Temporary Health - The Hidden Problem

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
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Before we commence can I mention that a lot of the current threads here are about balance and this is very heartening for me.

Usually, it’s glaring bugs, or huge imbalances, or ruthless mercenary AI that has dominated the discussions here and seeing many threads talking about balance rather than bugs is a bit of a confirmation that Fatshark is moving In the right direction > we’re all discussing balance now rather than bugs (on the whole) so it’s a bit of a boost to my flagging morale that FS are moving in the right direction.

If you’re planning on posting that “It should’ve been like this at launch” then go have a beer, kiss your significant other, enjoy life’s little pleasures and chill out.

Onto the topic.

Is it possible for us to have a discussion about Temporary Health? You know. Sensibly?

It is my opinion that temporary health is an enormous part of a meta-game that has previously been completely overshadowed by the Bugs/AI Director/ranged-meta.

I also argue that the Temp Health Meta is actually more of a significant problem than Ranged Meta or the fact that Kerillian is utterly annoying and should be thrashed with a bunch of nettles.

What has prompted this thread is the fact that one evening this week I have drunk more than my fair share of Premium Lager and I was getting killed a lot with the Clanrat Sneaky Stab Of Death™ so I dropped to champion.

I joined a champion group with 2 level 19’s and a level 18. Slayer, BH and WS.( I played Huntsman)

We failed. A Lot. Maybe three runs getting a quick wipe (Going from 4 upstanding to me upstanding in maybe two minutes – players dropping one after the other really quickly when they got surrounded.)

I need to let you know they weren’t bad players. No YOLOing into the distance, No pulling ambients and patrols for nothing, no daft play strategies. Just good people who weren’t absolute pillocks.

The only thing that kept me upright when they’d got downed was Temp Health. They weren’t bad players by any means, and I wasn’t at my best so as a HS I could dodge and swing at a horde with 1h sword to keep myself going. Clutched a boss, wasn’t concentrating and Chaos patrol gave me a good battering. Dead.

Maybe this group highlights the MASSIVE impact Temp Health has on the game. Due to the little EXP gains on failure two of the party made it to level 20, used the Temp Health Talent and we sailed through the next four runs – even with me being half-cut. I mean we really cruised through the levels now.

I’ve always known Temp Health was a bit off, but this group and this selection of runs really polarised the problem for me.

This experience has prompted me to make this thread. The Temp Health Meta is, in fact, unbalancing things enormously. This could even be reinforcing the Ranged-Meta everyone moans about as gaining Temp Health as a HS via horde conga-line Headshots is almost guaranteed full health when you need it. Temp health promotes play that will give kills (Ranged in many cases) and makes you almost cavalier in your attitude to taking damage. When I play footknight I laugh in the face of danger and drop ice cubes down the vest of fear. Temp health FTW.

So if Temp Health is skewing the game to much, how do we fix it?

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Temp helath is not prob

these days i got dmg taken like 0~150 in legend even with melee focused like slayer or handmaiden

Now i did all career 100 helm but 2 career that need to do 100 helm for me (handmaiden and slayer)
And i do all of them in legend
If you feel you lose champ cuz of your teamates taht dont have temp hp, im sure they will fall e ven with it

At vt1, im not remebered correctly but shoot arrow and swap to melee makes you gain health from bloodlust thing
And it was easy to maintain full hp

Prob is not temp hp
Hordes are too easy speicals are too easy boss are too easy now

We just need new level like deathwish that single rat can deal 60~80 and boss can tank like 3k hp

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You talk from yourself, but you forget the problem behind it. How many players are able to deal without temp health? 1-2% of the whole playerbase? This isn´t even about a new difficulty or anything else.

Temp health is broken af. A lot of ppl wouldn´t be able to play legend without it. Especially deeds benefit from it.
I´m pretty sure everybody can confirm, that lvl 20 is a gift from the goddess and this is really a run-saver if you don´t pay attention once.

Me and others already posted our thoughts here.:

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I would like to see temp health become a base value given to every character for crit & kill (turning down what we have now).

Recently leveling up characters I never played is a pain until lvl 20. I only quickplay veteran until 20, but have completed champion bot matches with lvl 10s.

