I don’t really mind his damage necessarily, I just think he’s a bit overkitted. Great utility via his ult and tags, insane personal damage/an instakill on most enemies, pretty high survivability, it’s just a little much when put all together.
Flense is silly too, absolutely, and just doesn’t fit his character very well anyway.
I guess you wanted to say ‘was never there to begin with’, right?
I do love me some Vermintide 1, the atmosphere is a whole lot different than V2, mostly to factors others have mentioned in this thread. But we are talking about V2 now, and i don’t think V1 style of play will ever come back (in V2 that is, Darktide news mentioned it being a survival horror FPS, so less focused on slaughtering hordes and more on avoiding them).
Yes, you can make comparisons on how through talents/ults in combination with specific weapons allowed powercreep to be there in the first place while V1 never had all of that, but staying realisitic here, talents and ults will stay in Vermintide 2, they are a core gameplay mechanic.
The only thing we can do (imo) is talk about how they should be balanced: when is the dreaded ‘powercreep’ term applicable, what should be done about it, getting some good metrics and testing on possible solutions, and so on and forth.
You know what that sounds like, BBB 3. I don’t think there’s a way around that (and i do want it to happen). But the last one was one drawn up by the community, so i doubt how much effort FS is willing to put in yet (in their perspective) another one. They do said there would be more after the last one, but hopefully sooner than after all careers come out.
Personally I see the “Problem” with the Core-Game-Design of Vermintide, which is in essence a Skillbased game. (which is no problem, I love games like this).
A great Player can make nearly any class with any combination of talents and weapons work, so ofcourse a already great player that takes SoT will be OP, but that goes also for careers like Huntsman even if you take Bow and basically have hit 9 out of 10 headshots.
While bad/mediocre players can take a class like SoT and still me mediocre or outright bad with it.
Thats why I think, just leave it as is, maybe tweak some things but it is still a PvE COOP so there is no PayToWin or true Competition between Player (green circles for everybody to see was a mistake xD just give a personal statscreen at the end).
But then again I nearly always play with premade since many players in random legend games don´t seem to even grasp the gamebasics like when to heal, which item to use for heal, what potions are for, when and what to Tag etc.
The last BBB was to 50 % done from Fatshark. The community did comment on the talents but all the design ideas have been by Fatshark.
Also, I am not to hopeful that another BBB would solve the power creep issue. The last BBB was a buffzerking fiesta. I am not sure that Fatshark would be willing enough to tear though the whining when they for once tackle the overperformers and outliers.
Yes and no. What I meant was light attacking for fishing Killing Blow. This was possible at one point with certain weapons (cough - Rapier - cough) and then changed. See here:
" ** Killing Blow: Now requires the attack to deal damage to the target to trigger*"
People have been fishing with light attacks before as they do now with Fervency (or WHC in general). Difference is that you have this time guaranteed damage as every hit is a crit. So they arent 100 % the same. But it is based on the same principle.
you could still kill SV with killing blow if you landed light headshots
effectively the same as WHC killing shot in concept. Also anyone who claims V1 didn’t have powercreep of its own or balance issues/overpowered stuff is frankly high as a kite and relying on nostalgia goggles.
nah that last bit is just putting out there in case anyone thinks about bringing it up lol
Not sure if this is adressed at me. But I do not think that Vermintide 1 had not powercreep issues. They were obviously there.
It’s really just Killing Shot that’s the issue. The same light spam happens without Animosity being involved at all. It would still happen if Fervency was outright removed. WHC’s single target melee dps with Rapier would still be nearly the highest in the game without Killing Shot (without Killing Shot it’s comparable to Grail Knight with Exec if the Rapier WHC has a high headshot %).
Run 20% Crit Chance + Wild Fervour + Unending Hunt. Effectively the same thing as Fervency but safer, with less chance for overkill/less waste when overkilling.
Possibly wouldn’t be fair to remove Killing Shot for the other less headshot damage bonus boosted weapons, but it’s completely Fatshark’s fault for making the headshot damage talents favour specific weapons instead of making them simple damage increases on headshot.
I disagree. It’s pretty average survivability. Eternal Guard, aoe ult and dodge/stamina recovery. No damage reduction. Takes more care/force of will to survive than it does for a lot of other melee careers.
@Velsix
I think Witch-Hunt is part of, if not majority of the reason his pickrate is so high.
It’s a lot of team value, a straight 20% debuff for just tagging.
His other DPS stuff could easily be reined in.
Aside from that, yeah SoTT could be nerfed/rebalanced and actually improved in other areas.
