Versus thoughts

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Versus Feedback
1

So, i played it.

A few quick thoughts.

  1. Its painfully, painfully obvious which people have cata experience…or at least some manner of PVP experience.
  2. A consequence of nr 1 is that the team with more cata players typically is very prone to absolutely steamrolling the other. Heaven have mercy if its a 3v0 or 3v1 scenario. Because these veterans have absolutely none and i am not very ashamed about it.
  3. Similarly, premades are often very easy to notice, they react exceptionally quickly even without vision consistently.
  4. Matches are often very unbalanced as a result of the complete lack of matchmaking/balancing mechanics. A group of below 20s can match against a cata kill squad.
  5. Characters that are good at using stagger THP like FK, BW, WP and such are insanely powerful, you somehow poke them down to 10 health but then 5 slaves go near em and a second later they are back to half. Virtually indestructible in a horde when done right. Even more so with premades/cata teammates.
  6. Packmasters jump-hook clipping seriously needs looking into.

Edit :

  1. Warrior Priest shield-heal-revive is incredibly infuriating to deal with as Skaven. Even if your team catches someone out and deal a lot of damage despite the recruit modifiers he just pops them back to full.

Over and over and over. I had to watch a bunch of guys get their asses saved from nearly zero more than 15 times before i lost count.

  1. This leads to the feeling that Skaven side really doesnt feel nice to play as, heroes take little damage and the main threat Specials offer, adding pressure, doesnt work because there is no pressure! Adds are too weak&few!

At least when both sides are somewhat near eachother in skill, or when one side has “that” teamcomp.

4 Likes
2

I encountered a bug on fort brachsenbrücke where the cannon ball got stuck in the lift but didn’t progress. So there essentially was a deathmatch. But the U5 were able to just rev each other constantly making it basically impossible to kill them. Reviving should be more limited to make it harder for the heroes.

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3

Pretty much summarized most of my gripes. A good hero team is nearly unstoppable.

The other thing is that the tank/sniper meta gets stale. Infinite hero revives.

It’d be more fun if the difficulty was balanced around Legend similar to campaign mode for hordes/elites. Then give all players versus weapon crafting similar to weaves, but allowing them right off the bat access to max weapon properties and the same traits, so that builds can be experimented with, and so that not everything is focused on high health and THP gain for revives and special sniping.

It seems almost as if they nerfed all the specials except assassin and hook rats, but the hook rats get the speed boost like before, and they can still drop off of cliffs very fast. Many ledges still result in an instant death for the hero too without them hanging on the ledge. This shouldn’t be the meta. There should be enough hordes and elites to keep the heroes busy enough that specials can take advantage of the opportunity. I feel like 80% of the time, a halfway decent hero team can just move unhindered, and sniper or use their ult to wipe out any Skaven player.

Another thing, the rifle now only has a 13 shots I believe, but the Engineer with trollhammer has 11, and that’s often a 1-shot. I think crossbow bounty hunter is insane with the double shot crossbow from blessed shots not consuming ammo, along with the steel crescendo bonus now, he can insta-wipe most specials with a quick weapon switch, and then has an ult with perfect accuracy while being shot at.

I think rather than constantly nerfing the hero weapons and ammo capacity to the point it’s just sniping a special 3-4 times to kill them, there’s got to be some really threatening hordes and elites in play. The only thing to make that work for all players is a ranking system, so that maybe entry level is Veteran Difficulty, and then as you rank up, the hordes and elites go up to Legend.

Also, to prevent non-stop rushing, there’s got to be checkpoint objectives regularly that require all hero players are present. A good many objectives can just be rushed to, things like stopping the bells, they’ll just rush. Being forced to babysit a moving object is also not ideal, even though that helps. I would prefer migrating from one arena or theater of combat to another, giving the heroes a certain amount of time to survive, and then progressing to a checkpoint together, and moving on. As is, against a decent hero team, particularly a pre-made team of friends, the only hope the Skaven stand is to get the thickest horde they can going and then hope they can separate the players enough to pick them off. Usually though, a halfway decent team can always get there in time to revive and won’t be easily separated, and since the hordes and elites are so weak, they can easily kite them around or even ignore them, and just push through.

It got stale so quicly, that I realized, it’s too imbalanced to enjoy. I’m either wiping a clueless team out quickly or getting wiped out while constantly reviving teammates, or on the skaven side, disabling or downing a hero, only to have them revived a moment later. I had one match out of maybe 20 where we were evenly matched, and both times, the hero team felt so difficult to stop that it made playing the Skaven feel like, “staggered, shot down, wait for respawn”, repeat. The only reason we stopped each other’s hero team is by fully coordinating hordes and setting up traps together. This is almost never possible when playing with randos, and even then, it barely worked. We were all 8 of us experienced players, and it felt like steamrolling through the mission as the heroes.

