I’m done talking to you. I’ve said my peace.
To me it looks like a massive buff to all classes, I play with a group of 4 other and we each main 1 character.
Our win rate on champion went from about 20% to 80% over night, now ether we have transcended our mortal forms and become gods or the changes were effectively a massive buff for us.
We played champion because it was challenging, now it just doesn’t feel as fun.
Make enemies hard to fight again.
I wrote a contrarian view on the game post.
This is a result of ALL Monty haul games.
The players who got Thor’s hammer scream when its removed or nerfed a bit.
Obviously better to have never given it but what do you suggest when the devs did, realized it, realized they can’t keep creating more and more to challenge those with it without killing those without it, and can’t keep op players challenged?
How would you suggest the devs react to realizing the players are op with the gear, skills, and classes?
A: all new content and difficulties ever increasing to entertain and challenge (keeping in mind players will want new skills with new levels, better gear, etc creating an arms race between devs and players
B: nerf it and get mad players keeping in mind the nerfs don’t really balance the play but only remove some FEW of the op player elements.
C: after release and after all this testing decide skills and classes were a mistake and remove them and really anger a huge chunk of the player base but actually fix the problem.
Or do you see a
D:
?
Honest question.
I’d pick C. Its the best long term solution to fixing a serious problem. What would you pick?
C – but allow for refunds to players like myself that bought multiple copies of the game for people that no longer even want to log into the damn thing anymore. None of us want to work on progression characters b/c God alone knows what they’re going to nerf into oblivion next.
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Cya next week!
Not exactly true. V1 has (or had? not shure if it’s dead now) trinkets and weapon perks. And as you play, you choose those. And a lot of them were really strong and game changing, including healing, ammunition recovery, extra movement speed and protection from specials. It was a different system, but not that far from what we have now. You had backstab as weapon perk, now you have career dedicated to it. And so on. You may say a lot about skill, and it is still there, but if you take away bloodlust from my axe in game one, I would loose twise as many games. System is just deeper and more complex now. My biggest consern is that it seems like they created system so complex, they no longer have controll over it and a lot of discussions are born because they struggle to manage it (ex. huntsman+blunderbuss+str potion).
I hate character progression system as well, and I hope to reach power cap sooner rather than later. Game one had no real charecter progression, only gear, that was also totally random, with no relation to whatever you like to play. I played 4 of 5 charecters pretty equally, and 5th was elf, hence always taken by someone else anyway 
You would reach oranges pretty fast, and from there - it was only about finding best set of perks for different weapons. Handcrafting anything now feels pretty pointless, since I would drop my tuned orange weapon for grey one with 30 more power. This game should not be about progressing your character, but about mastering tools you have. And current progression system, that, probably, was created with intend to hook up players for longer, is confusing and time taxing.
But with all respect, they stated that beta progress may be wiped, and you should have been ready for it. They made it pretty clear, that your participation in beta is at your own risk. If you feel that you wasted time on character progression, remember, they could have been forced to just wipe all of it.
Just responding to the part directed to me:
I will say since most were only a small %chance to proc, overall they were weaker, but I see your point. In my mind these v2 talents are just flat upgrades and with active skills effectively being “get out of jail free” cards, new players immediately become dependent on them and don’t learn the fundamentals of survival.
in regards ofhte power cap, since Leveling also influences it, this might be of interest. Even if you’ve already maxed all the characters
Food for thought: the system is broken if traits are so worthless that players see no benefit in upgrading past blue weapons. Whether you like the nerfs or not, the 1.0.1 patch definitely pushed the trait system towards being redundant and a waste of code that should probably just be removed from the game.
Given that Fatshark put the trait system into the game in the first place (as well as in Vermintide 1), I would tend to argue in favour of making them more useful instead of nerfing them. Perhaps that means traits need to be more creatively designed in order to be satisfying to everyone. There are some traits that are really smartly designed (e.g. the potion trait that gives you all 3 but reduces their duration by 50%.) These are similar to TF2’s alternate weapons in that they have tradeoffs, opening up alternative playstyles without producing a net benefit in most situations.
By contrast, some of the traits are just lazy and provide an unambiguous benefit: all three of the non-weapon equipment slots have a “25% chance to not consume resource on use” trait, which is worse than almost every other trait, but better than no trait at all. Traits like this should be removed. They’re the ones that make you want to re-roll, and therefore cause getting ‘perfect’ traits to feel obligatory.
