Issue Summary:
There seems to be an undocumented change/nerf to opportunist/shield push strength. Prior to the DLC Patch, you could interrupt chaos warrior overhead attacks with a bash attack. After the DLC Patch, you can no longer interrupt chaos warrior overhead attacks. This affects all shield weapons. I’m uncertain if this was an intentional change or something which wasn’t carried over from the BBB. Or perhaps chaos warriors where buffed.
When tested against stormvermin/maulers, shield weapons without opportunist behave exactly the same as shields with opportunist with no discernible difference.
EDIT: I should specify that this is on legend difficulty.
Steps to Reproduce:
Initiate bash charged attack during chaos warrior overhead with a shield weapon with opportunist.
Oportunist joins Parry, Heroic Intervention and Off Balance in the useless trait club.
Which leaves us with swift slaying builds for everyone (wanna get that +30% stamina regen property for Ironbreaker with 2h axe? Forget it, you need crits for SS), with some really really rare builds making use of Resourceful Combatant (again - go for crits or bust).
I didn’t know opportunist affected the shields “slam” attacks. Thought it was purely for the pushes.
Anyways, SS is becoming extremely prominent because it’s too easy to stagger and dodge enemy attacks now. Another thing that has revealed is that I believe FatShark SharkFatted attack speed increase up
More on this here:
So we’re all left with builds that simply optimise DPS, whereas parry was insanely powerful before, it is now extremely rare to block any kind of attack.
Parry wasn’t insanely powerful. It was good. But with over 50 ping you often ended up with an axe up your face. It was a great tool for the host, but that’s it. And required v. good timing. It was possible to parry 3 chaos warrios, but throw some marauders in-between and you were losing tons of stamina, unless you had a weapon like falchion or axe, where you can block-cancel almost instanteously.
True it was/is very ping dependent. Still extremely powerful if you are host or low enough ping. Just has too little use for it to be a preferred choice now.
Yup. I’d love if Fastshark actually gave the “non-crit-build” players a choice. Right now trinket is just +crit + curse resistance. It’s a dead item, could just be removed from the game and I wouldn’t notice.
Before the patch I was running curse resistance + stamina and 2h axe with parry. Yes, I was often too late, but it saved my hide a few times from several CWs overhead-attacking me one after another.
Now I can’t really see the point of parry, 2h axe or anything else than +crit for melee careers on trinket.
The game needs another “big balance beta” with 2h weapons overhaul and new traits added. It would be nice if Fatshark made shieldvermin into an interesting enemy and not the boring PITA hit sponge that they currently are.
No no… please not another Big Balance Beta. It’s what the game currently is, even if they are doing it in the live environment, and I think we’ve seen enough attempts at “big”. Try a “Small Balance Beta” with a clear objective and scope.
However you name it, it would be nice if, after making many weapons useful, they actually have tried to give players more build choice with fun traits, maybe some unique to weapon groups.
Also I see a big issue with the 2h vs 1h weapons, right now the balance is weird at best, with 1h weapons often being better at dealing damage and avoiding it at once (1h axe - you can block cancel, get more stamina, faster attacks, better DPS, way easier headshots, and less dangerous horde clear vs 2h axe, which has better stagger and maybe push attack (right now actually I’d take 1h axe push attack over 2h axe push attack, because it allows to eliminate shieldvermin effectively and easily).
You maybe right in that opportunist was only intended to affect pushes. If that is the case, it is limiting the usefulness of an already limited trait further. What I have observed is prior to the 1.4 patch, without opportunist you could not interrupt over heads with a slam attack. With opportunist equipped, you could.
It is unfortunate that the majority of weapon traits are overshadowed by a combination of game play/human elements. It’s doubly unfortunate that they’ve been neglected for as long as they’ve been. I’m positive however that Fatshark’s developers are aware of this disparity.
