Seems like a potentially interesting point but doesn’t get us very far unless you’ll help enlighten us as to what the root problems actually are here.
I can certainly agree that a lot of the issues are built upon one another which makes it hard to know what ought to be addressed first. For instance a weapon trait or stagger talent rework would almost certainly shift the power balance between careers considerably, so addressing individual career issues is difficult with the larger systemic problems looming over them.
Personally I’d say FS is best address wider issues such as aforementioned traits, stagger talents, and THP talents before continuing to individually tweak careers. I hope such things will be the focus of the next BBB but I think it’s more likely it will just be individual career tweaks.
Where do you think the best place to start would be to sort out some of V2’s wider issues?
I’d have gone into specific examples, but they tend to make posts needlessly long and invite a lot of bickering over minutiae. Which is fun but ultimately meaningless & self defeating. I wanted to put the point out to stand on its own first.
As for wider issues, on the build front the game has always struggled to provide players with distinct & fun options that are also of equivalent value. And a lot of that struggle is endemic to the systems they have designed. Just think of how much better the balance between the characters would be if they’d never had to fill out 3-4 careers with different ultimates & talents for all five of them or had to worry about roles.
I’d say the best thing Fatshark could do would be to axe a whole lot of the talent choices. Leave the really powerful and fun ones that directly tie into the career’s role, ultimate & passives. Cut out the chaff talents that only exist to fill up space.
In addition, I would say that Fatshark should add in a lot more options for our items. Adding in new, powerful properties & traits would help offload some power from career locked talents and into a career agnostic system.
Plus making items better on top of simplified talent selection could shake up the metagame in a very significant way and help things stay fresh. And this would also go a long way to make the loot in V2 less goddamn boring.
There is just so much that you can do in a rat bonking game and I don’t think it was ever reasonable to imagine it could be spread in a meaningful way between 15 (eventually 20) careers and 15-18 talents each. I personally would have enjoyed a more bare-bones experience like the first game. Comparing the two, sometimes I feel that Verm1’s gameplay is a good example of “less is more”.
But it is what it is. I recall that way back Diablo 3 had the same issue. Classes were built around talents that were called runes in that game and they modified how specific skills worked. There were many rune options for each skill, but obviously what ended up happening (at least during the time when I had interest in it) was that you had a few very competitive options, a couple of memes and a whole bunch of useless stuff. Which sounds painfully close to the current situation of Verm2. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I think a good overall goal is to try to make the game fun and challenging as opposed to balanced and punishing.
You know what’s the worst part? Fatshark simply has too much on their plate to implement serious balance changes. Currently, Darktide, Versus, Chaos Wastes, and 3 new classes are in the pipeline, and the incentive to work on these is much higher than balance patches because the former can be monetised.
Let’s not forget when BW was gamebreakingly OP, she remained untouched for 1.5 years.
No matter how much strong a career is, this game can be hard and there will be certain death. Also, playing shade isn’t easy as playing without enemies and shade isn’t the best career in game.
This game is harsh enough currently and i want most of career get buff without any nerf.
It would be if you had every class as strong as shade. Instantly nuking huge chunks of enemies with zero risk to themselves, why even bother having enemies in the game at that point?
Just add a bunch of jumping puzzles or something, people love those.
who do you think is stronger? there’s a few who are close, but I’m curious who you think is better.
I said HM is better than shade already and i play it. I’m actually, big fan of jumping puzzle. It would be really fun if there is.
Monsters are true obstacle during whole run. You can’t just delete monster as shade. You need ally to deal properly. It’s same for HM but HM can kite much more easily.
Shade is good but not the best. And there isn’t that much power gap between good careers IMO.
They never promised support for 10 years. What they said was 5 to 10 years which is a massive difference. Three years they soon will have, so it is just two more for the minimum they said. And considering that we still will get an expansion soon and three more classes this is more than realistic.
You wouldn’t have a game to play, dude. Just one guy pushing ahead killing everything and leaving you in the dust.
