The Powercreep Problem

Well, the second point of the OP states that the disparities between modded and official cata have been powercrept, which OP considers something that shoud be be adressed because normal cata is not a challenge for him anymore. So while it wasn’t explicitly stated it was heavily implied.

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I kind of was dreaming of something like that way back when I did the balance suggestion doc (which ended up going nowhere, as many would recall)

But I agree - we desperately need some serious rebalanse and testing at this point, or we risk losing track of what the game is supposed to be <_>

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This is probably the only post I’ll reply to, but it’s come up a lot, and you’re insistent on telling people what I do mean. As someone who plays modded, it does not mean that I want the game balanced to be like modded.

The disparity comes from the fact my friends like live progression and I want challenge. I would think more people would play modded if it had live progression, not because people incapable of it (I don’t have numbers, but I’ve been told at one point, Onslaught lobbies in VT1 used to outnumber non modded ones).

That said, I enjoy a good pub, and used to do them often, and feel I can’t right now due to the power creep. Modded is there and I play it, but its difficulties are not a solve for this issue. Amping a difficulty is not a solve for balance/powercreep. See the point, “do I run a trash setup or do I play walking simulator and make my friends’ games unenjoyable?” Please don’t put words in my mouth. Someone above me said it best: “the gap between optimal and bad is too large.”

Disparity isn’t due to me being a modded player, it’s due to people reaching and upper end too quickly and either leaving live or leaving the game, which means less skill mixing in an enjoyable way.

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As much as i am onboard with the idea that powercreep is bad for various reasons, like our new career having a teamwide 25% healboost and a build that does metric tons of damage, there are a few cases you raised that i wish to object to.

  1. Convocation

The problem with convo was and to a degree still is that the difficulty doesnt come from there being a lot of enemies or difficult enemies spawn in. No the difficulty is artificially created by jamming us into an extremely poor environment where enemies have a ton of advantages.

Flashbangs, narrow circle with that bath in the middle to kill space, enemies spawning silently below the platform (specials!) and specials spawning on and attacking silently from the cliffs.

These elements do raise the difficulty but not in a good way, they just abuse things that players cant deal with like silent enemies and force you to hope to god a special wont get a favorable spawn that you cant do anything about. You dont learn squat from this except that you have to run and let the progress bar reset now and then…and how to watch your teammates get vaporized every so often because of something they could do nothing about.

The main deal with that event is supposedly that sometimes elites+specials spawn in and you dont have a lot of space to safely move, woho how dangerous…except you can drop out, kill everything and then walk back into the circle until the next wave comes in. Difficulty entirely removed minus the above joykillers.

I much, much, much prefer the chaos wastes editions of this with a wider area of battle with more enemies and even bosses.

  1. Beastmen

Dont raise beastmen as an example of powercreep if you know that they were a problem! Heck they are even still a problem with disjoined animations and how insanely the difficulty spikes when they send in armored hordes + banner spam.

Thank Morgrim for the trollhammer.

  1. Nurgloth

Nurgloth isnt difficult for good reasons either, it´s just a DPS check and a timing check if you fail that followed by yet another DPS check.

Starts by him spawning some adds and you bash em up, if no elites pop in it´s silly safe even with flies unless your teammates are all very weak in melee. Then he goes to the middle and you bash him up.

Do enough damage? Back to adds&flies until third phase if you keep that up.

Dont do enough? He teleports around the edges of the room spawning enemies, if you do damage to him with bad timing now he´ll spawn a double or triple wave and also start his flies phase again.

Third phase? Aight now the edges of the room blow up every so often (damage+knockup) and he is flying around swiping his scythe and adds are coming in. Seems like a pretty normal boss fight…except he has massive knockbacks, massive range, drains your stamina extremely fast and if you get hit by the knockbacks you cant block which lets his adds or himself hit you.

This isnt good difficulty either! This is artificial and extremely forced! Its just a question of “do you blow him up before he kills you with knockback spam or not?” !!!

