Coming from Vermintide: End Times, I’d say that Patrols used to be far scarier then they are currently.
Attack Speed & Damage lower across the board.
Smaller waves of harder to kill Skaven + More drops incentivized using your Ammo & Bombs against trash.
No Ults. You simply have no Stagger/Evade/Kill abilities to either buy time or out-aggro the patrol.
On Nightmare:
Total of 12 Stormvermin per Patrol
2x Bombs could only kill in the center of the explosion. Strength pot could kill at best half of them in one bomb.
Only the Axes, Glaive, Executioner, Pickaxe or Dual weapons could reliably 1 to 2 shot Stormvermin.
All firearms/staves that could 1-Shot Stormvermin required headshots.
On Cataclysm:
Each patrol is a whopping 14 Stormvermin
Overheads would one-shot you, no exceptions.
2x Bombs won’t even immediately kill any. Strength pot will only kill those in the center.
Tl;Dr You should stealth and wait for them to pass by… but in the right position, enough faith and skill in your gear, some expendable resources and a deathwish; Face danger head-first and make Okri Proud. That’s what the patrols are meant to be.
If they should have rewards then they should also be more difficulty in a way. You can pretty much delete legend and even cata patrol with few well placed bombs especially if you stack say strength potion with it.
At most you would need them now be somewhat resistant to bombs if something like dices are tied to them.
Do patrols need a reward or reason to fight them?
Feel like they should be threatening, something ought to be avoided and if pulled, your reward is surviving, being able to continue the mission.
Of course it doesn’t play out like that currently.
Honestly? I tend to pull and kill stormvermin and goatpatrols(shoot the bannercarrier first) because they are a bunch of pushovers more often than not…all while avoiding chaos patrols like the plague.
Because those wipe teams in QP 4 outa 5 times.
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But for example, just yesterday i got a bit trigger happy while playing kaboom wizard due to a ranger spawning conc pots everywhere. I drank one and had another and started jumping ahead right into a vermin patrol and the end result was that i burned every single of the non shielded ones to ashes on my own. The only damage i took i think was from one swipe while drinking the second conc pot while the shields having been damaged all died in basically 1 hit each from my teammates when they caught up . So all in all i am not really sure there ought to be a reward for anything except chaos patrols.
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But then again those also fall over in a heap when faced with a conc grail knight or painshade.
Plague patrol would be terrifying, 20+ Plague Monks.
I love to see a plague priest added to game, equipped with censer bearers and a AoE DoT aroudn him that heals monks.
Would Incentivize priority DPS, which he would have a fly shield to reduce ranged damage. Meaning people would have to risk the horde of plague rats.
Would really cause a shakeup in gameplay. Now imagine this for a bunch of Savages with a similar Chaos Priest.
Shame FS wont be adding any big changes to game like this.
Personally I love the idea of diversified patrols. Right now they really boil down to anti-armor playstyles. Wouldn’t be too big of a rework honestly, since the units, sounds and animations are already in the game.
Plague patrols, shieldwalls, slave caravans… Could potentially spice things nicely.