I have no mouth and I must scream
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I mean, BH is kind of meh with no real horde dps options. Volley kind of works with Barrage, but otherwise doesnât cleave Marauders, making it really only good for wiping Skaven hordes. Huntsmen isnât imo (a little janky with Longbow and a bit too slow for my taste in melee, but very good overall dps), but BH is overshadowed pretty easily by just WHC with Xbow. 90% of the time BHâs boss dps is complete overkill, and BH only brings bodyshots outside of that. Special kill time is a little faster vs multiple specials at once but not by much. On top of that, BH has worse non-crit breakpoints because of WHCâs tag. They could both benefit massively from thp on cleave being added to their talent options. This is probably because of WHC being too strong with ranged as well, but even careers like FK with the Handgun are bodyshotting specials.
If BH got thp on cleave and Rile the Mob was made to be 20% move speed and 10% dodge range, that would make BH pretty cool in my book.
What actually happened with the Mace and Sword? I canât remember how it was in the mod. Did Fatshark overbuff it?
Tfw Core brought Engineer to an Australian almost-pug DWONSC3+ game and got the most circles with 300+ ping. Core is op and needs to be nerfed.
Iâve become a fan of using the 1h Axe on BH. It puts the player in situations where they are forced to rely on others, which as a result leads to me playing in a much more supportive and team-aware way.
Itâs so bizarre to see Fatshark nerf Volley and also create Cloak of Mists Vanish Shade.
Thanks, I shouldâve searched for it sorry.
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Not to speak for Incan, but literally in this very topic he wrote.
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Iâm curious as to why youâre under the impression that I was advocating for burning the whole game down and starting over. Nothing I wrote about in this topic is anything of the sort.
My post was a gentle, non-specific criticism of the brand of internet video game kvetching that is so common: giant lists of stuff with numbers thrown about semi-randomly and an obsession with aesthetic âbalanceâ. Things that are only truly suited for allowing users to amuse themselves on boards like this by playing pundit because the noise in the post largely drowns out the good points being made.
This thread told about nerfing HS, GK, RV, IB, Slayer, Engineer, WS, Shade, WHC, BH, zealot, BW, UC. Directly or non directly. Regarding conservative shooter and venting damage, every career. Is this 10%~20% in your eye?
Why do you think cataclysm QP should be that much challenging? It came out 1 and harf year ago. If it is still so hard as it was, it is the real problem. It is true OP.
Then why mutators and modifiers are even exist? Are they not meant for played? You donât have to use some stupid twitch to reach your limit right now. Only seek and destroy with kind of normal twitch give you insane difficulty. I havenât said any of modded realm things. I also prefer official realm.
Game gets harder and harder because of repeatitive nerfs. Especially like heat/crit stagger nerf. I still donât understand where that idea came from. Maybe someone in secret discord group suggested? Iâm tired of full of nerf patch notes. This game doesnât need nerf right now. I donât feel that this game is easy.
Yes I donât play normal cataclysm QP. But i just donât like it. Itâs so static. I would rather play legend twitch if cataclysm QP was hard for me. I only played legend twitch before cataclysm came out. Nowadays I play very reasonable setting, 5/30 twtich cataclysm as solo. Found out it is really difficult. After nerf? Of course i should increase timer.
Nerf means like you can use ult only once while you could use twice before nerf. It already happened. Thanks to stealth patch, firesword canât get ult regen as it used to.
So doing only half things can be fun? It isnât fun to me because skill ceiling usually goes down after nerf. Do you know why I prefer to play more difficult things with buffed thngs? Because skill ceiling goes up infinitely. You will never see what you finally can.
It seems you are doing same thing again and again expecting fun. How can it be fun over 1 year.
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Your suggestions/analysis of issues sounded more like a list of unspecific, general reworks of several core systems as opposed to the smaller tweaks discussed in my original post.
Apologies if I misinterpreted your post.
(If I may add, that last quote is rather intriguing as it represents the exact opposite of the evolution from Vt1 to Vt2. The Vt2 talents have replaced the weapon and most trinket traits found in Vt1.
Were you by chance inspired by Jsatâs Vt1 in Vt2/Back to Fundamentals mod project?)
At the end of the day, I think that precise lists of specific suggestions can be of more use when desiring tangible change compared to broad statements about the basic principles of a game.
For instance, changes to Cloak of Mist, Famished Flames etc. would directly result in a âbetterâ game.
These suggestions are realistic, straightforward, easy to follow and, most importantly, easy to implement. None of them are really meant to address any sort of underlying systemic design issues.
