Rework the purple potion for fair monster/lord fights

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
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I’m making a suggestion I made elsewhere into my own post, since bosses seem to be at the center of the discussion and attention at the moment, both from players and devs (see: grudge marks), although this suggestion is strictly for adventure maps, ofc - no purple pot in CW.

Time and again it’s been argued how laughingly easy some fights are, but at the same time balance is tricky since it’s a whole other ballpark when playing with fewer DPSs.
As I see it, the biggest problem is the ultimate spams. Which, although it has proven to be an unpopular opinion, it would really be solved by nerfing the concentration potion. That would work like this: “ A concentration potion, when drank, instantly refills your ultimate bar. The end. ”
That would still be a good potion to have, for those instances where you think “oh man, if I only had my ultimate” and it could still be used to increase boss damage although in a less broken and more time consuming way than it currently is, IE: bounty hunter (or shade, or whatever) uses its powerful ultimate, then has to drink a potion to instantly use it again. Unless potion duplication kicks in, it has to fight normally from there, which, it seems to me, it is the desired goal of the monster/lord discussions.

IMO this would be better than giving the boss health thresholds or time-based damage reductions, which could easily prove unfair in certain circumstances.

After all, if a Bounty Hunter, a Shade and a Grail Knight w̶a̶l̶k̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶o̶ ̶a̶ ̶b̶a̶r̶ all focus on a rat ogre, I expect it to die, or get close to dying anyway. While it feels more unfair to the bestie if a single player stunlocks it and deletes it in seconds.
While we are at it, I’d maybe change double shotted so that it does even more damage to a boss, but without the 80% cooldown, which, granted, it is skillbased, but it also looks pretty ridiculous. Yeah, it means I prefer the previous iteration.

TL:DR: I’ve highlighted the most important parts, but basically: I think nothing would be better for monster/lords balancing than changing the way the concentration potion works.
For people concerned that it’s too big a nerf I can only observe that between the 2-4 potion slots, potion dup option, and the sheer amount (and popularity) of boss-deleters I think there’s still a way to reach the current “laugh at skarrik” level of unfairness, if it’s something you absolutely feel you can’t do without. Just, not as ridiculously easily.

PS: this would make concotion useless on purple, but I think it’s a good thing. It could also be a reason to run potion duplication. Decanter might need to be balanced though. I have some ideas, but that’s a further discussion.

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Ah yes, let’s make a blanket nerf that makes the game unfun for everyone instead of reworking the Lord fights to be more engaging rather than “spongy” or “wet tissue”.

Blast those boss killers for being too good at doing boss damage!

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In more than a way I agree with your quote.
But instead of offering a flat refusal, could you provide me with an example of an instance where “abusing” purple potion has rewaded you with a level of fun that this suggestion would ruin?
That would be helpful to the discussion.
I can’t think of many myself, to be honest. Foot knight charge could be one.
If they prove far and in between, there might be a workaround, like, for example, giving the FK a talent akin to the one the slayer has, that enables him to use his ultimate a lot. (For example: staggering an elite decreases the cooldown of FK ultimate.)

I don’t have all the answers, but I’ve given a lot of thought to this over the years, and I think this could be beneficial to the health of the game. I mostly play as a melee tank, so my point comes from a guy who occasionally goes boss deleter but generally doesn’t see the game as being “too easy”. I think that challenging boss fights though - without them being tediously long, which would defeat the purpose - are one of the funnier parts of the game. To clarify: that to me means having to manage a boss and a horde, and eventually specials, for a limited time (anything longer and it goes to hell. anything shorter and it’s not really fun). It’s nice to occasionally blast a boss before a horde can arrive, but not if it’s the norm.

To go back to your point, I can only think of a few careers that need a lot of ultimates, without their having them being OP, and as I’ve tried to show, those can be provided otherwise.

