So powerful its unneeded, talking out of both sides of your face. Changing traits like Heroic and Off Balance is powercreep SOLELY in the sense that more variety of traits on a team equals more utility.
The idea that the only trait worth taking(because it gives the player immediate feedback that its working and is the safest trait) is overpowered is cute. The other traits lack utility and feedback, let’s start there and break the only thing working after.
Also to ‘fix’ SS is easy, just can’t proc while active(like the old Grimnir’s Focus)
Debatable, sure. Bugs and beastmen did no favors for 2.0, but neither did the stagger & dodge changes. Anecdotally there’s still a huge swath of formerly regular players on my friends list that completely dropped out of the game due to how those things impacted gameplay.
For everyone who enjoys the new paradigm, there’s also people who were driven away by it. And since it seems quite mad to suggest that the stagger & dodge changes brought in new players, that means that the huge, sweeping changes Fatshark made to their gameplay resulted in a net loss of players. Exactly how many is up in the air, but it’s certainly a real concern for future changes.
Dude. 1.6 was the first anniversary patch with A Quiet Drink, which was also the first time the game’s peak player count went back over 10k after the incredibly disappointing release of Shadows of Bogenhafen. That patch didn’t even have any gameplay changes in it. How can you believe a statement about 1.6 gameplay being “pure crap” is in any way credible?
1.6 gameplay was 1.3 gameplay. And 1.3 was a near universally acclaimed patch for increasing weapon viability, nerfing the range meta, and removing a lot of jankiness and uncertainty from dodging.
Which is one solution I posted in my first post if you have read it.
If you think that a trait which:
Increases attack speed (offense)
Increases damage (due to more hits in the same time)
Increases THP regeneration since you cleave more enemies (defense)
Increases active skill regeneration due to more hits (offense)
Makes blocking faster (defense)
Gives enemies less opportunities to hit you (defense)
a trait which increases the effect of SIX MAIN COMBAT MECHANICS BOTH IN DEFENSE AND OFFENSE is not overpowered than you are either in denial, have no idea about gameplay balance or are in horrifying fear of losing your toy. A consistent theme for the game is that you have to chose either for more defense or more offense. That Swift Slaying increases both is obviously an outlier. The fact that both Ressourceful Combatant and Ressourceful Shooter both have gained restrictions showcases that crit based trigger conditions are broken. Everything just everything demonstrates that Swift Slaying is broken and overpowered. This isn’t even about opinion anymore. These are all facts based on current game balance and past game balance changes.
Also concentrate for the last paragraph. I don’t say that the effects need to be removed necessarily but that the downtime has to be cut from permanent uptime to about 25 - 50 % uptime which would still make it the strongest trait. Yes, cutting its effectiveness by half makes it STILL the strongest. That is the defionition of overpowered.
And yet I see people making good use of it with just the 10 % equipment bonus if at all. Sure, it is far easier to use. But necessary. I don’t think so. But even then, we can adress this by giving them a slightly better chance for proccing.
Stupid but serious question: Have they given the game another serious run (lets say about four hours) after most bugs have been fixed?
Simply check the player numbers. Let’s ignore the huge spike for anniversary since it does 1.6 even less favour. 1.6 is one of the versions (not counting the release months) which has the highest percentual loss of players in the whole game lifetime and this despite Steams largest sale falling into that time. Many people simply didnt enjoy the game anymore and stopped playing.
On the other hand after WoM stabilized the bugs the player numbers have increased. So the player numbers suggest that WoM brought in new players and also kept them.
Well I also believe that the other melee traits are simply just garbage or too situational to really compete with swiftslaying. You can make some arguments for opportunist with shields but even that trait is simply just way too specific to be useful for anything else.
Heroic intervention and off balance just need to be deleted from the game and something else needs to be created in their place. What it is, well I don’t really know but I can say for a fact that anything that requires the enemies to do something for it to be worthwhile will not be run no matter how powerful it is (unless game breaking).