They are there to treat the symptoms and not the cause because it is doubtful we will see sweeping changes to key designs.
Unfortunately so, as I agree with you that fixing the root of issues would be preferable - but that seems rather unlikely at this point.
And the multiplicative damage reduction!
Obviously yes. You would have some very skewed mathematics to get any higher than 10-20 %. It is not like: âOMG, they totally nerfed Shade in the ground. One of seventeen careers is now unplayable.â No, the things mentioned here are very specific changes to outliers which only make up a very small amount of the total. In the case of Shade it would be two (!!) of thirty talents of Shade. In total, what has been describeed in OP? Like 20 changes? So 20 talents would be adjusted from a pool of 300? Or five weapons from a pool of 60-80? So yea, this thread talks about toning down a very minor amount of the overall package.
Because it is the highest official available difficulty. In no Singleplayer Game ever you would see insisting so many people to being able to play the highest difficulty. Most people do not even touch anything over normal (Veteran) or hard (Champion). And the highest difficulty is still the same difficulty in five years. Yet, for Vermintide it should get easier? Why? In worst case they would have to introduce new difficulties fragmenting the community. Instead it is easier and healthier to maintain a large spectrum of difficulty on the lowest amount. Five is already plenty and shouldnât be more. So Cataclysm has to be difficult and obviously not getting easier O.o
Pre-made groups which have better coordination. Or people who seek some change from the main gameplay modes. But as these modifiers are available on all difficulties there main purposes is not the provision of difficulty itself but diversity.
Game got easier over the course of the last 12-14 months. Significantly so because all we ever get is buffs, buffs, buffs. Have you seen the patch notes of the last BBB. 80 % of the weaponary has been buffed! A lot of talents has been buffed. There are rarely any adjustements for toning down.
Yea, because secret discord groups rule the world and Tencent, our new chinese overlords, plan to sell DLCs to be allowed posting in the forum. Is it not exhausting to believe in such fringe theories?
Bringing balance closer together increases the skill ceiling because you have now choices of equal value and have to make harder decisions. If you have outliers, most meta slaves will stick to it, killing diversity. Even after the adjustment the most prominent weapon on Zealot (and also his other careers) is STILL the f*cking Axe&Falchion. Oh, so fun. Every public game has the same weapon. Oh, so diverse.
There is not a single game where power creep had a healthy effect. Buffzerking is a problem. And always just buffing brings only problems because at one point it doesnât make a difference anymore what you use because everything kills with a single click. Oh, sooo fun. There is no skill ceiling in buffed or overpowered stuff.
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My analysis is just what is obvious to me when considering career balance in a holistic sense. The addition of careers & talent trees in V2 was an experiment: one that has made an endless nightmare of tweaks and changes and reworks. This cannot be undone, but it can be mitigated by moving away from the flawed design paradigm that lead to this outcome in the first place.
Such a thing is very unlikely, but not due to the effort needed. It is because developers rarely listen to random board users. Indeed, you severely undersell how much effort would go into wholesale reworkings of every âOPâ and âuselessâ talent in the game. What I outlined would not be grossly disproportional to your own suggestions.
True, it also added more gameplay options and variety to be fair.
The more complex a game becomse, the harder to balance it becomes as a result.
Either via the addition of talents like in Vt2 or weapon traits like in Vt1 - which also had its fair share of balance problems.
While I cannot claim to know much about Vermintide programming, I firmly believe changing some numbers and tweaking the few mentioned talents is very likely considerably less work than doing what you outlined.
Which is why I only focused on the specific outliers that threaten overall balance and not âevery op and useless talent in the game.â
Do not let perfect be the enemy of good.
I respect your opinion of focusing on the underlying core design as opposed to the surface level.
The approach may be different, and yet, ultimately, the end objective is still the same since both aim to improve the game.
In all fairness, the reason why the latest BBB consisted mainly of âbuffs, buffs, buffsâ was due to the fact that a lot of the arsenal and the talents touched therein were completely useless on high difficulties. The game lacked build and gear diversity as those choices were picked only by people who were either completely clueless or extremely bored and sought challenge by gimping themselves with meme setups.
When it comes to difficulty and challenge, Iâd rather wait to see first what they come up with in terms of new content with the upcoming expansion. If at all possible, Iâd rather not have a repeat of what happened during WoMâs release, when a simultaneous nerfing of weapons and abilities coupled with an increase in difficulty and a plethora of bugs constituted what felt like a really bad experience for a lot of people.
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This.