2 Likes
4

I agree with everything that you’ve said to keep it simple, stagger THP too much, WP still too strong, the slight nerf against OE they made was nice tho

One thing, that has been on my mind is if the heroes really need the ability to ping the Skaven? Skaven are already loud and can be one-tapped, do they need the 5 seconds of wall hacks on too? Maybe being able to ping enemies can be a WHC only ability which would have him fill a very good niche, while also giving skaven players more freedom

Ping systems are ignored by new players anyways but are depended on by higher tier players which are already too strong

Pings are also a consistent counter to the fire rat, if he’s burning you and you’re disoriented and blinded, you can just ping the fire rat to see exactly where he is and kill him

Or use it to keep track of an assassin

Of course I don’t think removing the ability to ping enemies (or reducing its highlight to only 1 second or so while the WHC can keep them pinged for longer) for the heroes will fix the balance, but it’ll deprive them of information and an advantage that, in my opinion they have too much of anyways

2 Likes
5

Yeah this happened to me as well, it was like last stand for them but they all getting downed with infinite revivals was annoying to watch. That basically means all rats who do damage are mostly useless overall, only disablers matter. There is no point on deplete their health or try to kill them if they have infinite revivals.

It should be only 1 revival per hero with only 1-2 healing items in the whole level or max 2 revivals per hero with 0 healing items in the level or something like this.

1 Like
6

I played a bit more versus, and I had a lot of games with brand new players who struggled to gain points as the heroes.

One thing that stood out to me was how quickly new players adapted to the Skaven side. The hero side is much more complex, although elites and hordes don’t do much damage, and there’s less of a dynamic set of builds without item properties/traits, lacking knowledge of dodging, pushing, and how talents and builds work hurts the hero side quite a bit more. Being the only hero player who ever played co-op in several games, I could help carry a bit sometimes, but there was one game, where neither side got more than 30 points on each of the first two hero rounds.

As the Heroes it isn’t really possible to always stop an assassin or hook because dodging doesn’t work, and the servers tend to have pretty bad latency so, it’ll often feel like the actions aren’t syncing.

The main issue I think is the need for a ranking system. It’s got to be more fair. For me playing with brand new players isn’t fun, and with so many, I’ve seen my share of toxic behavior as a result. Most games I was against or with teams where 1 to 3 of the players were brand new and they’ve only ever played versus.

If only one two players on one side is experienced and the others are brand new, going against a full team of friends who’ve played a lot of Vermintide, it’s not fun. Even if you can “carry” the team, it’s not a fun experience. Likewise, playing against new players or a mix of new and experienced players, I see toxic behavior to the new players often from my opponents. That shouldn’t happen, but Fatshark has basically put new players into a competitive game mode with people who’ve played a long time and so it going to aggravate people.

I understand this is not a highly competitive game, and this mode is just for fun, but there’s always going to be people who play more or less, or as in my case, I spend most of my free time indoors. If it weren’t for my wife and kids, I’d be a basement dweller shut in playing games 100% of the time, but they get me out of the house to do healthy things, and sometimes my work requires I go places. The game mode just won’t be fun if there’s no way to rank up.

I still think they should include a system to apply weapon properties and traits to builds, and up the base difficulty. Maybe scaling from Veteran to Legend with rank, and with rank, getting less revives before being “wounded”. I only had one game where I got “wounded” and up till that point, I thought we had infinite revives.

The ranking system can be relatively simple, and based purely on hero score, because even a good loosing team will get quite a large hero score, and I think the ceiling on the what Skaven players can do is low enough that really good players can always get through outside of edge cases. I don’t want to suggest any specific system. I’m sure there’s some math out there that Fatshark can implement to determine the best way to rank players. Maybe get a mathematician to design a system for the game that can be adapted to code by Fatshark.

7

This is the worst part of the gamemode right now, but even more problematic than that is the extreme reach of the packmaster.

I think this is a real problem on its own just on the face of it - the reach is SO much further than vanilla that your muscle memory of when you should be dodging just doesn’t work - but the real severe issue is how far this reach goes vertically.

I’d prefer it if the packmaster just had literally zero reach downwards (upwards is less of a problem). It should never, ever be the case that a packmaster can hook someone from above to a point that the heroes literally cannot get to, and yet I’ve seen this happen in multiple games. It’s extremely aggravating to go through and I can’t imagine it is fun to play this way either.

I can tell that the whole gamemode is just going to quickly become really annoying tricks like this soon enough. This will completely kill any casual interest in the gamemode, the playerbase outside of private matches is going to end up just being a few sweaty nerds who have memorised the points on the map where you can grab players in such a way that they cannot ever be revived.

8

I enjoy fun strategies, like saving your Skaven horde triggers to use all at once, or baiting and splitting up the group. However, the Packmaster hooking players and pulling them off ledges feels cheap. Ledges that don’t lead to oblivion is a nice touch. They have a lot of spots in the maps now where players can climb back up. I’m fine with them being able to pull players down there. If they simply made hordes and elites thicker, then there’d be no need for the speed boost when hooking a player.