Resourceful combatant is something I believe could be viable with some number tweaking because it has been good in the past and arguably was even way too good for some careers hence the current once per 5 seconds limitation we now have.
Parry has always been kind of interesting but personally i have always felt like it’s one of those weapon traits that kind of traps you into specific playstyle. This is not necessarily a bad thing if the trait would also do something else apart from reducing the stamina cost for example knocking back enemies once every few seconds or something that rewards you properly for timing the blocks right.
Other than that, I also find the idea of making swiftslaying a baseline to be rather interesting, but I really believe strongly that the current power of swiftslaying is stemming from the lack of actual competition.
That’s the problem. It’s such a versatile Stat that it’s hard to compete with it for both offence and defence. If it was Crit/Power/Crit Power, this wouldn’t be an issue. The fact that it’s 20% rather than 5, 10, or 15 is just adds to strength.
They would certainly have to do some tweaking and decision making based on Weapon speeds and functions. Including possibly changing the trigger mechanic.
Sure i understand 20 % to be extremely problematic but i also believe that if swiftslaying was like 5 % tomorrow it would still be with the current trait setups be run nearly 95 % of the time.
Sure resourceful combatant might see some more use in this scenario but the rest?
Currently this game just needs some more options be it something stupid as guaranteed criticals for 5 seconds or 100 % stagger increase for swings that’s actually interesting. (Bloated examples but just for the sake of my point)
Yeah, that’s why I’d suggest tweaking other Traits, or adding more, and also possible double functions for situational ones at the same time.
At the minute it’s just boring.
I mean if you had to rank them in a tier list, SS would be S+ and nothing else would even get passed B in my eyes, other than Opportunist, just for Shield Weapons.
Some have. Ask @mahkra for instance. Though I’m not sure he’s even paying attention to these forums anymore.
Again, 1.6 gameplay is 1.3 gameplay. 1.3 came out in mid November of 2018. If people didn’t like playing the game that way, then why did it take more than 5 months for the number of players to go down?
This is a Vermintide’s problem since d1… destroying one thing only because it’s over power with the 1% of the game… while a rework would have been a greatly better idea.
In fact, even when it was op with certain cheesy combos, it was “meh” with the rest of the game.
Sometimes I can’t understand Fatshark logic… The game already reduces your cooldown for each enemy hit. Would it really so hard make that Resourceful Combatant just buff this mechanics?
Why everything must be under crit%?
I’m sure that they want prevent that those careers like Shade (and only Shade, I think) spam their ult… but using crit mechanics, they are favoring those specific careers.
I agree they way the handled resourceful was kinda stupid especially now considering you probably get more cooldown reduction by using swiftslaying -.-
Then again it wasn’t only shade who was abusing it (yes she was the most notable one) but even careers like mercanary and witch hunter could have nearly 100 % up time on their abilities when combined with the old 33 % cooldown talents they had and some cdr from equipment.
I think there’s a bit wider meta-discussion about the reason so many things are flat ignored, and that’s the variety of enemy armour types (or lack of it) that funnels players into very restrictive builds - even without the clearly useless traits we have.
Firstly, having beastmen and chaos covered by * % vs chaos* makes that anything automatically 2/3 more useful if it has vs Skaven build.
Just having Vs chaos, Vs Skaven, Vs Savages(including zerkers&Moo-cows here) would increase variety of builds a lot, and of course reduce the power of other builds. The %vs Berzerkers is mostly overshadowed anyhow.
As of SS, it ticks too many boxes for it not to be used. By making it SSvsSkaven, SSvsChaos and SSvsSvages would restrict it somewhat, although that’ll cue up people to either; drop when they have enemies that aren’t their build or avoid those race-specific maps, spend time messing about swapping weapons or downright soil themselves that SS has been nerfed.