Sorry to nitpick, i do agree that game has powercreep problems and fatshark has problems with their design philosophies that are plainly visible in places but these above points are things i do not want to overlook.

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Mistshade just got hammered pretty well i think.

nah it definitely killed the worst of it, it´s no longer so unconditionally powerful&easy to use which is what has reined it in. A person cant just walk up behind a goat/rat patrol and stab away.

They cant just stab any random target and start a crit fueled spree, nope it takes having a bit of awareness, positioning and a bit of luck to get the most out of it now.

I don’t think anyone likes the change. It still leaves Mist Share roughly as OP, and it pissed off the people who liked the playstyle. Just nuke the combo and redo it.

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Thats why rest of event should be buffed not nerfed to ground like it was with end events of fort baconbreakfast or enginees of war

most of time that event is straight up just wait till they drop and clean them without any risk

Depends on how early you get those events and what modifiers are in play, with extra elites or specials things can get really spicy in the later stages of an expedition.

Having one and a half chaos patrol come down on your heads along with a spawn&other enemies is an interesting experience.

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Okay, thank you for clarifying that. Powercreep needs to be adressed so no arguement there.

Hmm. Vermintide 1 had less than a thousand average players outside of dlc updates. I don’t know about private lobbies but usually you had about 1 or 2 public cata lobbies at best (at least in EU).
It may be true that modded lobbies outnumbered unmodded ones, but the game was almost dead so it doesn’t mean as much as one would assume.

Do you have any numbers on that? I don’t have any either but if we look at the achievement statistics:

  • only 3% of total players have reached level 30 with every character
  • only 5,4% of players have completed skittergate on legend

I know these statistics encompass all players who have ever played the game and many of them have left but without getting further into it it doesn’t look like people are leaving the game because it is too easy.

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Stats are anecdotal, unfortunately. Only FS has access to those stats. I will say post-tourney; there’s been a really nice uptick in modded and modded newbies, and they are more than capable of clearing modded difficulties. Playerbase is very talented–moreso than I think the community expects.

Using Steam stats is a bit of a false positive of results as well; since it includes people who own the game, even those who barely touched it, finished 10 hours, and left. I do have some official stats on live realm that were accurate as of early last year; but sadly don’t know if I’m allowed to share them or not. :frowning:

A better question, maybe, is “how long should the progression path be?” Getting into Cata now is less of a learning curve than before, which is part of what makes me ponder on powercreep and part of why I wrote this.

Okay, that’s my last reply to this thread so I can keep my promise to myself. Appreciate you keeping me in check in this discussion; you bring up valid points on my own flawed data. :slight_smile:

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In my opinion, the fundamental issue has always been Verm2’s lack of consistency when it comes to the kind of experience it wants to offer. And the fact that, in a sense, the quality of combat has been substituted for quantity from the very beginning. I love the game, but I feel like it’s in an ongoing identity crisis.

Verm1 was a game on a much smaller but more focused scale. You had to deal with a reduced number of enemies and had very few tools at your disposal. Mastering the game essentially meant understanding mechanics that were never explicitly revealed, but they were implicitly understood through experience: fighting with a wall at your back, learning where the monster triggers were, learning kite loops in specific parts of each map and so on. Sure, there was a lot less to do in it, but what it did offer presented a lot more tactical depth and a sense of true accomplishment upon overcoming challenges.