I’ve noticed that hooked players hang from the ledge afterward, which helps a bit, but ledges are still a big issue, and I don’t think the packmaster should be able to pull a player over a ledge that causes them to hang or die instantly. Additionally, players should be able to self-recover (and do a pull-up) as long as there are no enemies within a certain distance. Hanging on the edge often leads to the player trying to help them also getting pushed off by a Flame Rat or Troll.

The real challenge should come from managing hordes while simultaneously dealing with enemy specials. Without significant hordes, most Skaven special don’t pose much of a threat. A decent hero team can clear them out so quickly that Skaven players rarely get a chance to capitalize on the advantage. You’ll either get sniped almost immediately or countered by a player using an ability, bomb, or potion. Against newer or more casual players (those who rarely touch Legend or maybe even Champion) the hordes can keep them busy, but it’s not the same for experienced teams; which is why some kind of a ranking system could help, and set the difficulty higher.

Globadiers were my favorite before because they excelled at slowing down hero teams and forcing them to take damage before moving forward. It felt so gratifying to land that juicy hit on the hero team while they were in difficult spot. Now, most players know you can push straight through gas clouds with relatively little damage, and they’ll just clear space by pushing since everything is easy to stagger. I don’t know if they messed with the throwing arc or cooldown too, but I can’t do much with the globadier. In most cases, I find it’s better to die and respawn. They’re only really useful when the hero team has to defend a spot or is dealing with a very large horde, otherwise 80% of the time, better just to die and re-spawn as something else. A lot of games where the hero team pushes through, it’s because two players on my side are surviving as globadiers and not getting picked off, but doing practically nothing to slow the enemy down because they just push through the gas.

9

I would say that is a valid strategy and doing so should be rewarded. Always a nice feeling setting up traps and utilizing your mechanics

3 Likes
10

There’s not much strategy involved, it’s cheap. I’d be okay with that if they fixed the revives on ledges, remove the hook rat speed boost, and grabs from on top of or below ledges. Otherwise, it’s not strategy, it’s an unfair advantage.

11

Instakills from pulling someone up a ledge should be absolutely allowed

It’s not cheap because it requires a full hoist, hero must be in a specific place and the hookrat is exposed

Now, instakills that are made by just the hookrat grabbing you on a stair and only needing to start the hoist to glitch you out of the map, that’s defenitely unfair and should be fixed

1 Like
12

Near the end of Engines of War, before the bridge to the docks, a packmaster can drag a hero off the ledge right next to the circular area with the stand-and-wait event. In other words, the hookrat can remove a hero with full health from the map’s finale for the insignificant cost of dying as well.

I was dragged into the abyss as Kerillian. When a teammate asked how the elf suddenly died, another teammate helpfully explained that I “sucked.” Apparently they thought that I had gone down too many times, even though I wasn’t even wounded. I love this community sometimes.

13

If its any consolation, i too had a game on engines of war, also playing Keri (waystalker), i was reserved in using trueflight, mostly for gunners&saving teammates but otherwise still landing a heap of bloodshot javelins. Landing both is a oneshot and one is still enough to stagger a gun/fire/hook.

So we get past that tiny little bridge by the end and enter the tavern yard area when a troll jumps down on us. A Battle Wizard on the team instantly jumps forward but ends up flanked by a gunner who´d started to shoot. Dies practically instantly.

Bounty Hunter teammate next to me forgets that blocking is a thing an gets maimed by the troll trying to shoot it. With a crossbow, in melee range.

Last teammate is a lvl 19 ironbreaker that the two had been flaming for “not knowing anything” which i told em was plain pointless. Poor sap…tried his best. Tried saving the wizard but got roasted for a couple of seconds then gunner had reloaded.

Finally found myself very much alone with a troll, gunner, fire and gas, died. Both BW&BH (premade) had been flaming nonstop since dying being salty AF going on about “learn to press F” and “useless not doing anything”.

Badge screen happens, neither of them is on it, i was the MVP. Scorescreen tells i did as much or more than two of them combined, both on hero and on Skaven sides. Was i surprised? Not at all, and i still wasnt when both went dead silent and quit, refusing to respond to my comment about both being quite useless as rats with little damage and no disables. Even the 19 did better than them as Skaven. Tsk tsk.

1 Like
14

i love when karma strikes back :sweat_smile:
But yeah such misery should be denied by a matchmaking system.

15

Agree to disagree, there’s plenty of spots where a hook can almost immediately take a hero over the edge. Again, if ledge revives weren’t ridiculously finicky, and there weren’t so many spots where there’s no possible revive, that’d be a different story.

16

I’d really like the option for private lobbys and games.

A few friends set up a VS discord but it’s very difficult for 8 of us to have a match due to random people joining in.

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17

The feature for private lobbies just came out today, so that’s great.

1 Like