Since it changes gameplay so much I think it should be baseline, which gives new lvl 20 talent options to everyone. This would also smooth out the learning curve of new players.

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This is a good idea.

I don’t think temp health is a problem per se, the game is designed around giving you an incentive to charge into combat, pressing forward, having a fast pace. Temp health fits into this formula: You get rewarded for killing/attacking, but it also fades away so you need to get a move on to keep slaying. I like the game’s pace, you still need to re-evaluate whether it is benefitial to keep pushing or to wait, position, fall back, but in general, the game is telling you “Keep pushing! Keep killing!”
I totally can finish rounds with less than 200 health lost and on the ranged carreers, that is usually the case. But for melee, I wanna be reckless, I wanna be on the offense, I wanna be trading hits.

I do see the problem with temp health being locked behind level 20 talents and their imbalance. That needs a change. But I like the concept and its impact on gameplay.

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I think the amount of health should scale with the enemy type like giving only 1 hp for slave rats and up to 5 for Stormvermin sized enemies.
Then take this and turn it into a weapon trait so the level 20 health gain talents can be optimized for the specific hero/career.
Or every career gains a special way to generate temp health as innate talent like Ironbreaker for every blocked hit (from the optimal block arc), WHC for every crit(ical headshot), Mercenary if Paced Strikes is active and he kills something, and so on.
This way you could free up the no brainer of taking the health per kill talent, keep the temp health mechanic, make the careers/heroes more distinct and open up the possibility of more versatile builds.

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Wouldn’t that just make the health per kill weapon trait no brainer? Moving a problem somewhere else does not fix it.

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This was a thought I had early on, though in general enemies are more threatening in this game than in VT1 - more varieties of them with different attack patterns. In game 1, aside from specials, you had two types of minor rats who had the exact same attacks, and Stormvermin. This game you have two types of rats, Marauders, Cultists, Berserkers, Maulers, two kinds of Stormvermin, and Chaos Warriors.

Still, I think it is a bit too much. and too often, I see that 1-2 players are getting full HP bars, while everyone else is barely staying afloat. To an extent, some classes are just killier than others . . . which leads me to think Ricordis is totally right, each class needs a unique way of getting health back in some way, though hopefully in a lesser capacity than we have right now.

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Can someone set up a crowdfunding page to get this implemented? :smiley:

Love the idea of rewarding good class play with temp health. If FS can create 3 unique talents along these lines for each class, it would undoubtedly diversify the build choices and playstyles that are viable.

EDIT: Appears this has been suggested in other threads also, I clearly haven’t been procrastinating enough to keep up with all the topics.

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I think this is generally the way to go if one want’s to keep some lvl of permanent temp hp gain.

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It’s quite true that some for some parts, temp health and its generation is troublesome, even broken. Part of that problem is that there is supposed to be two potions for its generation for every character, but the same one is always (or nearly so) better. Of course, there is the third option, but that gives up temp health altogether and is rarely useful, so it’s even less of a choice. Another part is the sheer amount of temp health some weapons and careers can generate, and a few other, smaller problems (like venting on temp health). And of course, there’s also the clear gap in survivability before and after lv 20.

Removing temp health altogether isn’t a solution in my mind. Large parts of the system and character survivability are built around temp health, and several careers (Slayer and Zealot as the obvious examples) owe their effectiveness to it. I also think removing that significant a system changes the game way too much.

All of the things that I’ve figured would be good changes have been mentioned here already. Tweaking the generation down (possibly making it dependent on what’s killed), making it a baseline ability, and giving each career a unique method of temp health generation are all nice ideas, but each of them has their own sets of problems to be watched out for, and need to be thought of both separately and together.

Temporary Health as a baseline ability: This would certainly be a nice change, and would remove the no-choice Talents at level 20. They would need something to replace them, though. Lv 25 Talents could be moved down, of course, but that would feel… A bit cheap, I guess. Figuring out completely new Talents for each Career isn’t that simple a task either, so I think it’s still an acceptable tradeoff. Personally I also think that having Temp Health generation from the start is quite likely to start teaching some bad habits, allowing even the fragile careers to take hits. So it might be best if it opened up later, maybe at level 10 or so. This would teach the careful gameplay first, still open up the ability before moving to the more serious difficulties, and also let Zealot and Slayer (in my opinion, the two Careers most dependent on temp health) to use it from the start. It’s quite possible this would require some additional tweaking in the total amounts of health generated, but the different difficulties are largely self-regulating through enemy numbers.

