Old Fashioned Learning is impossible in normal play; other Warrior Priest challenges need a rework

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
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Title.

I’m surprised that the Warrior Priest challenges haven’t been addressed in a hotfix yet, with Old Fashioned Learning been the most egregious example.

Old Fashioned Learning (Hit 60 Enemies with a fully charged skull-splitter/tome attack)
It is verifiably impossible to hit 60 enemies with one strike even with an increased horde deed without cheesing it using AI pathing glitches (See literally every guide on how to achieve this challenge). Because of teammates, because of the way the AI paths, because of the general size of hordes, the only way to do this achievement is to purposefully set out to break the game with a team mate who can kill off the bots for you.
This should be changed to 20 enemies so that it is still difficult, but achievable in normal gameplay.

Sanctuary (Use Shield of Faith on an ally within 1 second of them going down 10 times)
Casting Shield of Faith on a fallen ally within 1 second of them going down is definitely possible, but the challenge basically requires that you flick onto your ally and hope that your ability casts on them. More often than not I will accidentally cast Shield of Faith onto myself because the challenge necessitates that I can’t hold the ability while looking at a team mate to confirm that it casts on them.
If the challenge was changed to 3 seconds it would make a world of difference.

Holy Warrior (An ally blessed with Shield of Faith must kill 50 enemies with melee attacks)
The only way you’re going to achieve this normally is if you’re playing with a very good Shade/other broken melee class, you two are the only two left, and you’ve just been hit with a very large horde. 50 kills within 8 seconds (presuming you’re using the talent that extends the duration of Shield of Faith) requires that they kill over 6 enemies every second, for eight seconds, without stopping. Even IF they have the talents to do this it would require that the horde is large enough, none of your other team mates kill anything and you sit back and do nothing while they struggle through a horde so you can get the challenge.
(You could extend the time that they have with a purple pot, but again, you have to sit back and do nothing, none of your team mates can damage the horde, and the horde has to have enough enemies in it to get the required kills within the required time)
If the challenge was 20-25 kills it would be much more manageable supposing you have a full team and they’re not forbidden from doing anything because you need a career challenge.

I have over 600 hours in Vermitide and I have completed every other DLC career challenge, but this is the only time where I’m forced to say that these challenges need to be looked at and reworked. Thanks for your time.

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Considering Old-fashioned Learning, I like to believe that they’re playing the meta game with this one. I mean, it’s called old-fashioned learning… as in, look it up somewhere, learn something about the game, break it, win.

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I think they were going for “Old-Fashioned Learning” in the sense that you hit things hard, they learn fast.

As much as I’d like to think FS was meta about it, I kinda doubt it.

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Take note, this has a wrong description (unless they changed it?). It actually wants you to shield an ally within 1 second of them being disabled (by a gutter runner for example), not them going down.

This one wouldn’t be so bad if it said the correct thing.

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The description is ‘Use Shield of Faith on an Ally within 1 second of them being incapacitated by a special on 10 separate occasions’.

I have to admit that I thought the challenge just wanted you to shield them when they got incapacitated. The fact that they have to be incapacitated by a special adds to the torment immensely.

If someone gets grabbed by a leech you have ONE SECOND to shield them. That’s still ridiculous. The average reaction time is 300 milliseconds, leaving you .7 of a second to highlight your teammate and cast Shield of Faith on them.
Upping it to at least 2 seconds would make a world of difference for an otherwise unachievable challenge.

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I think I did this one by ulting somebody just before taking fatal damage that would have downed them, not necessarily disabled. But I might be wrong, I already did the challenge and and cannot test it easily now. But that was what I did. And assassins were a great help for that, but disablers are not required

So I think the description is fine. The thing is that you need to use your ult BEFORE they go down, to prevent them from going down. So maybe if they are wounded, it won’t count (?) but I didn’t do that test. I did read this wrongly the first time too, though xD But after doing it wrong a lot of times, I noticed that I was reading it the wrong way xD.

IMO this one is very doable while in normal play, just try to prevent your teammates from dying. At least I did this one while playing normally.

@GeneralIncomeTax

About the other 2 challenges, yeah, they are very difficult while just playing the game normally. But they are not difficult in duo. With just a little coordination, you can do both with a Send in the Next Wave deed in places where the team can hide and not be hit (which I think is very common in normal play when you are clutching xD), while one teammate goes into the horde and either kill slave rats or just blocks for you to jump in the middle of the horde with your ult on you and use your AoE tome attack.