For all we know we might get something totally new or simply just few maps and weapons. Heck maybe someone already has alpha access and this thread is early response to that(doubt it) but the balance discussion could be totally different the day chaos wastes is revealed compared to how it is now.
Even if I agree with some of the general sentiments here (aka powercreep and stuff) I personally think its bit too early to speculate.
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More than subjective. Most if not all weaponery could be used without issues on Cataclysm. The âlackâ of diversity was only a result of a few options being to strong. The alternative would have been to bring down those outliers and you would land in an equally balanced but slightly more difficult game. But not the point of the discussion. Nearly all changes over the last year have been buffs. That is a fact as you agree on.
Sure. But there was a discussion recently. And it appears that we get a new gameplay mode. If this assumption holds water we can do this discussion without any worries as a seaparate gameplay mode would have a majorly different and separate balance set-up. Also WoM release, especially the improvement of combat by introducing the stagger mechanic was a major buff. As the increase in damage more than compensates the increase of health for the enemies. It was however completely overshadowed by the bugs.
Also, in all fairness. Us having this discussion here indicates that we donât have to do anything better with our life anyway. So let us discuss. It doesnât hurt anyway as long as no action is taken upon it. And even then it will only hurt the game if we continue buffing 
Well with the BBB we nerfed most of the top and then brought the bottom tier of things up a bit to try and find an equilibrium
in my eyes, balance is give and take
(doesnât include talents, wasnât our purview)
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Yea, we had this discussion before. However, where to set the line was always a subjective choice. As it stands far more weapons have been buffed than nerfed. Something like 80/20?
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something like that (to hell with doing the actual math on that lmao)
anyway most of the top tier stuff is still at the top so ehhhh we kinda just brought the meta down a bit. Could call it powercreep that Falchion no longer blows copious amounts of-- but I donât think it really is, itâs more just a diversity increase. Not like Falch outperforms rapier or billhook by any stretch and the same logic applies to the rest of the arsenal for the most part (already established M&S was overbuffed compared to the mod values).
Baseline I feel like is a tricky thing since like, we donât even know what FSâs baseline is or if theyâve even got one, so our baseline for the most part was just âbelow the meta stuff, above the meme stuffâ but we also wanted to avoid butchering the meta stuff and simply reversing polarities rather than achieving a balance that felt good but toned down
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Doesnât really matter how many weapons are buffed or nerfed.
A while ago a lot of weapons were simply unenjoyable to play or simply didnât have a job/place among other weapons.
Maybe careers/traits should be fleshed out more so players can build around their weapons rather than simple âPower, Crit or Attack Speedâ
Hypothetically lets say HM had a talent that improved AP, it would ease Dual swords weakness and potentially be more viable.
Granted that might pigeon hole/tie certain weapons to specific careers but itâs a different approach.
WHC + Rapier is already like that in my eyes. Not a big fan of it on Zealot and itâs pretty much just a safe weapon to fall back on BH but WHC really makes rapier shine.
Not exactly and Iâll give you a very basic example. Weapons like the glaive, the greataxe or the falchion had such poor cleave that they were essentially useless against a chaos horde, particularly when paired with a career that wasnât necessarily a prime pick for melee combat, like the waystalker, the ranger veteran or the bounty hunter. Being unable to cut through more than 1-2 meatboys and getting completely destroyed by the guy standing next to them even at more than reasonable density was neither fun nor challenging, but simply a frustrating issue caused by weapons severely lacking in any form of performance. Buffing was necessary and itâs not like they are over the top in any capacity on those careers, but they are reasonable weapon choices now that perform well when played well. Previously they just hamstrung the player and it was entirely up to their individual skill level to compensate for all the added handicaps with little to no benefits. I donât think either of them qualify as âmetaâ currently, but at least you no longer feel like derp for wanting to play them.
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It doesnât change the matter of being subjective. Your example is still subjective. I have seen multiple people using these weapons before the BBB with ease. Would they have performed even better with other weapons? Probably. But that doesnât make the weapons useless before.
Something being frustrating to use is still subjective. It is just that people prefer for stuff to drop dead with less effort. But a lower baseline would have been possible. But I donât think we will get much further with this discussion and should simply disagree. I just say that buffing was not the only viable option.
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Obviously seeing doesnât equate to actually trying them for yourself and discovering whatâs what. But what were you seeing now that you mention it? Even post-patch itâs hard to come by a BH running on cataclysm without a rapier, and if thereâs a ranger veteran with a greataxe around, itâs usually me. Those weapons were virtually non-existent in the public landscape prior to the buff and I donât really understand what other options were available aside of upping their performance a bit.
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