Weapons only feel sluggish and weak because the higher difficulties are done by filling the screen with enemies, and making them damage sponges. These changes highly disfavor weapons that are slower-but-impactful, while affecting weapons that are fast-and-agile-but-less-impactful relatively way less. Example: If at a certain difficulty your slow weapon can one-hit something, and your fast weapon takes three strikes, they could very well be balanced in overall effectiveness. But if you then go up a difficulty, and now the slower one needs two hits instead of one while the faster one now needs four instead of three, the slower weapon is heavily disadvantaged while the faster one’s playstyle is hardly affected at all. This is also exacerbated when attack speed also serves defensively by making enemies flinch more often, when more hits = more temp hitpoints, and when higher difficulties also make enemies more stagger & cleave resistant. Swift Slaying can turn the first type of weapon more into a second type of weapon, which is the only way that a weapon becomes effective at that point. The first type of weapon wouldn’t need it when it still had its impact, however. This is a fundamental problem in the game, and affects classes and skills as much as weapons.
Like Grail Knight! To me, GK actually feels relatively much better on Legend than he does on Cata, and I think it’s because of this very reason. On Legend, GK feels about equally as effective and powerful as WHC or Shade. On Cata, however, he feels a lot less effective, while WHC and Shade feel relatively way less reduced in power. This is because GK’s strenghts (single target hitting power) and weaknesses (low mobility, less effectiveness vs. specials) scale waaaaay less favorable with damage sponges and full screens than those of WHC and Shade.
Not only GK is affected by this. Weapons like the single Axe or some ranged weapons have the same problem. Heck, I’d even pose that pretty much everything in this game that is considered weak in the meta, is considered that way because it scales less with the way Vermintide handles higher difficulties than the the weapons and classes that are considered strong, while likewise the stuff that is considered overpowered is stuff that scales really well. (Like for example WHC’s kill on crit headshot with a guaranteed crit Ult. That is exactly as effective on Cata as it is on Recruit.)
I honestly don’t rightly know how to solve this problem in the current game without completely overhauling the fundamental principals of the game, or at the very least without making the slower-but-harder-hitting stuff completely broken on anything under Cata. In an ideal world I’d try to implement something like a difficulty dependant weapon damage profile so all breakpoints can be tweaked individually by hand for every weapon on each seperate difficulty, but implementing that in Vermintide 2 is probably impossible at tgis point. I’m afraid that speed and mobility will always be meta on higher difficulties in this game…
On another topic in this thread: I applaud and appreciate your initiative for a structured discussion on class balance. But this is a near impossible thing to do, as long as there is disagreement on one thing: What is the baseline?
People seem to agree more or less which classes are more powerful or weak relatively to each other overall, but the disagreement is in which class people consider balanced. Some might have the opinion the game feels like it should when playing Mercenary or WHC, while others think the game is only just right when playing GK on Cata. Before a discussion on what changes to which classes should take place, you’d have to agree on the target power level to strive for. Only then you can decide which classes to nerf or buff and how. And the discussion about what that should be, I fear is a discussion that will never end…
