Ranged vs melee thoughts

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
1

Hello!

Just a little over twenty minutes ago i was playing on champion when i suddenly came to realize a few things as i was playing with a group.

A pyromancer Sienna, a ironbreaker bardin, Bounty hunter salty and myself on handmaiden Kerillian with a spear.

We ran a few maps with hardly any problems…or rather no problems at all actually…

The reason for this is, everything died at a massive distance away, Between Sienna and Bardin roasting everything there was hardly anything for me or Salty to do, we just kinda stood there on the sides watching those two roast entire hordes at a time and shoot down anything ahead of us.

Me and salty couldnt really get in on the action as our health dropped way too quickly if we tried walking upfront.

Slavrats&specials&stormvermin, rotblood warrios&champions&specials…almost everything died before it even got into melee range, even entire patrols dropped dead.

I found myself questioning the point of picking a melee oriented specialization when i could just have gone waystalker and at least helped them shoot something instead of just standing awkwardly on the side looking at the scenery.

Anyone else seen anything similar? Thoughts?

I personally think Ranged might be a tad bit overtuned and melee quite undertuned overall…Even if you play melee perfectly there is no way to get in on action when a duo like that steps up, heck i am pretty sure they could have finished the map by themselves and gotten everything if they had the slots to carry it.

P.S

I dont see any reason to nerf waystalker any more than she already has been with those crazy pyros being available and even better at the job,…actually i dont ever recall waystalker being that potent against a horde and specials except when her F could wipe a stormvermin patrol by itself, now it struggles to kill a single chaos warrior.

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Sounds like it’s time to play legend. The only place where balance mean something because hero power is capped at the maximum value.

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I play zealot and I have a blast. Its a DPS turned tank its very fun and enjoyable and it’s really out of the norm.

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Well melee classes offer nothing, their passives are very meh with best one being 5% atk speed on slayer which is talent…might aswell get footsoldier with 40% damage reduction and 5% atk speed on 5th lvl talent.
Thats the problem, theres no reward for going balls deep into enemy, even with dps oriented charge actives, they give you 5s buff, not enough to clear the horde.

There needs to be some beastly actives for these classes to make sense, otherwise welcome tanks in era of post nerf ranged classes.

That was pretty much problem with huntsman, that he had better melee active than melee classes.

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Don’t you have the problem of being completely unable to go near anything with a bardin or Sienna on the team?

The ones i play with always drown half the screen in fire and on champion+ there is friendly fire damage.

My issue with handmaiden is not that it isn’t fun to play, i just cant go near enemies because i end up being shot from behind if i try, and even then its actually kinda stupid of me to do so given how effective their AOE actually is against hordes.

So issue is, i cant go near hordes because it ends up being more of a bother than a help :frowning:

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Ya don’t get me wrong fatshark was WAAAAAAY to heavy handed with melee nerfs to the point it is not very fun to play them anymore (in comparison) to me melee doesn’t feel as powerful as it once was and ranged did get a heavy nerf as well but it remained mostly viable. I just hope over the months fatshark keeps working on the balancing issues until it gets to a sweet spot. The game needs work but all work takes time. Unfortunately players come in two flavors; patient and not. The Zealot’s special dashes you into combat with 50% attack speed and at 25 can heal itself with a talent. So I just push into a wave and with talents I usually heal from it and have more then enough temporary to survive.

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I do agree with you, patience is needed at times.

But as for the Zealot Dash, the healing on is makes a lot of sense, handmaiden has to be extremely careful for while you have a very short cooldown on the dash and it now deals a bleed you are still extremely squishy with no way to heal back.

So a bad dash kills you pretty quickly, even without charging face first into fire.

