Slayer Rework Suggestion

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
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Hello, it’s me, you may know me from yadda yadda just look at my post history if you want to read other essays that are longer. I write a lot because it’s fun and I want to write suggestions to make the game better because the game could be better. I’ve been busy with work also I just bought an HTC Vive and this game totally doesn’t have a VR mode even though there was a little trial mode for the first game. Payday 2 has a VR mode, it’s pretty neat. Anyway, on with the post.

I used to main Slayer but now he sucks and I hate him, which makes me sad. I posted this a bunch of times in Winds of Magic feedback forums as bits and pieces, and I think I’ve posted the entirety of these ideas a few times. I also wrote this in basically every single one of my google feedback forums for every single beta phase I participated in.

I wrote a reddit comment with these ideas copy-pasted from my google feedback forums and other places where I have them saved, so I’ll copy that here with slight tweaks so that this forum has the PG version.

  1. Revert Slayer Leap change and address out-of-bounds issues on the maps themselves… or, don’t address out-of-bounds issues because I’m scared of you fixing bugs and then ruining classes in the process.

  2. Combine Bounding Leap and Dawi Drop into one talent, aka…

    • Dawi Space Program: Increases the range of Leap by 50%. Increases attack damage while airborne during Leap and 1 second after landing by 150%
    • Basically, add an extra 1 second of bonus damage for latency and because Dawi Drop is really finicky and situational. Together with the meme of Bounding Leap, I see this as a viable talent pick.

  3. Re-add Crunch! as a middle talent with a slight rework, since it’s weird that a talent literally with the word “stagger” in it got removed because the stagger mechanic is… interesting…

    • Crunch!: Increases the stagger of landing from Leap by 100%. Landing now staggers monsters.
    • This adds the first talent that interestingly interacts with the new stagger mechanic, since the existing stagger talents are not interesting and cookie-cutter across all classes. Also, it has a separate niche as being able to interrupt Chaos Spawn grabs and pull boss aggro like how Foot Knight can do it on a similarly short cooldown.

  4. Don’t touch No Escape because that talent is great and I’m scared of you touching things that I love because you’ll break them.

  5. Buff Slayer’s base HP to 125 because it’s weird that Ranger Veteran is basically just as tanky as Slayer except he can go invisible and has more guns.

  6. Re-balance all damage mitigation talents at level 25

    • Oblivious to Pain: Damage taken is reduced by 35% or reduced to 15 damage, whichever is higher. (aka nerf the damage resistance but make it apply for all attacks)
    • Grimnir’s Focus: Take 50% reduced damage while readying a melee attack. (change “charging” to “readying” so that it’s clear it applies to all melee attacks, not just charged attacks, otherwise don’t change it)
    • Barge: Increases dodge range by 20%. Effective dodges push nearby small enemies out of the way. (This talent sucks because Slayer is fat and slow compared to Handmaiden who also has this talent)

  7. Move Adrenaline Surge to be a passive perk for Slayer because anyone who doesn’t take it is a big dum-dum or just goofin’ around with Sanic speed. Also don’t @me just because I’m talking crap about you if you don’t use Adrenaline Surge.

    • Re-add Unstoppable!: Increases the duration of the buffs gained from Trophy Hunter by 5 seconds.
    • This talent had good synergy with large, slow weapons so you have more leniency in swapping weapons while maintaining your buffs. It’d also synergize well with Throwing Axes because it is very difficult to leverage Trophy Hunter with them (and they used to not even work with Trophy Hunter stacks for a while…)

  8. Remove talents that are 100% dependent on weapon choice because Slayer’s tier 2 talents are absolutely awful. Rework them to give bonuses to light/heavy attacks with Hack-and-Slash giving a bonus to all attacks.

    • A Thousand Cuts: Increases the attack speed of light attacks by 10%
    • Skull-Splitter: Increases the power of heavy attacks by 15%
    • Hack-and-Slash: Increases movement speed while readying an attack by 10%
    • Actually test that the talents work for Throwing Axes because it’s stupid that in-game right now two of the talents can’t be used with throwing axes at all because of how poorly they’re designed and I hate them.

TL;DR

There, I fixed Slayer being absolutely doo-doo while drinking my morning coffee before I walk my dog. I think a lot of these suggestions would take literal minutes (the number tweaks that don’t add anything new), while the others shouldn’t take much effort at all since they act similarly to existing bonuses.

