Weaves are actually fun

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
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So I´ve been holding out on playing weaves after the Winds of Magic release due to all the negative reception surrounding them. The last few days I decided to do something with all the stockpiled essence I had from playing regular missions, upgraded a character and went out for a few rounds.

I have to say, I am positively surprised. Weaves are actually fun! They break up the pace of the regular missions with their enemy wave and miniboss structure quite nicely. The maps look gorgeous with the various Wind effects, and playing them backwards provides a whole new challenge. The obstacles each wind provides get you to try new tactics, like building thorn walls in green or stacking metal buffs in yellow or directling lightning strikes at enemy groups in blue. They combine this with various interesting challenges, like Ratlings having super armor or max HP ticking down unless you are near a shrine… those who played some weaves know what I mean.
Ontop of this, the upgrade system is way better than that of the regular game, as it has no randomization and lets you build your equipment exactly as you want, and even change properties around anytime with no cost. This is really, really good.
(The only minor complain I have is that I have no idea what curse resistance does in weave mode).

However… overall, the mode is just not well implemented. I´ll try to list the problems I have in order of importance:

  • Matchmaking
    Its completely bonked/none-existing. Players climb up the weaves one after the other, and there is no motivation to redo any weave you have completed, as they grant nearly no rewards. Thus, the people that play weaves are split across 120 levels, making it basically impossible to find teammates for the weave you are on, especially later in a season. The fact that bots are not allowed (why?) and that weaves dont scale based on player count means you cannot even do solo-catch up. I actually wanted to play weaves, but simply couldnt. Weave mode pretty much screams “have a premade group or go home”.
  • Separation
    There is harldy any connection between the weaves mode and the base game, neither lore-wise nor gameplay wise. Weaves only offer only rewards usable for more weaves apart from framens (that dont even look that good) and the occasional commodation chest for reaching milestones or from the measly XP output. There really isnt any grinding motivation here, which hampers the mode a lot.
  • Progression from zero
    Having to level your heros from anew, not just once but every season, is a pain in the ass. I remember the first weave I played and how incapable my hero felt, slow and painful and really jarring when you are used to high level characters. Thank Sigmar I had a huge stockpile of essence from doing normal missions to level up my heros quickly, otherwise I might not have bothered.
  • Focus on leaderboards
    I´m ranking this low because it doesnt really bother me, I can freely ignore it. But I have no idea what the focus on leaderboards is supposed to add here, and there are rumours it affects other parts of the game, like the frequency of balance patches. I could do away with this aspect entirely.

And now, here are some suggestions. These are by no means all original, but I hope you find something useful.

  1. Move away from 120 step-after-step model. Instead integrate weaves into the quickplay queue. Make getting sorted into weaves a checkbox that grants better rewards if checked (whether or not you actually end up getting a weave level or not) and put them on the same difficulty scales as the ones we currently have - so have a selection of all winds for Recruit, Veteran, Champion, Legend and Cataclysm. You could multiply the quick play level pool easily and get a lot more variety, for those who want it. Everyone else leaves the box unchecked.

  2. Make weaves have better payout. If weaves worked as more of a part of the normal level pool, as suggested above, they could also turn out XP and loot boxes as normal levels do. You can also keep the essence system and combine it with the lootbox system. Make it so you can either grind items the old way, by opening boxes and re-rolling stats… or take the item you want to the Athanor and spend essence points earned from weave levels to give it exactly the stats and properties you want.

  3. If you want leaderboards in your game, why dont you simply keep track of level clear time or some other metric, so the competetive-minded players could just go and compete for new best times? You could split the boards per patch, so any speed runner or so can brag that they had the best clear time of “Convocation of Decay, Champion” in patch 2.0.13 or “War Camp, Aqshy, Legend” in patch 2.1. That would actually give people more things to compete while doing nothing to hinder those who dont care.

Personally, I think these steps would bring the fun of weaves to a lot more people, bring more variety to quick play and imrpove the itemization system of the base game to boot. I´m not a seasoned game designer, but I think the weaves have a lot of potential and something along these lines could really bring that potential out.

Thank you for reading

7 Likes
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I really like the suggestions. I’d actually que into weaves if they were quick playable and you had a chance to get normal maps or weaves.

They really should do away with the entire base game crafting and switch to the weave system for all game mods. It’s 100x better…

I really like the idea of weaves just being shorter maps that you can que into. Instead of 160 weaves you have to complete in order.

