Thoughts on Necklace Properties

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
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So Traits and Properties are always a hot topic round here, and I wanted to post some thoughts on specifically necklace properties.

It seems to me like pitting damage reduction vs +% health will always come down to effective health, with one coming out as a winner, making the other borderline obsolete as a result. Originally I was against the idea of removing the health property entirely, upon further consideration I’ve pretty well come around to it. The positive I see is allowing the damage reduction options to be much more potent to compensate.

I would change the categories for damage reduction to vs hordes: covering all chaff enemies you’d expect
vs specials: which would include gas and storm damage with the vs AoE category removed
vs elites: what you’d expect really, SV, CWs, Maulers, Bestigors, berserkers
vs bosses: this would include all monsters and end event bosses

Regarding specific percentages, after some number crunching with and without barkskin, this is what I’m currently thinking:

Vs Specials - 20-25%
Vs Horde - 30%
Vs Elites - 30%
Vs Bosses - 40%

These values were tuned to give you better effective health than the +health property would against that category of enemy, to compensate only working on one category of enemy. Numbers for each category are also varied from one another to reflect the relative threat of that enemy type e.g. the vs special value is lower than vs horde value because protection against specials is generally more important. This is to help balance the damage reduction properties against one another.

Some of the values might seem a bit high, but this is assuming the health property were removed, so the end result compared to the current situation is a good bit more effective health against the enemy type you’ve selected, a fair bit less against all the other enemy types. Vs bosses especially is so high since it’s value will always be limited greatly in QP.

If removing the health property is too extreme for the community, I’ve seen the idea of it being a flat health increase instead, might be easier to balance but still not sure about that idea either TBH.

Regarding +Stam vs +BCR, I really have no idea how to better balance those two against each other :man_shrugging: Not sure what’s even worth running +Stam on these days other than Dual Daggers, even then I’m not sure.

Lastly, this is not a new idea, but I’d add extra push radius to the effects of the push/block angle property to make it more competitive. Probably about 10-20% more range would be reasonable.

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Yup, correct decision in my opinion. Right now + 20 % health is + 20 % damage reduction versus everything. It shouldn’t be like that. As for the numbers concerning the damage reduction, I’m not sure. I was thinking about it but only a bit as I would like to get a complete rework of the whole system. In general, the more specific the damage reduction is the higher the value. I think that is self-explaining. For that reason I would to have something like:

Vs AoE + 80 % (including Warpfire, Ratling Gunner, Gas and Troll Bile)
Vs Skaven + 20 %
Vs Chaos + 20 %
Vs Beastmen + 40 %
Vs Disablers + 50 % (including surrounding damage while being pulled by Packmasters)

Not sure on the values, not sure if I would include Elites or Bosses at all (like let them be elite). There shouldnt be to many obviously. But it would give you the chance to erase certain weak points of careers in exchange of letting other flanks open. Beastmen should be extra to Chaos. There is certainly a lot of discussion potential. It would lead to better and more interesting customization but health increases has to go, in my opinion.

The rest not sure. Personally, I run +Stam on a lot of things like the Flail or the Greatsword because it allows more push attacks. Not so big on Block Cost Reduction. I think they are more or less in balance.

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In my opinion, the whole system could simply be removed. For me it does not matter much what properties the necklace has, if then I change the traits sometimes at most. That’s why, as in other discussions about weapon traits, I’m more in favor of removing the properties, balancing the game reasonably and introducing more interesting traits, maybe even ones you can activate yourself. I’m thinking of something like an activatable shield instead of specific damage reductions in a game that is mainly based on randomly appearing enemies.

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I feel like traits and properties are a separate discussion. Wanted to keep this focused on specifically necklace properties in the hope that might make it somewhat more productive.

As much as I’d love to see wide sweeping reworks for a bunch of this stuff, can’t say I see that as very likely at this stage, so trying to work on what can be salvaged with relatively small tweaking. I feel necklace properties can be tweaked to give meaningful, balanced defensive options without too much work.

