Post-2.0 Feedback

[TheSandhog]

First of all, a resume of this:
Big disappointment, not because of talents, they’re mostly good. But they’re so good it makes the game way easier.
Meanwhile, you over-compensate that with some idiotic placements of specials and elites because you think that makes the game harder. No, it only makes it tedious.
If you don’t know what tedious is; Harder but neither challenging nor fun.

I only have a few gripes with the heroes’ new talents, but they’re just as important.

Heroes
Markus Krubber - Mercenary
Ready for Action - Who thought this was a good idea? Cooldown Reduction but no healing effect, you really must be against teamplay or think too badass or rely on your team (all friends I bet) too much. This is situational beyond relief, it’s like the whole idea was made MERELY for these specific kind of people and nothing else.

Bardin Goreksson - Slayer
Dawi-Drop - I like it, it’s great. Sadly, it can be very luck-based and situational. What if you can’t jump out? This trait ain’t worth it then because you get no boost. Just make a small change to this talent, make it so there’s a 0.5 second for 50% boosted damage after you’re off the air.

Kerillian - Handmaiden
Why even remove the “Bleed” effect from her special? It was weak already, only worth it to deal with hordes. Now you make it a choice between being bloody, invisible or critty.
It’s not bad, but the fact you remove it when it was an innate ability, a good one for that even if useless…Really, what’s the explanation if there is even any?
Makes her special more useless than before, in my experience I have never seen a single Handmaiden use it offensively, merely to “run faster” because that’s what Vermintide 2 is about, being fast not teamwork.

Time for the real important part.
Maps
Convocation of Decay
You really must be desperate on making this already annoying map, especially the last part where we defend nothing, ‘harder’ by adding more specials, including the boring fat bastards and the absurd CWs and Stormvermin.
I had to be extra-cheap just to win this map and what do I get? No reds, no hats, thanks FatShark.
You’d do better by making this less tedious, make it so there’s only one CW, he’d be priority target, and reduce those armorats between 1-to-4.

The Screaming Bell
Yet again, you think adding THOUSANDS of specials and a non-stop wave of armours, including armorats with shields, is a good idea to make it more challenging.
Wrong. All it did was, this is going to be a mantra again, tedious.
Breaking these beams means you’ll get over 10 specials ready to buttfeck you with their disabling attacks as well as about 10 armorats, hopefully NOT the shield variants but it can happen so easily, that your priority HAS to be to regroup and fight against them.
No, your teammates don’t care, their only goal is to get over this ASAP. The fact a lot of the randoms want to get over a level ASAP must mean something. It does, it means they aren’t interested in fighting against such cheap twats.

Fort Anamethateventhefatsharkdevelopersdontwanttoproperlyspellitoutsotheymakebadjokesaboutitlikecallingitburgerbugeorsomething
Yet again, last wave, tedious.
Send in specials and armours as if there was an “Armoured Rats designed to Ruin Your Life Club” very nearby. Not just one club either, but ten.
And yet again, people just want to get over it, not get on a spot and defend. In my experience, 3 of these and the bots tend to always die (mostly because they want to be more busy killing rats than helping up a teammate, including Ironbreaker Bardinbot) as well as 6 of these and all the players don’t care about you, they just want to get over with, yet they die in the end because…Well, you know, it is ‘very challenging’ to fight against a spamwave of specials and elites.

Empire in Flames
Thank Hel, because at least in this one it’s not a SPECIAL spam. But Elite spam? You can ask Samuel L. Jackson to bet your ass on it.
Each wave, there’s more than 3 CWs and more than 8 Maulers, get ready to be screwed. Meanwhile, again, not a single player cares to stay in one spot with you and fend them off.

The Skittergate
I thank not Hel but The Builder for he provided me the mighty hammer, which I can use to smite these armoured rats.
Yes, armoured rats. In the last section, where we fight our ol’ pal Rasknitt, there were already 6 armorats coming out to the right (and the goddamn Minigun Boss didn’t even get down) and if it wasn’t for me, a Kruber Mercenary with a Two-Handed Hammer (BLESS THE BUILDER) we’d be all dead.
This should be proof here that weaponry in Vermintide 2 is now ‘meta’; you need armour piercing because you can guarantee there’ll be a spam of armoured elites on the last section of virtually every map.

