Overhauling Vermintide 2: Part 1 – General Changes

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 General Discussion
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Hello fellow verminslayers!

I’m excited to share the first installment of a series of posts where I will share my ideas for reworking and enhancing most of the rpg aspects of Vermintide 2 (mainly talents, traits and properties). This project has been a labor of love, inspired by my deep passion for the game and its community. Some of you may recognize me from my comprehensive guides, which I’ve shared in the past (you can check them here). The comments I received on those guides pushed me to keep making content related to the game, and I’m hoping we can create even more engaging conversations with this new series.

What to Expect:
Over the next five weeks, I’ll be posting one section per week, starting today with the gear properties and traits, as well as the common talents (stagger talents and THP talents) and a small improvement to regeneration effects. These reworks aim to enhance gameplay mechanics, balance, and the overall experience, drawing on both my gameplay insights and input provided by the community over the years.

What’s Next:

I will be posting each character’s section weekly (ideally on Fridays) where you will be able see my ideas for reworking them. Sometimes it will involve just a few talent adjustments, while other times there will be more significant changes.

My goal is to increase build variety and to address “dead” talents, ensuring every choice feels impactful and meaningful. Your thoughts, critiques, and suggestions are not only welcome but highly encouraged. Let’s build this conversation together!

Stay tuned for next week’s post, where I’ll dive into my boy Kruber.

Thanks for reading, and may Sigmar’s light guide your hammer!

Link to the first section: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1atBEBGN4McUyZhLGv78pedSFKNqWdRkxxtiPyVx0K48/edit?usp=sharing

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hmhm.

1 Health talents.

Seems good for the most part, but the healshare change is too punishing for QP, if two people roll in then both suffer for it.

  1. Stagger talents

Its not that assassin is too good, its simply that the others on average are weak-ish. Like smiter is easy to activate sure…but its on ONE target at a time. In a horde fighting game. Sure that one guy in the horde of 50 infront of you will surely feel the pain, his buddies wont give a hoot though.

Assassin comes of as strong meanwhile because it just so happens that most of those who can use it, use crit builds, which also tend to use weapons that have good finese multipliers (crit&headshot damage) which all combined serves to make a strong mix.

Outright removing the crit component is just punishing less skilled players and those who use weapons that crit but dont headshot well, at least not while clearing hordes.

  1. Weapon properties.

Using Crit power, block angle and power vs on melee weapons is like self sabotage, they are actually just that bad in comparison. But this doesnt hold true for ranged weapons so leaving those unchanged is fine.

  1. Necklaces, charms&trinkets.

Seems fine i think, this goes goes for the proposed changes to the traits as well, mostly.

  1. Traits.

Oh boy.

First up, your change to swift slaying does on average nothing except for maybe on Kruber who innately doesnt hit very fast nor has a lot of crits baked in. Keri, saltz and the angriest Dwarf + pyro wizard will still be having permanent uptime.

Not changing resourceful is quite strange too, this trait is entirely awful with even inconsistent swift slaying uptime still providing more ability regen from hits than this would do.

The heroic intervention change is honestly, laughably useless, it doesnt accomplish anything and is faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar to weak to be of any use.

Removing scrounger, why in the world? And the replacement talent is downright awful too, ten times so since you didnt even touch conservative.

Inspirational headshots effect is too short to be any use, or too demanding to be fun to use having to swap to gun and shoot in the middle of melee constantly to maximize.

  1. Healing changes

The main problem with healing from the likes of waystalker, GK and natural bond is not that they replace THP, its that they are too low and too conditional and compete with often seriously superior options.

Waystalker healing doesnt even happen if shes not below 50%, if a WS is there they probably are in a fight and boon will give infinitely better value being able to rapidly fill up and keep full THP.

As for GK, i have never heard of anyone complaining about that blessing except Zealots who wants to opt-out of it. All while cursing the GK for his bathwater loving-heresy.

Natural bond? Biggest issue with natural bond is that its low and it competes with boon and barkskin, something that would not be helped by you halving its effect and buffing the other options aside from those two.

…

All in all i get the feeling you dont seem to chat with diverse people nor use the various balance mods in modded realm as referece at all. A lot of it seems like echo chamber stuff that only addresses surface levels with a serious lack of consideration for circumstances like how natural bonds biggest issue by far is being in competition with bond&barkskin and then even proposin to nerf it even more.