It’s not that the above mentioned depth wouldn’t exist anymore in Verm2, but it’s overshadowed and diluted by two factors, which are pressing F and the overall amount of enemies. A lot of career abilities simply substitute skillful play. There is no need to consider the most fundamental aspect of the game, namely positioning, if you can simply brute force your way through the opposition. To counter this, the official realm simply overloads the game with enemies, bringing it to Serious Sam levels of ludicrous. Some aspects of the modded realm go about addressing the problem in a way that in my opinion is even more clumsy, namely overloading the number of enemies even further and giving them stagger resistance. The former doesn’t really make sense for me due to its lack of elegance. One of the most dangerous combos you could ever meet in Verm1 was a single stormvermin surrounded by clan rats, and it was due to the fact that the stormvermin’s armor would stop any strike and the clan rats around him could poke you. It’s bizarre that the only way in which Verm2 can reach a comparable level of threat is by dogpiling the player in a blob of enemies so dense they end up existing within each other. Or by the threat of them sliding around corners in roundhouse swings or overhead attacks. The latter aspect, namely stagger resistance, becomes inconsistent with the overall experience, given the abilities of the heroes. If Kruber can literally knock a stormfiend off the map by shouting “Nyaaah!”, why couldn’t he stagger a stormvermin by swinging a heavy attack? I’m all for the stormvermin being unmovable, but not if the much bigger rat can be bullied silly. It just makes no sense.

This becomes even more confusing as careers themselves become inconsistent thematically. Verm1 was a game about 5 rogue adventurers on largely equal footing, finding themselves stuck in a backwater town overrun by vermin. This would have been the case for Verm2 as well closer to release, but now we have shifted the narrative to heroes such as Grail Knights or Sisters of the Thorn venturing into the Chaos Wastes. I think that within Warhammer’s theme, these heroes are way above the pay-grade of the threats presented in Vermintide. They are not meant to struggle against clan rats or marauders, but are able to take on demons, dragons or vampires. And the fact that they still coexist with careers like the lowly Mercenary means that demons, dragons or vampires could never be a meaningful addition to the game either, not if as powerful enemies as they are, they can be yeeted off the map by a simple “Nyaaah!”.

I think the game has become a prisoner of its own ambitions. In an attempt to offer as much content to as big of an audience as possible, it fell in a vicious circle of providing more and more powerful toys to play with, while failing to also offer a challenge that was as enjoyable and of the philosophical simplicity in Verm1.

As a final note, I would add that my last 2 cata expeditions consisted of myself and 2 other players trying to keep up with a steamroller but never quite managing. The first one was a Manaan’s fury BH who waterpistolled all the way into Sigmar’s favor. The other was a SotT who jav-chucked her way into Lileath’s grace. The rest of the party’s damaged summed up couldn’t match theirs at the end. So yeah, anecdotally I’d say things have slipped a bit out of hand.

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The vast majority of content is utterly trivial now. Bosses last less time than patrols, no-one gives a F about ammo as it is either completely nullified by talents and traits or downright unnecessary due to class choices.

Last BBB made virtually every weapon overpowered in legend and has turned legend into the new champion. People barrel through the levels with scant regard for anyone or anything else and loads of classes and builds can now solo bosses in seconds and scoot around simply beating things sh1tless before the enemy even get to raise a shield.

We’re back to the point where the dodge meta made things completely dull and the stagger mechanic is nullified, so another thing launched with WoM that is now a complete waste of time.

IN fact, players as so powerful already that they had to be utterly hamstrung to start chaos wastes. I wonder if ChW would be such a challenge if everyone was just allowed their usual build and didn’t have to rebuild every time? Definitely boss chests would be completely trivialised by the bosskiler classes and the first three-four maps would be a cruise through.

We are at the culmination of the last BBB. Weapons were boosted a lot by FS, and now everything has to be at least as good as the average weapon, and to sell DLC it need to be more powerful. It just happens that elf is currently boosted to the stratosphere with Moonfire Bow and the latest class, although it could be argued Shade was the class that made things trivial long before anything else showed up.

The real problem is now that to redress the balance and reign in the powercreep everyone is going to feel bad again. Either things like levels, enemies or end events need to be buffed as @Perteks suggests (I’m not against this if it is a general increase in threat in line with the progression of the story) or the heroes need a fundamental nerf in power to everything that trivialises content. Shade, BH and GK ults, SoTT I.Radiance and Doomsight, BW stagger, and so on. Thing is, We’ve all been through this once with Stagger Mechanic at WoM and that cause a tidal wave of salt.