Let me know if you dislike the ideas so I can shut you down with a small essay, unless you suggest a better idea in your comment as well. Anyway, see ya.

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I went ahead and just made a reddit post because this forum is still super dead and also that reddit thread is also dead.

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What’s unfortunate is that the initial draw of Slayer was that two melee slots meant you were incentivized to pick specialist weapons to be able to handle everything in melee better than other characters. Most of the characters have really strong versatile weapons now, though, and Zealot was given a type of Adrenaline Surge with the update, so he’s feeling a little redundant atop all of his drawbacks(almost no ranged, low health, etc).

He’s one of my favorites and his leap being neutered really killed my momentum all on its own. If that were the only thing that ended up changing I think i’d be pretty happy. In reality I still don’t think he’d match up with safer options like Merc and Zealot, but at least he’d still be kinda fun to play.

Him being a glass cannon in some respect is okay, he doesn’t need to step on Ironbreaker’s toes, so instead of just being really durable his mobility needs to be crazy. The old jump helped with this, but more ways to get around would be great. Stuff like barge is okay, I like the suggestion to give it more dodge because that in turn gives the push effect more value overall. I sort of wish he’d gotten that Handmaiden ability to walk through crowds. You make him hard to pin down and super aggressive and then I think he becomes a high-risk high-reward sort of character which suits him nicely. Maybe even a talent on his last row that gives attacks during his active a strong push effect(stacking with heavy stagger attacks to begin with, sending enemies flying) to give him some utility and a means to escape while also maintaining aggression which is what you want on the character. Or just give him Crunch back. Like seriously.

Rather than force him to have specific weapon loadouts or boost specific attacks you could try to give him talents on that row that all play around the uniqueness of his mostly melee exclusivity and weapon swapping. Stuff like:

  • Stamina damage does not carry over between weapons.
  • Swapping weapons grants a 10% power boost for a couple seconds; swaps occur 50% faster.
  • Kills on one weapon become stacks towards stored critical hits on the other.
  • Lockout your secondary melee slot in-game but add the properties and perks from that weapon to the one in your primary. Achieve weird stuff like +10% crit chance and two separate primary trait options(swift slaying and parry, for example) on a single weapon, if that makes sense.
  • Switching weapons while having stacks of trophy hunter consumes those stacks and they become an equivalent amount of temporary HP.
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This is good, you’ve covered everything with constructive feedback. You both suggest removing a talent and replacing it with something else (Crunch).

What I feel what’s wrong with the slayer right now is that some weapons feel too weak. Like the dual axes were nerfed into the ground a long time ago and there isn’t much point to pick them over the dual hammers. Which literally do just as much damage against armored enemies, and has more stamina to boot.
The 1h axe should have a tiny movement speed bonus on attacks like what the 1h hammer and dual axes have. For some reason the hammer can do just as much armor piercing damage as the axe too.
The greataxe is too slow and is just a weaker version of the 2h hammer right now.

I think that it would be better if one of those level 30 talents were a default skill. Either 50% leap distance or the damage buff would be fitting.

I agree that Adrenaline Surge is all but required on every Slayer build. Not just because it’s powerful, but it’s fun too, being able to leap every 5 seconds.

The tier 2 talents you suggest are great and make sense, but Hack-and-Slash should remain as a 5% crit chance. It’s too important to have if you’re going for a critical hit build.

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If that’s true, you could always make it a passive like Mercenary.

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That might be an issue because he may get too many passives if Adrenaline Surge gets rightfully moved to a passive.

We could make it a buff to Leap that he has increased crit during Leap. Or maybe have increased crit with trophy hunter as another talent.

5% crit is nice but it is so damn boring to see in a talent tree, especially because the other two are useless with my loadouts that I like using.

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Sure, you could maybe just add it to his leap. If Adrenaline Surge is a passive he’d be leaping pretty frequently and that’s basically the same as making it a passive but requiring a little more effort to maintain which is nice. Rewarding aggression on a glass cannon is good, these are all sensible changes.

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Actually I thought about your Hack and Slash comment and I actually disagree.

It is really stupid and annoying that most every build in the game revolves around maximizing crit chance to proc Swift Slaying, so now I think it is an even better idea to get rid of the +5% crit chance talent.