You know why BW was nerfed? Because it was the most overpowered thing this game has ever seen and completely braindead. Lingering + Famished + old Kaboom meant all you had to do was hold block, dodge, and press F to disintegrate everything with an infinite leave AoE 350% power DoT. There was no fun, no intricacy. You didn’t have to melee, you didn’t have to think about anything, it was literally just press F to win. You kill everything. And what about your teammates? What about me, playing as Mercenary? I want to get into melee, get some hits in, kill some enemies, and experience that melee combat that V2 is so known for. Y’know, have fun, the reason I play this game? I can’t have fun when there was stuff like old BW killing everything before I could even do anything. It didn’t even matter what difficulty I went into, it was broken.
So then to unironically hear people asking for careers to get buffed to the same level of power like Mist Shade is just so antithetical to me, that I don’t even know what to say. It is so far from what makes the game fun for me, I would just stop playing.
Getting hit by and killing some enemies aren’t fun at all? Why do you want to get hit by? I want to evade or block every single damage unless i want to fill up my ult. Also I want to slaughter many enemies and feel that i’m powerful.
Shade isn’t BW. I remember weave and fow were hard even with BW when WOM came out. Cataclysm QP was also harsh enough. I agree that BW was strong than ever but I miss that BW. It was fun to me and game was still challenging. I don’t know how you played. However, if you use staff aggresively, dps isn’t that much different from now. It was good because of safety.
So you want to play same thing again again and your skill grows, game feels easy. Then you are not gonna play anything but what you always have played. For the balance sake, your character become weaker so that difficulty feels same. What if you become vermintide god tier player? You dodge everything and shoot like aimbot. Then delete all talents and play without gear?
I’m sorry, but I literally don’t understand what you’re saying here.
Regardless, our views of this game are completely polar opposite. You want increasingly powerful careers that can kill more and more and more enemies on screen. You liked BW that killed everything at the click of a button, you think Mist Shade is average when you can stay invisible 80% of the time and instakill everything, killing patrols with one ult. You want careers that can kill hundreds of enemies in a second. Cataclysm becomes Legend, Onslaught becomes meaningless, specials spawning every 5 seconds now spawn every 1 second to challenge you. The game starts breaking down because of how many enemies the game has to throw at you. Patrols now come with 50 Chaos Warriors, and get blitzed immediately, Huntsman gets permanent invisibility, RV gets permanent invisibility, FK gets 1 minute invulnerability, IB becomes unkillable, nothing can kill or harm you, and now you have to go to Cataclysm 3 Deathwish Onslaught Tzeentchian Twins HBFS The Vanguard to have fun, when before regular Cataclysm was enough. Monsters start spawning like specials and get deleted in seconds when they should feel special individually. Nothing makes sense anymore, everybody gets bored, computers get fried and game dies out. That’s how I see it.
The funny thing is that apparently handmaiden is overpowered. I guess if you’re playing tag then yeah. Anyway, this thread seems to be getting more and more off-topic.
This is actually the first time I see proposition of Shade nerfs in a quite soft manner rather than “REMOVE VANISH REMOVE MIST REMOVE INSTA KILLS REMOVE DAGGERS REMOVE EVERYTHING SHE CAN’T BE AN ASSASSIN BRUH ME NO LIKEY”.
Though I’d say your nerf is a bit too soft, but it’s still a reasonably good path. Cooldown on Vanish can be around 2-2.5 seconds so if you’re backstabbing trash for permainvis it would actually require at least some timing.
CDR on ulti is too a good proposition, should be lower, especially considering majority of good Shade players run CDR daggers anyway, so in the right hands you can have a 100% ulti uptime.
But I’m all in in the idea of Shade being a glass canon that spends time in invis. It fits the character and playstyle perfectly and it is fun. Nerf her damage or anything you want, but removing her invis would be a crime.
Level 20 talent row ideas are too pretty good, though I’m not sure if backstab talent would be viable even in this buffed condition.
How? I guess she can speedrun better, but that’s about it.
What?
I feel like you’re playing a completely different game to the rest of us lol. Excluding busted things like RV pistol, shade has super good monster damage and can absolutely solo them without issue.
I don’t play speen run nor modded realm either. Both are not fun. I use twitch and deed to increase difficulty. I use handmaiden to kite 3 monsters over 30 min on my own.
