHASE 3 eruption has no knockback.
  • Option 2 - Nurgle’s knockback swing, as not all his swings send you flying, has an internal cooldown. Similar to what Bestigors have. Only 1 Bestigor can charge you every 10 seconds, or something like that anyway. Implementing this change would retain much of the difficulty but still allow for runs to be saved by a well timed revive.
  • Option 3 - Nurgle only does a knockback swing on the first hit after an aggro change. This would maybe make the boss fight a bit too easy to get used to? His normal swings still push the player away so careful positioning and situational awareness is still a necessity. Hard to say for sure.
  • Option 4 - Reduce frequency of eruption in PHASE 3

One change that I really really really do not want to see. Making his swings dodge-able. Dodge back to avoid his swings? So he becomes what, another Chaos Spawn? This change would completely trivialise PHASE 3.

I personally would like either option 2 or 3 implemented as option 1 still leaves the player with an arduous scenario as reviving without invisibility is not simple at the moment. Option 4 would have to be nailed ABSOLUTELY PERFECTLY. As in down to the tenth of a second. A bit too slow means that timing is no longer an issue. A bit too fast means that hardly anything’s changed. Option 4 would still leave the players with a lot of knockbacks though and from what I’ve seen that seems to be a relatively major concern.

Whatever happens, a change needs to be made. But I would like this change to be in the form of a beta so that players can at least see what they are given and have an opportunity to give feedback.

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I don’t really have an issue with the Boss other than the sprint attacks from the Horde on the last phase. Not because it bothers me (I run 30-60% BCR and Stamina + Talents), but I know for a fact it’s paralyzing my teammates to the point where they won’t clear anything for fear of being hit, as you have to be constantly aware of what’s around you, and time clearing with the next wave. This is where the adds become a problem.

Everything else is really fun, but the Stamina needed and killing power needed for the adds really tests your team comp and players confidence in dealing damage while under pressure.

You can deal with every situation with positioning and good awareness of your teammates. The only real obstacle should be, being punted RNG into his fire when you have Boss aggro, or wiping on the CW spawn because of flies. There should be no issues anywhere else with a premade.

The Boss ‘type’ doesn’t really bother me, and I’m quite happy to see a Boss require everyone in the group rather than one ranged Career with a STR Pot.

Another thing you can do during this Phase, is to have a tanky Career go into Melee of him and have 3 others stacked near, to clear adds/defend their back. This gives the 1 person aggro, forcing the Boss to do melee attacks, and makes him stop shooting the orange orbs.

Works really well with a Zealot, but requires some good awareness and skill on the player doing it’s behalf. Sometimes you’re standing right under an add spawn.

You can block the knockback attack btw.

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Pointing out unsound reason and emotional reasoning is not callous or ‘belittling.’ That’s refuting

I would argue knee jerk reactions such as ‘Change the new thing’ before we can all really experience it is nihilistic. And all the emotional argumentation is ineffective and indicative

I think you’re coming off a tad bit aggressive there. I’m only just stating my opinion and what I believe in, I’m not against nerfing Nurgloth due to my own ‘elitism’, but rather that I don’t think that the boss is as hard as you think it is. I’ve stated multiple times in my own comment that I personally don’t believe that the end event is that hard in comparison to something like current CoD or Old Haunts. The boss only came out like a week ago, we should give it some time and see what changes actually need to be made without radically altering the boss, people still need time to adjust to the boss and figure out a decent strategy to deal with him.
QP is the most played game mode, but the point of it is that you get a higher reward for more risk. You don’t know what map is going to get picked, how well your career and loadout will synergise with the map and how well your team composition is. People should accept that. If people don’t, then why don’t they just host specific missions? Is the QP bonus that important? The reason I said this:

Is because I think this is an overreaction from the players. The map isn’t freakishly difficulty, I don’t believe that it’s out of line. Besides, how many people are killing themselves on this map? I haven’t seen any threads about people really complaining about the fight yet or killing themselves at map start. I’ve done several runs by now and pegged him just fine with Legend QP. It’s not some sort of suicide epidemic where people just absolutely despise the map. In fact, many I’ve seen actually enjoy the boss fight and are glad that it’s something more on par with CoD.

