The new balancing principle

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
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The new balancing principle

Hello Fatshark, Hello Community,

Until now, balancing has been done in the classical sense, which meant that there was no real balancing. This is not because Fatshark does not do its job properly or the community is always wrong with its wishes, but because the classic balancing can never work the way we would like it to.

If something is too strong, it will be made worse, but then something else becomes stronger, which is too strong in relation to something else, so it has to be adjusted again. This creates a trend that makes everything that is strong become weak.
The desired result would be that everything is equally strong or equally weak, but this can only be achieved if there are no differences. Differences are in this context, talents, weapon, attack patterns, classes, opponent types, attributes etc., so actually everything that makes the game customizable and thus creates the fun.

Do we want the perfect balancing ?
I think not, because that would be boring. We want differences and interesting combinations of possibilities and therefore also challenges. But that also means that there are always things that are better than others and some that are worse.

But there are also possibilities to change the principle of how balancing is done. Away from the classical to a modern form.

  1. get away from the idea that everything should be equally good or bad and equally useful and strengthen the “differences” even more.

  2. replace everything random in the fighting system with more predictable, active and synergetic elements.

  3. strengthen the players and adjust the challenges accordingly.

The first is the most difficult point, as it requires everyone to consider something that works well as good, and not criticize it because it is good.
It’s about looking at classes, weapons, talents, etc. and thinking about how to make each one’s strengths even better. Each class has a job or 2 and their own strengths and weaknesses can be developed. No class or weapon should be good at everything or be able to do every job. Furthermore, synergies should be created through skills and talents, as well as weapons. Additionally, synergies between classes should also be considered.
Give us players enough individual strengths and we will find the combinations. Once these are found, they can be developed further.

Every weapon must have its own identity.
What is the advantage of carrying a one-handed weapon? You have one hand free!
So you should be able to do something with it.
Mace or Hammer weapons must be strong against armour.
Thin pointed blades must be accurate and fast.
The idea of the perfect block or parry could be developed further, so that the risk is worthwhile compared to the block. There is a lot of potential in this fighting system, these strengths just have to be developed.

All things in the combat system that are based on chance must be removed.
Specifically, the Critical Hit value. Makes critical hits predictable by introducing talents that generate them 100%.
The Critical Hit Chance is a relic from times when games didn’t have the possibility to display and calculate real Critical Hit Points on enemies. Vermintide 2 does not need this. A Critical Hit means that you hit an area that is vulnerable, e.g. the neck, head, heart, back of the knee, etc. depending on what armor is worn or how enemies are supposed to be vulnerable. So it is also necessary for an authentic fighting system to rethink the random element “critical hit chance”.
The talent series could be implemented additionally like the Stagger or TempHP talent series.
2 examples already exist in the game: Every 5th strike is a crit and attack from invisibility is a crit. This could be further developed.
Attacks from behind ?
Head shots, close combat and/or ranged combat ?
Or maybe real weaknesses in the opponents’ damage model?
There are certainly many possibilities to integrate this in a meaningful way.
This makes the game more tangible for us, because we know exactly when something is triggered, we can use these things better with our own skills and don’t have to rely on luck. Especially classes and weapons that used to depend on the critical hit value could benefit from this.

Removes flat attribute increases from talents. Talents should be unique enhancements that are caused by an action or even allow new actions. So anything that only needs to increase + damage or + attack speed will be removed from the talent tree.
Attributes belong on the equipment and you can allow more experiments like in Athanor.
The principle of the Athanor should be implemented in all game modes. You can also create new attributes like more stagger, more dodge count, push distance and so on.

Now that all classes, weapons, talents etc. are so strong that the current enemies and challenges are too weak, you can correct the enemies, which is much easier, because they have less complex combinations than we players.
The easiest thing to do is to increase life, damage, number. The fine tuning would be to find the balance between the enemy types and the special spawns.
In the beginning of Winds of Magic, the enemies were very strong because we were too weak, but now it’s the other way around, where spawns appear and how many and which enemies appear in the final events should be reconsidered. But overall, these things could be made more challenging because we players have become stronger.

At this point you could say that nothing has changed compared to the classic balancing.
But if you look closely you can see that every class and weapon is powerful and there are more combinations of good things than before.
More individualization, more control over your own fighting style and fighting events. All this will be more fun and the developers can fine-tune with much less effort, because the scaling of the opponent strength is much faster.

It would be recommendable to rework the Deedsystem as often requested and to make the Twitchmode more accessible.

I assure you everyone will benefit if the balancing system is changed according to this pattern.
There will still be classes, talents, weapons etc. that are stronger in combination than others, this is unavoidable. But since all classes and weapons have strong possibilities where they shine, it will feel better than now.
It will be a better felt balance.

Also the employees of Fatshark will have more fun and more courage to try something new, they definitely had cool ideas.
Also the people here in the community had a lot of cool ideas that could be implemented with the new principle.

I thank all of you who have read so far and I hope that in the future Balancing will be seen and handled from a different perspective so that we all have more fun in the game :slight_smile:

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

2 Likes
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I only want to touch on one part of your comment

Hard disagree. Balance will never be perfect and it will always be evolving as the meta changes or new elements are introduced, but that doesn’t mean you don’t even make the attempt.

Also, you say it’s fun to have broken overpowered stuff in the game? There is nothing as boring to me as playing a walking simulator while I follow behind a player ‘having fun’ with OP stuff.