Apart from my ramblings about enemy armour types, I favour the suggestion that it is somehow weapon specific. 2h hammer/pick gets +20%, Elf weapons get +1%.
I’d also favour some more skill-based triggers for the traits, like the way some of the talents are triggered - dodging, hitting more than one enemy, and so on although I think there’ll be significant pushback if peoples favourite build (Attack Speed + Crit chance + SS YAWN) is broken.
a few new traits that i came up with
melee weapon
-Big and Small: You do 5% more dmg to enemies smaller than you. You take 5% less dmg from enemies bigger than you. (so dwarf and saltz have different effects since their size is different)
-Psychological Warfare: Upon slaying a creature, you have 5% chance of inflicting fear to a melee range creature of the same type, sending them running (like sack rat) for 10 seconds.
So if you kill a clan rat, theres 5% chance a nearby clan rat runs away. if you kill a cw then a cw runs away (lulz)
Range weapon
-last resort: Allow you to block with your ranged weapon. your ranged weapon now has a minimum range. so the right mouse button turns into block if there are enemies within melee range (or a bit bigger range) and you can’t attack with your ranged weapon if there are enemies within melee range (or a bit bigger range).
Take that You Sword
-Shooting an Attacking melee (or a bit bigger area) enemy makes all enemies of the same armour type within melee range takes 1% more damage for 15 seconds, stacking up to 20 stacks. this effect ends if you switch to your melee weapon.* (20% extra dmg is alot, but its shooting in melee range so either its horde which doesnt need much dmg boost, or tough stuff in melee range which is hard to pull off).
*can also be “only applies to ranged weapons” so you dont drop the buff when u change to melee weapon, and can weave in range dmg here and there.
Neck
-Twisted Karma: You take hp (till 1hp) dmg before temp hp. you gain half the thp when ally (anywhere on the map) gains thp.
-Heart of Iron: The first damage you take every 25 seconds is reduced by 65%. You cannot receive healing from ally. (this includes the current aoe heal talent, elf’s party hp regen talent and maybe merc’s ult).
Charm
-Bottle Lobber: Potions become a 1 time use (unless you got chance to not use like RV) throwing weapon. upon landing the potion shatters and allies within the affected area receive potion affect, the duration is evenly distributed among the allies. this is like proxy except you can have everybody gets the effect and/or can do it out of melee range
-Careful Drinker: Potions you drink has half the duration. Your potions have 2 charges (maybe you can apply this to healing draft too.)
-Reckless Drinker: Potion and healing draft drinking animation speed is reduced by 80%. there is a 50% chance you only receive 80% of the potion duration or 80% of the healing draft healing.
Trinket
-tremble sensor: Your bombs only go off if there are nearby enemies, turning them into landmines.
-Carpet Bombing: your bombs do 20% of the dmg, area and knock back. and bombs comes with 5 charges.
Print that out and laminate it on Fatshark’s door.
So, if I could give a different take on the problem of SS, I’d say that the other traits simply don’t have a visible impact on gameplay. There’s only 2 other melee traits worth considering and that’s Parry and Opportunist. It’s already been said in the thread, Parry’s window is too short. Opportunist is a must on shields, but as already pointed out, it still needs more power to knock out the most obvious attacks from zerkers and overheads. It’s a deadweight on any non-shield weapon.
But with SS, no matter how casual of a player you are, once it procs you actually see it working. There’s next to zero visual feedback on every other trait in the game and I think that’s a huge issue if you want the non-meta learning masses to use something besides SS.
So, yeah, I think adding a clear visual feedback to a bunch of traits (even something like changing the push animation of when Opportunist is equipped) would go a long way.
One other thing, once you hit Cataclysm and beyond, the game overwhelms you in everything, and no amount of breakpoints can help your weapons keep up with the extra mass, stagger resistance, and hyperdensity of hordes. Extra attack speed is the only real option by then with exception to shields.
Would straight up remove Heroic Intervention, Off-Balance, Inspiational Shot.
