i’m just so fed up with that kind of conversation that i winded up being rude, i’m sorry
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How many months in a row did they spend just on the damn dogs? Like 5? Practically right out of release too.
I know it’s not quite the same topic, but I think there’s some valid parallels.
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Kinda bad argument. Every weapon and class is much stronger in DT compared to VT2.
Witchhunter could do that. It was a fun build.
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It’s not impossible to balance things and keep a game fun.
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it is if you don’t nerf things. if you just keep adding numbers eventually you lose track of how to accurate balance things because you keep altering how the balance itself holds together.
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I have tons of hours, every hard content/challenge completed, still I 100% agree with you, @Dexta … thanks for this thread 
People need to understand that after 999999 hours, if you’re a player with a minimum skill, it’s normal find the game easy… if that didn’t happen, it would mean that the difficulty is artificial and RNG… and I don’t want that in “my” games
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The point, at least for me, is not how easy games becomes, which is a given if you play a lot. But how much objectively something is better compared to the competition.
“ThEn JUsT BuFF EVryThInG ElsE!!!”
You assume that the majority of the weapons have the intended target of power and adjustment correctly. Players that ask for nerfs are the same to ask for underperforming weapons to be buffed.
“It’S NoT Op, It’S JuST FuN!!!”
Everyone knows this is a lie, what is fun is to feel like you are the main character of the game, as soon as those weapon get nerfed pick rate drop consistently, even if they are still very solid choices.
(First PS sword nerfs are proof of it)
If a weapon is fun you play regardless of how it performs.
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Not only that, but the sledgehammer approach of “just buff everything else” or even “just buff the enemies instead” will cause extreme balance issues. The more changes are made, the more complex interactions get overlooked. For an example if you “just buff all the weapons” you’ll end up with something accidentally hitting some really OP breakpoint and accidentally getting even more powerful than the previously-best weapon that everything should’ve been buffed to. So now you have an overperforming outlier again. What now? Do you just buff everything to THAT level again and inevitably repeat the problem because you just buffed 30+ weapons?
Conversely if you make enemies a little bit more tanky, that sounds like a great solution to the duelling sword killing them too fast, until you realize you took the hits to kill on a special with a high powered single shot wep from 1 to 2 and now the weapon is utterly pointless compared to a faster weapon that does the same still.
Balance has to be surgical for this reason and address weak points and overpowered points very precisely. If they ‘just buff everything’ like people often suggest they’re also going to break everything. Power creep sucks
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cant find a single game where i can feel remotely challenged anymore without a plasma, shout, dueling sword or knife, flamer, shroud or dueling sword, trauma, smite or shield, achlys, gunlugger completely voiding all threats instantly without needing so much as a thought. to actually get a game, i have to actively run forward to get into fights, but now people get upset im ‘running ahead’. so what, i sit back and watch people play the game for me? is that it?
these things need to be nerfed. thanks.
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nerfs only really matter in damnation, which players who are new or are carried by their gear should not be in anyway.
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I’m not sure you got what I wanted to say… anyway I play only T5 auric/mael. I’m not carried by any gear. Still atm the I don’t see the need of any nerf 
and that stupid pox burster stagger resistance that would change every patch
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Lotta people biting on what was an obvious troll thread 
Guess I’ll take the biggest bite.
To toss my $0.02 into the conversation, with the number of threads/comments we’ve had regarding nerfing all sorts of weapons and abilities across nearly every class, and people talking about defining game modes by restricting them to specific weapons (nevermind that some of those weapons were meta weapons themselves in older iterations of the game), at this point it feels like a subset of the playerbase has effectively “beaten” the game as it currently stands, and perceives the difficulty and balance substantially differently from most of the userbase.
