Late game Psyker Penances are seemingly impossible. Specifically Cliff Hanger.
There is no way that you can get 20 people knocked into a chasm with a single warp push. Most I’ve ever gotten was 8. This is just legit not possible especially since the force push doesn’t really knock people back far at all. So the bad guys have to be right at the edge, all 20 of them, and then they gotta not run at you while you shove them off. I don’t care what anyone says, this is not possible.
As for Warp Battery, it is apparently miss written/coded. Progress only is completed on HERESY difficulty, not Malice. At least, according to someone else’s comment.
Going Out With a Bang isn’t impossible but wow is it insanely difficult to setup. This one is weird af because you have to dance around with a few elites (most likely berserkers cause they’re the easiest to get in a single group) and then suicide. Having a penance that makes your pysker teammates intentionally kill themselves at the worst moment is just plain out toxic. But no no, a scoreboard is much more toxic… yeah.
Pick n’ Mix is actually pretty fair and easy. I’d be surprised if people who play Heresy a lot don’t already have this one. Just spam brainburst. If you’re struggling, use Kinetic Barrage feat at level 30 to cast faster and pop more goons. Groups of elites and specials show up in big numbers so this one is really easy and probably the more ‘natural’ kind of achievement that you would expect from this kind of gameplay feature.
Lastly, Malleus Monstronum actually seems like the easiest of all the penances… if you go into a game with a dead squad. You can ONLY complete this with a squad and even then its extremely difficult for your teammates to not accidentally hit the monster. Even if they do a single point of damage, you gotta try for it another mission. This also asks for 3 of your teammates to essentially go afk when teamwork is the name of the game. If you don’t work as a team, you will die. So what is with this anti-team penance? This isn’t the only one like this, a ton of the high tier penances for other classes are the same where they force you to have your team go afk or make you play in an anti-team manner.
TLDR: These penances are either impossible or ask you to screw over your teammates in some very major way. Why are these a thing? Who designed these? Why were they even approved…
All challenges like these cosmetic penances should be primarily attainable from playing your class and being a benefit to your team. Stuff like Suicide Bomber is seemingly written by a employee who actively dislikes the entire premise of the game while others like Cliffhanger are so ridiculously specific to a certain scenario you have to have three other people helping you to complete the challenge, instead of you helping these three people to complete the mission.
In my head the challenges should be like this instead, just as a example:
Headpop enemies
Kill enemies with staff
Do warp damage to bosses
Headpop enemies who are doing damage to your team mates
And these should go high with the numbers, headpop 10 000 enemies for the elite chestpiece would take some time but it would be a challenge you keep chipping away while playing the class normally, as part of a co-op game. I would much rather have career challenges over incredibly specific and arbitrary ones.
Yeah the penances for Psyker plain suck and some are literally impossible to do in pubs. I mention this in a recent thread I made about Malleus Monstronum.
In the first beta, Psyker’s F ability had a very long range and used to push enemies back quite significantly. Now it staggers a little and pushes back enemies who are literally in your face ; I think the challenge was designed with the previous version in mind.
That being said, it still isn’t great design.
“Push 300 enemies off ledges” → good
“Push 8 enemies off ledges in a single use of ability” → good
“Push 20 enemies in 2s” → bad
This achievement was actually pretty easy for me. It took me three tries, but I was able to do this in the final event where you need to defend the cogitator in the tower with the bridges that extend. When the pox walkers built up on the bridges, I just triggered my ult and I got it.
Te game is like… 40 hours old and you want to complete all penances already?
It might be though, FS has a history of real tough achievements.
They are tough to provide challenge.
I got Cliffhanger today, but only because my three other teammates and I coordinated and then proceeded to cheese the absolute hell out of it. I agree though, the class penance challenges in general seem stupid, not because they’re hard necessarily, but because they discourage core gameplay mechanics or just outright ignore them.
I don’t mind the challenges that require some group coordination to pull off. Asking a group to stall enemies on a bridge so you can blast them off isn’t unreasonable. However, challenges that require objectively bad play such as solo’ing a boss or intentionally downing yourself are objectively poor design. To accomplish these, you need three friends willing to potentially throw a run so you and only you can get a reward.
I can’t imagine asking a random discord group to help with some of these challenges. Why would they? They don’t gain anything by helping, and risk losing the whole mission while you try to BB solo a boss or blow yourself up repeatedly.
Difficult challenges rewarding cool cosmetics are great and I think most games should have more of them. But challenges that are impossible without an entire team playing stupidly so one member can get a reward is just bad design.
Hard agree penances shouldnt require your teammates to play to accommodate your penance. If a penance cant be completed with3 alive bots it shouldn’t be a penance. Solo players will have to kill their bots to even be able to attempt this its crazy.
Im nota solo player but i know the solo community in vermintide was pretty big.
Honestly the only one i have issue is Malleus Monstronum though. Me and my friends on comms have been penance hunting with one another and its pretty fun but asking them to afk for 8 min as i kite and do basically no damage to a boss is ridiculous. It not fun for me or for them. When there’s usually hordes with bosses as well its inevitable to help clear horde someone deals damage to the boss and voids the penance run attempt.
Especially when compared to some of Ogryn’s Penances. Charging into a charging Plague Ogryn? Easy. Chucking your 'nade box into a big yellow eyeball? Easy. Knocking down 100 trash enemies in a Bullrush? Easy. They all require you to just play the game. Psyker Penances not only require you to go out of your way to do them, but require team Coordination AND risk throwing a run.
I’v try everithing to finish cliffhanger, and, it’s just not fun, I know challenge is made to be hard, but it’s need to be hard and fun to do, not hard and not fun, I was waiting 30min at the end of the special ammo mission with a friend ogrin to try to push 20 ennemie, impossible even with hordes.
There’s a difference between tough because they provide an interesting challenge, and tough because they’re stupidly designed. Some of these penances are just flat out impossible as a solo player (playing in pugs), unless you somehow manage to wrangle a group of strangers into cooperating, and even then you’ve no guarantee of success, particularly with ones like killing a monster using brain bursts and only brain bursts - one stray bullet or melee swing and bye bye penance. As soon as I saw that one I immediately thought “well %$!* you too game” and immediately put it in the ‘never gonna happen’ basket >_<. Which is a shame, because I rather like the cosmetic.
I’d like to try this, it’s a shame that mission, nor any other espionage mission, has been available since the release of the repair mission. (essentially all day today).
the push penance and the malleus monstorum and the suicide bomb penance are counteractive to the team play focus in this game and makes it hard for psykers to even do them in the first place without having to beg on discord or steam
all this is just gonna generate griefing since there are no private rooms and if someone enters they can ruin it by accident or on purpose these 3 penances really need to be looked at again and made reasonable
these are supposed to be “gameplay” challenges not begging for help challeneges
The Cliffhanger, and going out with a bang penances are so fricken infuriating to attempt. You either have really bad luck with not enough enemies spawning on malice or higher, dumb randoms and bots being dumb. They ought to really make these penances a little bit easier and achievable, not by being a solo inconvenience to your whole team.