Unique methods of Temporary Health generation for each Career: This would certainly make things more interesting, but it would need to stay on the Talents so it doesn’t limit your playstyle too much and to retain some choices on how to gain your toughness. Balancing is also troublesome, as is figuring out what should be the most prominent aspect of playing each Career. Of course, moving the Talents to a lower tier is still an option. Level 10 is still my recommendation. In this case, there also are several of the no-choice Talents on that level, so tweaking those could be done at the same time. I think there could also be some interesting options beyond temp health (at least if the generation is toned down altogether) to increase your character’s longevity.

Tweaking down Temporary Health generation in general: As you may have noticed, I think this is somewhat needed no matter what is done, but it may present a kind of solution by itself too. Temp health generation (through killing) is just so effective that it seems to render some things in the game irrelevant. Venting (on both Sienna and Bardin) can be done on it, so it indirectly allows more shot to be thrown on heat weapons. It can be generated effectively enough to fill you up from one wave of a horde, letting you eat even Chaos overheads with impunity on the tougher Careers. So yeah, I do think it’s a bit too powerful right now. Tiering the generation on what is killed could be the best solution, giving Special and Elite killers a bit more for their single targets than crowd-clearers for theirs. Balancing it is again troublesome, though. It needs to be remembered that everyone is on Special duty and can kill elites too, and even the most specialized single-target eliminator needs to take part in fighting a horde.

I feel like I still have things I’d like to say, but my thoughts are wandering too much to grab them. Oh, well. I can always make another reply, and this one’s long enough already.

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Suddenly so many temp health threads.
So here is my opinion on the suggested solutions of this and other threads.

  1. Remove temp health:
    The most drastic solution. The problems is the game is not intended to be played without temp health. In V2 the player will normally take much more damage than in V1.
    If they choose this solution (i don’t think they will) they also have to make melee safer. Here are some ways to make melee safer.

  • running attacks. It looks like they are not using the slot system. That means you can get attacked by an infinite amount of running attacks even throug other enemys. Same thing is when a marauder attacks you throug a CW. There is not much the player can do against.

  • Downwards attacks of enemys are to fast. On stairs for example

  • Boss 180 attacks need to go

  • If you have a certain distance to a marauder, then you can’t dodge his attacks sideway anymore. Problem with dodging

  • Reach on some enemy attacks is to high.

  • The slot system in generall has some problems. J_sat demostrates it very well in his videos. He also say’s, and i agree with him, that if the slot system would work like you would expect, the game would be way to easy. Imagine you could always only get attacked by the amount of enemys that actually fit in the slots. game would be kinda easy. But in my opinion this changes if you remove temp health.

So if melee gets safer i would like that suggestion.

  1. nerf temp health.
    easiest solution in my opinion. Instead temp health on every kill, only on every second or third kill.
    Of course that would make it really bad on weapons that already aren’t that good in generating temp health.

  2. Make it a weapon trait. (My favorite idear)
    I like that idear. You could make that diffenrent weapons generate a different amount of temp health. I also would make that you can’t get that trade on ranged weapons.

If it gets correctly balanced than i don’t think it would be a no brainer. It just depends on how much temp health the weapon can generate. Some weapons with high dps and cleave should just not get temp health on every kill. I really would like to get a new weapon traid that can be considered to be taken instead of swift slaying or parry.

  1. Carrer specific temp health generation.
    its a nice suggestion but i think its hard to get enough idears for every carrer.
    The first suggestion already (Ironbreaker temp health on blocking) has a few problems.
    It is hard to balance. It usefullnes would heavily depend on how fast your allies kill all your enemys. It also could be exploited. Leaving a few enemys alive so they fill up your health bar could be done in some situations. If somebody comes up with enough idears that are fun, balanced and diverse enough then this is one of my favorite suggestions.
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I don’t think making it solely a weapon Trait would be a good idea in any form. In VT1 (where they were far weaker), at least one healing property on a weapon was already practically mandatory on higher difficulties; here with more and stronger hits coming your way, it’s even more so. If it was balanced in power to the level of other Traits, it would still be a (practically) forced pick on at least one of your weapons, likely the one with better crowd-clear, and not worth it on the other. I also think it would separate using melee and ranged even more, by using one for crowd-clear and health buffer generation, the other for single targets.

