In my opinion, the most recent patch fixed most of the problems with them. I hope Fatshark doesn’t listen to the people over at Reddit who just want to spam click light attacks and easily clear everything off their screen. Is there still some tweaking that could be done to them? Probably, yeah. I just don’t agree with people saying they are a terrible enemy or that their health needs to be reduced to where any weapon can easily one shot them.
Having to actually interact with enemies to defeat them is good. Now we just need a dreg mauler and crusher equivalent with high HP and infested armor that doesn’t instantly get deleted. I want to actually have to “duel” enemies by blocking, dodging and attacking them at opportune moments. This is way funner than resorting to spamming elites to up the difficulty. This obviously has a lot to do with power creep as well, but these enemies give me some hope that Fatshark is trying to take the game in a healthier direction.
Agreed. There’s also a recurring problem where something will be bugged so people will ask for buffs/nerfs. Then FS will fix the bugs AND buff/nerf – wildly overcorrecting.
I will say thus far they’re more of a ‘speed bump’ than an interesting enemy type for my skitarii. Fire and explosions should have less of an easy time with them, though, I agree.
While I wouldn’t call them “fun” to fight by any means, they’re shielded enemies. They’re not supposed to be fun. They’re supposed to be an annoying speed bump, and they definitely serve that purpose. They do feel weirdly tanky without their shield, made worse by the fact they look very similar to other enemies so when you got one little shitter chasing after you and you just turn around and swat him like a common mob, you end up taking a backstab after cause he didn’t die like you expected. That could be looked at. Reduce the unshielded health, maybe in exchange for tankier shield. Certain movesets should also have shield breaking attacks like in Vermintide to give some weapons an interesting edge. Currently only ones I can think of are chain weapons. Other than that, they’re fine as they are. Their initial iteration was catastrophic, but now they’re absolutely not a nerf-worthy enemy.
Sell it to me. Explain to me how you exactly interact with vanguards, beyond hitting them few more times. There is nothing interesting about them, they are inferior to shield enemies in VT2, you cannot spend stamina to open them up, or go around the shield. We already hit at the head level for any other enemy type, and thos f…don’t seem to even use their shields right.
There is no clear “shield breaker” weapon class in DT, or flails which would ignore the shield.
They can also spawn in packs up to 10+, which just makes it tedious and gives me a whiff of bulwark mass bs.
I’ve found since the patch I can generally stagger them, and in general dodging to their side and attacking from there has been working well for me.
Though I do agree this would be a great opportunity for interesting weapon interactions. Part of me thinks the thunderhammer should just have insane cleave on them and not stop until it’s hit 4 or 5 of them. It’s slow and it seems like it would be thematic if the giant warhammer wasn’t bothered by a bit of metal in its way.
I like that im implementing single target strikes as appropriate into my horde clear to deal with vanguards, getting them over their shields is a minor skill check to take small satisfaction in, they feel like they give more purpose to attack chains that mix between strikedowns and cleaving attacks, they reward intimanty knowing your weapons moveset so you can smootly switch between single target and cleaving combos. I’ve enjoyed having them in the game, especially with this second patch
Vanguards were not fun because any way you could mechanically counter them and not just brute force through them was systematically neutered for reasons.
Their stagger thresholds were so high they wouldn’t react to hits, shield or not.
There was no mechanical way outside of a handful of weapons’ special attacks to open them up that isn’t just brute forcing their shield.
They had an insane amount of non-indicated, uncounterable universal damage reduction to punish you for daring to aim and go for their weakspot.
They have almost 3 times the health of their bruiser counterparts without any real indication for why they have so much health, and it also counters flanking or hitting them from behind because of how tough they were even if you actively attempted to mechanically bypass their most salient feature, their shield.
It’s an enemy design that doesn’t reward you for making good decisions; they were an unresponsive, visually uninteresting HP sink that did nothing but further punish weapons that were already struggling and did absolutely nothing to the current cream of the crop weapons.
The first set of changes made them more bearable, because at least they respond a bit more to your attacks now, but the implementation still sucks.
I don’t mind the shield damage cap, but I feel that if they have that, they should have a max damage threshold too so it doesn’t mess with slower, harder hitting weapons. For example, the shield has 500 HP, damage is capped to 250 damage meaning it requires 2 hits minimum to break but if you can hit the shield for 750 or more, it would ignore the cap.