I don’t even know why you quoted this. How is this elitist exactly? Are you saying that you should be able to solo clutch a boss no matter what? It’s a co-op game, if all of your teammates die, then I think it’s fair that the end event of a map (in this case, a pretty serious boss) will take you out unless you have special clutch abilities like invisibility or Handmaiden.

Did I gloss over all of your points? I think I pretty clearly said what I think about every single point you made, and made counter-arguments, such as to your objection with the flies (they’re really simply to deal with) and the fact that you can revive people just fine if you don’t time it horribly. Again, my opinion is that the boss isn’t that out of whack with the other maps. There are changes that I said I agree with, and that’s that.

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frankly man it’s hard to read it any other way when someone brings up pretty legitimate concerns for most of the playerbase and your response is “I don’t care”. it wasn’t your whole post obviously but it definitely colors it a certain way.

The arguments for Nurgloth being in line with other levels is pretty simple. Difficulty levels exist so people can choose to do harder stuff if that’s what they want. QP exists so people can get relatively varied games within a certain difficulty. A single level being way outside the norm for the difficulty defeats the purpose of both of those, as does nurgloth being super resistant to normal bosskillers and weak to builds that no other boss is.

It doesn’t do anything interesting or fun to have a single map be way out of line on legend and lower, it just adds more RNG to the already insane loot grind that people have been annoyed with for aes now.

I also think this line is a bit of a reach.

Nurgloth is pretty simple, none of his mechanics take much to figure out or are particularly intricate. It’s mostly just “don’t stand in the red stuff”, except sometimes he just knocks you into the red stuff with an attack you can’t block anyway. It’s just a pretty basic MMO mechanic, but not implemented super well.

The idea of add phases is the same thing, except his is just kind of spammy and lacking in any sort of downtime.

it’s a step up in mechanics from “guy who runs at you and hits you/casts a spell”, but it’s still pretty basic stuff. I don’t think anyone is complaining that he’s too complex or whatever, it’s that he’s significantly harder than other bosses, not at all more rewarding than them (something that would be an issue in any game with loot), and that his mechanics don’t feel super well put together.

Also

I think this is the case and has been the case long enough that we’re allowed to feel like it should continue to be. Mostly everything in VT allows for cool clutches without having to borderline cheese the event with invis. It’s a big part of the fun in QP for me at least, knowing that pretty much any situation is beatable if I’m good enough. Nurgloth feels less that way, at least in the last phase.

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this line is pointless. tell me then what is the point of modded realm? u dont grow ur skill in QP u go in modded realm

Some people want loot while they develop. Further, modded doesn’t have the biggest playebase. You either pug or premade. There are no randoms (okay, you get them sometimes, but 99.9% of the time, they’re there on accident and/or leave immediately). And randoms are kind of part of the fun of QP.

Sure, modded can help you develop further, but not everyone likes or WANTS modded difficulties, so why can’t base game amp up the challenge organically?

I’m pretty happy with where Nurgloth is right now. :slight_smile:

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Ive beaten him solo on Legend (with Bounty Hunter).

And wiped to him in Quickplay Legend a few times

Imho i think the fight is perfect with the exception of the Final phase (Flight mode). The knockback needs toned way down. He should be tankable / kite-able so the final phase can be managed and not just a complete mess and dumping damage into him to make it as short as possible. You cant really tank him because your knocked back all the time and guard broken. Melee damage cant really melee him because he floats after whoever hes aggro’d rather quickly. If you don’t have ranged dps or low on ammo lol good luck on the last phase!

so yea TLDR… First few phases are perfect need no change, even terrible group composition with all tanks can get thru the first phases no problem just paying attention to mechanics and killing adds

Last phase - the knockback needs nerfed or removed, he cant be tanked, tanks are useless as they are just sent flying away, and low dps team compositions are severely punished for this phase and this phase only, simply because hes basically un-tankable

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