The hero power mechanic as is makes it a lot harder to get newbies into games

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
1

I’ve been playing this game for a couple of years now, and the constant complaint I get from other people I encourage to try it is twofold:

  1. They can’t play on higher difficulties yet because they aren’t allowed, whilst they find their current difficulty level trivial
  2. When we play with them the game also becomes trivial, becuase we’re playing at too low difficulty level for the power of the party.

This is a source of great frustration for me: Veterans complain that the difficulty level for carrying other people through the game is too low, newbies complain about the grind they need to go through to get to the challenging parts of the game.

Similarily, because of the way hero levels work, switching heroes regularely makes it harder to progess to higher difficulties since you then run into the hero power gate again.

The winds of magic expansion has a similar issue: A few other veterans I play it only recently got the winds of magic expansion and as such don’t have the same amount of weave power as me, so they have to grind on the lower difficulty levels (or play lots of regular missions again) before they can get to my level.

The whole system, as is, serves only to prevent people from playing together and in a lot of ways makes the game less fun for beginners.

If you really need a system of progression, consider making it based around cosmetics instead. It frustrates me that I can easily get anyone to play something like Left 4 Dead 2 and have an enjoyable time no matter who plays it, whilst with Vermintide 2 I have to start considering their power level and what have you.

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2

Just to explain this a little bit: The community I play Vermintide 2 in is centered around a PC Gaming website, so it’s also a community that plays loads of other games. So in there we get this small hard core that plays Vermintide 2 on legendary and cata, but we can’t really get anyone else along for the ride becuase they are turned off by the grind.

This wasn’t an issue with Vermintide 1 for us: Being dragged along by people playing Legendary is how I got into the game!

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I think it may be too late for them to completely ditch some of these systems, but they could definitely incorporate what’s already there to make it much easier. Maybe a fairly significant XP bonus based on character level difference if it is a private game? Friends I have tried to get in to the game at this point have also said the exact same things and end up just not playing, even when I try to not steamroll the low level games for them.

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4

Relieving restrictions for private games but keeping them in play for quickplay could work without upsetting the regular balance too much.

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5

Host picks difficulty no matter who is in the party. How hard can it be?
[edit] not aimed at OP, more at FS.

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6

Nvm. I misunderstood.

7

I couldn’t agree more. The progression system is just annoying at first and redundant at the end.

In my opinion, the level system on the weapons is simply unnecessary. In the beginning you only get shoddy weapons that you can melt down 2 rounds later anyway, for materials you almost never need. Actually it would be much easier to set the weapons to weapon level 300 from the beginning, on Recruit and Veteran to raise the opponents to the level of Champion and to have only Infantry/Elite opponents on Recruit, on Veteran then bosses and specials with area damage and on Champion then the full program with Disablers. So you don’t have to adjust to new difficulty levels (at least until Champion) but only to new enemies. And you should be able to play Recruit/Veteran/Champion from start.

Also, I would like to adjust the whole lootsystem at this point, but that would be offtopic :sweat_smile:.

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