Shade 'Hungry Wind' Level 30 Talent

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
1

I’ve been playing different builds exclusively to make this talent work for a while now, and I can confirm its usefulness is atrocious. I haven’t seen anyone use it except me btw.

This talent needs to be either buffed or reworked. The easy route is to keep the 5 sec invisibility even when you attack enemies. This way it’s gonna be a good talent for horde control and you can keep the rest of the talent the way it is without changing anything.

I think this is fair, because using this talent heavily nerfs your backstabs on elites and monsters already. So keeping the invisibility even if you attack something is not a big deal. This way you can enter an horde and start slaying it from within safely for a couple of seconds. If you try this currently after the first swing your invisibility goes away and you always end up getting hurt by the horde, so I can confirm the talent is 100% useless and not fun in most situations. In fact this talent is a huge nerf for Shade, because she’s not an elite/monster slayer anymore with this talent equipped.

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3 Likes
2

You’re not the only one. When loadout slots were added I immediately made sure that I make 3 builds for each Career that make use of all the different talents (well, except rows 5 and 15). There’s a few stinkers among the options and Hungry Wind is possibly the biggest one of them. Most bad talents just don’t add much and feel like a wasted point. Hungry Wind actively makes your build worse and you’d be better off having no 30 talent at all. It’s so bad that Shades in Chaos Wastes will avoid random boons just so they don’t end up getting it. I’ve been trying to make use of it on like a “frontline fighter” style of Shade, with the stacking Headshot damage talent (so there’s not as much reason to go for backstabs, to synergise with Hungry Wind) and it feels like I don’t even have a Career skill. If you were to really, really optimise maybe there’s a way to get to some otherwise unreachable Cata breakpoints with Hungry Wind, but even if that were the case. 10 seconds isn’t nearly long enough to make proper use of that. Considering something like Huntsman gets baseline 6 seconds of DOUBLE ranged damage, 10 seconds with a talent pick, getting a measly 15 % power and 10 % movement speed is pathetic (what is it with Shade and movement speed talents btw??) .

My suggestion would be, either increase the power boost, or increase the duration (like, double or triple it) or, and this would be my preferred option given the name of the talent, make it so that during the buff’s duration, Kerillian’s melee swings deal splash damage to enemies around the target. That way you can actually build her to be a frontliner, go for the headshot talent, and then make it a point to go for headshots during Hungry Wind so all that massive headshot damage splashes. If she’s going to sacrifice her ability to assassinate monsters and bosses, fine, turn her into a frontline meatgrinder instead.

3

Wow I’m surprised to hear people hate this talent so much. I genuinely like using it. Being able to pass through enemies is HUGE, especially effective with dodging through them.

  • Dodge through an enemy about to overhead you, backstab him (bosses included)
  • Cornered by a huge horde? Patrol? Just keep dodging through them while attacking

Making it work requires changing up your normal combat rhythms a lot though and doing stuff that feels pretty weird at first. But I can take out a whole patrol pretty easily by constantly moving and dodging in really weird directions (basically constantly into and through whatever is about to hit you), and nothing will hit you because they’re constantly trying to retarget and getting in each other’s way.

Basically the way I see it this talent sacrifices heavy spike damage for much higher utility. This isn’t to say I wouldn’t like to see it buffed a little bit; 10% movement speed is basically meaningless, that should be at least 20%. Similarly I think the power could be buffed up a bit too.

Still, I think the ability to pass through enemies is the biggest perk of this talent. If you don’t change your playstyle accordingly to leverage that, then yeah, the movement speed and power buffs are pretty meh by themselves.

4

Sure, you can use it creatively to weave through a patrol and gradually kill it. Or you can take Shimmer Strike instead and kill an entire Chaos patrol on Cataclysm on your own without ever being seen or threatened. As far as getting out of corners is concerned, the baseline Infiltrate already lets you pass through enemies. Hungry Wind brings very little new to the table in that regard.

1 Like
5

How many hours do you have? because you’re nerfing yourself a lot by using this talent. Shade is not even good anymore at dealing dmg to monsters nor Chaos Warriors. About what you said about patrols… I don’t know if you are trolling but there is a better talent for that purpose.