So now FS are a bit stuck.

Yet… @Fenrok also has found the nuggety heart of the problem. Maybe the game needs to be catered to the masses who play at Champ and below, and those who are at Legend and above have far too much influence in what goes on? It definitely feels like it sometimes but IF everything feels the same in Veteran and Champion, why bother progressing? And so we’re back to my opening point.

Powercreep has trivialised content at Legend -meaning higher level players are into Cata, or Modded- so exactly how dull is it for new players in veteran or champion who just swing away and win? Could it be that the complete lack of challenge coupled with lacklustre loot and rewards just doesn’t make the game engaging at veteran or champion?

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Sienna mace that good huh?

the only weapon that got made overtuned by the BBB was the mace & sword. Idk why you keep trying to die on this hill regarding the weapons especially since a good chunk of meta stuff was nerfed and all the current major powercrept weapons (masterwork, moonfire etc.) were not a result of the BBB. Cloak of Mist and certain other talent tweaks definitely did introduce a level of powercreep, however.

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My opinion is that the power creep is alleviating the issue of an incredibly grindy progression system.

Without special events, it takes 2-3 missions to go up a level. If you haven’t perfected your loot sudoku, it takes an incredibly long time to reach 300 hero power equipment. That’s on average like 20 - 30 hours to get your talents on one hero if you only win and only play one hero.

I made another very wordy post about this but losing is way too punishing. Progression takes forever if you only win and if you are losing 50% of the time (appropriate challenge anyone?) It’s crippling from a progression standpoint.

So you get this ugly situation where players get frustrated if they don’t win because it sets them back on this road of incredible grind. That creates an environment of hard loss aversion which contributes to, among other things, power creep. It’s this power creep that makes the players happier from a progression standpoint and evens out the grind, but trivializes some of the challenge that keeps the game interesting.

And then you have this incredibly broad two dimensional spectrum of both player skill and hero power that contributes to a nightmarish balance conundrum.

  1. Hard enough? Lack of progression absolutely kills player retention.

  2. Speed progression with higher win rates? Players aren’t challenged enough to have the full experience.

So the bottom line, for me, is that I think power creep is an inappropriate solution to a very real progression issue (loss is too punishing). Fixing power creep without fixing progression I think will always be a loss for either the 250+ hour veterans who want the challenge without the loopholes or the very respectable 20-60 hour players waiting VERY patiently to unlock the actual game.

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I play twitch cata wit ha group of friends - we even play twitch cata for CW. - because thats what we like. Power creep is not an issue for me. I don’t feel overpowered at all when I play the highest level of difficulty in the official realm.

Powercreep imo is relative. Would I feel overpowered with my temp health Sienna build on Champion - absolutely.

Would I feel overpowered with a twitch CW Patrol and a reg pack rat patrol on screaming bell on cata - hell no - absolutely not.

Maybe I’m not adding to the conversation here, but I don’t see this as a problem at all. This game is extremely hard - and it has levels for all tiers of players to not feel like it’s a cake walk

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That is another thing I don’t understand. I see people complaining about how overpowered they are - and then when u probe them a little bit, you realize they are playing Legend, or even Cata.

Why not play twitch, and set the modifiers to 200, and get a double mino with 6 specials. The feeling of being overpowered completely fades. And if u are able to still feel overpowered, then congrats you are godlike

Jokes aside, and not trying to be facetious, I feel this might misrepresents the sentiment of difficulty in the game amongst the players we have.

There are usually only about 3-4 Cata games in my region in the US. Compared to the multitude of Legend, Champion and other difficulties. I get the impression that not a lot of people play Cata “because of the difficulty and challenge”

You might want to have a challenge playing Cata - and you should, but you will get better at it over time. When you feel you can cake walk Cata, then it’s time to elevate to something else → Twitch, Twitch Cata, Onslaught, Incursion etc.

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I play twitch deeds a lot and can safely say it still feels trivialized.
Played moonfire bloodshot loaded bow WS and a friend ended up leaving due to boredom and lack of contribution.