The games balance has slowly been shifting since WOM, if not earlier.
There isn’t competition, but with OP builds comes an absence of cooperation also. Having one person steam through a level also defeats the purpose of the game for the three others.
I agree with a lot of the points discussed in this thread: General powercreep, the discrepancy between good and overpowered setups is too big, and the monster / monster killer ults problem where monsters are either trivial or a slog - those are the most important ones to me. About the nerfing of certain end events I’m a bit ambivalent because some are certainly outliers to the rest so that requires fixing, but on the other hand there are also way easier ones that could use a buff instead. (And not to mention SotT because she’s so obviously broken. That dev blog touting her as a support instead of damage dealer made me literally laugh.)
But I wanted to mostly comment a little more about people in this thread blaming weapon balance and even the last BBB for the power creep. Because I disagree with that. The weapons themselves are actually mostly balanced very well, with the exception of a lot of stuff released after the BBB. The issues with balance in this game are almost solely the problems of abilities and talents.
Let me give an example by comparing two weapons: the rapier and Sienna’s mace. When you’d ask any regular player in this game, they’ll say the rapier is top tier, and the mace “has its uses” at best. But lets compare the weapons on their own merits:
Rapier: Fast low damage lights, powerful but slower single target heavy attack, good finesse multiplier, good mobility, but no stagger power and can’t fight its way out of pressure well.
Mace: Pretty nice sweeping and cleaving attacks with good stagger, good single target heavies, okay mobility, but can fight its way out of pressure alright.
When you look at the characteristics alone the weapons both have situations in which they shine, and in which they are suboptimal.
So why is it that the rapier is seen as top tier? Because it is usually found in the hands of a Witch Hunter Captain. Who gets even more finesse bonus with headshot damage trait and the Assassin talent, flense which scales insanely well with the light sweeps, “free” front blocks, even more mobility, compensation for its weakness under pressure with a mass stagger ult, and the ability to fish for crit headshots really seals the deal with how easy that is with this weapon. Whereas the Mace gets at best a damage or crit chance bonus on characters that don’t have super good defenses in a frontline where this weapon is intinsically best. Had this been V1 where talents and abilities didn’t exist, we would find these two weapons to be balanced pretty well. But because of the classes their effective performance in V2 is so different. You can’t solve that by tweakung the weapons. You need to tweak the classes.
I know this is just one example, and I’m definitely not pleading for a Vermintide without talents. But I just wanted to point out the weapons themselves aren’t really the problem. It’s also perfectly fine when one career is a bit better than another for dealing damage at the tradeoff of other stuff, especially if the class specializes in a certain aspect of damage (single target, hordes, etc.), but right now the difference in effectiveness between careers is too big to properly balance. We probably all agree WHC and Shade are better than Unchained or Slayer, but Unchained and Slayer are actually pretty good classes that are perfectly viable in even the highest official and unofficial difficulties. Buffing them to the levels of WHC and Shade would cause even more powercreep.
The Vermintide community and Fatshark simply have to accept that it is time for nerfs to the top careers and weapons (and Swift Slaying). The crying and anger will be end-times worthy, but it is the only way to bring up difficulty in a non-cheesy way anymore. I don’t think everything needs to be nerfed into the ground, but rather a little back to the overall effectiveness level of a class like Ironbreaker or Unchained or Pyromancer, where you get multiple viable builds with clear strenghts and weaknesses without either being too big. If you make everything into a SotT this game will get boring real fast.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment but nerfing Swift Slaying specifically has another problem and imo probably the biggest underlying problem that will cause said anger, a justifiable problem at that: weapon traits (especially melee) either feel like must-picks or are total lame ducks. Even if Swift Slaying was halved to 10% AS, I suspect many’d take it as the alternatives are:
Ranged has it a bit better choice but many setups still take Scrounger and stack crit or take Conservative Shooter with how vital ammo is. But at least the other traits can be decent and you see them get taken way more than the alternatives to Swift Slaying do:
Scrounger is incredible but bland. Taking it out would leave some ranged careers without ammo regen however. This is kinda a hard one to address since it depends on what vision FS has for these careers. OE for example would always have access to ranged attacks of some form thanks to his ult. I personally don’t mind careers having consistent ways to earn back ammo but as it stands Scrounger or Conservative Shooter get taken with most ammo-dependent weapons, which is boring. CS is a little more interesting, again, it has a stipulation, Scrounger is RNG and bland RNG at that.
