Tower of Treachery Barrels

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
1

The barrels need desperate tweaks if this is going to be any sort of a decent end game fight. Currently i don’t know if it’s a bug or not but the barrels just do whatever when you throw them. Sometimes they just go straight up, sometimes they fly in a straight line, and sometimes they act like normal barrels. This needs to stop, they need consistent actions not random projectile patterns. IF you want that to be a mechanic then the barrels shouldn’t be able to be exploded by enemies OR you should succeed the task whether or not the barrel was lit before you threw it in (honestly the latter seems to make way more sense to me, why does the task fail if you light it before you throw it in? seems like someone didn’t think that all the way through because the barrel’s going to explode in there anyway). Because then you essentially have to either A. throw and hope you get the right projectile pattern, or B. run straight up to the well and throw it straight down into the well and hope an enemy doesn’t even look at you or else the barrel explodes.

Implementing any of these changes would make the end-game event much less of a crap show because currently the big thing holding people back (mainly from what i’ve seen) is getting the barrels into the well which honestly shouldn’t be the hardest part of the event. Like i get there should be some struggle to get to the barrel and to get the barrel to a prime location to throw it, but why is there another added layer of difficulty to throwing the barrel? Also that added layer of difficulty is very much random and so there’s no true way to work around it outside of nearly falling into the well yourself (i’ve seen it happen many a time).

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Just explaining some mechanics for the off-chance you hadn’t been aware.

The barrels in the Tower of Treachery Final are not random. If you look a bit above the Well of Souls, you will notice three to four light blue-coloured skulls swirling around it. These skulls are a defense mechanism of the well. If the barrel carier gets to close to them, they will home in to the carier. If they hit you, the barrel will be lit and soon after explode.
To be specific the skulls do not home in to the carier but the barrel itself. This means if you throw a barrel and let it lie a second or two around in the center area, they will attack the barrel and bring it to explosion. They can even intercept a barrel mid-air when it had been thrown and repel it. So before you throw check the position of the skulls, the distance and the angle to them, so that you can make sure that it is going it.

Naturally, one could ask about why lit barrels don’t count. This is most likely applied so that people don’t face tank the skulls and then throw the barrel. Fatshark - most likely - wanted the people to pay attention to the surrounding. Or even “worse” for people to work together because you can shoot the skulls out of the air.

On a sidenote we could ask why lit barrels count for other events as it doesnt make sense they stop burning. However, it is for making it a bit easier. For the Tower of Treachery this is not necessary though.

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Yes, in my experience they fly weirdly only if they have been hit by the skulls.
@Adelion I wasn’t aware you can shoot the skulls, thanks!
Btw, do the barrels get lit in conventional ways, too? like if you get hurt while carrying them. I haven’t checked. Or are they special barrels, like in Khazid Kro?

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I think so. Although, the last time it happened I wasn’t yet aware of the skulls. I am pretty sure getting hit by enemies does lit the barrels. But if I remember I can check this evening.

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I think the skulls were not appearing in the first few days , they are now clearing visible for me…

@WhereIsBaoDur yes barrels will light if you are hit while carrying.

Before noticing the skulls, I was under the impressions that enemies can hit the barrel if you try to throw it over them…

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Days or hours? I saw them in my first run on the first day.

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As others have stated but to add to it, the well isnt just guarded by the spawning mob waves but also by those floating ghost-skulls. If you want to get through with certainty you need a dash or a slow&steady pace that lets you clear everything step by step.

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Honestly, the fact that the skulls can home in on the barrels, even when the user is using stealth is straight up bad design. When you need to nullify an integral part of a class in a game like this in order to protect your boss mechanics, you’ve committed an egregious game design sin, because you’ve made these characters’ core mechanic useless in an area where it has excelled in the past. Stealth characters are such a boon for these barrel missions, and that should have never changed.

Secondly, the fact that the barrels have to go 10-20 feet or more down the hole in order to count towards the objective is a bit too broken. I’ve seen many perfectly thrown barrels that make it into the water not count because they blew up before they hit the incredibly arbitrarily placed objective trigger. If it breaks the surface of the water, it should damn well count. When game mechanics don’t line up with observable reality (in this case, the barrel hitting the water in the whirlpool, but not necessarily hitting the very dead center 10-20 feet below), it’s disappointingly immersion breaking. In this specific case, it’s also broken, and unfair.

Thirdly, aside from the fact that the skulls can see through stealth, they would be fine IF they only triggered the barrel to explode, not caused it to physics glitch like I’m playing Garry’s mod and committed some error.

Fourthly, blightstormers must have a higher rate of spawning, because I often get two that are just completely hidden behind walls, and spawn huge storms that take up almost an entire half of the playing field when it’s divided by the ghost-wall thing. Your ability to pursue even one of them, even if you happen to immediately spot it, is diminished greatly by the wall-dance/horde survival mechanic. I’d understand one, but the fact that there are regularly two during that phase just smacks of being incredibly overtuned on a fight that is so positioning-dependant.

All in all, this section is just really badly designed, and should’ve been quality tested harder. It’s incredibly unstable, and wipes are very often way out of the players’ hands, and not in that “Oh, that’s just how these horde games go” kind of way. I know fans of these games, including myself, love challenges that many people with skill issues would cry “Unfair!!!”, but in this is objectively a case of bad design, and overtuning. I’m honestly just leaving every time quickplay puts me on this map, because the end is just so bad.

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I agree with a few of your points (the weird physics of the barrels, mostly, no argument there, and the skulls tracking you when invisible, but that I can accept, because “magic”, and those skills still being invaluable there), but I was actually surprirsed at how “balanced” the final event is, considering how many mechanics they introduced there.
I’ve wiped there a couple of times, but mostly I can reliably finish it. Trail of Treachery’s finale in my opinion is much worse, while offering little else besides huge walls of flesh.
For example, unlocking the stashes is nigh-mandatory there, while in Tower we’ve ignored the stashes even after we’ve unlocked them a good 50% of the times.

This is true for solo play as well: on legend bots wipe hard on Trail (plus, they can’t follow you in the underpassage, and don’t fight in the crypt), while they are mostly fine in Tower (you’d have to throw all the barrels yourself, but that’s something you can do with speedpotions - and you can get as many as you want at the start, and replenish them at the feast).

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i think the main issue is sometimes the skulls appear and sometimes they don’t

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