I actually switched to the Stealth ability. But i use it like the Volleyfire. I don’t spec all the way to the end now
Recon laser / krak / meleeing with Catachan Mark IV sword is quite good on Damnation
With Duck and Dive you can really sprint slide around, Catachan sword is a pleasure and athletic in melee, krak one shots ogryns. You can long distance bomb reapers
The ammo and toughness talents being at the bottom of the trees is noticeable, and very felt, after spending the last few days getting reacquainted with Ogryn, Psyker, and Zealot (in that order) it is pretty odd.
Odd because the toughness and ammo stuff isn’t even that strong, it’s just stuff that used to be innate passives or level 5 feats, but they’re in the Keystone spot.
The extra ammo was also nerfed from 40% to 25%. Which on top of the nerf to the aura is very punishing for specific weapons.
I think there are also a lot of things that should just be built in to Vet by default, or early on in the tree. Like voice of command should buff teammates on its own, you shouldnt need to go down to the very bottom for it. This buff needs to last longer also imo if they’re going to make it a very bottom node. All ults should probably mark all ranged enemies by default too, with them getting refreshed being either only for executioners stance or a node you can pick. Ranged damage damage nodes are spread out too sparringly, they should probably just be removed and be built into Vet by default tbh with executioner’s stance being “the ranged damage ult”
I’m joining the counterfire brigade now that its properly nerfed. It seriously needs to mark scab stalkers and reapers too, now that it is fair.
I like commando vet too, I’ve been enjoying playing around with it since yesterday.
Same for officer vet. Although I’ve settled on a CAxe and a Vraks7 for commando(it’s godlike now after the buff IMO, even without executioner’s).
Although I agree that reccy las feels great on him too. Try out a bleed crit knife set up, also works very well and feels great. Still, commando feels very squishy though, its counterproductive imo, especially since the class encourages you to be very aggressive.
The other frustrating thing about it I find as well is that to get the most out of the class you NEED attentive and communicative teammates you can trust to support and follow up on your pushes.
Otherwise you’ll just be joining the methhead club, and, unlike unkillable ogryns and zealots, the game will make commando vets pay for it.
I often found myself getting dropped even with all of the durability talents, plus the 33% resist from the officer tree on top of them. Tbf though, the garbage latency issues don’t help this AT ALL.
Overral I like all three trees, but I still feel like you’re too vulnerable even if you focus on picking survivability talents. Heck, if you’re not a John Wick vet, sharpshooter vets needs more babysitting than before too.
So you’re going to get dropped often because all melee specialists (even vet commandoes) are incentivised by their kit to be out of coherency and upfront most of the time.
Don’t count on psykers or gun ogryns helping either since if they’re running DPS they can just do your job for you anyways.
DPS-wise sharpshooter can compete, but mobility-wise you’re still beat by both regardless of what they run. So they’ll keep up with the teams’ methheads and you’ll be left to die if you’re not running knives. God save you if you’re running a low mobility PS with a low mobility helbore.
Overall it feels like the vet’s previous skill ceiling has been turned into the baseline now, but without the payoff in either survivability, DMG, or UX.
Although I really like all the utility, talent nodes like field improvisation and For the Emperor are easily worth two points each with how much value they bring. Hell, I’ve even started to come around on smoke grenades, they’re incredibly useful in helping bail yourself and the team out of killboxes.
Vet rn feels like pre-patch support psyker if you’re not min-maxing for DMG. This in turn makes it hard to feel like you’re contributing even if it’s your timely uses of Voice of Command that has been keeping your methhead zealot and ogryn from committing suicide every engagement.
So far I think this is what alot of the issues with Vet’s tree comes down to, UX and survivability. It feels bad, especially if you’re a newb, average, mediocre, or like me have garbage latency most of the time. Overall, I like the direction of this update, but each of the classes feels like they were designed by a different designer, and they weren’t talking to eachother during the QA phase.
The thing that annoys me the most with trying to do more melee-y Vet are his terrible base mobility stats. Even taking all of the movement speed and stamina boosts and you’ll still be left in the dust by anyone else.
I don’t know why they didn’t normalize all of the base stats between the human classes with this overhaul.
There it is.