Not every class needs to have a crit build. I’m sorry if this post ruins your build, sucks for you. The rest of the update ruined all of my builds, so you can suffer like me for the betterment of the game.

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You should tone the aggressiveness down a little, this bitterness is coming out of nowhere.

Part of the reason why I say to keep it was because the 10% movement speed buff compared to the other talents sounds weak. While critical chance still sounds vaguely strong enough when you use it on the right weapons and properties. So might as well keep it as a competitive choice when you have other good options.

I do agree that critical chance is a boring choice on any talent tree, but “nice” as you first said. If it has to be replaced, and the alternative is something fun that fits the class, I’d be happy.

Slayer is the only class of Bardin that has something for critical chance and it makes sense since he’s the damage dealer anyway. Now for fun, if I was changing the talent. I’d turn it into “Slayer gets 5% critical chance and 5% attack speed for 10 seconds on Elite kill”. Then I’d do something similar for all the other classes that have the same crit talent, that fits their style.

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You should tone the aggressiveness down a little, this bitterness is coming out of nowhere.

I apologize if I came off as aggressive, I didn’t intend to come off that way, but I kept the post short because I am on my phone replying.

Still, no, I disagree for reasons previously stated and I’m not convinced of your argument. Being a damage dealer and having a crit build are not one in the same. You’re conflating dealing damage with building crits because crits and Swift Slaying are ridiculously broken and imbalanced.

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  • Basically, add an extra 1 second of bonus damage for latency and because Dawi Drop is really finicky and situational. Together with the meme of Bounding Leap, I see this as a viable talent pick.
    Ok what about using ult for just stagger (no jump) then you have 1 second of ultra powerfull hits,
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That too is an upside so that the talent is less useless. Are you trying to frame that as bad or did you just want to share that use case as well?

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Just pointing it out, that it can be way to powerfull in this case

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I mean, to be fair. While in mid air you’ve got not collision during jump. Anyhow despite my posts to the contrary I’m going to have to play a tiny bit of devils advocate here, since some suggestions I frankly don’t like

You get your career skill in a quarter of a minute. That’s 4 stuns a minute. That’s insane. Absolutely not.

I’d take Ranger Veterans 30% DR on headshots for 5 seconds any day of the week over current Oblivious. This should NOT be the case.

Until they let the ability refresh so crap like this no longer happens:

That stupid damage buff needs to be upgraded.

Secondly. FS gives a class. With low base health, standard thp regen, a DR talent that doesn’t currently effect the major source of our hits (hordes and specials), a DR talent that’s unreliable and inapplicable during grabs and various other crap, and a “DR” talent that doesn’t give DR at all and gives it THIS as a passive

But without having passive DR, health or any other crap.

I’ll say this again:
Slayer lost 25% health, 20% dodge, 30% DR for 3 stacks (which competed with AS sure but it existed), and the 50% or 10 and gets this?

Well hey! You can take a minotaur attack directly to the forehead and keep charging. :thinking: Zealot generates enough tHP forever. This talent goes directly on him and make more sense. I simply don’t understand their logic here.

Alright let’s switch gears

All for this. Against removing crit. I don’t care if you don’t like crit. They can throw crit onto trophy hunter for all I care. You could remove SS and I’ll still take crit because landing a crit with the greataxe is the most satisfying experience I get playing this career.

Think crit is too strong? Then go advocate in a new thread about removing all of the crit weapon traits in the game.

Anyways, yes, the second tier is awful.
Limit yourself with a career that has the ability to be versatile into weapon loadout into one specific playstyle limiting versatility.
Frankly no clue what dimension the balancing act was in this. Nobody likes this tier. Goodness gracious.

He never did that even when thp was absolutely busted. IB was always slower on the kill and so was less desired. IB was an obscene meat wall who is even more obscene now that it gets a talent that lets it get specials off of itself. Fatshark is actually insane.

And if we’re going to be honest. I don’t like the idea of encouraging or forcing weapon swapping. For one, Each weapon was a tool that you used in various situations. For the other FS let’s Bardin and Bardin alone be balanced around NOT having great all around weapons. But if you take throwing axes you NEED a great all around weapon and you simply don’t get to have one. Oh wait that’s wrong. Pony up the dosh and you can have the dual hammers.

I use Barge. I’m mostly okay with Barge because it does it’s job. But Barge is weighed again being useless against specials, elites, and monsters.

