Time to collect some more unpopularity points. Thanks to a very recent thread concerning powercreep ( The Powercreep Problem - Vermintide 2 / Vermintide 2 - Feedback - Fatshark Forums), I think there may be at least a slight tailwind for talking about adjusting stuff. I will try to separate this into mainly two “tiers” with a list of “more obvious stuff” (obviously containing SotT) and “more personal pet peeves”. The list just contains stuff I got right now in my head and does not vouch for completeness. There might be overtuned things I just can’t remembered or I don’t have sufficient experience to give a fair judgement. I may or may not offer a suggestion how to change, depends on case and motvation. I will also not cover changes to boring/underperforming talents. Most of the stuff mentioned in Tier 2 is something I made threads about in the past. Also be warned, that this will be a lots of text.
Tier 1 - The Powercreep (aka the list I may get support with / the conservative list)
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Masterwork Pistol: The Masterwork Pistol does damage. Like lots of damage. The LMB hereby has a stark range drop-off (if stark enough is another question) and a delay in firing. Overall, the LMB has some drawbacks for the power it holds. The RMB on the other hand is just dishing out damage like mad without any delay. Most obviously this can be seen on its monster damage. It does lots of damage in short time.
Potential solutions: I would favourise something what I call “Pressure loss”. This means while shooting with RMB each subsequent bullet loses damage/power as you don’t give the weapon enough time to build up pressure. Simplified it the six bullets would do damage 100/80/60/40/20/0 % and the pressure loss would count until reload (if you don’t waste the whole clip). This would effectively half its monster damage dps and also reduce the elite clear potential. Another (easier and more boring) solution would be to reduce clipsize to three bullets. -
Moonfire Bow: The Moonfire Bow does everything … excellent. Not average, not good. Excellent. Even on Cataclysm you can kill most/all specials with a measely charged bodyshot. The only “drawback” is that you can only shoot five arrows before depleted. However, this is not really an issue. For starters, you don’t play alone. Outside of your team dying (and having made errors before) you will not have to shoot so many specials alone. Also, the bar recharges pretty fast. Also the main damage is by dots. And they don’t have a damage drop-off. The bow is also AoE damage and has large stagger. And you don’t have to watch ammo. That is a lot of benefit for little drawback. It may be okay for weapons which can be easily used by less skilled players. However such weapons shouldn’t be strong enough to be the potential top-contender of all weapons. Moonfire Bow is for a reason the most picked weapon with an overwhelming majority (Javelins may change this, at least for a while).
Potential solution: Well, good question. It is a magical explosion, so removing stagger would feel wrong. In the same manner damage drop-off for DoT feels equally wrong. This leaves two options mostly. Reducing the recharge speed / total capacity of the bow or decreasing the DoT damage. Alternatively, I want to suggest another idea. Leave recharge/overall damage as it is. However, increase the time for the DoT to apply fully. Like it still does the same damage but it takes four to eight times as long as right now (I will ignore the potential horror this will cause with Friendly Fire). It is still powerful but it gives enemies ample time to take revenge before they die (right now the DoT is applied in the time most enemies are in stagger state). -
Sister of the Thorn: The sheer amount of discussions across all boards should be indication enough that there is an issue (and I have never before seen so many people agreeing on something). Let’s just say that she does noticeable damage for a support career.
She was “nerfed” but it didnt change anything because of how minimal the nerf was. To keep it short, set Radiant Inheritance to a two stacks trigger, the other talents in that row are actual good and balanced. Bloodrazor Thicket should have 10 % less power and 30-50 % of its damage should be shifted from impact to bleed damage with a prolonged bleeding period (similar to the suggested change for the Moonfire Bow). Because right now it kills Legend SV on impact. This is a Thornwall, not a shredder. It should bleed you to death. Morai-Heg’s Doomsight should guarantee two critical hits (or maybe just one) for the whole team whenever SotT uses her career skill (practically reversing cause and benefector). -
Coruscation Staff: After thinking more about it, I think that other new weapons may also be in need for adjustment. This should be done more carefully though. The one I personally use the most - the Coruscation Staff - I would change by increase the duration of the RMB by 25 % while decreasing the damage per second by 20 %. This gives it the same overall damage but needs more control and better placement to make the best out of it. In addition, it may be an interesting approach to limit the number of active cones to two at a time. Maybe also slightly increase heat cost for the VERY potent LMB. At the moment, the staff rewards a simple spam-a-lot-playstyle and you can spam so many fire cones or scatter shots due to the low heat costs.