I tried Melee Vet, and found a build that works fine. PS+Laspistol. Good mobility, good damage, good boss damage, and even some decent ranged power (thanks to rending).
Problem is: You get f*ed over by the teammates.
You can initiate gunners, shotgunners, anything really, but the moment the team doesn’t let you kill what you are fighting you are in a ridiculously bad spot.
Shard psykers are the worst as teammates in this regard, absolutely homing in on anything you are currently fighting.
What was even more interesting is that I thought it would be good with Zealot who is melee-focused. Guess what? They take all your kills too. Be it a knife Zealot, a Caxe zealot, or a Evis (haven’t played with other Zealots), they take 90% of elite kills if you fight the same thing.
Sharpshooter Vets who really want those special kills are just as bad.
Toughness regain and regen being tied to GETTING THE KILL is HORRIBLE. CDR tied to SPECIAL KILLS is also HORRIBLE. Yes, it works really well if you can kill the damn thing in front of you, but that doesn’t happen. You just can’t.
I played Zealot before the patch with a Vet who was adamant about only shooting what you are fighting, but this is in a whole other universe.
Oh and of course, it doesn’t even come close to melee Zealot in any category, be it initiation, survival, mobility, or damage.
My other takeaway from the whole experience is that nerfing PS heavy made it so that you never use it. Powered heavies come out so slow and deal so little extra damage that it basically halves your DPS.
Good job again testing team!
This sentiment will always be true.
FS needs to stop putting “On Kill” conditions on builds that cannot reasonably be expected to get kills. It’s true in Vermintide 2. It was true with Psyker before they were buffed. It’s true on Veteran now that all his breakpoints are gone.
On the bright side it looks like the strange relationship between class, toughness damage and differing movement states is gone, so you aren’t going to be losing tons of your newly non-existent Veteran toughness for sprinting like before.
Conversely this also means no more no damage hits at 100% toughness as Zealot. But everyone gets a nice 50% DMGR during slide and it appears dodge…
Veteran still has that 1.25s stamina delay which is absolutely horrible now, so I run a selfish tree that grabs both 0.25 stamina nodes. sorry not sorry
. . . WAIT WHAT!? YOU CAN DO THAT!? Do you run it with regen curios and deadshot? How does it feel?
I suppose you could run it with deadshot, if you dive straight down the middle of vet’s tree you’ll have enough points to grab always prepared and trench fighter on both sides. With ammo regen, or you could use those 2 nodes and a useless aura for more buffs at the bottom. I find this is optimal vet tree loadout.
From my point of view the major problem with trying to play the vet as sharpshooter now is that they really aren’t needed anymore.
A decent sharpshooter used to to be the teams best chance of getting rid of shooter mobs.
Shooter mobs have become an none issue now as ogryns and psykers delete even better then sharpshooters at range and zealots can easily close the mobs unpunished.
However the squadleader and commando centric builds feel quite interesting.
And I have a recon lasgun Crit+rending build, that’s really fun 
The point is that too many playstyles are patched out. I needed the reload on Volley Fire. Now that its gone the playstyle I spent 350 hours perfecting is just gone and the game is no longer fun.
Dont force the player into a new build - retain the original options, at least.
I think vet is intended to be more rigid as the “newbie” class. My zealot build has stuff all over the place. Likewise even my vet build had a different blitz and several random talents.
If that was the reasoning, then why the hell wouldn’t they have just had an auto-leveling option that picks the talents for you?
If that was their reasoning they failed. The tree is extremely counter-intuitive. For example one of the strongest damage nodes is in the middle called rending.
I skimmed and saw some people have trouble with toughness and movement. It’s pretty late here but I’ll go over some quick points
Melee vet is easy on Auric Damnation
I’ve been meleeing Vet since beta and will tell you to Get the Toughness regen at ranged talent. This is actually a melee talent
For movement spec Duck and Dive and learn to sprint and slide; get lots of sprint efficiency and stam recovery on your relics. I am currently running +30% toughness regen, +15% sprint effi, +12% stam regen on all of them. They are +toughness relics btw
I’m using Recon laser with Stripped Down blessing (+15% sprint speed), but it’s not strictly necessary. Spec -20% sprint cost of course, and a 0.25 decreased delay to regen stamina node, or whatever it’s called
See my summary on building a melee vet