With all this analysis, I think the intention of FatShark here is to make these levels ‘more challenging’ (heh) so there’s more teamwork.
Well, sadly or perhaps not so sadly, you have failed terribly.
Maybe you were successful, but you were blind to realize that not everybody has V2 friends ready to stand for you and have fun because they’re your friends or whatever.

I am not against reworking these levels, let alone EVERY level, to be more properly challenging, but all you did was make it tedious. The game is already overly-tedious than it is, with foolish teammates and mentally unstable bots only making it worse.

[geekhaven]

I don’t know that I agree with your text as written but I agree wholeheartedly with the implication that engaging game play and challenge are not mutually inclusive.

a) Failure rate does not equate to engaging challenge

b) more x (x being something that makes a scenario harder) does not equate to engaging challenge

so if you want more challenge but don’t care about engaging content just make an enemy who can hit you from outside your visible range definitely through hordes but maybe also through terrain also make them spawn in numbers any ware the players aren’t looking (or sometimes where they are) and don’t give them any sound until after the players have been hit.

There is a clear direction here and it feels like a Bethesda game difficulty slider. Don’t make the challenge more interesting or strategic just ramp up how much HP you have to chew through and remove how much hp and or resource you have to do it with.

It an unfair simplification but it is exactly how it feels.

[souI23]

I agree. There still are some bad talents, like no tHP on ult with Merch.

And I mainly agree about final events. Some of them are innatural spikes of difficulty. They aren’t “hard but funny”, they are just broken with the game that vomits on us the world. Some maps are much harder than other ones, but without a better reward.

[geekhaven]

Yeah there has to be some discussion about natural difficulty and how 8 chaos warriors 12 black rats and a Boss during a horde don’t really fit into any naturally occurring difficulty spike all the while the AI directer seems to think leaches and hookrats are an excellent combination to a group suffering from limited mobility options and a crowded corridor full of visual noise.

[TheSandhog]

You guys said it.

Indeed, failure rate and “more enemies” is not challenge, just a very weak excuse of it.

And yes, I forgot to mention that indeed the fact these maps I mentioned are harder than others is ridiculous and you indeed get no extra reward just because the game decides to spike the ‘difficulty’ (Actually, I wouldn’t say that’s what it does, it merely spikes the tediousness) out of nowhere.

[hanzy]

Eh, still doable in legend QP with whatever team comp.
A bit harder for Cata QP because some of these terror events require tight teamplay and some planning.

To me I like the fact that terror events now scale with difficulty.
Maybe it’s not such a big jump for me because before WoM I spent a good portion of time on modded playing ONS and ONS+.
Terror events pre WoM were a snore fest.

[geekhaven]

Agreed pre WoM they were mediocre and likely the least engaging or difficult part of the run. However I agree with most that they don’t scale with the rest of the level.

[TmanDW]

What a rant. Sounds to me like you just can’t deal with the new increased difficulty (yet!), but your ego won’t let you accept that you can’t do the difficulty the game let you do before, so instead you try to convince yourself “It’s not harder it’s just tedious (and that’s why I fail, not because it’s too difficult for me, yeah, exactly, that must be it! It’s not me, it’s the game!)”, which is a nonsensical argument. Won’t fool anybody, and shouldn’t fool yourself.

Look, the game got harder because of all the combined changes in 2.0, fair enough. But relax, you didn’t get worse. You’re just as capable as before. However, there’s no need to feel entitled to be able to clear more difficult content (new Legend vs. old Legend), and no need to feel inadequate because you can’t do it yet either. Just see it as an opportunity to get better, or jump down a difficulty for the same experience as before. If you want to instead make the argument “it’s not fair that the same in-game rewards are now locked behind more difficult content, and FS said Legend should’ve stayed the same difficulty as before”, that’s a different thing and another topic. But saying “it’s not harder it’s just more tedious!” (whatever that means) is just silly.

Let me just ask you then, because I’m genuinely curious what you think: How would you propose to make the game harder, as opposed to more “tedious”, then, instead?!

[geekhaven]

Cut down hordes, increase attack speed on all weapons tone down swift slaying. Get riud of all the ‘does not stack with’ abilities and find out what the base line output of players at full ‘OP or not’ capacity are and then I would tailor the AI director to build semi predictable counters to player movement through a level.