I once played difficulty that monsters spawn like specials. Hyper twitch without blessing on legend. Couldn’t play on cataclysm because it was too hard. Twitch+seek and destroy let special spawn insanely. 399% twitch send a lot of CWs. I don’t need harder things. That’s harsh enough. Also fun enough. If half of careers get nerf like this thread, maybe i can still play, but it can be unreasonably hard. So i will have to lower difficulty. Why I always have to lower difficulty than i have played? Even though my skill improved much more.
By meaning that deleting monster, numerically killing monster in around 15s. Shade can do if your ally hold aggro. But it’s just ideal. Other monster dps can do that reliably. Soloing monster is really harder than it sounds. If you are alone, you have to clear every single threat and hit monster. You have to kill multiple specials fast while kiting monster or just do dps on monster while invisible. Shade can only hit once or twice. HM also can hit monster twice but at least, take down 3 specials with one ult.
I agree that this thread is meaningless. How insisting nerf over half of existing things can be meaningful. You started with nonsense.
That’s a lot of BS written there O.o You say the game is harsh but you seem to need heavy Twitch Modifier to reach this state. Don’t you understand that if single careers can survive such a dump of enemies like in Twitch that balance has issues?
Because it is possible. The whole balance discussion has to center around the difficulties available within the official realm. If you think something is to difficult than you can always go down a difficulty. There is only a problem if Recruit is too difficult. However, the way up is limited and saying people should play just modded or some stupid Twitch is just rude. The difficulty should be available within reason in the official quickplay pool. I could ask the same? Why is Cataclysm so much easier than it was at release despite me playing worse? Because they game got powercreeped. It is only reasonable to keep the balance between career powers and difficulties constant and if it went out of whack it has to be corrected.
Half of existing things? This thread maybe touches 10-20 % if it is even that much. The alternative would be to buffzerk everything to the meta level trivializing the game. How that can be considered meaningful is a riddle to me. Buffing only causes problem and is no fun in the long term.
People who want to feel powerful have these options within the official realm. People who want challenging and fun gameplay are getting restricted. Balancing means adjusting the minority to the average. The things listed here are an overly powerful minority. As such they have to be toned down. Balance changes for WoM and the last BBB have been super-buffing for most part, so some kind of adjustments and toning down is more than justified.
I’d like to add that Official Cata hordes are too basic. There’s too many pure chaff hordes and a Swift Slaying build is hardly required to solo a Cata horde, so tweaking Cata to have more complex enemy compositions and less extreme lows in difficulty in addition to tweaks to the careers and overall balance would be ideal. Not enough shielded enemies as well.
Fair point, I thought about opening half a dozen threads but ultimately decided against it.
It might not have quite turned out the way I intended it to to be fair. Might have been a better choice to divide it into several threads.
Still, I deem it crucial to keep an overview of all changes instead of losing sight of the overall balance by going into too much detail for every individual change - because, if this thread has shown anything, then that there are a lot of aspects that could/should see changes.
Concerning the thread as a whole, at least it has sparked some discussion and has hopefully made FS more aware of potential aspects that could be changed.
Other dev teams like to post updates such as “What the team is working on” that contain a similar list of acknowledged concerns and the dev’s ideas on what to do with them.
Since FS do not really do that, I figured it might as well be be me or anyone else that throws their ideas out there and brings some attention to balance
The last BBB was in part motivated by the Weapon Rebalance Mod and while my thread is far from the level of work of that mod, it had the same motivation: to cause people to think about balance.
I understand where you are coming from even though the effort required to change the core game principles would likely be monunmental compared to changing some values for current talents.
I’m with you on the topic of making the underlying design better, that would be the best option.
My post was aimed at working with what we got at the moment, tweaking small things to fit the existing game instead of coming up with a full rework of basically almost every concept.
Generally, it is easier to fix a thousand tiny things than it is to redo the full package.
Compare it to changing the roof of the house instead of rebuilding it from scratch - as unstable as the whole house might currently be.
On base cata, base Slayer ult staggers some elites. Crunch enables it to stagger almost every elite. So no boss stagger and less potent stagger versus some elites if going with base Slayer jump aeo stagger level.
Exact details can be determined as seen fit, e.g. no stagger vs CW overheads, or vs CWs in general and so on.