Granted everybody plays differently and not every career is abusable, but there are cases of builds/career combos just trivializing official realm content.

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Not really, no. Weapons that no one ever used were buffed a bit, sure, mainly so that you wouldn’t feel like a completely gimped meme for picking them up. People can actually play them now but it’s not like they’ve all turned into popular picks that melt maps start-finish. Some top end weapons were nerfed (less than they deserved imo) and they’re still the most popular picks across the board. Dual daggers and Sword & Dagger were nerfed for instance, yet they remain the absolute best melee weapons available for the elf and completely outperform the rest of her arsenal.

Overtuned weapons were released as dlc, but I think that the even bigger issue in regard to blatant power creep problems are talents being all over the place. Some of them are so bad that again you feel like a gimped meme for taking them, others just make the game explode. I think expeditions really show the disparity between players who understand the game at a more fundamental level and players who get carried all the way through Cataclysm by busted weapons and talents. The former manage the early stages of expeditions just fine with their skills and basic kit, largely regardless of what they are playing, while the latter are all tied up by the first drop down.

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:sweat_smile: Ranged meta back when THP worked with ranged. Just pyro deleting anything and everything while the rest of the team headbanged in the background.

I’d say bosses melting is partly independent from general power creep and more a problem with specific weapons/careers. If they buff bosses too hard they’ll be even more of a slog and a pain to deal with on a team that has little boss damage, which will encourage using these careers even harder.

On the other hand constantly having bosses melt in 5s flat has turned them into a total joke. An even more ridiculous joke when a new group support/utility career has that kind of insane boss damage. The idea I liked the most that I saw around here (I don’t know who had it first) for bosses is to give them an anti-burst mechanics, e.g. if they take more than x damage in y time they get a stacking damage reduction buff.

Either way ludicrous boss damage has no place on SotT imo. MWP could use some reduction to the boss damage it deals too, that part of the weapon is broken.

On specific bosses: did they remove troll’s health regen at lower HP amounts? They used to regen at 50% and 25%, now they seem to just die after the 50% regen phase, without ever going into another.

This is probably the best summary of Convocation I have seen. And tbh, with how cramped it is + the horrible lighting flickers when you are at the edge, it really is an end event that punishes your team depending on career comp and whether players know they can drop down - many newbies I have played with feel they have to camp mid and die as much as possible - the most success I had was where 3/4ths the team dropped down taking many enemies with them and I or another guy stayed up in the tiny arena dancing around in the circle to progress the meter.

Mobility careers and control careers have a big advantage with how tiny the arena is - Handmaiden can singlehandedly turn Convo from a loss to a victory. FK is amazing too for sheer control. GK can cleave multiple elites in one go. IB’s ult can be a life saver too, whereas OE is useless but RV can still be solid thanks to smoke bomb knockback + stealth. BH meanwhile has the nightmare of a cramped area with lots of enemies and specials you can’t always see coming in as you get blinded by the lighting. Merc and WHC can both do solid work with their shouts. BW can stagger and fling enemies around while setting them alight.

Having a team of e.g. Outcast Engineer, Huntsman, Waystalker and BH like I did in QP are just a huge pain if you try to play the event by the ‘book’ and all stay in the circle up top.

On the beasty boys, yeah, if they didn’t still have problems with unsynced animations and the fact sometimes they seem to ignore stagger entirely (e.g. you shield bash a horde and for some reason one or two don’t get knocked over at all) - or the fact you can have twenty archers stack in the exact same place firing through a horde - people would find them a lot less annoying.

It’s a shame, I really enjoy them, but the jank they come with can turning an otherwise fun mission into a frustrating one. Also banner spam knockback is absolute hell on some Chaos Waste maps.

I can’t really comment on Nurgloth, he definitely does turn tricky if you don’t have high boss damage or your ranged careers get locked down, but I do enjoy the fight’s mechanics for the most part. The main bane with that fight is the fodder enemies that trickle in.