Yes, it is NOT normal gameplay, but it only requires 2 coordinated people and some map knowledge to find a very effective kitting path. Maybe Fatshark wants us to figure it out, at the end of the day, it is a challenge. For me, those were some of the better challenges because they actually needed some planning and they were not randomly completed at some time.

Sanctuary is totally doable while playing normally.

If you need help with those challenges, let me know and we can try :wink:

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Just be ready to use it when you hear hook/leech/gutter the moment they pounce on someone. It really is perfectly doable in normal play. If you want to really farm it, you could try Horn of Magnus gutter runner stache with a purple pot or two.

The other two I will definitely give you are not really build for normal play, I cheesed both on more horde Into the Nest champion deed duo with a friend. You can jump on some rocks right after the stairs with lightable braziers and wait for a sufficient horde to gather around.

@Rodo I am really confident it really is after being incapacitated. I was running like 20 Against the Grain maps with bots trying to shield them after or right before death a not a single one counted. Read on reddit afterwards it’s for disablers and did it in like 4 normal games.

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Oh, and about Sanctuary, I used patrols for that xD When somebody triggers a patrol in Cata and it seems they are getting overwhelmed, it is actually very useful to use your ult the protect them. So I just waited for a little to see if they could manage, and if they were struggling too much, I used my ult.

Granted… I “killed” a few teammates by waiting for a little xD but with 3 people you can still easily revive them xD

And yeah, assassins are very useful too, but not required if I remember correctly.

@Reorx

Maybe I’m wrong about that :stuck_out_tongue: sadly, I cannot test it properly =( Maybe I can find something in the code.

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Honestly, I am not 100% on this either and can’t test it too. But shielding disabled teammates in the 1 second window definitely worked for me back then.

If your way worked for you, perhaps truth is somewhere in between. Who knows with Fatshark challenge descriptions. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Yeah, disables definitely help, mostly gutter runners because they deal rapid damage on their own :stuck_out_tongue:

According to the description, the troublesome word is “incapacitated” xD That could be interpreted in any of both ways xD

@FatsharkLev
@FatsharkJulia

Do you know something about this?

tldr: What exactly means “incapacitated” in the “Sanctuary” description?

Sanctuary (Use Shield of Faith on an ally within 1 second of them going down 10 times)"

Is “incapacitated” the formal name for:

  1. Being “downed” and bleeding?
  2. Being “downed” and bleeding OR straight-up dying to be rescued later (or not with abduction)
  3. Being disabled by a disabler (gutter runner / pack master / leech) or other disabling effects (blight storm, spawn of chaos grab, etc)
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@Reorx

I found it! =D

It’s in the file “scripts\managers\achievements\achievement_templates_bless.lua” from lines 225 to 297. I’ll leave the chunk of code here

local bless_fast_shield_amount = 10
local bless_fast_shield_window = 1
achievements.bless_fast_shield = {
	name = "achv_bless_fast_shield_name",
	desc = "achv_bless_fast_shield_desc",
	display_completion_ui = true,
	icon = "achievement_trophy_bless_fast_shield",
	required_dlc = "bless",
	events = {
		"register_shield_applied",
		"register_player_disabled"
	},
	progress = function (statistics_db, stats_id, template_data)
		local completed = statistics_db:get_persistent_stat(stats_id, "bless_fast_shield")

		return {
			completed,
			bless_fast_shield_amount
		}
	end,
	completed = function (statistics_db, stats_id, template_data)
		return bless_fast_shield_amount <= statistics_db:get_persistent_stat(stats_id, "bless_fast_shield")
	end,
	on_event = function (statistics_db, stats_id, template_data, event_name, event_data)
		if event_name == "register_shield_applied" then
			local shielded_unit = event_data[1]
			local priest_unit = event_data[2]
			local local_player_unit = Managers.player:local_player().player_unit

			if not shielded_unit or local_player_unit ~= priest_unit then
				return
			end

			local status_extension = ScriptUnit.has_extension(shielded_unit, "status_system")

			if not status_extension then
				return
			end

			local is_incapacitated = status_extension:is_pounced_down() or status_extension:is_grabbed_by_pack_master() or status_extension:is_grabbed_by_corruptor()

			if not is_incapacitated then
				return
			end

			local incapacitated_t = template_data.incapacitated_units[shielded_unit]

			if not incapacitated_t then
				return
			end

			local time_of_shielding = Managers.time:time("game")
			local timing = time_of_shielding - incapacitated_t

			if timing <= bless_fast_shield_window and timing >= 0 then
				statistics_db:increment_stat(stats_id, "bless_fast_shield")
			end
		else
			local incapacitated_units = template_data.incapacitated_units or {}
			local current_t = Managers.time:time("game")

			for unit, incapacitated_t in pairs(incapacitated_units) do
				if not ALIVE[unit] or bless_fast_shield_window < current_t - incapacitated_t then
					incapacitated_units[unit] = nil
				end
			end

			local unit = event_data[1]
			incapacitated_units[unit] = current_t
			template_data.incapacitated_units = incapacitated_units
		end
	end
}