‘Being able to pass through enemies is HUGE’ not really if you’re going to be hit anyway… that’s why I suggested the 5 sec infiltration not ending if you attack. To make this talent safer against hordes, so you can get in, strike and then go out without losing half of your hp along the way.

6

I remembered time, when one of the talents was removing bonus damage, but was reducing cd greatly. Was it good? I wouldn’t say so, BUT at that time shade had guaranteed crit on ranged too! Used to be hella fun paired with her crossbow, being able to spam it due to lot of ammo from scrounger, had its niche.
Now we have +15% damage buff, which is not that great trade off for loosing huge damage/chain invisibility.
Well, we get ability do dodge through enemies, but only 10 sec, while handmaiden gets it for free for picking regular talent.
And 10% speed? Like, ability itself tells you to use it IN fight and dodge all the time, but instead of dodge distance we got… Speed, which is not that useful in our situation.
To keep the niche, would change speed to dodge distance, increase buff duration a little, maybe 15 sec, and give ability for ranged weapons to crit.
To be honest, getting ability to dodge through enemies is great, i use it on handmaiden all the time, but… Drawbacks for picking this talent is too big for shade, and only for limited time.

7

It’s one of the worst talents in the game. I get the idea behind being able to maneuver through enemies, it kinda is a good panic button to save your butt and deal some damage at the same time. It’s the option for non-backstab, kinda works with dual swords and such, but the power bonus is way too low. Bump it up to 40% power and 20% movement speed bonus. Give the shade some real killing power for a bit.

Likewise, the grail knight’s ability that gives 35% movement speed is a weird pure temp movement bonus. I couldn’t really find much use for it. Should probably make that a power and speed bonus as well.

1 Like
8

Lmao of course someone has to ask this, god forbid someone not as good at the game enjoys talents that the tryhards don’t. Well, for your information, I have 1,172.5 hours, play Legend/Cata about a 50/50 split. Have tried my hand at Onslaught and such in mod realm but only a couple times. So I’d say I’m pretty good but not “the best”.

I like taking challenging builds and figuring out how to make them work, so sue me I guess. I could not care less about what the “most optimal” or “meta” builds are. I try builds I think are fun and try to make them work. With the way I play, I’ve had a lot of fun with Hungry Wind.

Care to elaborate on this? yes, you lose the damage spike of your ult, which hurts your monster damage some. But at high difficulties there are so many Chaos Warriors that you can’t count on your ult to handle them. You can use it on a CW once every what, 30-60 seconds, depending on CDR, and there’s way more of them than that. What do you do when your ult isn’t down just not fight them?

The +power on successive backstab talent (forget the name) can significantly make up for the lost damage, including against bosses. While the boss is aggro on someone else you can lay down some serious damage esp. with a quick weapon like daggers. Combo that with the +dmg to poison/bleeding enemies and lead with a light strike to trigger bleed, or a quick light from the hagbane, and you get even more.

(Edited to add, crossbow can shred bosses too)

You’re not “going to be hit anyway”. If you do it right, nothing will hit you.

Honestly, it says a lot that you’re arguing so hard against my playstyle without ever trying it out to see what I’m talking about. Everyone plays differently… for the way I play, I have a lot of fun with Hungry Wind as is (though I’d like to see it buffed, as mentioned earlier. I think 35% movement and 25% power would be pretty solid)

9

It does if you land a lot of hits in that ten seconds… but I agree it should be buffed a bit.

Agree with you there. Always felt like that was such an OP cheese talent for Handmaiden that I never take it.

Yeah, should def be buffed a bit. Even if you stack it with Gladerunner, I feel like you need at least 30% movement speed for it to help with anything combat-related :frowning:

10

This is the part I feel like people are missing the point on. You can run (or easier, doge) through an attacking enemy, and backstab them while they’re still in their attack animation. You can even do it back and forth thru a boss and thus keep laying down steady damage… though I’ll admit this is a very high risk high reward maneuver, easy to goof up the timing and get ground pounded XD

Is it worse than her other two options from a min-max, play the highest mod difficulties perspective? Yeah, I’ll admit that is true. The point I’m trying to make is it opens up a new playstyle that I think is super fun and is effective enough to work on normal Legend or Cata difficulties.