Theres a loit going on in these equations but I’d find metric I felt actually came from engaging difficulty and I’d find metric that came from what would be frustrating ddifficulty and try to find a way to moderate the latter in favor of the former.

Strong runs that end extremely quickly must be a sign of frustrating circumstances. Surely a metric can be built into the AI director to give this kind of feedback. Runs that show data that indicate player progress as x (we need a baseline) speed should indicate expected skill play at difficulty.

So many metrics to work with so much context to explain. You can’t solve the engaging difficulty issue in a forum post, and to be fair I’m not doing it for free… or I am, as a paying player but no theory crafting for game design is a job and I’ve already got one of those so all I offer here is opinions and loose abstract ideas.

[TmanDW]

How are your suggestions not the same as “make the game more easy”?!

[geekhaven]

Because they are incomplete. As I said, these aren’t simple problems, they need to be built around a baseline which Fatshark has already (I assume) and then tested and tested and tested.

In the greater context the game is quite balanced but in the microcosm its all over the place. With this many moving parts stuff is always going to be hard to flat line but that is the desired outcome. A feeling of balance, of class, trait, stat and weapon equality.

How would I fix it, I’d start with what it is, and begin moving to what I want. It takes time, and if I was to take your statement and extrapolate it I could ask you,

Why do you think all enemies should one shot heroes and take 100 hits to kill? Isn’t that the difficulty your asking for, that would be impossible to win thus difficult.

Being facetious for fun and profit ?

Its a complex equation and I think the enemies have more hp are faster and hit harder approach to difficulty is lazy. Better designed enemies would be my focus but I’m not privy to how hard it is to get licencing through or modeling or how much established resources are burnt in what exists already.

Beastment were a mistake (IMHO, just not interesting enough), green skins would have provided such great diversity of enemies and enemy tactics. My opinion would start there, I want diversity of tactics and consistency of difficulty. Players should be forced to adapt to the situation but all situations should be equally difficult (or easy depending on your level of skill I suppose) to an adapted player. The skill required to manage a massive skaven horde with assassins and hooks is not the same which is required to manage 2 + flags + meatwall desnity while dodging projectiles from enemies that are behind meat wall and outside of range, while also still dealing with hookrats and assasins.

The intent of design between the races is so radically different with beastmen. It doesn’t fit in the difficulty curve of the established races and it likely never will. Unfortunately it is likely that when the big balance update comes they will trivialise the beastmen because the only thing that made them different was their hyperdense HP mass with the ability to block line of site from ranged melee and ranged ranged attackers. Take that away and they become… well more weak blackrats and skaven slaves with range. The flags are great btw just stop them from being placed outside of player interact able space. 4 is a bit much but I think an organised team manages it pretty well in most cases.

[souI23]

It depends. Without doubt this new difficulty has hit some players’ ego… But say “every player, that hates it, must just git gud”, it’s the death of every discussion that could improve the game.

I haven’t problems to deal with Legend or Cataclysm, but in “2.0 difficulty” I still find there are some unfair/broken things that must be fixed.

I have already written it on another thread, so I will not re-write the entire post here… But I can do some examples.
The problem with terror events isn’t that now they scale with the difficulty, but that some of them are just much much much harder than other ones (without a better reward). Or the unstoppable Specials spawning… It doesn’t bring more challenge, but just more confusion.
Or I could continue talking about hyperdensity and how bad works with new dodge mechanics… Or about these new old bugs (bugged sound, enemies that spawn on your back…).

[4eja]

Let me just tell the kruber I played with a while ago to “git gud” because an assassin I dodged slid across a wall and covered a 30 foot gap in an instant and hit him instead. I’m fine with having increased enemies and all that even if it does kind of cement the “MAX DEEPS” kind of builds, but what i’m not fine with is how god awful the bugs are. I never really noticed how buggy the game is / how much the enemies cheat on a regular basis until they gutted thp, threw more enemies at me constantly thus increasing the chances of these kinds of bugs occurring while also making enemies hit like a truck to ensure you really FEEL IT.

[geekhaven]

Yeah people defending the bugs as ‘not an issue’ frustrate me and don’t help with the discussion. I’m not the best player but that doesn’t change the fact that weird bugs are a problem.