Temp HP Dynamic in WoM

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
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I’ll say this flat-out to start. I think people are seriously miscalculating the effectiveness of thp talents, and a large part of it is that everybody is getting hit. a lot. This isn’t a git gud call, this is being realistic and recognizing that with the justified dodge nerfs, pokes during hordes become more common. Getting speared by storms is more common. Blocking instead of spamming lmb is more common, and also does not award thp. Barkskin was run much more frequently than ever before.

Previously, cleave granted ridiculous amounts of thp during hordes and additionally afforded sustain throughout a map by resetting your thp decay on every ambient you came across. The only thp talents that surpassed it were crit/hs or stagger with a shield weapon. When they removed thp from single target attacks, I thought the balance was shifting back towards health management, and a core gameplay loop where having a full white bar was not the norm without additional investment. WHC thp on tag death was removed. Ult thp talents are gone. Bonus healing talents were mostly removed.

Strictly speaking, the slower you hit, the less thp you gain no matter which talent you take. Many classes actually gained attack speed steroids, and potent ones at that. Zealot has 20% permanent attack speed. WHC has 10% on tag for 15 seconds. BW gets attack speed for hitting 4 targets. The counterpoint to this is that the less time you spend attacking, the less thp you gain. Any time you’re evading the deadlier hordes, or blocking a stormvermin overhand that you could previously stagger through, you’re no longer gaining thp. Here I think is one of the more subtle effects of the stagger system, especially with respect to elite enemy attacks.

Anecdotally, I can confirm my findings (imagine that). Playing exe merc or hammer slayer I am regularly topped off from a glut of elites killed that my team seems unwilling or fearful to engage. BW fire sword (a spec I mained pre-WoM) takes about 10 seconds in a sea of slaves to generate a full bar. WHC and lmb spam are also great with hs/crit, and I’ve no doubt that the elf classes are fine with it as well. What I do notice is that I am getting hit an order of magnitude more times than I did pre-patch.

So, let’s talk about thp on cleave. In an ideal world, talent choices present opportunities for your spec to distinguish their role, as well as support a wide variety of playstyles. Thp on kill rewards dealing with elites. Thp on headshot rewards well placed attacks and supports weapons with good headshot angles. Previously, stagger was simply a cleave alternative that outperformed in hordes if you had a weapon that supported it (shields/bashes), and suffered against single targets or enemies you wouldn’t or couldn’t stagger (think bosses, or landing the push followup on sword and shield). Largely a non-choice. With the new stagger mechanic and emphasis on stagger weapons and specs, thp on stagger as a talent is more relevant but still has quite a bit of overlap with cleave—both excel in horde situations where you can repeatedly hit multiple targets. One of the problems here is that there’s not really a choice to be made for stagger or cleave, you simply pick the one that fits your weapon best. In the same way I would like to dissociate thp on hs from crit, because it simply comes down to a numeric choice: “Does my weapon or class have bonus crit?” I’m not sure what can be done to give stagger an identity. As of right now, you pick it when using a stagger weapon because the numbers on cleave suck. I think cleave has an easy route to take for giving it a stronger identity, and that’s to buff the thp gained for hitting 3/4/5 targets and remove thp gain on single targets. This would cement its purpose and power as a tool for wading fearlessly into a horde, and create a significant downside while dealing with ambients and bosses.

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I don’t think thp on cleave was too strong before (it’s awful right now), but giving higher thp on staggering elites would give it some merit over pre-patch thp on cleave

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THP on cleave was too strong before (though not so badly as to warrant the huge nerf it got). It was generally the clearly best choice, very much useable even on low-cleave weapons, and allowed absolutely insane sustain for some Careers and/or weapons. It was overnerfed, though, and judging only by the numbers, still may be.

Earlier, before the Big Balance update, there were only two options for THP gain, available for every Career (the third one was a completely different Talent, though still the same for all): On kill, and on Crit (no headshot). Problem was, the only ones who would ever pick On Crit then would be Shade (who could get her crit chance constantly high enough to actually get advantage), WHC (same) and maybe some builds of BH (those Talents also gave THP on ranged attacks). Even on those Careers and setups, it was questionable whether on crit was worth it, due to its innate unreliability. Now that it’s been combined with headshots, way more Careers, weapons and builds can get use out of it, and the choice is what Talent fits your setup (and playstyle) the best rather than “can I use this at all”. So no, separating headshot THP gain from Crits again wouldn’t really be a good idea.