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I am completely against removing 20% health until unfair sources of damage are removed.Such as silent attacks&enemies, enemies spawning ontop or behind you or combinations like beastman horde + packmaster/assassin.

That last one is utterly imbalanced, the only counter to those two specials is killing them before they attack or dodging them but you cant see them with beastmen around which makes dealing with both absurd.

Oh and the thing with multiple specials spawning but there is only sound for 1 is also utterly nasty to deal with…like here i am fighting a horde and i spot a packmaster so i burn ability/bomb/make a play to deal with it and then a second one jumps down ontop of me or pops out behind a bestigor/chaos warrior next to the original packmaster.

0 warning, instant death.

…

As for the stamina/BCR deal, i tend to find that you generally want about 4 stamina for a weapon that needs to push a lot to deal with hordes and then you pump the rest into BCR.

As for the push radius/block angle…i am not sure it can ever compete with the two above.

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I understand the argument. However, the imbalance in the traits and properties is, in my opinion, impossible to overcome with small tweaks. Because in this case players will defend overpowered stuff to the death and insist on “Just buff everything to silly levels”.
That is why I prefer the larger throw like “Okay, you can chose now between the old boring system with one broken trait or you can have the new interesting system with lots of different equal choices which doesn’t have the over the top stuff anymore though”.

You have to show off players a larger benefit if you want to let them go of stuff like 20 % health or Swift Slaying which are balance problems.

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I completely agree, which is why I set the DR numbers such that it’s actually a buff to effective health in the circumstances is applies. It’s less of a nerf but more of side grade just with no generalist option. Admittedly it’s not the most exciting compensation, but I would hope such property changes would come packaged with wider, more exciting trait reworks that help make it palatable

See I just don’t really think properties are that broken across the board. Traits? Sure, I think that takes a more creative, wide sweeping approach to fix meaningfully, but properties can be fixed good enough with more minor tweaking IMO.

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While I’m not wholly against removing health from necklaces, this proposal doesn’t strike me as a good replacement.

Most of the suggested divisions of damages strike me as poor. Vs Bosses is extremely niche, largely only making practical sense in some modded scenarios. Vs Elites is like a worse version of the current Oblivious to Pain that sees very, very little use. Vs Skaven/Chaos is where we are now and is less than compelling for obvious reasons.

Vs Horde seems useful, potentially even too good since it would cover a very broad band of situations. And Vs Specials/AoE/Disablers seems like they would easily be just as big a ‘no brainer’ as the current health property when taking Barkskin functionality into consideration.

I think more interesting damage reduction considerations might be like: backstab DR like the RV talent Exuberance; a DR variation of The More the Merrier; DR while ADS/spellcasting. Loads of possibilities here.

Not to mention all of the other potential defensive properties that could be added to necklaces. Dodge range, effective dodges, stamina regen, stagger cleave, stagger strength, increased healing, etc.

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Pretty much. Removing the bonus to health while creating specialized categorizes for damage reduction will simply shift the obvious choice towards damage reduction versus AoE attacks, as poison wind, blightstorms and occasionally warpfire are by far the biggest hazards. Nobody with even a small amount of experience in the game is ever going to pick DR versus hordes or monsters, for example. Assuming the game was less buggy and spammy with sources of absurd damage lacking any kind of visual or audio cues, I’d be completely in favor of scrapping these properties in favor of perhaps a new system. Verm1 didn’t have any kind of +% health trinkets, but everyone who had a clue ran DR from poison wind. However, that game was also mostly free from all the bugs plaguing the current title’s combat and enemy spawns.

As for stamina versus BCR, once you have at least 2.5 shields on a weapon +60% BCR offers way more effective stamina than an added shield, but then again nerfing BCR will simply make everyone switch over to stamina, so not sure what that would solve. There would be less of a need for these things if the game had a smaller scale approach to combat, but it simply isn’t that kind of game anymore. It’s no longer about dealing with a handful of rats in close quarters and few tools at your disposal, but about handling huge waves of enemies under a spam of specialist fire and disablers, usually in open areas. You kinda need firepower, attack speed and some stat boosts to your ability to survive, otherwise everything would become a bit tedious and frustrating, to say the least.