If an FPS is to survive long-term, it needs to have lots of replayability. With or without PvP, that means it needs a high skill ceiling. In the MOBA genre, the skill ceiling is generally a product of whether or not the game has high-risk/high-reward gameplay. Heroes of the Storm is a flat, easy, casual game. Dota 2 is not. The key distinction is that characters in Dota are very specialized, which makes good teamwork very necessary to balance out their shortcomings. If we want Vermintide 2 to last, balance decisions should favour making heroes more distinctive, not homogenizing them.
If that doesn’t appeal to you, remember that Recruit and Veteran won’t vanish just because the higher skill difficulties exist. Maybe traits and high-level talents should be disabled on Recruit, if you really want to keep the playing field balanced. (The devs already put a cap on power level for lower difficulties, so this would be consistent.) That way there will basically be two games, one for casual players who want uniform experiences and another for more extreme and diverse playstyles.
Finally, the scoreboard is probably a big reason why people think the game needs to be homogeneous. It suggests that players who get few kills aren’t doing as well as others, and fosters the kind of thinking we’re seeing here. If a player is tanking, or focused on picking off elites, their numbers look worse, and they feel compelled to focus on slaying hordes instead of fitting into a unique role that synergises properly with the rest of the group.
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i personaly consider it actually rather useful… if the trait procs
Of course they seem good; they give you free resources. But in the closed beta, no one would prefer “25% chance of not consuming a potion on use” to “100% chance of not consuming a potion on use, but you lose some health” (the Concentrated Brew trait). So those traits are bad in two ways:
- they have no downsides, so they feel obligatory if you don’t have any traits
- they’re weaker than specialized stuff that actually synergizes with a build (e.g. concentrated brew + the health regen trait), so you feel like you need to reroll them once you do get traits
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LOL I like how this guy goes into great detail about how ranged weapons basically shouldn’t exist in this game. I actually had to read this twice to fully understand how completely wrong this guy is, yes classes had to be nerfed and talents had to be nerfed too but they should NOT of made classes unplayable I mean the bounty hunters active the so called “press this button to win” does less damage then is ranged weapons…like what? Ranged weapons have a place in this game and I think they are on the right track with the nerfs but I think they went a bit too far on certain characters.
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I disagree with op. I played V1, at least 250 hours in it, with all my cataclysm wins. I was happy to see them adding new elements to the sequel, variety, changing things up. Just because things are new doesn’t make them inherently bad. If i wanted every sequel to the original game to basically be a copy paste where more map DLC would have pretty much done the same job, I’d be playing call of duty. Rehashing the exact same formula gets old. Adding the new elements was a fresh welcome change… and people thinking it should all be scrapped to make the sequel a clone of the original is a slap in the face to all of the developers who put in a lot of time and effort into all of it. It’s also a slap in the face to all of us who actually liked where it was going before they had to tuck tail and cave to all the negative feedback about pretty much everything through the beta, because at the end of a day they are a business and need to make money, and if it appears that people are unhappy with the direction they end up having to change that direction. Most of what i saw through the beta was just “nerf this and nerf that because my ego is bruised from not getting tp damage or kills” instead of stopping to think and realize that with specializations, not everyone was going to be good at the same stuff, and that the end game scoreboard isn’t really an accurate reflection of exactly how people contributed to the team effort. There was very little actual unbiased constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement. It was constant crying about not being top dog, or it was too easy, or too hard… all at the same time… I actually liked what the original direction for the sequel was looking like and am extremely disappointed with almost all of the recent changes. some of them were much needed, like what was done with damage… but… almost everything relating to heroes and talents… at this point may as well do a full 180 and get rid of all careers since apparently people just want every sequel to be done the way call of duty does it. A pointless clone of the original. pump out a new vermintide every year with the same mechanics and new maps… maybe change some of the weapon loadouts in each one… yea… that would be soooo refreshing 
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Fatshark must grow the customer base. It is ok if they change the VT1 formula. There is always Legend, where a Legend player’s opinion will carry even more weight, and mods
Thank goodness we listened to trash-can basement dwellers who play veteran and think they know what’s best for the game at all difficulties. Especially before the game even launched with Legendary. Whew.
Comparing an FPS horde game to an ARPG. Bravo. Because this is even remotely close to playing like Diablo. Well, I mean, if you count the development team dumpstering the game for the lowest common denominator… yep. It’s a Blizzard game.