So now I’m sure you are right, @Reorx

The variable that verifies if a player is incapacitated is “is_incapacitated” and it is defined only taking into account gutter runner / pack master / leech. So other kinds of incapacitation like blight storm, spawn of chaos grab, etc do NOT count for this challenge.

local is_incapacitated = status_extension:is_pounced_down() or status_extension:is_grabbed_by_pack_master() or status_extension:is_grabbed_by_corruptor()

So being incapacitated for the game means to be “disabled”. So maybe the achievement description could be improved. @FatsharkLev

If you want to check the other warrior-priest challenges code, they are all in the same file.

If someone sees I’m getting something wrong, please let me know.

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@Reorx @GeneralIncomeTax

So this means that packmasters should make this challenge veeeery easy xD just wait for a pack master to go for a teammate, prepare your ult and use it as soon as your teammate gets grabbed. Pack masters are very predictable and deal almost no damage. If you go to a champion run, you will be able to use it a lot just by playing the game. Or you can always farm it in Horn of Magnus as @Reorx already said.

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‘Old Fashioned’ and ‘Holy Warrior’ can be done using the Tzeentchian Twins mutator. It’s actually the Xbox weekly at the moment don’t know if it’s the same for other platforms.

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Thanks for your contributions guys, but I think it stands that these achievements can’t be achieved by just playing normally. Old Fashioned Learning and Holy Warrior require that you have a friend that kills off the bots for you, and you find a spot that will hyper stack multiple hordes.

Challenges should be hard, yes, but these challenges necessitate breaking the game to achieve. Fat Shark has done us a dirty and I’d really appreciate the challenges been hotfixed so that they remain difficult, but entirely achievable by playing normally.

No challenge should require that your team mates do absolutely nothing while you or your chosen Shield of Faith recipient kill off a horde in record time. These challenges necessitate that you don’t play the game the way it was designed to play, and personally I think that’s bad game design.

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It can be done by abusing hyperdensity (into the nest works well, due to skaven’s lower mass), but it’s in no way reasonable to ask for it.

Holy warrior could be done without cheesing too much though, I think. But you’de need an ally with a meatblender (like GK or slayer). 8 seconds is suprisingly a lot of time. But yeah, it won’t happen normally.

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I don’t agree with you and maybe we won’t agree on this (which is fine), so I won’t say much more. Just that I don’t consider coordinated play as breaking the game and there are plenty of good and fun achievements that require you to have a “friend” (or just a random who is able to communicate). I think that interaction and planning are fun.

Edit: I deleted the “Feed me, Sinner” argument

Or the one where you need to kill the boss in Enchanter’s Lair without hitting or staggering any ads. You cannot do that with bots (while you can solo this one, it’s not advised xD)

Etc.

@WhereIsBaoDur
I don’t think it’s unreasonable.

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It’s indeed superhuman reaction time, but: you can get consistent progress when you see a disabler coming towards an ally (you know, all the times you think “this guy is gonna get grabbed”). You just have to be ready with the ultimate for when it happens. Playing with bots you can easily get 3-4 in a map, if you’re playing with friends you can ask them to get grabbed when the situation is safe (like a lone special coming for you).
I can assure you this makes all the difference.

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Sigmar’s bloody beard in a handbasket, that’s an actual challenge? Is it difficulty locked?

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While I generally agree with you I would like you to watch this:

I accept it being an outlier though. Then again, I am still missing the Cataclysm challenge and I am tempted to try it either with Warrior Priest or the wide wall SotT.

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xDDD

Yeah, it is an actual challenge. In my opinion, the 4 most difficult challenges in the whole game (I no particular order) are Cata “Feed me, Sinner”, Getting to Weave 160, Cata FoW, and Recruit “Unsafe Work Environment”. It is very unsafe indeed xD. Everything else is easy in comparison xD

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We did that challenge on recruit and it was hard as f*ck xD We tried on Cata… it’s ridiculous xD But it was so much fun.