Just to clarify myself i am totally fine with a shade nerf. I am only thinking about a change which makes her mechanics feel still impactful when you put a certain effort into it. A cool thing would be if you can manage to make her somehow bit underperforming out of cloak of mist compared to other careers (and yeah the cloak of mist damage is a bit too strong). But on the other hand you need it somehow because if you dont kill a enemy with a backstab your vanish breaks and you are stuck between a large amount of enemies. If she shouldnt be able to instakill the enemies during this, there has to be something else which gives her more survivability for example extended stealth but no more instakills.
But yeah i see the problem making her underperforming outside of her level 30 talents, because all relys on critical damage and you are dealing critical strikes all the time, not only with the level 30 talents. Thats bit of a pitty.
But that was my idea behind removing the additional stagger damage: to make her underperforming outside of cloak of mist so she has to put more effort into it to get behind the enemy lines. At the same time it would be more rewarding and more “high risk high reward gameplay”.
at this point you’re looking at more of a shade rebalance instead of a stagger talent rebalance
yeah because she is too good in all situations and was moved away from her intended niche as a high risk high reward performer. But this change for assassine would also work as a nerf for assassine for other classes without breaking the intended function of this talent (supporting critbased careers), and it would be more equal to the other talents like smiter in my opinion. But for this assassine really only should concentrate on crit and no more on stagger as well to turn it more equal to the other talents.
personally I disagree with the idea that crit heavy careers need a stagger talent catering to them in specific
Yeah I get where you’re coming from. It’s a fair idea and Shade is just a big can of worms TBH.
@Incandescent is right though, we’re straying way off the thread’s topic. Shade balance is a topic we could definitely use another go at though, so go ahead and make a thread for it if it’s something you’d like to go deeper into.
I think most of us have been holding off because we were hoping FS would even out THP/stagger talents first, then the discussion would be more fruitful after that had been done.
At this point though it’s increasingly questionable whether or not FS has any further balance plans whatsoever 🤷
@Aqshy @Fatshark_Hedge The lack of communication/action over further balance plans puts us in a very difficult situation, where it’s hard to talk about individual class balance, because we have no idea if there are any plans to address the more systemic balance issues (ie stagger and thp talents). To be clear, I certainly don’t expect any updates on that in this thread. My intention with tagging you both is to make sure you’re clear that leaving wider balance issues on the backburner for such a large amount of time is making balance feedback impossible as overlapping problematic elements become more and more of a chaotic mess.
Would be also glad about a feedback from fatshark and as you guys already pointed out stagger and thp talents are one of the core issues. I only wanted to show that more mechanics and problems depend on these issues.
Well, there is this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vermintide/comments/r09zbw/-/hlse13a
But this honestly doesn’t fill me with confidence. Any sort of balance changes could very likely be months away. I really feel like we could use some patches now.
Ok yeah so it’s the same BS we’ve heard forever. It’s “on the radar”. As it apparently has been this whole time. At one point I was pretty happy to wait till all the DLC careers are out, but honestly that was before the DLC updates started being the balance equivalent of a Molotov cocktail thrown into a paint factory. I’m pretty well out of patience for FS ignoring systemic issues to add further instability to the mix (eg grudge marks).
I’ll believe something is happening when I see anything concrete whatsoever. At least it’s nice to see Aqshy so active on all the community groups. More active engagement is certainly a good thing, even when communicating non updates.
While we are at it, talking about Months of nothing happening!
I hope everyone made up his mind on what should be under Nurgloths tree this year. Its his second Christmas and his second birthday is also rapidly approaching with no sign of him and his home not being the youngest in the foreseeable future.
Gotta spoil and treasure our child so FS finally sits down and grants us mere mortals some more.
This is exactly how CoM should work. Giving personality and interesting mechanics that are actually usable.
Why are developers in charge of balancing anyway ? Don’t FS have game designers that are supposed to work the numbers and then tell the devs what to implement ?
Unfortunately/fortunately (depending on how you look at it!), it’s true. It is on the radar and I was just in a meeting where it was brought up. It’s just a matter of balancing current things and then carving out the time for a balance into our workflow. I’ve been in this community for a while as a player, so I understand the need for a rebalance as much as you do; but if we rebalance, we want to make sure we do it right, with the correct resource allocation.