If you are heavy in melee and got solid THP, use barkskin for serious added bulk.
If mainly ranged but solid THP and got some DMG resistance that you use, also use barkskin like on engineer with the 30%.
If ranged but squishy, use boon to ensure two random pokes in a melee wont kill you before you get some back.

Where does natural bond fit in? Ranged but squishy and supremely confident that you´ll never take any serious amount of damage nor feel pressure in melee…this is a condition that 95% of players will never meet. Its the biggest thing that ensures bond will never see the light of day.

3 Likes
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Yk its been 6 years and no one actually complained about anything except some dlc stuff that was nerfed (sott, jav, coru, etc.). Bugfixes should be a priority. This balance is really unnecessary.

Changing something in terms of balance is just weird right now, honestly. You will never achieve agreement since there are always people who use and love the talents and traits you want to change. Most of these will not make much difference and only annoy old players. The game is just fine, the variety of builds is insane of you actually want to change something in your gameplay and not just make everything meta or equally strong. Some talents are « worse » than others in certain situation, thats how it should be, imo

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Natural Bond is good as it is now; it has a niche use for a small number of players, but it remains beneficial for them. I hope it won’t be buffed or nerfed anytime soon.

Regarding the increase in thp on kill – Idk, I think it should motivate players to kill elites instead of becoming stagger 2.0. Some other changes feel weird too, like Swift Slaying – it changes nothing for careers with lots of crits and makes life harder for others. Resourceful sounds like a meme for crit builds (spam pyro ult), Barrage and Hunter still feel like memes for some of the careers as well (any spammable ranged like fireball or necro).

The comments in the thread brilliantly captured the feelings regarding this balance:

and overall sentiment about recent balance changes — Hagstalker still a meme, overtime overall still feels like a meme, especially with the latest Lingering balance or reoccurring bugs with SoTT.

There’s no need for balance changes besides addressing some outlying builds or careers (e.g., SoTT a long time ago and OE currently, or anything mentioned above like hagstalker).

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Yeah, I may have overnerfed that part.

I don’t think any character can retrigger SS consistently on a 3 second duration unless they are using very fast weapons and/or have hight crit chance. And the change is meant to put it in line with the others, not nerfing it too harshly.

Yeah, buffing it to 7,5% or even 10% cdr wouldn’t be much of a stretch. I considered it for a little while but didn’t give it much thought. 7,5% seems fine though so I will change it to that.

The numbers are probably off, but triggering it on every attack against regular infantry that is attacking (which is almost constantly, unless they are on the ground) AND applying it to all nearby allies could easily make it overpowered, which is why I set it on a 4 second cooldown and limited it to restoring only 2 THP.
It’s true that getting THP is an easy thing to do, but when you want to be a better support for your teammates and they are not super skilled players, I think a talent like this can be super cool.

Because 90% of the time it’s “if you can land headshots, Conservative Shooter; if you can’t, Scrounger”. This opinion is based on (almost) every build that I’ve ever seen being one or the other.
Conservative Shooter at least rewards skill, but the former is just a way to cheese some extra ammo at random. It kinda “blocks” all the other traits.
The replacement was not necessary at all, but it still is better than nothing.

Yeah, it’s meant for support builds or even some ranged dps builds.

I have heard that exact complaint over and over again in discussions about Natural Bond. Because of that, people often consider it “literally useless” (and they are not too far off the truth).
I agree that it still wouldn’t be able to fully compete with Barkskin and Boon, but it is an improvement to its niches (even with the nerf to 10 seconds per tick). I have used NB to great success on squishy ranged-focused builds, on any of Sienna’s careers when using a ranged build, on some support builds and on Ironbreaker and Unchained.
I’ve used it extensively and it’s numbers are good in Official Realm. Nerfing the healing rate might not be necessary (or at least, not such a big nerf), but since having limited healing is a core part of the game, I wanted to make sure it stayed weak.

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When they are worse in any situation, then it is a problem.
There are several talents that are either bad, boring or straight up useless. I tried to change those. You will be able to read them in the following weeks.

And yes, it’s an skill-based PvE game, you can make literally anything work, even playing with no talents at all, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t dream about things getting better.

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They can be useful in other mods (Weaves, lots of various examples) or in some weapon and talent combos (Scrounger for Volley on Zealot)

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I partially agree with this. I’ve used it extensively and I really like it on many builds, but I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about it so… I wanted to make it more appealing.

Yeah, it wasn’t really necessary to change it, but after reviewing some of my own VODs I reached the conclusion that it’s hard to justify picking it over the others, especially below Cataclysm.