The damage boost traits are too unreliable to proc on some weapons (e.g. Barrage doesn’t work well with say Trollhammer, Hunter is too RNG dependent again so careers like BH and Pyro (or Huntsman with the right build) can proc it at ease, but ones with much lower crit cannot. And again, same breakpoint problem, these traits may hit a mere one or two breakpoints or none depending on the weapon.
Speaking of Heroic Intervention and Resourceful, a true panic button trait that scales off allies taking damage / getting snagged or downed and e.g. gives back some ult charge would be an interesting concept, but not as the game is right now - it’d probably just make broken builds more broken right now.
I’d be okay with Swift Slaying being weakened but I am telling you right now, at most I’d consider Opportunist as an alternative, which is the exact same problem as we have now. I’d rather see the other traits become more interesting but have a combat rebalance to compensate, like how Cata for example includes some elites in hordes which is an amazing change and something I miss when playing on Legend. Being good vs berserkers and having good stagger feel so much more impactful on Cata.
Come to think of it I’d be happier about current Legend if they incorporated the elites into hordes mechanic - perhaps less frequent and less of them than on Cata so it doesn’t feel too much like the latter for people who don’t like Cata.
I’m not disputing Swift Slaying is a bit too good, but melee weapon traits are so lame I’d take weakened Swift Slaying or Opportunist over them in their current state any day.
There isn’t competition, but with OP builds comes an absence of cooperation also. Having one person steam through a level also defeats the purpose of the game for the three others.
Yes of course, but that was always a problem in random public games, I think the “running in front and always dying then leaving ELF” stereotype did not come into being without ever happened at all.
But yes you touch upon the problem with skillbased games. If you take 4 great players and give them a relativ defensive loadout like FK, IB, HM and maybe WHC with mostly Shieldweapons, Handguns/Crossbow etc. nothing to overpowered and mostly defensive or coop-talents. They still cut through most content with relativ ease, whereas others struggle even if the combine GK,IB,SoT/Shade and BH/Zealot/BW. which would normally turn every encounter Legend and below into a light summer breeze.
Which is exactly why I mostly play premades where you can talk about having certain careers or not.
Trying to be concise about my point since my brain is all over the place today:
Lack of COOP Gameplay for me has always happened since I started (BETA was not as bad since most peopled I met seemed to be VT1 Veterans (I at least played the odd 75 hours in VT1 and made it up to Nightmare) so everybody kinda knew what it was all about) but lets say after the first year of release I kind of noticed the “odd-one-out-guy” that shits all over teamplay seemed to pop up more often, since then it has only gotten worse. When you meet lvl 35 PLayers that did not even have the decency to read one guide about gamebasics and then waste healing/leave potions/ do FF as if it was ice-cream I find it kind of hard to care about another OP Powercreep career because if SoT doesn´t try to solo everything the Waystalker or Shade or Grailknight will still try to do it.
But all in all I see your point, I just don´t think it is worth the effort (for myself at least) to get overly agitated about it, I would rather have a Slayer remake xD and hope that FS will try new ways in Darktide and maybe keep out Monsterkillers alltogether in Darktide…maybe add some mechanics which can make monsters challenging…well we will see I guess.
This is a very good point - traits are just really bad. I know that there were some really broken combos in VT1, but honestly they should consider bringing some of them back. Extra piercing, double-shot - you could even put in a melee talent that lets you get ammo back from melee WITH some nerfs - like, say, each kill gives you a stack, and at 10 stacks you get some ammo back. Something low, but helps you at least not be helpless against running out of ammo.
I wonder if they’re still working on that overhaul?
Thank you for posting this – I think that powercreep is one of the biggest problems this game has, if not THE biggest problem. For context for those of you that don’t know me: I got into vermintide the moment that vermintide 2 dropped. Since about patch 1.3 – the first BBB, I believe – I began to primarily play Footknight with the Sword and Shield. In total, I have 2200 hours in the game, and I play anywhere from Cataclysm with pubs, Cata Twitch, all the way up to C3DWONS, sticking with my favorite class/weapon combo whenever I can.
In other words, that’s a lot of pushing.
In my time, I notice that the power creeps up and up. And while Footknight has not gone without ANY buffs, to be fair (crowd clearer, bull of ostland, and Inspiring Blow have been pretty great) those haven’t been enough to bridge what I see as an ever-growing gap between less meta or support builds and the more meta, DPS builds. I felt like I could contribute more to damage pre-buffs than I can now. Previously, I could feel like I was doing something by dodge dancing a boss and getting in some respectable DPS. Obviously it would be less than the actual DPS classes, but the difference wasn’t so damn monumental.