I can kind of see getting a Trait in addition to the Talents (or whatever they end up being) if the general generation is heavily toned down, to widen options and to let those who want to specialize on temp health do it and to let those who don’t need as much specialization use other Traits.

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I think Temp Health on kill has a place in the game, here’s my suggestions.

Firstly, it should be an ambient talent for every character at level 1 with subsequent balance across enemies and difficulties. This would remove the big jump in how difficult things are prior to level 20 compared to how easy it feels post level 20.

Level 20 talents should become career specific weapon talents - a 1h weapon talent, a 2h weapon talent and a ranged weapon talent.

Examples being;

Kruber Footknight level 20 talents

1h weapons have something like barrage, where subsequent hits on the same target increase the power/damage/headshot chance.

2h weapons have increased swingspeed or increased cleave/stagger.

ranged increased crit chance or range.

or something like a Footknight equipped with a shield can block assassins and hookrats, and all boss attacks.

These are just pulled out of the air but you get the idea, weapon specific talents that strengthen specific playstyle choices and would widen the options of viable weapons at higher difficulties. If a 1h mace + shield had a exponentially increasing chance of Headshotting armoured units or be able to block hookrats/assassins and boss attacks it would be a bit more viable choice.

Across all careers there are weapon specific talents that could easily fit into the level 20 slot.

I’d try and get the Temp Health reward to only proc to a capped amount per swing/shot so that lining up a horde would not be a laughable almost instant full-bar. If the first three slaves killed gave Temp Health reward but after that nothing, then it might increase the difficulty of hordes, and change the meta a little.

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Well youre right. the trait should be additionally to a toned down talent. I like @Argonaut14 suggestion to make it a level 1 talent.
Pros are:

  1. You can balance temp health generation for every weapon. (Because else it will always be to strong for certain outfits and to weak for others. I really think it is impossible to properly balance it otherwise).

  2. It gets nerfed in generall

  3. You don’t have this sudden boost at level 20 anymore.

  4. You still have temp health so legend is still doable for people who don’t have premaid groups.

  5. We can have new and more interresting level 20 talents.

  6. You finally couln’t abuse it to went certain weapons.

cons:
Sounds like a lot of work.

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I don’r think that Legend is too easy (only 3,7% of players have done Skittergate on legend), and I find white HP essential to ‘‘fix’’ some bad enemy spawn or latency problem… but lv20 perk are totally wrong; they should be more specifics.

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When i started playing V2, i didn’t really like it. I only started enjoying it after level 20 and temp health. The same thing happened leveling all the other classes. It was real drag until level 20. I tought about creating a discussion back then proposing to make temp hp a level 5 talent (or default) but i tought that, maybe, it was my probably only.

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This number is completely useless on it’s own as many people never even finish the games they buy:
Only 32% have completed Skittergate on recruit, only 31% have ever finished the main quest of Skyrim, Vermintide 1: 21%, Portal 2: 42% / 20%(coop), BioShock: 50%, etc.

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There is a great difference between 32% (skittergate at recruit) and 3,7%. This means the most people is not able to play Legend. And, among this minority that play legend, most have an low-average % of wins… then, if you have 100000000 hours and you play with your friends (equipped with headphone) it is NORMAL that you find easy the game; this happens on every videogame.

Also most of casual player that play with me, they have low/average skill and they limp at Legend.

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What Haxorzist said above. That 3.7% statistic is misleading if those stats also indicate that only ~32% of the players finished a single play through of the 13 original levels on recruit (which would take maybe 6-12 hours of play?).

This means that more like 10-12% of the people who actually played the game have reached endgame and beaten all maps on legend. Probably a much higher percentage (20-40% is my guess) if you compared it to active players per day – not counting the surge from the free weekend. Although, only FS could really confirm this on the backend. The achievements don’t offer enough detail.