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Mind if I steal this idea into my balance brainstorming doc?
Even though I can see some possible problems and obvious bakclash, I still think it’s an idea woth at least trying out.
Because, at one hand, it would certainly be a definite nerf to more than just Boss Killers (Footknight, for example), but at the other it could certainly prove good (like Merc/Ironbreaker/WHC getting their ult INSTANTLY instead of waiting 5 seconds until it actualyl charges)

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Most Lord fights could definitely benefit from a rework. But how do you make them more fun and engaging when boss killers still just slap them dead in four seconds anyway?

Nurgloth at least slowed them down a bit, but as soon as he enters the last phase people drink pots and he dies faster than he can say huehue I r eternal.

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Gonna paste what I posted in the “Where are the balance patches?” thread:

Thoughts?

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I gotta agree. You could introduce the best designed and most interesting boss in the world, but if players can hit X to delete instantaneously, they will.

VT2 bosses definitely could use some work to be made more interesting, but that would be wasted development time on FatShark’s part if the bosses can be bullied with no effort or any real resource investment.

(Although I have to admit I like the Spingemanglr fight and the Jaws-like theme that plays a lot more than Nurgloth, even if the former’s a bit very simplistic - even when he isn’t just yeeted out of the solar system the instant he touches the ground).

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To be fair here, they are generally too good and something needs to be done.

While back a thread was made and the short of it was, the difference between a boss killer and anything else is pretty insane, let alone something like a boss killer and something that does badly against bosses. The distance between the floor and ceiling needs to be cut if we´re to have any hope of balancing the monsters/lords themselves.

A quick kill is measured in seconds, a slow one is measured in 15+ minutes.

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People still suicide at the start of Enchanter’s Lair if they roll it in quickplay and don’t have enough damage to burst Nurgloth down in the third phase. Partially because nobody wants to be thrown around the room by the fat bastard, but also partially because not having enough DPS when fighting him is a death sentence more often than not.

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@warget Go ahead! It’d be my pleasure. It’s usually just welcomed with backlash. BTW I’m really proud of my suggestion about FK ulti talent, although I just pulled it out of a hat, so I’d put that together with it: “staggering an elite decreases the cooldown of FK ultimate” to be somewhere in his talent tree.

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@WhereIsBaoDur Feel free to dig through the doc (link is in the thread)
I need input and feedback from as many people as possible, because of how many opinions there are.
Btw, doesn’t Footknight already have Inspiring Blow to reduce ult CD for himself and allies when staggerign stuff?

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I read your suggestion, I think it’s quite reasonable, I’m not the best guy to judge the minute stuff though :stuck_out_tongue:

Instinctively, I prefer the idea of having to drink the potion when you need the effect.

As for general tweaks to bosses I’m not sure what I’d do. I agree with Frostysir that the distance between floor and ceiling damage is too much. Tweaking that would be good I think.

As for specific lord phases, I have some personal opinions, but they are probably better suited to a more general topic. Anyway 2 spring to mind: Nurgloth phase 3 is where everybody pops every item, but that’s a consequence of how “unfair” that phase is, mostly due to the amount of trash enemies. When the party is missing stuff there it generally doesn’t end well. If it was more evenly balanced I think we’d see more even item use throughout the fight.
I also dislike Rasknitt, due to how things go esponentially bad from the first mistake. Many players (myself included) often position themselves to prevent spawns from coming in the first phase. If those bugs where fixed and the spawns were tweaked we’d have an easier time discussing balance :stuck_out_tongue:
That fight is either very easy or impossibly hard when things go south.

@warget I’ll admit, I haven’t been FK in a while. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I never see this being abused when running the skittergate… And I rarely have any problems in finishing the level.

That is true, but that is also true of most situations in the game.

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Without the “impossibly”. The problems are the casting interrumpting revives and the neverending spawns. Kinda like convocation of decay, due to the spawns being downstairs. This is getting to be a bit offtopic though.