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That assumption is flawed in an of itself. Balance can be achieved by more than jsut making everything the same. Balance also means that a weapon has strengths and weaknesses… Those strengths and weaknesses however have to be relevant in a realistic scenario. Sure getting to “perfect balance” is hard and a long process. But its still better than what we had previously. There where what? 2-3 good weapons and then alot of trash or meme stuff…
Thats just not fun for most.
And just buffing everything is not an option either cause then you are left with a bunch of overpowered stuff and you need a difficulty past cata to actually have a challenge. If I want to brainlessly run through a map I start recruit. If I want somewhat of a challenge I need the higher difficulties.

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It’s perfectly ok if you don’t want to read my whole text. I don’t read all texts here in the forum. But only read a few lines, then quote and criticize something that is finally explained in the text is no basis for discussion.
Nowhere does it say that I only want OP stuff. That is not the conclusion of my thesis.
Read the text completely and then talk to me or don’t and don’t talk to me :slight_smile:

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Just because I only quite one part doesnt mean I havent read everything. And as you said to so good yourself … I have wrote more than that and the buffing part was just a preemptive counter to all the people that tend to bring that up as an argument against nerfs…

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I agree with you that every weapon should have its strengths and weaknesses, that’s what I mean by identity. You can also use real weapons for orientation.
And by buffing you can very well create a balance, you just have to look at it from a different perspective.
If weapon A has the value 100 and means how good the weapon is, weapon B has the value 70, you can proceed according to your approach.For example, if Weapon A is nerves at 80 and Weapon B is buffing at 80.
Or Weapon A to 110 and Weapon B also to 110. In both cases, both weapons would be equally powerful, but both have been improved.
This feels different, although basically both weapons are equal in power.

Of course this is just a simple example, because the usefulness of a weapon depends on who is using it, what class, talents and attributes are chosen, as well as what game mode and difficulty level you choose and what other players you play with.

So in my topic I describe how balancing can be done in other ways, but perfect balancing is impossible because of the individual needs of each player.

Just because all talents and weapons are strong doesn’t mean that everything is too easy. If the possibility for more individualizable challenges is created, it is no longer necessary to make anything worse, everything that is too bad is simply made a little bit better. And anyone who finds it too easy on Cata 2 ++++ (modifiers) can make it almost infinitely high until it is no longer too easy.

By this approach, no player feels reset because his favorite weapon or talent or build is broken.
Of course metabuilds will be available for the highest areas, this cannot be avoided. But the approach to balancing is a different one.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

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Your pretense that the balancing is done with buffs and nerfs, or an attempt to achieve equal power distribution is wrong. No good game balance comes for the sake of buffs and nerfs, as ideally you don’t compare weapons, heroes, talents, etcetera to one another, but to the game, unless they occupy the same space. This is less relevant to heavily PvP oriented games and core to PvE games.

What you’re suggesting is instead of making Weapon A, 50 Power and B, 150 Power to both be at 100 Power by scaling them down and up respectively, is to buff Weapon A, 50 Power and Weapon B, 150 Power to both be at 200 Power, and then up the difficulty from there.
If you want your game to be balanced, you will make an enemy be 200 Power against 100 Weapon, and 400 Power against 200 Weapon respectively. Your suggestion doesn’t make a difference in the end, you’re achieveing the same result in the end via different means.

Everything else you’re suggesting apart from the core idea doesn’t have anything to do with balance. You just want to make the game and it’s mechanics deeper, that’s a completely different topic. Making Critical Hits more predictable is not different from predetermening every Boss and Special spawn. Both are true to a degree, with stats and Talents that increase Critical Hits, and Patrols with Bosses, along some scripted specials, having predictable points of apperance. Making them 100% predictable will not change the balance, it will shift an action game with highly variable highs and lows to a turn-based strategy game you can master. Still, if you really want, pick Witch Hunter, who has the ability to achieve 100% Crit or influence Crit of his party.

At this pace, especially considering the development of an additional game alongside it, I don’t see Vermintide 2 getting major system overhauls or depth unless it fixes a very prominent problem, those things are more likely to be experimented on in Darktide, like Crit Chance being substituted by having more weak spots on the enemy and more controlled ways to hit them.

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wholeheartedly disagree with this. examples would be crossbow, handgun and longbow in the BBB; they’re very different weapons but are balanced in their roles as snipers.

This is a novel concept but that in itself would be very difficult to balance since that would favour certain movesets very heavily over others and would create a meta focused around whatever weapons can exploit the system most

I agree with this but even the Athanor is still in need of various quality of life tweaks

There is an upper limit to difficulty, you can only increase spawns so much until you’re melting CPUs and you can only increase stats so much before people just find it annoying and unfun.

I agree, the deed system is in dire need of a rework

There will generally always be a meta for certain types of content and while that is expected it’s a matter of how forced this meta is. Right now for example there are certainly weapons that are “meta” choices but the gap between them and other options isn’t so significant that you feel forced into a specific weapon choice.

The thing is that games have limitations whether they be due to the game engine, the hardware specs, coding etc. and when it comes to the difficulty and therefore balance of the game you have to work within these limitations. There’s also a matter of scale, you can only scale things up so far before it becomes obnoxious/overwhelming and removes any grounding the gameplay had.

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Just want to say that I am 50/50 to the OP. Some stuff are great, I like the critical hit ideas and that weapons should be constructed as in the Athenor. But there are also elements which I don’t like.

Still I gav it a like, in a generous spirit. :slight_smile:

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Thats the thing I mentioned beforehand.
Just buffing every weapon to a value of 110 (using your numbers example) is dumb. It invalidates difficulty or leads to a huge number inflation. If you use this “balancing” method to often you will end up with 5 digit HP and dmg numbers on everything … That serves no purpose whatsoever. The better approach is to find a baseline. And then you have to balance each weapon to that balance. If some weapons perform above that baseline you nerf it. Simple as that.

1 Like