It’s hard to stress how much “balance” is significantly controlled by the way players choose to shape their experience. I literally never play this game without at least one other person I know, I’ve got several different groups I play with from work/old school pals/tabletop gaming/fencing & HEMA, etc, same thing for similar titles like DRG or HD2. I only play Coop games when I have friends to play with. I’m not usually playing with a full crew of people I know, but I’ve always got at least one other person I know IRL in the team. This means we can talk about what we want to take and run for each game to curate the experience we want to play, and someone is swapping characters/builds/weapons every game couple games. Sometimes that means I have to play lower difficulties because some friends may not be as good, sometimes it means we carry the game in higher difficulties because we’re used to playing together and the randos are terrible, but we’re not getting ultramad or burned out.
In playing this way, I don’t see oft-complained about Meta weapons on every single player or every game, and even when we do see them they don’t tend to just dominate everything. The few games of late I can recall where one player legit simply walked all over the rest of the group, they were just legit way more capable, active, and aggressive than the rest of the team. I can’t recall a game where someone tried to just Smite everything the whole time, or where the Plasma Gunner or Bolter-Vet just killed everything before anyone could get off a shot, nor where a Zealot flamer made the game ez-mode. In my lunch game today (yes random sample of 1 but I just played it) on Damnation with Mutated Horrors, the PG vet on the team outdamaged my MkVII Infantry Lasgun build by a whole 1.7%, they didn’t run roughshod over the team and play the game for rest of us, and we had some rough spots, it wasn’t an autopilot game.
For the people playing by themselves and slamming “quickplay” 2-3 hours a night on the hardest difficulty settings for the last couple years, it needs to be acknowledged that while such is probably the most challenging way to play the game if that’s your bag, it is also the most frustrating and the least “cooperative”. You’re going to have the least connection to your teammates, the greatest exposure to the worst of the meta, you’re going to be focused entirely prioritizing your own performance and capability, every perceived issue is going to feel more visible, and every negative outcome more profoundly felt. At that play pace, you’re also putting in enough hours to make the game a job and are outpacing the content and vast majority of the playerbase in terms of skill and ability. Not hating on the crew that play this way, just want to put that level of play in some context.
As for the larger “balance” conversation, this game has a gazillion variables that are nigh impossible to all control for at once, and the design choices in weaponry and talents largely undercut the idea of perfect balance from the get-go in favor of greater immersion and fun, with balance being relegated to a “good enough” mindset.
This game has five different base difficulty settings that spawn different numbers of enemies with different health levels and damage outputs, which can dramatically shift perceptions of how good/bad something is depending on what level one plays at, and then has random mission modifiers on top of that Additionally this title has ninety-three different weapons at present, ranging from literal boot-knives and handaxes to assault rifles and flame throwers and grenade launchers to anti-armor energy weapons that can one-shot Space Marines and penetrate the frontal armor of most vehicles in the 40k universe, most of which aren’t really intended to be equal or balanced in the source material.
And that’s all without getting into variations of stat distributions, Perks, or Blessings that can radically alter performance of each of this broad array of different weapons, much less Talents, Blitz/Grenade abilities, Stimms, or Ults. In that context, you’re basically “balancing” things within a broad range of “good enough”, and there will always be a Meta of sorts, and that Meta will inevitably eventually bore or annoy those at the cutting edge, same way it does in Tabletop 40k. The main issue really is containing the excesses of that meta. If something about a weapon or ability is impacting play at all difficulty levels and is plainly obvious for most players, maybe it needs addressing, if it’s only something that’s really apparent to those who find the game’s hardest content to be too easy, maybe the problem lies elsewhere if there’s really a problem at all?
As is, I think the balance on the whole for the majority of the playerbase is the best its ever been. A wider array of weapons and abilities are fun and functional now than they were in older iterations of the game for your average player, and while certainly far from perfect, is at a pretty good place overall.
In fairness, no game related in any way to the 40k IP has ever been particularly well balanced that I can recall.
Tabletop 40k itself most especially 
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i’m charging you another $48.60 for all the typing you wasted.