Yes, the THP Talents still aren’t in balance, but at least each one can be used now.

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There were certain weapons where crit/hs were better than cleave (S&D) and where on kill was better than cleave (any smiter weapon). On kill will always have that competitive issue of trying to land the last blow, but cleave is most certainly overnerfed right now. Ambients should still give a little sustain and hordes more than currently. Even without getting hit, I couldn’t get more than 10 thp with a cleave talent, which at that point, isn’t a buffer to take a hit or one that will last until the next horde.

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Hey, FS always do it, seems like people responsible for game balance just don’t know how this game works. It just remind me one iconic situation. At the launch Huntsman was a mediocre career, it was good, as all ranged careers, but definitely not FOTM, it required a lot more aiming and awareness to be as effective as pyro/ws/bh, but one day his ult accidentally got 100% crit buff during it’s duration. And it seemed overtuned, considering all “on-crit” buffs and synergies, so community overreacted. You know what FS did? Instead of just removing this “accidental buff” they nerfed HM ult all across the board, removing this crit buff as well. And that’s exactly how FS does most “balance changes”.

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I worded my thoughts incorrectly—I’d like to see thp on crit removed and have the talent balanced around thp on headshots only.

Something else I wanted to touch on is that the old values for thp on cleave provide little incentive for high cleave weapons and actually favored fast hitting weapons. With thp gains of 1/1.25/1.5/1.5/1.75 (I may be off on one of these values here), a fast hitting weapon like falchion could have thp gains equal to or better than high cleave weapons such as greataxe or 2hsword when hitting a horde. As soon as you stop hitting fewer than 5 targets, fast hitting weapons pull ahead in thp generation greatly. As it stands, the numbers for WoM thp on cleave are being balanced in a similar way, and I think this is a missed opportunity. A flat scale of 0.25/0.75/0.75/0.75/0.75 simply favors fast swinging weapons that can hit 3 targets, and I would rather see a scale with more backloaded returns, perhaps 0/0.5/1/1.5/2.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on cleave sustaining thp on single targets (by refreshing the decay timer). As it stands, thp on hs is the most reliable talent for sustain. On kill does fine with ambients, but has holes in boss fights. Stagger too lacks thp generation during bosses.

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The sustain of THP is a pretty complicated topic, I think, and my opinion isn’t straightforward. I don’t really make difference between on Cleave and the other options; each one should be roughly equal on both sustain and gain (even if the latter can be in spikes or in different situations).

On one hand, I think that THP should be, well, temporary. It should be more of a stopgap measure to keep you alive until you can heal, and shouldn’t be fully reliable. With the current decay speed (nevermind what it was a long time ago) and decay delay, it really isn’t. Especially the more melee-oriented Careers (who, admittedly, need it more than the ranged ones) can sustain themselves quite fine between bursts of action. Getting a lull in combat should, in my opinion, eat up the THP relatively fast.

On the other hand, it shouldn’t be too harsh - it can be the only thing that’s keeping you alive, especially after getting wounded, so you should be able to use it to get the combat started without being overly careful. I think despite being marked temporary, it’s still meant to keep you alive until the next (extra) heal.

I can figure out a couple of ways of achieving both, and they would need tweaking the system as a whole. One would be limiting the total amount of THP, maybe to half your missing health. This would limit the peak effectiveness of THP, never keeping you completely safe but still allowing enough sustain to go forward - as long as you didn’t screw up again (and reducing the margin for that). The other possibility could be staggering the decay speed, or making it relative to the amount you have: on high THP (perhaps counted as a portion from your current maximum) it would decay faster (with both the delay and actual speed), but on lower THP it’d hold up better. This way you could keep yourself up in intense combat, protecting you from mistakes, but getting permanent health low and relying on THP alone would be harder, while still leaving some buffer to start the next bout with and leaving a bit of room for mistakes.

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I’d prefer the latter should it change, but I don’t see big changes like that happening with the release update

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