Granted, if you’ve seen some of my Reddit comments you know that I still love Footknight. He can still contribute in his own way and be a great asset to a team as a buff support frontliner. I love the feeling that playing him well gives me, and I want to share that with others whenever I can. The problem with all of this power creep though means that you just have to try so damn HARD in comparison, you have to be that much better, and it’s more difficult to help others find that joy too. When classes can delete what is supposed to be the biggest threats in this game without a second thought, it’s easy to think “why am I even trying to support them?” There are reasons that you still see people asking what the hell the point of Footknight is, and that really makes me sad because his kit is so much fun when done right.
Hell, even classes that are theoretically support classes are given so much damage potential that you can’t really justify calling them support anymore. For example, RV got the masterwork pistol, and suddenly he gets to support the team AND delete everything short of Chaos Warriors? You introduce a class that is theoretically a “support” that says that “damage is for the weak” and it’s one of the best damage dealers in the game. While still giving your team support. It legitimately feels like an insult.
Add all of this together over time, and it becomes stupid how easy the game is. It forces you to shoot up the difficulty and hit the ceiling of what you can do in the base game way faster, and suddenly your only options for difficulty is to play twitch mode and just throw bosses at yourself – making the power gap WAY more noticeable, and frustrating – or leaving the official realm entirely. And in modded realm, it’s pretty much all Deathwish AND Onslaught, and suddenly a lot of what made the game fun in the first place is gone – in my opinion Deathwish goes too far with increasing the stagger resistance of enemies. It tries really hard to completely invalidate my preferred way to play the game, and it’s only by being a stubborn bastard and having teammates that know how to work with/around me that I’m able to keep some semblance of my playstyle and actually feel useful. Instead of feeling like I can dynamically blend defense/offense/stagger, I’m forced to either just spam shield slam or give up my favorite combo entirely. Normally, this wouldn’t be so much of an issue except for the fact that I’m FORCED to either do DWONS or Twitch mode for a challenge, especially if I want to keep playing with people that I know, who just so happen to be pretty damn good at this game. If it weren’t for all of this damn power creep, regular Cataclysm probably wouldn’t feel like such a snooze. It might actually be the super punishing difficulty it claims to be, and I could play it more often.
As it is though, I often feel like I’m getting left behind, and it sometimes makes me want to stop playing.
This is probably way longer/rambly than it needed to be, I’m not good at shortening things. I just wanted to describe just how badly this powercreep is affecting some of us.
Edit: A comparison I just thought of is like when you play Dungeons and Dragons and the DM is forced to balace encounters around one or two overpowered characters. Either the fight is a cakewalk or the weaker characters are useless/dead, there’s no inbetween.
Ha, my fellow brick in the shield wall! Nice to see you back around here. Thanks for the great and well explained post. It perfectly expresses a lot of feelings I completely share. About FK, the way modded is a meta shift more than a difficulty increase in a lot of ways so it’s not always a good alternative, and that it feels bad that your preferred playstyle is often less effective than just picking a top DPS class and that that seems to only get worse the more the game changes.
Since the last BBB real life has been quite busy for me, so when I did get to play I simply tended to stick to the classes I know best and preferred, like IB A&S and FK M&S. It’s been great, but I hadn’t played Elf in at least half a year. So when the new career came around I figured I was in for a learning curve and the thing was going to be a little harder than normal playing for me. So I loaded up a private legend game with bots, expecting trouble… And then I breezed through the map like it was recruit. I was running the DPS talents, but even without the worst offenders in play stuff just died like it wasn’t there. Cata solo with bots is also a world of difference compared to my favorite classes, mainly because of monsters and chaos warriors. (It’s ridiculous how different your experience fighting those is between classes. It’s waaaaay larger than the difference in, say, fighting hordes or other elites with a class that doesn’t specialize in those.) Granted that SotT is widely accepted to be out of line, but this experience for me has been exemplary for what this thread and your post are about.
The problem is that in V1 light attacks that do not deal damage to armor in the body do deal damage in the head, so spamming light attacks in the head does deal damage, and does proc killing blow, no real difference.
They could make it require WHC to tag the enemy for the damage bonus to apply, maybe with a unique orange outline. Then Templar’s Knowledge can be “Victor’s allies can now tag enemies for half of Witch-Hunt’s effect.” Then I Shall Judge You All can be all enemies on the map are tagged or something. That or make the tag only benefit the WHC outright. Witch-Hunt is a crazily strong passive ability.