9 Likes
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I have always defended that Weaves should appear inside the chests and should be random (same as Deeds) Example:

You open a chest of legend and you get a Weave for difficulty Legend with a random wind. In this way Weaves would be integrated with the main game and we could use our equipment and illusions in all game modes. The leaderboard is something we don’t need.

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I really dislike the idea of having to get Weaves out of boxes. That is exactly the problem with the Deeds system right now! I’m waiting for a Deeds rework where you can simply select the modifiers. Why add a completely needless randomized grind to just play gamemodes?! Grinding just to be able to do what you want?! That is horribly bad design. You create a fun gamemode first, and then make it borderline inaccessible so you can’t properly enjoy it… Absolute insanity!

I made some posts before about how a grind for weapons (in a power and gameplay sense) is needless and frustrating. That goes double for stuff like Deeds and Weaves. A game like Vermintide does not benefit from an RNG-grind in any way. At all. A grind in the sense of a clear “Do this challenge for this specific reward without RNG being in the way.”: Sure, absolutely. But a grind in the sense of “Play unrelated gamemodes you didn’t plan on playing in combination with being dependant on RNG to even bloody access the part of the game you wanted to play.” is absolutely ridiculous.

Leave that Skinner-box &^$%# to mobile games, casinos, RPGs with artificially “enhanced” content, and other manipulatively evil stuff designed to sucker people with a bad knowledge of math and psychology. Let us just take advantage of the amazing game that Vermintide is. Kill all RNG-grind.

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As far as weaves are considered, turning them into mutators for normal play seems the most straightforward solution. Mutators are easier to add to the game compared to how long it took them to make weaves this year.

The important thing to consider is that not every mutator has to be antagonistic. Stuff that benefits the player or both sides could be fun, too.

Scottzorz, when he posted, suggested being able to chain missions together and letting them get harder with each stage, but you can cash out between missions. Could Grant you extra coin for the emporium, as long as you don’t lose?

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Having the winds as mutators for maps would be pretty cool as well. You could have a reaaaaally varied map pool if, besides normal maps, you´d have the mutators:

  • for every single Wind of Magic
  • for playing the map backwards
  • everything deeds do

And you could either select the mutators freely (maybe with an upper limit… maybe not, for the absolute madlads out there) or just pick how many mutators you want and have them randomized.
That would probably also motivate me to play lower difficulties more, just to see what kinds of weird stuff could happen with all the mutators which I probably wouldnt want to deal with on Legend.

However, I admit that this sounds challenging on a technical level, my original suggestion might be a bit easier to implement (?).

Also, Im against the idea of having to unlock mutators through loot drops. I know how hard it is if yo uwant something specific and it just doesnt drop, I dont want to go through that again.

1 Like
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You could find a group?

My experience with Weaves was:

  1. Try weave 1. Never find a group, because there are 120 separate queues…
  2. Try weave 1 solo. Get to boss round. Die a horrible death because no talents and 0 gear. Get tiddly winkus in money, so little that I’d have to play and die repeatedly to upgrade enough to make it to Weave 2.
  3. Get a refund.

Maybe they COULD HAVE BEEN fun. But starting from scratch and with nobody to help (if you missed the 3 day long post-release rush) made them a non-starter. And to top it off, there isn’t even any reason to do them because all the rewards are self contained in the weaves - who cares about arcane essence when I still have the same old reroll system on my real gear?

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Lurker, these are exactly my points. In short - weaves offer fun gameplay, BUT the group finding and grind from zero are so flawed that this gets completely overshadowed. Which is why I made some suggestions how you might integrate the fun of weave maps better into the base game.

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Yea, I dream about them actually making good deed crafting system … like omg just copy Path of Exile map crafting… and insted of orbs use dusts. And that system allowing to roll winds as mods on maps.

That would be one way to engage with it, and second would be new game mode, which would link 3 random map chunks with randoms winds together thru some portals/gates/time-illusion-warp/whatever and last chunk would be ending with the tweaked map event. So first 2 chunks would be just chunks and 3rd chunk would be event-ending-chunk. And/or at least maps with 3 winds changing from 1st to 2nd to 3rd part of the map.

Easier to make, much more fun, QP-able, crapload of replayability, holy cow…

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I agree. And imho the solution was simple. Fatshark could add the new crafting system for the entire game* and they could add one only, simple, new mode: you choose the map, you choose the modifiers (both winds and deeds ones), you get a reward and a score (wich can be put in some leadderboards) based on how much you play well and on how many modifiers are activate.