Actually NO. Let’s talk about

some more.

Frankly I have no clear clue on why Slayers DR range is entirely composed of crap that has drawbacks. Handmaiden gets defense that works on everything and dodge distance on top of more health. Zealot gets his passive built into his kit, Armour of Faith AND friggin Holy Fortitude on top of more health. Unchained gets 3 different DR talents, more health, and DR built into the kit. Meanwhile Slayer gets

The career that can take the least amount of hits gets… Drengi Grit. A skill that is ONLY applicable when taking hits? Seriously? I don’t understand. I can’t believe they planned it. I won’t accept they thought about it. I’m not convinced they playtested it. I’m looking at it in my game and I STILL can’t believe it exists.

If you couldn’t tell I hate Drengi Grit. And given the results of the poll, not a whole lot of people are on about Slayer. And given past experiences. We’re going to be stuck this way for months.

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Some talents do need a rework.
Something to note: Bardin is the only hero without a 125 health carreer and the only hero without a passive crit bonus on any of his carreers. Now, Keri doesn’t have 150 health on any of her carreers (but she is more of a mobility hero in general and her stellar melee arsenal makes up for it), but Kruber has 2 carreers with a passive crit bonus, Keri has one, Salty has one and technically, Sienna as halso 1 (Pyro is the queen of crits). If anybody would deserve to have higher health than anybody, it’s stoutfellow McBeard. I would argue that Bardin would be a candidate for none of his carreers having less than 125 health, but that’s beside the point. Slayer, when compared to his closest counterparts, Zealot, has alot less survivability all around, and putting game mechanics aside, it kinda makes no sense that Slayer out of all carreers has low health, because it also kinda goes against the lore. Dwarves are sturdy and stout, Slayers probably even more so than even Ironbreakers, because they have to be.

Conclusion: Give Slayer at least 25 health.

Slayers are also vicious and arguably alot more mean, reckless and cunning than other dwarven fighters - again: because they have to be. They are 100% reckless abandon offense, and that should somewhat reflect in his damage dealing capabilities. The reason for Merc, Huntsman, WHC and Shade having higher crit-chance is not only understandable from a gamedesign perspective (they are alot more centered around crits than other carreers), it also more or less stems from the same lore-perspective: Their strikes are more capable of “striking a weak spot” (which is more or less the explanation for criticals in most RPGs) because of their finesse, their experience and/or their cunning at exposing an enemies weakness.
Slayer-Bardin would fall into a similar category: The viciousness and aggression of his strikes and his combat-experience from hundreds of battles fought without even the slightest thought of backing down or giving up. Each of his blows is executed with 110%.

Conclusion: Give Slayer a passive 5% crit chance bonus and make him Bardin’s “crit carreer”.

One could also argue that he is a high-mobility hero with even less armour than the likes of Zealot, how is basically just wearing sturdy clothing. I’d say it would benefit his cit in general if he received a 10 to 15% dodge distance passive, but it might be too much. Then again, his only ranged option are throwing axes, which are great on him, no question, but their very limited amount doesn’t create any danger of him becoming too much of a range-monster.

As for “oblivious to pain”, right now, it is not worth taking, as elite-damage isn’t your primary threat, but eating stray hits from hordes. THAT’S what he needs protection from and why the second DR-talent, while sometimes unreliable, fits his playstyle best. But it makes “oblivious to pain” pointless.
Either go with the suggestion to bring the old oblivious back but with a lesser effect, or may I suggest the following (to make him truly oblivious to pain):

Oblivious to Pain: Receiving damage makes Bardin invulnerable for 2 seconds. (Obviously cannot proc again within those 2 seconds because… well, invulnerability, so essentially, Bardin receives full damage, but can only eat a hit every two seconds. The rest is just shrugged off because he is an adrenaline-fueled ball of hair, axes and rage). Would also help against his other greatest weaknesses: Warpfire, Gas, Rattlings.