Yeah unfortunately. Opportunist would see more use, but the other traits don’t do a lot. James has mentioned it before, but attack speed is so tied into the game’s systems and benefits everything so much. If it was just attack speed and direct dps it wouldn’t be so problematic, but high attack speed means more Swift Slaying (ergo SS means more SS), more cooldown from hitting enemies more, more chances to crit, more thp, better defense, better move techs etc. on top of more damage. Hard to fix. It can be reduced, but it’s still going to be picked unless it’s made into basically nothing like 5%. I think buffing/changing the other traits is the best way forward, alongside possibly a small nerf to SS to reach a good middle-ground.
Noooo don’t take muh Scrounger.
But it’s true. It really isn’t interesting. Frankly it may as well be a flat ammo % increase for what it achieves and how it plays. I don’t want that either, just highlighting it’s a dull way of generating ammo, especially when obvious simple ideas that are tossed around on the forums frequently, like ammo after X melee kills, exist.
It would be cool to see a balance mod that reduced the stagger of dps weapons instead. E.g. Rapier/DD would have the effective stagger strength they do on Deathwish, but shields/2h Hammer etc. would be mostly unaffected. Or Fatshark could reduce the stagger strength of most of the high dps/finesse on Official. It’s pretty silly that half-cost pushes don’t come with real drawbacks (1h weapons don’t really stagger elites much on push anyway, Rapier’s pushes do more than enough for horde enemies).
I think Deathwish is also limited a bit by the low number of stagger animations of lot of enemies have. It’s weird, but Skavenslaves don’t move back an inch on DW, yet Chaos Marauders do slightly, because there’s no stagger anim that keeps them in place, while slaves are either a rock-solid wall or getting thrown around like tumbleweeds.
Hey Wall-Buddy! Yeah I’m not good at being active on the fatshark forums (social stuff is hard). I hope life has been busy in a good way, rather than a draining way.
That does remind me of one time I tried shade after so long of only doing Kruber. I expected to suck, I expected there to be a learning curve. There wasn’t. I just had cloak of mist, no vanish, and did purely frontline shenanigans and it was just… disgusting how easy it was to kill things. And here we are having to actually put effort into our builds in order to support these EZwin builds. At least then you could justify it with the fact that shade ONLY kills things, and at least doesn’t support anything! (Just ignore her stealth for much easier clutches I guess).
@Velsix That’s actually one of the reasons that I felt it was so easy to dual dagger on shade. It’s only a half stamina shield to push, just get +stamina on either your weapon or necklace and that gives you 6 pushes. It’s trivial to control trash enemies on an ASSASSIN with DAGGERS, and then you just dodge the elites and poke their head. EZ. When I eventually try new BrokenElf, I might just try opportunist dual daggers with max stamina with that one push talent just to rub salt in my own wounds, it’s ridiculous.
Like, I’m fine with increasing the stagger resist of things. I can see how vanilla Rats makes it too easy for someone to trivialize a lot of the difficulty of hordes/patrols. I’m fine with only dedicated builds being able to do that job, and having to specialize into it. Right now, in official all I need to do is take opportunist and some power vs race stuff and I’m good to go - everything else goes into offense. But the extent that it messes with that, how far I have to go just to play this game how I enjoy playing it is really disheartening. Maybe I should try getting a group together for Cata 3 onslaught twitch mode. Cata 3 already increases the stagger resist of enemies by a fair margin, so that could be a fair baseline I think. I haven’t really tried getting a group together for that because it’s hard enough to get a group together for the popular modded difficulties, that being anything with both Deathwish and Onslaught.
I couldn’t agree more that the biggest difference between V1 and V2 is that the quality of enemies was traded for quantity. I do recall playing Cata Ram the Manparts with bots, and coming across just five clanrats and a single stormvermin sent chills down my spine. In my experience, it was the heroes’ relative weakness that gave the game it’s charm, not drowning the players in endless trash mobs.
While I am in favor of significant nerfs across the board, I think the overall enemy mass should also be thinned. There are times when the game is an absolute FusterCluck of sensory overload, specially when playing pubs or with bots. Less is sometimes more, and if the general power level gets the chop maybe fewer but stronger enemies could make roamer encounters have some meaning again. Less mobs on screen also has the added benefit of better overall perfomance ~
Realistically I don’t think that’s going to change. For better or worse, this is what the game is. Characters have always been way too powerful through talents and career skills to make a small number of enemies relevant and still fun to fight (so that they aren’t just damage sponges that one-shot you in turn). You’d either require a small number of highly complex enemies, which is a pain to design, or you overload the game and make them threatening through sheer numbers. It is what it is, but it’s too fundamental to how the game was designed to change at this point.