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Trollhammer Torpedo: Has to many shots. There are various ways to go about this. Taking away the interaction with ammo regeneration traits & talents would help. In addition, we could think about giving it an absolute finite ammo of ammo meaning it can’t stock up on crates and pouches. Ammo can be adapted for this. I think one shot every two minutes is reasonable making for a 10 to 12 total ammo count with zero possibility for getting new during a mission.
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Griffonfoot: I have tried this out on Bounty Hunter and Zealot and it has the same issue as other horde eliminating weapons (Swiftbow, Flamethrower, Grudgerake). They are simply very boring to play with as team mates because they make 70 % of the enemies vanish. Griffonfoot has the additional issue that you can shoot subsequentially multiple times before the need to reload. And even on Zealot I have a hard time running out of ammo with them. The minor weakness against far ranged specials is not noticeable.
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Javelin: I don’t think I have to explain much here. They have super cleave, super reload speed (AND interact with ammo traits and talents), high bodyshot damage, close to zero damage-drop off in range, high stagger power and unlimited ammo. This is an issue on all of Kerillian’s careers in Cataclysm with Waystalker taking, eating and shitting out the cake in front of everyone. The stagger power makes sense for the weapons, maybe even the high bodyshot damage in close range. Most of the other stuff does not. Reducing cleave and reload time would be a good start. Maybe also introducing a more severe ranged damage drop-off.
Generally, most of the new weapons favour just simple spamming over skill. None of them are hard to use and all of them are overeffective. It kinda bumms me that we will not have a BBB soon and the game will have to stay with this absurd powercreep. Even then, I am not even sure that another BBB would adress the issue since we have seen close to none nerfs in the last. I can’t even remember if the summer 2020 BBB had a nerf for even a single ranged weapon. Also, after endless complaining the nerf that SotT received was … close to non-existent. She still has two talents which are favouring dps over actual fun playstyles.
Tier 2 - Personal Issues (aka the list I will get flak for)
While I do not agree with the result of the weapon buff fiesta, I will not vouch for changing anything there. There is no point in going back and forth on such stuff. More interesting balance can be achieved in other ways:
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Crit chance: I do not know any other game with multiple characters/classes to chose for where EVERY career can have a crit chance of at least 15 % independent from weapon choice. And there is a reason for this. Best reason: It is nearly unbalanceable. Also, it is potentially broken.
Potential solution: Remove the crit chance property from the game. I can not overstate the benefits enough this change would have. Swift Slaying uptime would be more reasonable, Helborg’s Tutelage/Smiter would be more reasonable picks, Scrounger would trigger more reasonable, Bounty Hunter would appear stronger, WHC’s Killing Blow would trigger less often, … Issue: It would be a PR nightmare, cause enough salty whining to increase sea level by 3 meters and would need lots of rerolling as consequence. Should it be done anyway? Yes. -
Infinite Ammo: On any career. Right now it is pretty difficult to run out of ammo. This shouldnt be the case. There may be a case for ranged careers but it is pretty much possible on each career.
Potential solution: As said before removing crits would help with keeping Scrounger in-line. For Conservative Shooter it should half the maximum ammo a hero can carry. As a result of these changes, ammo talents would also become more interesting. Could also make space for new properties increasing ammo by 10 %. -
Killing Blow: For a swift light crit to the head anything below CW will fall. I don’t think there is any passive or skill in the game which scales this well with difficulty. I like the effect it should be there but occur less often. If we remove crit properties it would be more reasonable in trigger chance (outside of Fervency).
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Swift Slaying: To much benefit, to much uptime, and many weapons feel silly/awful with so much AS. Removing crit chance properties would make the uptime more reasonable on many careers. Alternatively/additionally the calculation formula could be changed to create a “softcap”.