11

I think if you like it, you’d probably like it buffed up to par with the other two talents on that row. Anything works on Cata if you sink enough time into it. I’ve seen people solo missions with builds I think are quite sub-optimal for that task. I’ve done a few, and I couldn’t make a solo run work without a very meta build for soloing. I like trying to make niche builds work, but this is one talent I steer away from. Don’t enjoy it, can’t make much use of it. I see maybe 1 in every 30 grail knight players use the movement speed buff on ult kill, but it’s just kinda bad compared to the other two.

They are both careers that have some monster/elite killing potential, and a level 30 talent option for both is a speed boost, but at least the shade gets something a little more useful out of it.

12

100% agree with you there. Honestly 25% power, and switching movement speed for +50% dodge distance, would be heckin’ awesome.

Same. The only ever “utility” I have ever found for talents like that is “I’m clutching and need to put some distance between myself and the enemies to make reviving easier.” Way to edge case, and the other more useful talents could have meant you didn’t have to clutch in the first place XD

If you’re in combat the amount of movement speed bonus seems completely meaningless. Weapon attack animations aren’t affected by it (I don’t think?) so they slow you down the same as always. And dodges still work exactly the same.

One use case for Shade I could see is being able to keep pace with a boss that is chasing a teammate, always sucks when you hit your ult and the boss runs away from you too fast XD but it definitely needs to be more than a 10% buff to make a difference.

13

I’m very sorry, but are you really asking a dude about his hours because he has fun with a niche talent ? People here ask for « build variety » and then don’t use anything that « nerfs » them… people are different. If you can’t use this talent right, then maybe you really need to change how you view this career in general, or change your playstyle.

I’m not here to talk about hungry wind, I just remind y’all to stop thinking that other people know less than you because you can’t make something work or it’s not fun for you personally.

2 Likes
15

Well I asked that because he’s not right about some things he said. As I said at the beginning I have been testing the talent deliberately to make it work with different builds/weapons and 1.- you can’t dodge and backstab to kill the strongest elites because they will not get 1hit killed with this talent anymore (your backstab dmg is heavily reduced meaning you must backstab most elites in 2 or 3 sometimes even 4 hits now), against monsters you’ll be dealing mostly normal dmg (meaning you’re not a monster killing hero anymore), to deal with patrols you must use ‘Shimmer Strike’ instead meanwhile the guy said ‘Hungry Wind’ is good for dealing with patrols and several elites, which is clearly a lie.

Also good luck getting inside an horde, fighting and dodging avoiding every hit like he said because that’s again is not possible. You will be 100% damaged at some point, I’m sick of seeing it even while using the greatsword. Shade is a career with low hp pool, if you try to fight hordes with this talent like I did several times, attacking them from behind or the inside, half of your hp will go down the drain. It’s either that or going down shortly after, which is also very likely.

This talent is sh*t, guy said it’s fun well is clearly not because the only thing you can safely do with this thing is run away and flee from enemies which is super lame and boring. It’s could be a fun talent sure but it needs to be buffed. I don’t know why he doesn’t defend such obvious things and insists on the opposite.

By the way, all the things he mentioned will have better results using any of the two other talents and that’s the saddest thing. They are much better in literally every aspect.

16

You can’t determine fun for him. Fun is subjective. And, as I’ve already said, I don’t give a damn about hungry wind and I’m here not to discuss it. So no need to try and explain to me how you don’t like it or how « meta » is better.

Asking about someone’s playtime is unnecessary. It is a discussion of the talent after all, listen to others’ opinion and don’t assume that a particular person is a newbie or smth if they don’t agree with you.

1 Like
18

Hahaha wow thanks for clearing that up for us. I’ll be sure and put it on my resume :wink:

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19

Don’t worry about him, imagine assuming stuff about person’s skill without even playing with him. Must be a true fortune teller over there :slight_smile: have fun however you want and never give a f about metas.

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