Any THP adding Trait with a reliable trigger is going to be either useless or OP and trying to balance that by limiting it to only one person in a party equipping it will cause train wrecks in Quick Play. Off-Balance is immediately nullified by not stacking with anything or anyone so it has no purpose in game. Inspirational is worthless and requires user to waste ammo, a precious special killing resource, to give a teammate negligible assistance. No, remove it.
So, for Parry, I’d make the window a full second or close to it.
For Opportunist I’d just make it stronger.
For SS, any nerf that doesn’t include a malus.
I’ll take a melee trait that increases power of crits. Call it Cruelty or Precise Strikes. Reasoning: at Cata and beyond attack speed will always be the best defense, forgoing survivability for straight DPS is acceptable. Possible conflicts: Mercenary and WHC are already DPS power houses, and Merc gets extra attack speed built into him. Don’t care about Pyro or Slayer getting buffed from this trait because their weapon selection already comes with a variety of set backs.
Another one could be Berserker: enemy attacks, pushes, and knock backs cannot stop player attacks. Because currently the classes that have that passive do not actually work. This is another defensive trait, as I have died many, many times during hordes after being pushed by an elite or somehow hit-stunned and getting shrecked in that window of being completely defenseless and immobile. I’ll gladly give up SS if I can put up my block and walk away or keep attacking to stagger the enemy that got a lucky shot in order to prevent every other enemy from having a free opening.
For ranged, I like them as is and am surprised to see Scrounger getting wrote off so hard in this thread. Only thing I would add is a trait to increase cleave by a good amount (unavailable to drakefire and staves). Because getting rid of ammo sustain for power is acceptable.
And, you know, while I have no ideas, I think Handguns, Shotguns, and Bows being 3 separate categories of weapons with their own unique traits (like how they do with drakefire/staves) would be healthy. They’re very different and that’d open up the devs to making traits that are good for one class of weapons without making another OP.
Don’t hate Necklace traits except Hand of Shallya. Even if the affect was 100% it’d still be meh, whatever.
Bombs don’t scale well, imo, so Shrap became the go-to. Dupe is still fun, if it is weak. Explosive Ordinance could always be an even bigger radius with more knock back. Hard to imagine people being angry with a bomb that does a better job staggering groups of enemies. I want to send Wargors flying off cliffs as revenge for all the times they wiped Righteous Stand runs
EDIT: @everyone I’ve added some information to the original post:
Also added some of KKND2’s suggestions:
@KKND2 Going to comment on the ones I see as most likely to work, and then add them to the main post.
This could quite easily be a good way of giving Saltz a frontline Weapon, rather than just a Trait, but it’s a fun idea for a Trait too. Would probably get scaled out on Cata and only effect Skaven though.
I feel like this needs to be a Weapon specific function, and not a Trait (like the Shotgun bash).
Sounds like it would make Barrage/Hunter obsolete. BH/Huntsman already have something similar, with Crits.
I kind of see what you’re going for here, but something like: ‘you no longer generate THP, but gain 50% of the THP generated by nearby allies’, may be a bit more simple.
This is one I considered suggesting too. Both this and Twisted Karma seem to be very good for ranged Careers which don’t generate much THP, a problem I tried to solve with my suggestion of Rangers Glory. I’ll add both of these to highlight that Ranged THP is a little awkward right now.
Yes. The extra action/aiming involved could actually be the downside to the fact that you can buff everyone. Nice little blue, yellow and purple explosions would be cool visually too.
These should have been RV Talents instead of THP :').
Adding this, but they should just add a mechanic similar to mines regardless of Trait imo.
Also adding this quote as it addresses the aesthetic/feeling of Traits.
Definitely could use some stronger traits especially on melee weapons, but some of the dismissals of traits you don’t find useful SHOULD BE IGNORED.
My beef / bread & butter - Nature’s Bond, Hunter, Barrage, Opportunist are extremely useful in right hands.