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While I disagree with the removal of the health reduction - it really depends on the character and difficulty, it’s important for the soft ones, but the others are unlikely to use it - I have never considered any DR to provide sufficient benefit compared to anything else. Some people pointed out that there are careers which would benefit disproportionately because of their own resistance, but I’m not convinced. Every perk has something that disproportionately benefits some careers and combinations.

I would really like strong vs. AoE or vs Ranged protection (one of those should include storms), including the ability to resist being pushed by e.g. flamerats. There should be at least a 20 to 30% boost to others, maybe even higher, but then there could be further division:

AoE - 66,6% (cannot drop you below 1 hp if the protection engaged when your health was at least 1/3 of the max)
Ranged - 66,6% (allow slow pushback against the incoming)
Chaos - 20% (or 30% if the Norscans and Beastmen are separated)
Skaven - 30%
Elite - if you are hit by their heavy attack, you cannot drop below 1 hp if the protection engaged when your health was at least 1/3 of the max; multiple such attacks during 1 s window count as one
Disablers - you get a 1% chance that you will not be captured; after that, until you are disabled, every second you get another roll with 1% increase, 3% if you are damaged

In any case, the vs. Chaos is even as it is by far more useful since it covers both Norscans and Beastmen, which are more dangerous.

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I know we’re dumping example numbers here lads but anything over 25% is going to be busted as hell, don’t forget barkskin and other DR sources still exist

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Don’t forget that damage reduction stacks multiplicative. It doesn’t matter if we have health +20 % or damage reduction + 20 %. All we are doing is shuffling the numbers. Instead of having +20 % damage reduction versus everything you can gain higher reductions but more limited in use. The numbers shown are not busted.

It effectively allows you to erase one “weakness” significantly but at the price of having less leeway with other enemies in comparison to the current meta. You can also chose two damage reductions but you would have to give up on Stamina or BCR. The numbers shown are overall very balanced.

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idk man

80% DR from necklace+barkskin would be like 12% damage taken from gas making it effectively a non-threat. 20% hp isn’t strictly translatable to DR as well, they operate/math out differently.

multiplicative stacking may prevent things like becoming straight up invulnerable but the gains are still significant.

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The gains are significant, but only in some scenarios, while what is given up is really important, BCR, Stamina, Health…

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That’s true. But think about what is given up just to reduce that particular threat?

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Yea, you would have only 12 % damage from AoE which includes Ratling Gunner (only lethal very close up), Bile Troll (which is more problematic because of the slow down effect), Warpfire (which does very little damage already and is more problematic due to push back) as well as Poison Globes (where it would actually be beneficial).

This is one limited scenario in the whole game (unless i forgot something minor). Giving up a property space for that should come with such a damage reduction. I don’t see how this would be busted. Think about it, a property space for basically nullifying globes. There are some careers this might be useful but it would be nowhere near the meta of Health + 20 % and Barskin.

You are right. Health is far more useful unless you take damage equal to your base health. Then they even out.

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I don’t think you should be allowed to straight up eliminate a special’s pressure with a single property, idc if there’s superficial trade off or not.

Also as I understand it people are pushing for removal of health

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One single limited threat for a property is a fair trade, especially considering that globes most of the time can also easily be avoided.

And yes, Health+ should be removed as it influences to many situations at once. It is far more useful than a damage reduction vs AoE can ever be.

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I mean if that’s the case then there’s no point in taking the property anyway since barkskin and other DR sources+thp will keep you covered if gas really is a non-issue most of the time

Any property that’s a DR source really shouldn’t be going above 50%, and in the context of a game with thp, barkskin and other DR sources, 50% may still well be too far.

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Which is exactly the point. The property is basically very niche but still has its application. For some careers (Unchained) or situations (certain Weaves) or Bots it has its use but it is nowhere as problematic as the one-in-all +Health.

But I guess it is better to simply disagree. As it currently stands we either remove health and make the damage reductions better resulting in a system with customization and choices or we let health in the game and remove all damage reduction properties because they are simply useless right now.