We’re aware, we’re hearing you, and it’s legitimately in the bucket list; we just need to make sure it’s handled appropriately. I know that’s not the answer you want to hear, but it’s the only one I can reasonably give you right now. As always, I aim to be communicative within the bounds of my power, so I will of course, update the community when/if we get closer to that time.
Firstly, I very much appreciate the update and communication here always instills some faith, even if it’s just to reiterate previous news.
To give some feedback that can hopefully help the balancing process, I really think it would be wise to start with foundational/systemic balance issues. To me THP/stagger talents are the big one that needs to be addressed before a lot of individual class balancing is feasible. I’m certainly not saying the mod this thread is based around should be wholesale adopted, but a similar focus on evening out the options amongst classes, and making weapon choice less restrictive based on THP/Stagger talents would be great. One big takeaway from the work/math the modders have done here is that the current iteration of Assassin is very problematic, and stacking too many bonuses that revolve around crits is a dangerous thing to do. Also see Mist Shade for evidence of this.
Also, I can’t emphasise enough that delivering balance changes in a BBB style approach, that allows time for feedback and proper response to said feedback would be much preferred to dumping a whole bunch of adjustments in a live patch out of nowhere. I think this is a lesson you guys have already learnt from the past, but want to emphasise that point just to be sure.
I know I’m just one person, so naturally my feedback is just a small piece of the puzzle, but I don’t think I’ve said anything in this post that could be particularly contentious (though further responses may naturally prove me wrong).
I think there is a bunch of weapons which should see some earlier adressing, at least everything ranged which came out in the last 18 months like Moonfire Bow, Javelins and Coruscation Staff. Systematic issues while important take far more time to be adressed and the mentioned weapons are in such a bad state that they take out the fun for a lot of people if they get teammates which use them. So I really would prefer some quick shotgun on the really bad stuff and then take some more time for the general balance issues.
Then they can and maybe even should adress the Stagger & THP talents as long as the changes stay true to the initial design philosphy and do not increase the hero power further. As the new weapons have shown we are close to the Cataclysm breaking point where balance falls apart.
Yeah I agree there are a number of recent weapons that are very high on the priority list. Ideally if we did get a BBB style thing we could get a number of things to test out at once. That’s my hope but admittedly it might be a little optimistic. If that’s not possible, then yeah, the likes of Moonbow, MW Pistol, Trollhammer etc should be very high on the list of things to deal with. I only worry that starting out the balancing process with a slew of nerfs with nothing else is going to get a lot of people frothing and discourage further adjustments. Like obviously any nerf is gonna garner a lot of copium, but there are more and less diplomatic ways to go about it.
I will be honest. I strongly believe that the only chance for game balance to come somewhere close to actually being balanced for the different existing difficulties, the next larger balance update has to mostly consist of nerfs. Personally, I don’t see any way around it. Which is why I agree about the communication. This should be communicated before hand that it will happen. And at least for the THP & Stagger talents changes can be done in a way that they work as a slight nerf, improve gameplay variety and can still be sold as an improvement. For the questionable weapons? … FS should just be upfront and say that they are busted and no fun.
there are plenty of weapons and talents that could use some love though, there are many nerfs needed yes but shaking up some of the weaker stuff and adding some QoL to the janky stuff would be very welcome
Unbending purpose on zealot, manbow zoom etc. come to mind
Ricochet…
I agree to an extent. I would rather see reworks of the talents/passives that result in weaker characters. I don’t think number tweaks, regardless of how balanced they may be, would make me interested in the game again.
I agree that the power level of the characters needs to be brought down, though. Just that flat number tweaks are still going to leave the game feeling stale.
This is like saying you want to publish a bug free game. Not gonna happen.
There are enough little tweaks that would improve gameplay a ton, like nerfing certain weapons, and tweaking others. I get that there is no time for a massive Balance patch, but there is absolutely no reason for small balance fixes to take for ever. The wonderful thing about small fixes is that, incase they went wrong, its easy to remove them. This already happened once when the deed difficulty swap bug was fixed.
If we have to wait for a big balance patch its never going to happen. Especially if your goal is to just do it right.