This isn’t about the bugs/sound issues that have often plagued patrols in VT2 but rather the way they’ve been implemented in general. In VT1, the speed, pathing, sound volume/distance, start/end points, and detection level of patrols was such that you always could/should avoid them. In VT2, however, they march a little too fast, their pathing is on way too short a loop, and their start/end points are way too close to the active play area. There are very few instances where it’s worth sneaking by a patrol because their tight & fast routes make it extremely likely if you don’t kill them, you’ll just get them during a horde. I can’t imagine this is how you intended patrols to feel. In Legend, they’ve very much become just an ambient clump of mobs to be dealt with on our own terms like anything else because they’re simply too hard to reliably avoid in the long run.
A prime example of a bs horde path is right after the 2nd tome, just past the shipwreck in Skittergate. A Chaos Patrol often marches an extremely tight circle around the iceberg where the drop is such that unless you get through fast and hard, you will have to fight them during a horde, especially given nurglings’ penchant for immediately cockblocking the path with hyper-stacked instaspawns.
An example of a well implemented patrol is the first possible one in Skittergate that marches up the left side. This is the perfect patrol. Its path is reliable and once you evade it you’ll never see it again. Every patrol should be more like this.
Patrols should start and end their marching well outside the play area with soft-walls around them to prevent errant Trueflight Volleys and Burning Heads from cheesing their way into them from 10miles away.
One of the reasons I went over to just outright nuking them everytime. The instances where we successfully snuck past them only to find them coming back in absolutely quirky ways and then getting stuck have just become one too many.
Agree
I would also like if they would walk less repetitive routs I mean by now I know where they can go and I don’t like the idea that you can get a huge advantage by memorizing every place a pat can spawn and where they will walk.
Overall well said and I agree with everything except this part, I kinda like that part. Knowing there’s a patrol in the area and needing to be cautious about big seeking attacks is cool, if anything TF/burning head need some tweaks to targeting so they’ll only seek out the far away targets if there’s no close ones. That way the only players who would get penalized would be those firing off seeking volleys without any enemies around.
Yeah I mean just as a quality control measure to ensure they can’t be hit before they’re heard. Too often a stray volley arrow flies well beyond sight/sound range and aggros a patrol before it’s possible to know it’s there. I don’t want it to be impossible to hit them with volley/head in general, I want there to be QC to ensure you have a chance to know they’re there first.
I like new patrols. They finally feel like a threat you should really pay attention to. Only things that bug me - is how close they spawn, how silent they are and that they can get stuck. Otherwise I like how different they are and how dangerous they are.
But they’re only dangerous if you try to avoid them the way you’re actually supposed to, because it bites you in the ass when they double back way too soon. In and of themselves, they’re harmless and it’s almost always safe, easy, and trivial to kill them on sight.
Also just got killed by a patrol silently spawning right around the corner. God these bugs tilt me. But this is bugs that I hate, not the patrols themselves.
I’d add that they also spawn in linear sections and walk all the way back to the dropdown point, such that it’s literally impossible to avoid them. Happened to me twice tonight. Once with a boss and horde and once with 2 gunners, 1 silent packmaster, and a horde.
eg. on festering ground when you drop out of the tunnel section to the vertical bit with the tome. We were 2 men down and the patrol spawned just after we dropped. Actually survived that time somehow but it doesn’t feel fair either way.
Disagree. It is tough choice at least 50% of the time whether to kill them or to avoid. Killing them costs consumables you might really need very soon, for a boss for example. Also you might not have those consumables, be very damaged after some previous crisis, or something can always go wrong - waves, special.
My thing is that they don’t feel like enough of a threat to bother avoiding in the first place. A couple of bombs and you clean them up or are left with a couple of stragglers.
RV Bardin is one of my most played and I run the talent that gets you a bomb every 4 special kills. So using bombs on a patrol is often as mundane as whatever else.
However, this could just be one of the key selling points of having RV Bardin.
Ugh yeah I’ve died to patrols there before too, where we dropped down and THEN we could hear the patrol coming when we were already boxed in. You pretty much have to engage them immediately out on the walkway so that you have some room to retreat as you fight if you need to; otherwise you’re just cornered in a really tight space by a f***load of heavily armored units and pretty much totally boned unless you have bombs/pots and a lot of AP weapons.
Maybe you are right. Seems like a couple patrols are indeed unavoidable.
Though even that patrol, if you could hear it before jumping down, could have been avoided, and avoided very easily.
Still it’s a bad design that you can’t avoid a patrol if you pass a point of no return. Imagine having a patrol at the basement with beer in Empire in Flames. Yikes.
The shorter routes of the patrols aren’t a problem in my mind. Instead, they mean that you have to be fast in passing a patrol, you cannot just get to a hiding place and completely ignore them once they’ve passed you. In VT1, the patrol routes were so long that you rarely even heard them turn around and return, let alone needed to care.
Some of their routes are such that they’re (practically, at least) unavoidable, and I think these should indeed be changed. While patrols are indeed trivial to slay if you are prepared, they pose quite a threat if they come with a horde, if you don’t have resources to deal with them, if you don’t have space around you, and/or if they just plain surprise you, which means that avoiding them needs to be an option. As mentioned already, they also have troubles with turning around (which stops their marching sound for a moment, and sometimes makes them temporarily stuck) and ledges, which often make them temporarily or permanently stuck. Of course, a stuck patrol also doesn’t move, which means no special sound.
I also have another gripe, but that’s far more minor one: Chaos Warriors marching (And Trolls running; I’ve seen that a few times too) look (and sound) stupid. They honestly need a separate “marching” animation at some point.
Silent patrols and now even silent hordes have been plaguing my experience with the game. I wouldn’t be so frustrated if this hasn’t been happening since day one, but playing legend is like pulling teeth at the very least. It’s hard, sure, but I don’t enjoy it due to the bugs and overall state of the game.
I just started playing RV more, equipping my whole team with bombs constantly so we can just delete every pat right away without even thinking about it.
Always remember: Playing Fatshark Games is about finding workarounds for their software!
They are very troublesome right now . . . I also find their pathing to be very confusing; I kinda felt in the first game you could see a patrol (even if for the first time on a map!) and have an idea of where it was going to go, because they took logical paths. Now, it can be really confusing an unintuitive. You take cover behind of an out-of-the-way rock, but surprise! For some reason they’re going that way.