I genuinely love fighting Beastmen, they are one of my favourite factions in Warhammer Fantasy, and the audio visual design of them in Vermintide is extremely well done.
I feel like a notable outlier in that I genuinely preferred how the enemies felt to fight in both the games preorder beta, and the Winds of Magic beta, in that they had more mass and weight. The major reason being it made melee feel more grounded, and attacks had more satisfying impact. I find weapons such as the two-handed hammer, the glaive, and the axe a lot more engrossing in the moment to moment melee than the majority of high cleaving tools of war because of this fact.
Vermintide (and now Darktide) has some of the most technologically impressive and engaging melee combat I’ve ever seen in a video game, but I feel it’s at its worse when your weapons glide through the enemies with no sense of weight, and the audio design for bladed cleave weapons is immensely less satisfying.
The Gor hordes used to have a specific niche to make up for their lack of shields, being their heavy mass, which I absolutely loved. I greatly enjoyed the tweaks to combat to make it feel more like a back and forth duel, with a heavier emphasis on staggering to make enemies vulnerable, faster reaction times and smarter enemies to make dodging more skill based, and the feeling of holding back a onslaught, a swarm, of enemies, rather than just swiping through them and barely giving them any individual recognition as opponents.
Rather then improving the telegraphing of the attacks, outright removing the headbutt and kick animations also makes them less visually interesting and unique, and removes some of their bestial identity.
This is similar to why I feel the flak armoured enemies in Darktide are too weak and unsatisfying to fight in melee combat, when you can effortlessly stunlock your foe, and there is no gameplay incentive to using more advancing mechanics or dueling, I feel the gameplay is at its worst.
Removing the Ungors dodge mechanics was confusing and unnecessary, as it was a fun niche to make them stand-out as foes, and didn’t undermine the player in any frustrating way, especially since the hitboxes on the spears were fixed.
Since you can dodge, tag and parry, Ungor bows, the fact that their accuracy is now (at least mostly on legend difficulty, since it’s difficult for me to find cataclysm matches), so incredibly low also makes them incredibly uninteresting to fight.
I thought they were a great addition, in that similar to the hybrid combat in Darktide, it provided a good use for mid-range, high clip size ranged weaponry, which before their addition, felt incredibly underwhelming compared to the sniping gear, since specials were the only primary ranged threat (and horde clear ranged weapons still struggle to find a use).
Bestigors lack the shields, spawn density and damage potential of Stormvermin, and the heavy protective armour, high mass and dueling ability of the Chaos Warriors.
Since their telegraphed charge was so heavily nerfed, and can be mitigated by an easy dodge, or even just blocking, and they have a large vulnerable weakpoint without good armour, they very often feel weak and nonthreatening.
The Banners and Minotaurs are both in a good spot I believe, but expose how underwhelming the lack of unit variety in the Beastmen roster is.
If Vermintide is to receive more support in the future, I definitely feel like the Beastmen are worth further looking into to make them a more engaging and fun part of the game.