The specialization relies on dodging and dashing around to be effective and its sky high stamina regen but it’s still so punishing to make a small mistake on it :C

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Had something similiar with a Kruber, Sienna and Saltz yesterday on Troll mines (really nice map, I love the dark part), playing Shade, I felt like I did nothing at all, everything died before I could reach it, granted I was very tired because I had a 12h shift and played really bad but still … but stat screen said otherwise so I guess eeeeh…

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Yeah this is pretty close to what i felt too.

I ended the game having done like 2000 damage, but meanwhile bardin and Sienna both sat at like 4 k each and hundreds of kills and a lot of special kills over me…also, barely any damage taken.

It’s not funny watch someone else do all the work while you smack away at the occasional 5 coming in from the sides x)

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what melee nerfs? right now everyone has damn near unlimited cleave. i don’t disagree that the flamethrowers make the game terribly boring but even if you don’t have one the players can form a meat grinder and stop chaos hordes in their tracks. melee got buffed by an insane amount when the game went from beta to live, to the point that hordes are utterly pointless now. at least you had to shove and be wary of marauders before hand, now you just swing through them like paper mache

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Welcome to pyromancer & ironbreaker meta.

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Funnily enough, handmaiden passives are
5% dodge range, 30% stamina regen and 1 stamina shield.

She doesnt rely on dodging any more than other classes and 30% stamina regen is nothing, it wont even give you 1 extra shield in time.

Im amazed how many ppl convinced themselves that she relies on dodge based on placebo effect…

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Dude what.

What difficulty are you playing on?

I die instantly on champion if i make a single mistake while dealing with plague monks, or just a cluster of slave rats.

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The heal is pretty bad though. 2 hp per hit, barely moves the hp bar.

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Well as ironbreaker i dont even need to block hordes as temporary hp will cover all hits on me.

every 13s i negate 1 hit and even if i dont 40% damage reduction + whatever you get on gear.

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50% attack speed does make a big difference in the healing using a flail or 2 hander maybe not as much but I use falcion and it heals me very nicely

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Funny, because you only get 20% attack speed from zealots active. And everybody can get that on every crit with a trait, while the zealot has 60s cool down.
And there are quite a few reports that you don’t get any attack speed if you have the talent that make sit give temp HP.

There really is a lot of placebo going on

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Ranged is way stronger in this game, that’s a fact. I’ve even semi stopped playing melee because my two least favorite classes, Kerillian and Sienna are just too powerful and useful. I think the absolute BEST group is Waystalker+Pyromancer+Ironbreaker(with derp cannon galore) and then either Huntsman or Bounty Hunter. Dealers choice. My Huntsman runs around with blunderbus, gets 2 shots back for headshots, and gets 2 shots back from criticals. I don’t really run out of ammo, sometimes I may have to pick up to make sure I don’t. Waystalker/Ironbreaker and Pyromancer don’t run out of ammo either. So you can easily kill everything from range. The only thing that limits the group is melee, and their willingness to rush forward to a gang of bad guys and take damage. As Kerillian the only weakness is chaos warriors. Other than that nothing. Yes this applies to legend difficulty as well. Legend is not that different from other difficulties, more HP than champ, they do more damage (mitigated by ranged DPS) and there are more specials/elites (mitigated by ranged DPS). I also am not calling for nerfs, but it is what it is. Ranged > melee.

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This is one of the reasons I stopped playing Slayer. I can’t get close enough to kill anything or I take damage, risk reward isn’t there, and IB is just so much better. V1 was much more melee based, the only time you really pulled out range was to snipe a special. Now it’s being used as wave clearing.

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Her weaknes is warriors, and not even that bad tbh you kill them in a charge attack with the glaive ( on legend aswell ). And headshotting trueflight takes another. But nothing compares to bountyhunter imo his sheer range power with the repeating crossbow is insane, i’ve seen 6+ warriors on legend just mowed down :confused: i havent been able to do anything similar on 30 sienna / kerilian regardless of loadout. Altho! To chime in on the actual discussion i think melee is still very strong ! It’s just that ammo / overcharge is not the limiting factor it was supposed to be = spam galore.