The problem with the 3% no. is I know a lot of people that either play only one or two characters or have at least one they outright don’t like at all. I have friends with several hundred hours that still don’t have that achievement. A better one is e.g. Exemplar (which 18.1% have) which you get for unlocking all talents for a career.

Beyond that, the achievement for equipping a common item has been obtained by a mere 82% of players, indicating that should potentially be our baseline not 100%, but then unlock a first talent point is 78%, complete the first act (at all) is 51%, act two is 45% and act 3 is 42%, so your point is basically speculation as to why they are leaving - doing all three acts on Recruit is not difficult and yet it seems very few of the total % Steam counts have.

If we go with 40% completing act three and ~5% doing Skittergate on Legend that’d imply 1/8th play on Legend but I’d still take that number with a grain of salt - maybe some people hate Skittergate and play anything but - we can’t really prove or disprove this without any other data.

If I had to take a guess, based on friends, it is the grind not the difficulty they don’t like, but again, applying this to the entire VT2 community is speculation too.

Dodge is so wildly unreliable with latency atm for me you have to push/control enemies to not slowly eat attrition hits. If I’m hosting I can dodge most attacks safely unless my framerate is dying (Chaos Wastes with particle effects is the worst offender), if I play with someone else the enemies sometimes seem to track me when I dodge even if I started the dodge after they started their attack. They slide all over the place again atm, sometimes they dart left/right rapidly. Back dodges when fighting a boss + fodder are a death sentence since the fodder just slide 10m to get you (I heard it might be a slotting problem with enemies getting boosted into a freed-up slot while doing a moving attack?), you basically have to push the fodder at the same time as you dodge the boss attacks.

But I do have to agree that QP Legend and Legend with friends at least feel a lot easier (bots are another story, they feel worse since I returned from my last long break from the game, the builds that used to work for full book Legend with them don’t work for me anymore). I’m not sure what it is that is making Legend feel so, if it’s just new career/new weapon powercreep or what.

On the other hand showing new players Recruit/Vet is painful, they seem to spawn less enemies than when I remember learning the game back in the open beta + launch. Recruit especially spawns far too few, it doesn’t really prepare them for the higher ones, but maybe I’m biased from being so long past that stage. I could’ve sworn open beta Recruit spawned more enemies in waves etc however.

This is a fair point, the grind has always been egregious in this game, it was improved by giving all difficulties the same XP for completion, but changing the dailies to 5 shillings for example did the opposite for many people, they get 5 measly shillings and no boxes/chances at reds. And it’s been said to death but rerolling anywhere from once to several dozen times to get the two properties you want on an item feels really unsatisfying and unrewarding, if you’re impatient or were a newbie like me all the way back you possibly even made the worse mistake of wasting crafting materials rerolling oranges only to scarcely have anything to reroll with once you started getting reds.

This is anecdotal, but for me I didn’t play Cata for ages because I didn’t like Weaves and many of the changes back with WoM beta/launch (talents excluded but those changes came free), so I refused to fork out twenty bucks for WoM, especially when none of my friends were going to so I’d have nobody to play Cata with anyway outside QP. Worse, even if the host has Cata their friends can’t join as they won’t have it unlocked from the challenge.

In fact I didn’t pick it up until Chaos Wastes / the sale since I enjoyed that mode a lot and wanted to show FS this is what I want more of (plus I was interested in Cata). Meanwhile my friends still didn’t touch it even at half off thanks to not being interested in Weaves or the other stuff in the DLC, even those that are super interested in the challenge of Cata didn’t - some said they might at 75% off.

Cata really needs to be decoupled from WoM. Or at least allow non-WoM players to play Cata with a host/friend that has it unlocked. I’d prefer Cata to simply be decoupled and made available to all tbh.

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It´s just poor design really, ranged careers cant use ranged weapons because off adds coming in but without those adds then it´d be too easy. No matter what it ends badly.

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