Patrols Rework Idea

He was being sarcastic. His main point is that Patrols don’t pose a real threat anymore.

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this thread has taken a turn

but yeah on the whole I like freedom of choice but it’d be nice if the decision making had a little more weight to it. Right now a lot of team comps just walk through a patrol between hordes and you pretty much don’t lose anything or feel any pressure for doing so.

If that’s the case, i am truly sorry Rebel.

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So to state my thoughts on it.
Keep patrols skippable, Simply because it adds more player choice, which is never a bad thing.

If patrols were to be unavoidable i.e. pathing that made them always move towards PC’s I would say fine. I’m super against the boss wall mechanic, when it was inserted for bosses I was pissed off and I will remain so, because it ruined the fun of speedruns IMHO.

I usually enjoy fighting pats because it is generally easy bar beastmen patrols, which are only annoying due to banners knocking people around. I use Patrols as THP generators for Zealot, Shade, GK and Slayer classes.

Super Hordes are kind of easy to deal with though if I understand your definition of a super horde that is. Zerkers are the largest problem when mixed into a horde or patrol because they call for attention and are much harder to CC. I dislike the concept of Zerkers in every “Patrol” as i feel it would remove the threat i always feel when seeing them in other areas. As of now, zerkers are the only enemy type I ever frantically try to deal with in a way that changes my usual play style.

If made deadlier or even left as are i would say they should not drop a loot dice, but perhaps a bomb, or single healing supplies. That way it could be a decision of, “Ok we will pull this patrol because X is grey and we dint have any healing” or “There is a Lord up ahead would be nice to have 1 more shrapnel bomb”. More meaningful choices are better but arbitrary loot dice which is only a reward if you beat the mission is not.

Also no one who plays Cata cares about chests, at least I have never met, played with or spoken to someone who does.

This is probably the fundamental problem of this game’s design. Most enemies aren’t seen as threats, but rather as resources to be harvested. Not something that can change at this point, but hopefully to be avoided in future games.

I believe this can be alleviated by making thp on kill more rewarding on hordes and less so on elites. There’s a thp rebalance mod that does something like this but I can’t recall the details or find it.
@Incandescent Might be able to explain/correct me if I’m wrong.

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This is a hack n slash though, following heroes.
In VT1 the group were veterans but not heroes.

Now in VT2 however the group are heroic and much more skilled and powerful. What was once a hyper deadly threat no longer is. They casually banter about killing a warlord and a Grey Seer.

I like seeing the character growth this bought. Cata can still be hard specials mid pat or mid horde can be a true death sentence if its 3 disablers at once. Or teh Groups comp is bad for sniping. A horde at the start of a boss fight can also be an absolute pain.

Problem with THP balances atm is that before, hordes gave so much, and can you remember back when people were salty when ranged gave THP as well as melee?
Plus if you want a lot of THP for hordes, you just take THP stagger or cleave, hell depending on weapon , Bill hook, rapier, spear,) head shots work wonders too for horde THP generation.

yeah we’re still working on that (looking at making stagger talents less uhhh…sad, too, for lack of a better term)

basic premise is making thp on kill a bit more consistent so single target weapons don’t feel awful the moment you meet skaven hordes and also prevent people from looking at chaos warriors and other elites as nothing more than thp batteries. Also still working on making thp on stagger more reasonable across the board and we’re still not sure where we wanna go with crit/hs and cleave.

Mod is unlisted atm until we get it to a place we feel is good for public testing. Can’t provide a timeframe on that sadly since we’re all pretty busy with work, study etc. on top of timezones being hell

Apologies for the quick derail but yeah the mod will hopefully help a bit with making elites seem less like a resource to be farmed for certain builds

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The THP problem I think is more a question of which “skills” belong in a skill tree and which should perhaps rather be handled as weapon traits. I would argue that a patrol has little relevance to the THP problem in this game, as a rather rare spawn that occurs maybe 1-2 times per map (if at all). The actual purpose of THP is to compensate for single small hits during a horde and not just to give the life bar a different color and absorb an overhead every second. I don’t want to derail the thread further in this direction but THP is unfortunately only a necessary evil that is perhaps not really thought through to the end and finds its legitimacy only in the horde density, optimization problems and overlapping enemy models.

@Velsix So where was I before? Oh well:

So the thread I linked already includes other approaches and ideas outside of rewards, e.g. other horde types, units, etc. which is why I linked it (because that’s also a way to make pats more interesting and challenging ). Nevertheless, I think that, especially as a thread creator using a rather general title, there should be at least a basic interest in the whole topic. Sry if I have formulated this a little too aggressively earlier, but if I invest time and answer to a topic (I am also not fundamentally deviated from the topic) and get a “I barley care” as a response, then I find that a little “inappropriate”… but maybe I’m just to much of a sissy.

I have already commented on the part about the unavoidable patrol. Why do I have this opinion? Because I think that you should not force players into a situation, in the end this is a coop game which also requires agreements, a wall of fire takes this team decision completely out and just legitimizes the behavior of people who run carelessly into everything without thinking about the rest of the team.
What I might change would be the behavior of a patrol, especially as it relates to triggering… Sometimes they just run past the player, sometimes they appear out of nowhere and attack, that should maybe be more consistent (though those are probably just bugs ^^). But that they just run through a horde that just runs towards the players and then fight 10m next to them what they do not even notice could be addressed, so that they (provided they work bug-free) are easier to trigger and attack at a comprehensible LoS.

As for point 2, I can not say much, I find the routes actually quite ok, if they are not stuck somewhere.

Regarding suggestion 3, as I said, I had already written something in the other thread. As for the Super Hordes, I’m rather skeptical. Maybe something you could also discuss but as a patrol “replacement” I would not find that good. In the end, a patrol should still keep its identity. I think this situation occurs anyway, if in addition to the patrol comes a horde for example.

Regarding point 4, where it is apparently about rewards, I rather join @SgtSmith95, some pickups or minibuffs for the team, or just random as with Lootrats would be a good compromise I think.

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Lower cleave first hit tHP from 1 to 0.5? 4.5 for 5 targets hit in total. Seems like a reasonable change.

Yeah I’ve just taken to making people fill out a proper personality test and writing a short essay explaining their personal philosophies before I let them into my legend lobbies honestly.

Don’t play cata until you’re ready to admit that objectivism is a childish way of viewing the world, and that science is only one way of gathering knowledge.

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