The chip damage to your health from melee attacks needs to be removed

There are plenty of things that need to be addressed that is clear, but if I had to pin a single point on what feels the worst about the minute to minute gameplay of the game, is that melee attacks will do small chip damage to your health regardless of the status of your toughness. This is even counter intuitive to the training that is shown to every player. In the training it even claims that you wont take health damage until your toughness is broken, but when playing the game you can see that isnt true. Every melee strike against you even with your toughness at full you hurt you.

Screenshot 2022-11-19 044243

This design is horrible and needs to be changed. Design like this was even introduced into Vermintide 2 when Winds of Magic released and the beast-men had attacks that could do chip damage to you regardless of blocking, and you removed this because it was a horrible mechanic, its the same design here.

An example of why this design is horrible is its one of the main reasons zealot plays poorly currently. You can not get any benefits of your traits that activate at low health because if you play at low health, a single hit will down you even when your toughness is maxed out.

Fatshark please! this design is un-fun and makes anything related to toughness gain near useless.

Edit: I personally find the updated toughness change that was changed on the games release a really good solution. Ive played with it for a bit now and the ability to block the first hit only feels really well balanced.

168 Likes

Yes. This also makes Grimoires much more dangerous than in VT2. The rate at which health is corrupted by chip damage stays the same even though you’ve already lost 60% of your health to the Grimoire corruption, which makes melee extremely risky at this point.

I can already see a trend in Malice where everyone engages as little as possible in melee except to take on guardsmen. It’s been a lot of flamethrowers and lightning staves.

32 Likes

I think they wanted to fix the “temp HP factory” situations from VT2 but they took two bats to it (Toughness as a concept AND corruption) when just one would have worked perfectly fine.

Healing is already so sparse (iirc there’s only three three ways to recover health: medkit, healing stations, and being revived) that losing HP is already enough of a punishment for being hit.

I’d like to just see corruption outside of Grimoires and wounds disappear entirely, and perhaps only be present during mission modifiers that give bonus rewards.

18 Likes

What’s there to fix?
THP in VT2 is an incentive to play in a certain way (stagger machine, headshot, elite killer).
It does not trivialize the game in any way.

The grims, however, as they are, are literally a lose-lose situation.
You risk the mission failure for what, 200xp and 50 imperial quid?

37 Likes

Yeah the corruption mechanic on top of this chip damage feature is the nail in the coffin to why the game feels so damn difficult. Those two features combined make it just crazy punishing and its GOING to turn away new players. They need to change one of them, preferably the chip damage one as its the most notable change from vermintide 2 and its just feels not fun in the slightest

13 Likes

agree!

2 Likes

I disagree heavely… without chip damage you can play loose and fast without caring to much about emchanics. It would promote bad play.
Get hit? Tough s*** buttercup you will lose a bit of HP.

Improve - learn to dodge / block / weave - persevere

6 Likes
  1. how can you play fast and loose when toughness is still destroyed in a few hits?
  2. Chip damage just makes zealot worse.
  3. Having chip is like having temp health in vermintide but still taking health damage.
  4. what are emchanics?
20 Likes

I get where you are coming from and how one would think this, but if you noticed what I said that they tried this in vermintide 2 and removed it, it was removed for a reason. This idea that you can play unsafe if you removed this feature is definitely not true even on middle to higher difficulties. Even Vermintide 2 was hard as hell on the top end difficulties and its significantly less punishing to the player for getting hit than this game, let alone not even have ranged units that shoot you down.

22 Likes

This explains a bunch of the deaths I was experiencing where I couldn’t figure out why I had died.

There are so many aspects of this game where the game is telling you to play one way, and then yanking back the football and laughing at you when you do.

23 Likes

I didn’t even know this was a thing. It makes no sense, why even have the toughness at all then? The game straight up lies to you the way it is now.

26 Likes

Corruption is fine, love it as a mechanic. It creates interesting situations and makes the question of ‘medicae station or health pack’ more interesting.

Chip damage through toughness needs to be sent to the deepest, darkest datavault Fatshark can find.

20 Likes

Big agree, what’s the point of having toughness if enemies can just chip through it.

Makes playing Zealot a huge pain when he’s already weak enough as it is because if you get shredded by gunfire or surrounded by a poxwalker horde anything can just breathe on you and you go down.

I don’t know why this was changed from the CBT, I can only assume it’s a bug or something.

14 Likes

I also agree. You should be rewarded for maintaining high toughness as it isn’t always easy to do. It also makes achievements like taking no damage actually sensible, as a single hit from an enemy that snuck up behind you won’t ruin it. Just makes more sense mechanic wise, too.

12 Likes

Agreed. As it stands, toughness is no replacement for TempHP from V2. It has far weaker defenses, and breaks extremely easily, so causing us to receive chip damage for any time we get hit is a bit too much of a punishment, and that’s not even considering Corruption.

15 Likes

I concur. It’s gotten me killed on zealot several times, when I thought the full toughness would protect me.

6 Likes

Yeah, a lot of the secondary objectives (and map modifiers) give far too little reward considering how much risk or effort they add.

3 Likes

I like how poxwalkers gives corruption, it gives a reason to be careful with them even though they are the horde mob and usually get mown down by the dozen.

Chip damage on melee sucks.

I think a lot of the modifier and secondary rewards are currently placeholders, just the same reward regardless of what the modifier or secondary is. Fewer hordes give the same amount of rewards as low visibility and more hordes.

1 Like

Yeah, taking one hit from behind from a poxwalker and going down when you have full toughness just feels cheap and dumb. It’s really terrible.

10 Likes

I hit 30 as a zealot and it has been one of the worst slogs in my gaming history simply from a point of class mechanics. It’s as if the perks were designed punish you. Purify in blood, while I can tell its working, its completely underpowered, I also have several weapons that grant toughness on kill that seem to do nothing. Lets not forget every npc with a gun has aimbot. It’s a terrible experience playing aggressive with the chunking of health as a class that’s suppose to be in the middle of the fray. Whilst others are aiming or channeling skills the zealot is clobbering baddies. I somehow managed to get an entire run with bots and it was probably the smoothest run I’ve had yet because the bots stayed in my back pocket. I know what zealots issue is, COHERENCY RANGE IS TOO SMALL, plain and simple.

9 Likes