Yup.
Ironically I agree with both sides because I like both styles of game. But I suppose that’s what it comes down to isn’t it? Not “this is better” but rather instead “this is what I want” with the tacit admission that they don’t really care what other people want. Simple self interest.
But all of this is quite flawed thinking. What people say they want is often not what is actually good because they don’t understand either the game or themselves often times: https://www.polygon.com/gaming/2012/3/14/2861998/gearbox-borderlands-testing
This is what makes Fatshark’s job so hard. Their job is to follow their vision, try to adjust it for better player enjoyment, but also they have to understand what would actually be the best for players despite the player’s own feedback often being ill informed and sometimes even self sabotaging (like the build your own gun borderlands example).
This is probably a bad decision. The odds that you would reach an important breakpoint with 6 more HeroPower is close to 0 I’d say. But point taken.
But FS is up for one hell of a balancing job. 5 heroes, 3 careers, 12 talent combination, on average 4 melee and 4 ranged weapons, and then like 5 * 5 * 5 * 5 * 5 different trait combinations. Thats nine million different combinations. Balancing all of them will get insanely complex, Diablo 3 solved it by only making certain sets viable (i.e. +25000% dmg if you have the entire set (seriously, that is in Diablo 3 if you haven’t played it)), and now Blizzard have around 30-50 different combinations they need to balance. I wonder if FS will do something similar in the end to lower the balancing complexity. This would in reality mean 2-3 viable builds per career, which I would dislike intensly.
After reading the entire thread, and feeling somewhat drained for it, I can’t really bring myself to agree to anyone. I agree with most points, but never quite all of them.
I think Fatshark did a great job so far, they did a great job with the release balance changes, and I am totally ok with not having patch notes, because someone would have had to write them, and no one had time for that.
I also agree with the base premise of the OP: Vermintide is indeed not Diablo, and the core of the game should be around skill-based coop gameplay, with a focus on team interaction and more melee than ranged.
However, I welcomed the changed in VT2, the new options it brought, and still does bring.
Some may deride it as calculus, but those few numbers can indeed have an effect even without deciding the outcome already; They change the gameplay. Sure, it’s high skill and exhilarating to not be hit during a wave because you can’t afford that, while it’s possible to not be hit. But I’d rate it the same if, with the right class, an alternative situation would be “ok, I can’t avoid all of them, but I’m still fine if I’m only hit once and deal 2 headshots and a backstab in the next 5 seconds”.
A different focus that still requires choices.
And I believe that FS will be able to balance this, even if it’s somewhat more difficult.
No, not all choices will be viable, but it’ll also be more then 2 per class - We’re not computers, non-deterministic choices are actually quite doable.
What FS seems to be doing at the moment is a sort of pendulum balance: They don’t do little incremental changes (not only, at least), but larger onces, then go back and forth, reducing the changes to scout for a good middleground.
1%? Too low. 5%? Too high. 2%? … we’ll see. This might unsettle players, but it’s a lot faster and more reliable to get serviceable solutions with, as it scouts out the borders of “good enough”.
As such, I really don’t believe they are trying to abolish their vision and throw everything away.
… I know this comment is all over the place, but it’s late. It was a tedious read. ^^
This kind of situation is why I see vertical progression (i.e. increasing damage, practically-straight upgrades) as undesirable, but it’s also a powerful way to hold a player’s attention. We’ll likely never be rid of item power, but I’d like to see more of the power handed up-front, with the long term focus being squeezing out the last drops rather than stacking up bonuses and perks.
It’s nice that you feel that it is good, but the nerfs didn’t really prevent this from being Diablo. Since Diablo is one of the biggest franchises in gaming history and a totally different game and concept. I personally think Vermintide 1 did it better. No talents, can’t really recall the gear that was offered but I do think it was less items. The trinkets were 1 trait and that was good, so you could pick what you liked. Not having stats that won’t matter anyway. It is such an unnecessary component since they just nerf everything that is good. So remove talents, remove stats on trinkets necklaces etc. Make it all about the traits again. Weapons should be their playstyle and bonuses they offer like armor penetration. It is just a bad way to give people incentive to play. RNG and reroll galore isn’t really fun, and once you do it they nerf it. 
That is just bad design from the get go. The core game is good, but the rest is meh.