Swift Slaying could use a slight nerf and other aggressive alternatives are needed, the problem is how to determine what procs the effect and not giving flat stat bonus… generally considered not fun and the role of properties.
Weapon traits could proc in other unique ways though tend to overlap with career traits /talents but would be more interesting and diverse.
Multiple Enemies Hit - Mercenary
Tagging Enemies - WHC
Staggering Enemies - Bulwark
Killing Specials - RV/WHC
Every 5th Swing - Talents
Killing Enemies
HItting Monsters / Super Armor
Hitting Enemies below X% Health
All could be tuned for synergetic buffs and compete with SS but would need to be limited amount of traits and balanced… matter of FS doing it or leaving as status quo.
But DONT REMOVE traits that are widely used, I wonder if FS could determine as they can say Kruber is least played hero, such as my bread and butter!
That’s an excellent point. The effects the other melee traits are thoroughly obfuscated.
Hell, for example, it sounds like even you don’t realize that what Opportunist actually does is give a 50% increase to stagger power. Has almost nothing to do with timed pushes like it claims. And then you have take into account how incredibly tedious it is to work out stagger breakpoints as well, so it’s doubly hard to understand what benefits it’s giving you in most situations.
I can even throw out a 2nd great example. Most people don’t even know that Heroic Intervention actually works. Or they believe that it only works on freeing allies from disablers. Purely due to the fact that it both seldom triggers in normal combat and it has no unique feedback.
melee weapon
-Master Crafted: the stats on this weapon are doubled
-Gouge: Every 20 seconds your attack incapacitate a man sized creature for 8 seconds, rending them inactive, unable to move or attack. Any further damage will remove this effect. (i guess instead of random melee attacks, this instead can be activated via extra button, so add 1 more attacking animation to most weapons when they hit their extra action button. the rapier pistol shot would activate this)
-kick while they’re down: you do extra damage to knocked downed creatures. (not sure how much extra dmg L_L…)
range weapon
-armour piercing: You ignore amours, but do only half damage (ie body shot cw). if the target already can be penetrated, it hits 1 extra target (no more armour piercing this time, so if you shoot a sv, it hits the sv dealing dmg, and hits the sv behind it but does no dmg).
-21 is the rule: your ranged weapon ammo is set to 21 shots (good for weapons that doesnt come with alot of ammo like shotgun, not so good for large ammo weapons)
-cursed weapon: When out of ammo, you consume 10% hp/thp per shot. (will not fire if there is not enough hp/thp to pay for the shot)
-improved magazine: add another shot to your weapon before you need to reload. (single shot weapons becomes 2 shots weapons, bardin shotgun turns into 3 shots. doesnt do much to bows ?_?)
neck/charm/trinket
-Ranald’s Whim: You have 20% chance upon picking up an item for the 1st time, duplicate said item. (this was in v1 lol)
@Adelion –
I may be missing some of the nuances of this discussion as I only skimmed to find out what @BongoSkaggs was pinging me about, but I’ve played ~100 hours since they fixed the most egregious brokenness that was present in 2.0. (Compared to ~2000 hours in 1.x, and probably ~10 hours while the game was an unplayable buggy mess for an irresponsibly long time post-launch of WoM/2.0.) That’s not enough time to really test all of the weapons & skills for all careers, but it’s certainly enough time to count as “another serious run.” And yes, I still think 1.6 was a better game than 2.x. I still hate everything about the stagger-for-bonus-damage system, the skill changes on characters still feel arbitrary / annoying & largely unnecessary, weapons feel worse balanced now than they were in 1.6 (shields are better, but now axes are trash), etc.
Now, there may be some truth to the idea that when the game was utterly broken for so long, I found other things to do with my time, so now I’m not in the habit of playing Vermintide regularly, but I still think they made the game net worse with the core combat changes. The new maps are great, but I still would rather play them in 1.6 than in 2.x.