*anyway the new crafting system could work only with red items… so opening chests and already obtained reds would still be useful

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Weaves woud be my favorite if system to find people for desired weave is better.

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It’s there but it’s vague and easy to miss. The kickoff for weaves are finishing Dark Omen and getting access to the prismatic meteor (or whatever they called it). I have no idea why we want to gather essence from the weaves though. So, in short, I’d also appreciate both a stronger connection to the base game and some reasons to traverse the different weave levels.

Then again, I’d like some stronger lore ties for the rest of the game too. I didn’t realize they existed somewhat in Oleysa’s commentary until way many hours into the game.

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All they need to do to fix weaves from my perspective is to add Quickplay matching (which they are already doing IIRC) and implement at least basic bot AI (equal to current adventure mode)

I mostly ignored season 1 because I found the balance for beastmen to be overly difficult to the point of ruining the experience a bit. So I put the game down and played other games for a while. When I returned towards the end of season 1 I found weaves impossible to get into. There simply isn’t anyone playing at my level because the highest weave I’ve done is 3. Everyone has already done the first 40 weaves or so and my only means to progress now is to play solo. But this isn’t just solo with bots, it’s enforced as true solo where the first down or disabler attack is an instant fail for the level. After my first two deaths to random specials I just gave up on it entirely.

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They are several others things that needs to be done to fix weaves.
Balancing pass on all weaves, especially winds of shadows and death.
While they are both rather good ideas for a general mutator, the enemies and situations created aren’t really well done in the context of a “fair” challenge.

Assassins in weave 114 (shadows) are a good example of this. You have to rely on safe spots in order to actually be able to beat them.
Some shadowy options are also strange. Enemies are already near invisible (besides smoke), is there any point to making them also resistant to ranged damage ?

On the death part, weave 103 (or 23 I think), also is a bit of a headache, boss, right at the beginning, where you have absolutely nowhere to go. And on top of that spawning gunners either right behind you or on your way, is a bit too much. Death weaves requires spacing enemies a bit more than that.

On cataclysm 3 difficulty, enemies attacks way too fast. Making melee unbearable. Even if you can still stagger them with some weapons.

Not taking into account the crazy damage resistance buff and damage buff of the latter weaves (at least until 120, after that I don’t really care =p). They both increase the issues of the game, aka taking a hit kill you, making your tanky char unable to play something else than a shield AND not attack. Making all heavy weapons useless because they are far too slow. And each “minor bug” becomes major.

Some weave related bugs are a bit annoying, like, getting damage from fire weave, because you were pushed (there’s absolutely no counterplay involved, pushes are instant, you can’t see them coming, and you can’t really dodge them).

I really don’t know how, with the damage resistance, and the mass increase, they’ll be doable in the future without the help of the battle wizard which will obviously see nerfs.

(because she’s op in any difficulty where a “normal weapon” can’t cleave enough where she could be okay in legend, because dots kills as fast as a weapon could)

Now, the time limit, is also usually a huge hindrance, especially for some of thoses weaves (like 115) where you don’t even have always enough enemies to fill the purple bar.

I think that all the challenges in the game should stay within the limit of hard, and not going into the “way too hard” which were the last 10 (or 20) weaves. Letting people push their limits as they see fit instead of kinda “forcing” them the hand (I know, the term is not really used correctly, but for collectors, that were able until now to actually collect all thoses cosmetics and challenges, it can be a bit a bummer to push them into their limits like this =p)

On each weave though, I like a lot the general effects, but some requires change :