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Assassin: Assassin is an idiotic amount of damage for either simple headshots or even simpler for critting (with 15 % Miniumum chance). It simply does to much damage and on three careers which really don’t need the dps at all. Generally, the Stagger talents could need some rework. There are reasons why an unification may makes sense. However, I urge Fatshark to do this carefully. The worst thing they could do is give every career (a weakened version of) Assassin. The second worst they could do is giving every career Smiter (as it is right now). Numbers which (in my opinion) still hold up to now can be found as a thread in the last BBB (should still be accessible for FS).
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Group THP talents: Just mentioning them shortly. There is a thread somewhere explaining what bugs me about these.
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Hagbane: As I did answer this in the comments already anyway. Hagbane is strong, insanely strong. However, at least in public cataclysm games it was rarely seen even before Moonfire Bow. So one could make a case of the weapon needing more skill to be effective which could make the power more reasonable and rewarding. If nerfing it, I would start conservative: Remove stagger from Superarmor Headshots, as well as damage to Globadiers.
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UC - Pushing Strength: Also because it was mentioned in the comments. I still don’t like the idea of her pushing strength increasing with overcharge. It allows a lot of silly stuff, especially with Flaming Flail. Please FS, revert this change (or at least half the bonus). As a compromise, add the pushing strength for overcharge into Chain Reaction. It makes the talent competitive and more interesting. Then Chain Reaction would complement the Coruscation staff perfectly with the staff having no stagger at all but all the burning and the melee pushing strength being increased. Also still don’t like Abandon. But I fear that I won’t get rid of that one.
Now a few career-related issues. Generally, for the three careers I will mention, they are all somehow in need for a rework/rebalance.
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Zealot range power buff: There is literal no reason why his power stacks should apply to his ranged weapons. Also, he gets a lot of benefits for no reason while hiding behind a THP wall AND an undying passive. Should be reworked to be more interesting in general. Something like conflicting buffs would be interesting.
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Bright Wizard: Lots of Safe Damage, defense capability and lots of stagger. All at the same time. BW also would benefit from a rework, making different builds more distinctive while eliminating the one for all. Examples of this could be changing Famished Flames to reduce all non-burn attck’s power by 30 %, Kaboom having more damage but decreased stagger and Burnout having twice stagger but doing less damage.
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Pyromancer with Volan’s Doctrine: Sienna on Pyromancer and BW slows down with overcharge. One reason is lore to demonstrate the danger of using to much magic, another reason is balance. With Pyromancer and UC we have two careers getting bonuses on high overcharge. Ideally players will be as high as possible. However, this should be come with a risk. For UC this is in place with her Blood Magic passive. She is always in danger of exploding. For Pyromancer, this is in place with the slow down. This is an actual interesting gameplay here. Each player has to find his personal sweet spot where he can still manage the overcharge slowdown to get most benefit. With the introduction of Volans Doctrine, this element has been reduced to ashes though. You get the full benefit with absolutely zero risk. Volans Doctrine is a design fault and shouldn’t be in Pyromancer’s talent tree or even worse passive list. There are options though to give it some drawback to actually make it interesting again. An example for this would be tying the “no overcharge slowdown” to killing an elite in melee (counts for five seconds). Could help for a necessary rework with making more distinctive melee/range/other thingy builds. Right now Pyromancer also has this one for all build with high crit melee and range and no slowdown.
Edit add to Pyromancer in the unlikely case that FS searches inspiration for a potential Pyromancer rework: I really like the idea of replacing Volane’s Doctrine with a conditioned talent which works like this: “Killing an Elite in melee removes overcharge slowdown and overcharge can’t decrease for 6 s.” With such a talent you could play a high crit melee fighter which doesnt have to watch for decreasing heat. But he could also not use ranged attacks at a certain point because overcharge could still increase. Eases up getting the highest crit chance on melee with a noteable drawback. Would have to be tested if balanced already.
On the same row you could make another talent “Killing a special will make you are unable to overheat for 10 seconds.” With this you would be a high crit ranged balista which has the overcharge slowdown though, making you accessible for melee attacks. So people could chose to be the mobile melee fighter OR the slow moving magical ballista.
And with this I’m done for the moment. What is in your Tier 1 list (the obvious outlier)?