I guess I’m too influenced by Reddit’s collective hive mind.

I think you will like the changes I planned for the careers then.

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That´s the thing, every single elf does this with absolute ease, even waystalker, thanks to her popular weapons having innate crit chance which the users build off on, and so forth.

How exactly would anyone ever go about making this talent better at supporting the team when both swift slaying and oppertunist exists? One for clearing enemies and one for stunlocking them, depending on weapon or at times, preference.

At random? You´ve failed to grasp the intricacies here.

First lets establish this, for the majority of weapons in the game outside magic staves&fire ones, conservative with its headshot refund is the best. Always. The exceptions using scrounger are only bounty hunter, waystalker and Sister of thorns. Why?

Bounty hunter and Sister both have the means to consistently remove the RNG component and just make it 100% ammo back on demand, nothing strange about them having weapons that utilize this.

Then we got waystalker, she typically only uses scrounger on one weapon, swiftbow. This she makes work by the fact of her passive massively inflating ammo + Kurnous reward talent to fill in the gaps. No one else can use Scrounger particularly well and i dont think i ever see anyone try.

Support builds? Its too short to be any use, you shoot one nearby enemy, it activates, then you kill one guy in melee and its gone and now you are drowning in enemies and wont get any more use. This isnt support as much as a scam.

Its literally useless because it will never have any hope of competing with the other options unless buffed to the skies. Which would as you noted, clash with the core idea of “limited healing”.

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Being one of the few fools who do use it i get the idea, but at the same time i hold the perspective that maybe the design ending up being so “elitist” for a lack of better terms, is not ideal in terms of letting people have diverse&similarly good options for variety.

Not that i know exactly what to do about it either though, boon and bark simply provide far too good a coverage.

And in a few short lines you’ve magnificently struck my single biggest complaint about “overall sentiments” :sweat_smile: Casuals making comments like “hagbane is bad, even on WS, buff it”… Dear lord these lambs are too innocent.

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Sorry, I meant that for Scrounger (“the latter” instead of “the former”). I always mix those two words.

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I suspected as much, no harm done.

But basically, Scrounger works for those that got enough crit synergy to make use of it, or simply enough ammo to make yield work. Its a niche but not bad.

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  1. 99,9% dont use them and pretty much forced to play one-two builds. Becouse other builds are just “same but just worse”. Most of the talents doesnt change gameplay playstyle or even weapon you use.
  2. 99,9% of people that are using bad talents enjoy them only becouse they dont understand how those talents and game work. My two friends always rolled block angle becosue they didnt know that you can block 360 anyway.
  3. We have such limited perk\trait\prop choise that “lets keep those perk for one guy” is not an potion

If you forced to play one thing over and over and over you will get bored and leave.

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They do; they are necessary for certain builds, and if you (or some percentage of players) don’t know how to use them, it doesn’t mean they are useless.

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Yea yea “it is not bad you are bad” argument. Next one pls.

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While i believe there are some talents like this, not widely used but truthfully useful or at least not bad in some builds. I do still think the “actually just not helpful” ones are also prevalent.

Waystalkers “Drakiras accuracy” sounds good on paper but its too short to help melee and its badly overshadowed by the other two for ranged output. Fervent huntress similarly isnt awful in concept but it competes with a talent for major cooldown reduction which makes it really subpar when compared. Though not anywhere even remotely so awful as Ricochet which just flat out doesnt have any meaningful use 90% of the time and when it does, it hits a foot somewhere. Or pulls a patrol. Or both.

In summary, lots of talents are kind of too weak to be relevant and some are actually just that awful, requests for reworks are not unfounded by any means. Made worse by Fatshark going very hard on nerfs at times and removing stuff like loaded bow being able to activate conservative shooter for some longbow synergies etc.

2 Likes
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Keeping 99,9% of audience in suffering and boredom becouse there are 0,01% enjoyers is just insane.
With that logic you should not nerf everything like old Javeline, Moonbow and SoTT or current OE becouse there were people enjoying it.

I heard only one use of it: you take in on flamer and annoy your teamates with its sound XD

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This! This is exactly why I decided to write these reworks.

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Ears start bleeding from sheer trauma

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

…

Actually i didnt even know it had a sound, do not recall anyone ever using it :no_mouth:

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Same. I heard that story on forums.

Tourney balance mod for DWONS. Some changes are on question for base game, but most of them are really damn good even for base game.

But its purpose wasnt to rework the game so crap like Rile the Mob is still here.