  • Hysh , the White Wind, the Lore of Light : This weave is okay. Nothing to say there.
  • Azyr , the Blue Wind, the Lore of the Heavens : This one is perfect. It does promote an active gameplay, you understand what to do fast, and it’s a bit fun as it can be used in your advantage as well. Invincible enemies vulnerable ONLY to the storm (but are OS by the storm hey, don’t make them having a hp pool as well), could be done in higher difficulties. My favorite so far as all is readable fast (even when the storm will hit), does have a counterplay, and can be used for you sometimes.
  • Chamon , the Yellow Wind, the Lore of Metal : This one is not that great. It promotes more beefy enemies, which is already an issue with higher difficulties promoting the same passive gameplay that we don’t really like. Not only this, but it’s also not clear on what this weave really do, and graphically it doesn’t show any “gold armor” on enemies. Making this wind a bit hard to understand at first. I think the effect should be reworked overall as of now, it isn’t fun, new or shiny. (could be looking at some sort of petrification effect, or goldification if that word could exist)
  • Ghyran , the Green Wind, the Lore of Life : This one is a bit strange. It’s very interesting as a wind, and also understandable. And it would work well if the firsts one (the easiest) could at least do a bit of damage instead of only slowing you. I guess you could look at a “dot like” damage, like elf do to you all the time in friendly fire =p. It could be great if, as for azyr, you could use thoses poisons/slow zone against enemies as well.
  • Ghur , the Brown Wind, the Lore of Beasts : This one is interesting. But totems are somewhat not obvious enough in a lot of situations. Nothing to say here, this is only a matter of balance.
  • Aqshy , the Red Wind, the Lore of Fire. Well, probably as for the gold, the effect itself is meh. Does not promote any real gameplay. Is not readable enough. And pushes applying the dot is also an issue. There are probably a good variety of ideas that could come with fire. And this is not one of them at the moment.
  • Ulgu , the Grey Wind, the Lore of Shadow : It’s actually a good idea. The only issue here is the production. Putting ranged enemies in an “anti ranged” weave is the obvious one. But the effect itself, without the damage resistance on “clouds” is actually really interesting.
  • Shyish , the Purple Wind, the Lore of Death : It’s also actually a good idea, and as stated before, hordes of enemies should actually happens where you actually have space to manage them. Also orbs going out from bosses are not readable enough visually. (you don’t know when they come, as they’re hidden behind a huge body of corrupted muscles)
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While I can´t disagree with you on the balance state of the weaves (I literally cant because I cant find people to play them myself), I´d say balancing and fine tuning of the challenges is something that should be done after you layed the groundwork of people actually wanting and being able to play that mode in a reasonable fashion. Currently, even if weave gameplay was perfect (and I personally think it is already pretty fun) that wont really change much if hardly anybody is getting into it due to the reasons I mentioned earlier.

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The singular Weaves are interesting, fun and well-crafted. What the Weaves need is just a better accessibility and presentation. Since it is fun to post my own thread over and over again, have it here:

Most of the problems mentioned in the OP would be solved with the integration of the Weaves Pathways, giving us more a sense of exploration.

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I also quite like the weaves as they are (what few of them I’ve been able to play) and agree with most of your points.

Just wanted to add that before WoM actually came out I had assumed weaves would work as modifiers to adventure maps that netted some kind of bonus rewards appropriate for the added challenge. I kinda wish that was how they actually worked though I guess there’s a lot of crossover there with what a deed rework might look like.

They’ll likely be serviceable with the season 2 changes, but I really wish they didn’t feel so detached from the rest of the game.

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I’m sorry, but I have to disagree with the OP… I mean, weaves have accessibility and technical problems for sure… but I would not call them “funny” (obvly imho).
On high weaves archers cut off more or less 80hp. Other enemies oneshot us. They are totally scripted: when you repeat a weave (and trust me, you will repeat a weave more times) you feel you are doing exactly the same thing. You haven’t “the numbers” to deal with enemies in a funny way. You are forced to adopt a cheesy and boring strategy. They need skill, no doubts, but they mainly are comparable to a grind festival. Some modifiers are nice, like brambles, other ones are very frustrating, like vengeful spirits.
Honestly I don’t play weaves, but I helped some friends to complete some high ones… and I can say, for me, they haven’t been funny.

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I cant really contempt to that because I´ve never gotten to weaves 80. I just played a random selection of lower weaves and found them to be entertaining and a nice change of pace. If the higher weaved are poorly balanced that might be an issue, but I dont think that makes the weave gameplay as a whole somehow bad. Neither would I claim that the Cataclysm difficulty for regular levels having balancing issues de-values the concept of regular levels somehow.

However this is one of the things that could possibly be fixed with my suggestion, if weaves were to be brought in line with the regular difficulty levels (Recruit, Vet, Champ and so on) and you would keep getting the according rewards even if you replyed them, you can just stay on the difficulty/balance level that you´re comfortble with - and not be forced to work your way up until it becomes unfun for you.

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Yeah, when I played some low tier weaves, I thought the same thing: “Why are players hating them? Sure, they have accessibility problems, etc etc… but they are funny!” After that I played high tier ones :rofl:

I really hope your solution (or any other fix) will help, because I has be forced to pay also for them.

p.s obvly you could find funny also high tier weaves, everyone has his opinion, but imho there are some objective gameplay problems.