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This is a pretty good point but I also have to make the counterpoint that the game is designed around it. Playing with 3 friends is definitely not the experience they wanted. You can’t pick the mission and modifier you want to play challenging content together so you’re at the mercy of quickplay still. There’s no deeds. There’s no chaos wastes. There’s no actual hard content to play through and tackle with your friends. The sole exception is hardmode twins but that’s more or less one and done, the map doesn’t even have modifiers.
And before you say Havoc will alleviate this, it might. It’s been 2 years of that though. And even Havoc won’t let you pick anything, as far as I’m aware.
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I definitely understand that trying to get 3 other people consistently is an issue, I can only get that maybe once a week or two, but playing with at least one other person you’re comfortable with makes the game feel so much better and less frustrating as the brain shifts from solo tryharding to just hanging out and having fun and people can jive on what they’re doing and feeling so much better.
Regarding more difficult content, unfortunately the game’s really just gotten to where it should have been at release in terms of features, and people have essentially been training/playing for two years in advance of an incomplete product, and that’s also part of the problem. Havoc mode is the right idea at the right time, but looks to have a host of implementation issues that I think will unfortunately knee-cap it.
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me watching people say I was insane for using conflag staff and unchained Sienna on release Vermintide 2
You’ll pry my circle of “I control the map now” from my cold dead hands.
Yeah, it sure would be silly if you still had to deal with something like a smite psyker making a round of auric completely faceroll.
I literally clipped my friend commenting on it just because of discussions like this:
This is excellent advice, at the very least you can duo events/scans and make progress, and have someone free you from a net or a hound when the time comes.
Realistically, the game is also “balanced” around 2 good players.
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At this point I think it would be a good idea to introduce modded realm for the sole purpose that we can mod extra difficulty into the game. That might fix some of the issues like now where basically half of the weapon roster is considered OP by the more ehm… experienced part of the playerbase giving rise to multiple threads for most of them or me who keep asking for a harder difficulty or at least major nerfs for player defense/mobility.
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You make a lot of good points here, so I’m going to throw in some extra pennies of mine and state my own take on this.
A game is most fun to me when there are multiple “best” strategies. Either they’re so close together in power that it doesn’t matter, or all of them are capable in a way that doesn’t feel like they’re just doing the same thing differently.
My brain is wired to optimize the fun out of a game - pick the best strategy and use it until the game is begging for mercy. Part of why I like Path of Exile, and Vermintide 2 on a more related matter, is that there are SO MANY strategies that are really good, powerful, and fun to use. Warrior Priest is one of the most powerful careers in Vermintide - that doesn’t stop me from not liking his playstyle, not picking him, and contributing massively to the team regardless. There isn’t just one dominant “one-size-fits-all” strategy, which is what I think Darktide is currently suffering from.
The Dueling Sword and Plasma Gun come to mind when I think of such strategies. They’re not just good at everything, they’re debatably best-in-class at everything, and it gets stale really quickly when you want to pick the best option for something and end up slapping on Ol’ Reliable.
It’s fine for a weapon to be solid at everything. It’s good to have an all-rounder baseline to balance other things around. Think of Devil’s Claw swords - reliable, simple crowd-control options that fare poorly versus armor, but deal decent single-target damage to other armor types. These should NEVER be dominant, but they provide a good branching point for players new to the game and developers alike. The problem arises when that option is better than most dedicated options at multiple tasks.
Infantry Autoguns and Recon Lasguns are meant to be generalist weapons that fare poorly against armor, but the existence of Veteran’s Onslaught node make them absurdly good anti-armor weapons. The Eviscerator tears through hordes like a mofo, but why pick that when you can pick up a Tactical Axe, only lose some crowd control, and also get better armor damage?
These things stifle variety at the top level and make things boring for the players who are getting carried by someone who knows how to use these overpowered options to their fullest extent. I never liked the argument of “well just don’t use the meta lol”, because I feel worse not using the strong option than I do being bored that I did - and choosing to ignore the overpowered options doesn’t remove the problem of these options being too powerful in the first place.
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