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Well if a situation isn’t impossibly hard, it didn’t go south enough :joy:

More seriously though I agree that Nurgloth fight doesn’t feel quite right (but it’s not that bad either). I think that if they just switched the explosions areas to be in the centre and have the players kite Nurgloth around the outer edge of the arena, the fight’d feel much better already :

  • less knockback distance and therefore chance of being hit by minion while skipping over the floor cause of game engine,
  • no chance of being knocked back into an explosion unless your positioning is abysmal,
  • explosions would clear some minions crossing the room,
  • the success would overall rely more on the team positioning properly and staying grouped, similarly to convo,
  • allows for more damage openings against Nurgloth simply because the minion density would be more manageable and team less scattered
  • no need to strictly time revivals - though tbh it’s not that bad, kinda like Ratsknitt fight where you have to time with the zaps ; but it is kind of a tight timing.
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It’s not any potion’s fault that 4/5 lord fights are a snooze-fest.
Just give the lords more HP & stagger resistance. Except for Rasknitt, that rat’s tanky enough as is.

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I haven’t thought the balance of this through but I wonder how potions would feel if they all had multiple “charges”.

So e.g.
Concentration Pot has 3 charges. 1 sip gives you the cooldown boost for a reasonable duration but always ends when your skill is full. This means you can’t just mindlessly spam after one chug, and getting another ult from it means putting yourself into a vulnerable position. The duration and cooldown boost are parameters to balance it for outliers.

Similarly, a sip of strength and speed would give you their effects for a shorter period of time.
Decanter could be unchanged or increase the amount of charges by e.g. 1 or 2.

This way potions wouldn’t create such huge outliers and end up as a more managable resource. (Grail Knight’s potion duty though…)

But the real issue with boss fights is Skarrik and Bödvarr lacking built in damage reduction, which massively overvalues skills and weapons that ignore their armor.
You can’t just give them the same damage reduction others have without turning some (team) versions of the fight into absolute slogs, giving them armor was a mistake.

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Ratsknitt fight is in a right place imo.
Nothing to write home about (might just be because I killed him hundreds of times by now), but it feels fine.

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Sometimes it really feels like groundhog day, but here we go again:

They’re only a snoozefest because there’s always somebody with a busted ult and a potion prepared for them. Fighting those with a party of stuff like Merc / IB / Unchained / Handmaiden without potions and bombs or something similar actually is fine and fun.

Increasing their hitpoints will not make those fights more fun in general. That’ll only make them how they’re supposed to be when you fight them with busted compositions, and make them ridiculous for anybody else. Reigning in the ults and the potions instead will make those fights fine in every composition, and it won’t even take away the role or usefulness of DPS setups.

The essense of the issue is that those fights have become unbalanceable because the discrepancy between ults / potions and normal fighting is way too large. You can only balance their hitpoints for one, while making them stupid (either too high or too low) for the other. The only solution is reigning in ults and potions against monsters / lords specifically. Just nerf the damage of such stuff against the monster armor type specifically and everything is fixed. (And make sure all monsters / lords have their own exclusive armor types off course.) Ults are still great to delete CWs and such, potions are still great in “oh crap!” situations, and monsters / lords aren’t “15 seconds or 15 minute fights with nothing inbetween” anymore. DPS classes fighting monsters / lords normally still do more than other classes. Simple as that.

I mean, there is a community wide consensus that SotT and Moonbow are out of whack damage-wise and that they need to be nerfed. But nobody is silly enough to suggest all enemies get buffed to the point that they can last a normal duration against that busted stuff. But the fact is that the damage discrepancy between SotT / Moonbow and everybody else is not nearly as big as the discrepancy between certain ults with a potion vs. normal fighting againat monsters / lords! So why do people keep suggesting monsters / lords need buffs?! I really can’t understand anymore.

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Oh good, I was about to make make a grumbly, far less eloquent post saying basically the same thing. Thanks for beating it to me while being far more polite than I was going to be.

But yeah still gotta get some grumbling off my chest. Buffing bosses is a poignantly stupid idea when boss DPS is one of the most highly variable attributes in the whole game. I really don’t think changing purple pot on its own is a full solution either (hello strength pot hagstalker), but at least it would be more of a step in the right direction than increasing disparity further with a boss HP increase.

I’mma keep screaming this into the void along with you @TmanDW until more people listen and stop asking for god damn boss HP buffs.

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