Final suggestion: I am still a vocal advocat of giving Slayer some kind of death-blow ability. Not only is that covered by lore (and tabletop rules!), it would give him some kind of equivalent of Zealot’s death-cheating ability without being the same.
Suggestion: When Bardin’s health is dropped to 0, he gets 10 seconds of:
-invulnerability
-greatly increased movement speed
-greatly increased attack speed
-greatly increased damage

What happens then could also be fleshed out in different ways:
a.) at the end of the timer, Bardin is knocked down, no matter what.
b.) for each enemy killed during death blow, the time is increased based on their health, essentially calculating like temp-health on kill, wich larger enemies granting him maybe +1 second, smaller +0.1 second. At the end, Bardin is knocked down.
c.) If bardin manages to kill a special, elite or monster during death blow, he is revived with one health and full temp health. Death blow has no cooldown, but each time it is triggered and Bardin saves himself, the timer gets reduced by 2 seconds (min. 1 second). Additionally, with each time-reduction, the damage, attack speed and movement speed bonus increases further. The time reduction can only be removed by healing (or maybe only after getting healed with medpack).

Maybe the bonus could be even greater if bardin has already been wounded.

Alternativeley, Death Blow could be a much simpler affair:
When Bardin gets downed, he slays every man-sized enemy in a small radius.
When bardin gets killed, the radius increases and maybe even has an effect on CW.

Something along these lines.

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Each weapon WAS a tool for various situations. This is why i’m calling his strength redundant - his second melee slot doesn’t matter because Kruber and Saltzpyre and Kerillian can all do everything by themselves anyway, and now he mostly can too. His most unique quality is mostly pointless in regards to where the game is now.

The problem with Slayer vs Ironbreaker was prior to 2.0 there was no reason you wouldn’t run Slayer 9/10 times because he could be almost as difficult to break down(at the very least his durability was high enough that the difference didn’t matter at higher skill levels) on top of killing things way, wayyyy faster. An attempt is being made to redesign him to make Ironbreaker stand out in comparison, and in so doing Slayer is now a glass cannon, but just like every other thing to come out of this update and DLC it was poorly handled and didn’t go far enough. Like you bring up, Drengi Grit is completely out of place in regards to his new design.

He’s in the middle of an identity crisis right now, and if he’s going to remain a glass cannon then i’d like for him to be insanely mobile and powerful to compensate for all of his built-in faults, at the very least making him better at what he’s supposed to be doing than the much safer, well-rounded, overtuned classes. Playing up his unique quirks is imo the best way to go about it, but again like most of the stuff that came out of this update I certainly wouldn’t mind them backpedaling and rethinking things.

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Have you ever seen an idea that might be too awesome to exist? Love it, but I think heck will get chilled over before that happens.

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Glass cannon requires glass cannon levels of damage. If you’re capable of dying and outright have the least survivability then that damage should be inflated. Fast and dodging? That’s HMs territory? THP? I guess that’s Zealots territory? Being able to take a hit? Ironbreaker. As for overall damage? Have you seen the boss output of shade? The outright overall output of hagbane, conflag, and fireball? What handmaiden can now do? What ZEALOT can now do? All circumventing their weakness or just bulldozing straight through it.

And yet not being able to take a hit? Why would that exist on a career who gets the ability to jump into foes. Of what use would jump have if you can only use it safely for risk of ANY stray hit doing uncontestable levels of damage.

In no dimension should Ranger Veteran be more consistently hardy than Slayer. Slayers in novels take large amounts of damage. Slayers cave in rat ogre skulls. Slayers get fueled by a rage that increases in severity the more hits they take and when they die it’s after they take another fiery angry wrath fuelled swing at the thing that’s killing them. Slayers don’t prioritize avoiding damage above all else. They prioritize Slaying so they can have their atonement.

I don’t support that. never will. And we’ll agree to disagree on this.

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Sorry if i’m not being super clear - I think we’re in accord for the most part. All i’m saying is that since Fatshark historically doesn’t seem keen on backpedaling i’d rather they went all the way with changes instead of making him just a mediocre middle ground version of what he used to be capable of. It’s a shame that Zealot exists because I think he stole a lot of what could have made Slayer great in the long run. I’ve said it before, but they’ve spread themselves way too thinly.

For clarity’s sake, I agree with you, i’m just trying to find Fatshark-styled solutions to the current design of the character.

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Generally agree that Slayer is in a frustrating state right now, but I think you and I have chimed in on a good few Slayer posts between the beta and now. Particularly agree that the 2H-only and 1H-only talents are way off the mark, and that Adrenaline Surge is way too good to ever be an ‘option’.

Think this would be a more convincing post with less jabs and salinity, but that’s just me.

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