No idea how you figure that, but they made life of my Cleaver Ogryn way harder for no benefits at all. Cleaver never was in a good spot before, now it’s even in the worse spot. There are two problems with them:
They are still too numerous for the amount of troubles they cause
They are too hard to kill even when you’ve staggered them and broke their defense stance already (what is nonsense and pointless waste of time)
I could agree they add something interesting if there would be twice as less of them than currently the case, and it would be possible to kill them twice as fast (like, they would force you to stop your wide swings, stagger or flank them, quickly kill them - and keep swinging) - but it’s just non-stop frustration each time they enter the scene as you need to personally stagger each one of them and then poke them 3-5 times to finally kill them (depending on your weapon). It’s stupid design with no goal, same what they did with Plasma Gunner by giving them carapace helmet, making it unnecessary durable in melee when there is no point in it (when it came to melee already, gunner elite should just die asap and don’t bother you too much anymore, their whole point is threaten you at range, they don’t do anything in melee except wasting your time).
IMO, they need to become as fragile as trash after you broke their defense stance, or if you attack them from behind. And I don’t even think they should “share spawn pool with bulwarks” - bulwarks can have their previous spawn pool, I don’t mind. Bulwarks are much more easy and fun to deal with than those vanguard turds.
Otherwise it really seems like the only reason they added them is to make the new DLC class look more attractive, cause with all those DoTs and electrocution stagger it so easily can spam without sacrficing damage at all they are not problem for Skitarii - but for the base classes they often are. What are kinda shady marketing tactics tbh..
cleaver can have infinite cleave and cleave through carapace with the right blessing, i also just think your statement is wrong cleaver ogryn is in a fine spot, mk3 cleaver with the right build is talked about as being one of ogryns best builds as of recent.
Yes, you have to sacrifice bless slot for that, losing even more damage - and cleaver doesn’t do good damage in the first place, especially vs carapace. So, yea, great that you now can cleave through it - the problem it now takes 3 business days to kill anything more armored than a gunner. Also, I doubt that bless will do much vs the new shield turds, as they are not “carapace” enemies, they use different mechanics. So I suspect even with that bless your swings will be stopped by their shields.
P.S.
Overall, I still don’t get it - what is your reason for allowing those turds to still be that durable AFTER their shield is broken or they got staggered and “opened”? What do you find so “fun” about poking at a helpless mob that does nothing for 1 or 2 seconds more than it’s necessary? Are you by any chance enjoy playing with infinite Smite bots on your team too? ;]
i quite literally enjoy interacting with the melee combat this game offers, clicking on enemies is fun for me
no i hate psykers, and hive scums, and golden toughness
and what blessing do you normally run instead that is causing you to lose ‘more damage’? how is cleaving through carapace and hitting more enemies behind that target bad?
heres a quick video of the cleaver build fighting 20 scab vanguards, basically no issue at all, the enemy is slightly tanky and slows you down, and thats a good thing, i enjoy that and have fun
also, im just tired of the years of powercreep, seeing enemies just get destroyed instantly, watching bosses melt in record times. i just like clicking on the enemies and it actually taking some time and skill to kill em, i like the challenge i guess, its just fun to hit things and them die, its not fun to look at enemies and them get instantly vaporized
Dude.. I’ve watched 10s of it, and it was unbearable already at this point even to watch. We probably have very different perspectives of “fun” here. I don’t find poking at a concrete wall with a knife “fun”, for example. There is nothing “fun” in this video for me, it’s just a time waster. No challenge, no risk, nothing that would constitute a game. It’s “cleaning your toilet - The Game” kind of fun, a mindless chore you simply can’t wait to get over with.
I understand how fighting a Crusher is fun, I enjoy it - cause there is always a thrill, one mistake and you are splattered with an overhead. I understand, to a certain extent, how fighting bulwarks is fun - they are slow, have clearly visible opening you can exploit, you actually can easily and quickly kill them by shooting at their unprotected back or side. Those turds, on the other hand, can survive double barrel shot at their side quite often (may do something with them being less bulky and catching less pellets, but also them being ridiculously durable). Also, bulwarks (at least in the base game) were never remotely as numerous as those turds, so never were that much of an issue (not to mention they are elites so you at least expect them to be an obstacle).
