WHC Rebalance/Rework — Take 2

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
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It’s nice to see a new topic that can afford some actual discussion. Something that has been sorely lacking around here of late.

My biggest criticisms of these proposals are as follows.

  • Arguing for changing the headshot damage bonus formula seems to be a hopeless battle. Adjusting it would require a rework of something that is deeply embedded in the damage formulas. Plus, presumably, it works the way it does is due to some combination of technical limitation & stymieing the playerbase’s relentless desire to stack the every loving hell out of damage buffs.

  • The removal of team utility from Witch Hunt seems excessive to me. The very nature of breakpoints makes it unlikely for teammates to reach meaningful new breakpoints by sheer happenstance of having a random WHC on the team. Thus the true power of Witch Hunt only comes forth when teams plan around using it; which is mostly restricted to FoW, deeds, and the modded realm. The former two are not even worth mentioning in balancing contexts and for the latter the C3DWONS+ community is more than capable of creating their own balance.

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Whether or not it would make it worse than Zealot, it would certainly make it worse than a fair number of careers. If you want to balance careers, the first thing you need to do is figure out what the intended baseline is. I personally think the baseline should roughly be where WHC is currently (with a possible rapier nerf). Where do you want all the careers to be? How many careers do you think need to be nerfed?

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There’s also power in raw dps against bosses and monsters. That doesn’t have anything to do with breakpoints. Also it’s not like you’re going to be hitting breakpoints on every enemy. With the WHC buff you are likely to cross certain breakpoints you couldn’t otherwise.

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Which is not something that is ever complained about.

I would invite you to give what I wrote another read or two.

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Not at all. I literally said most the changes would be good but also adding in the nerf to his utility is a step too far. That was before I knew you meant to set a new baseline for career power. At which point, I said that the changes would perhaps be ok if all the careers were brought down as well. If that’s “blowing it out of proportion,” then I have no idea what would be in proportion.

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I read it fine. You are wrong if you think the WHC buff isn’t going to help certain builds reach breakpoints they couldn’t otherwise, happenstance or not.

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He’s saying you can’t be certain a WHC will be apart of the team; you’ll more often than not be building for non witch-hunt BPs. Witch-Hunts value/mileage varies player to player and their build.

Otherwise yeah witch hunt is a massive boon in premade lobbies especially modded realm.
It’s a cornerstone of c3dw, its value can not be overstated which might not be healthy.
Should 1 out of 18 careers hold so much team value?
(Obviously you folks can balance around modded accordingly.)

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I know what he’s saying. As to the question of whether or not its healthy, I know that I’ve never been bothered by a WHC being on my team. I’m actually glad to have one, in fact. Even if it doesn’t help my build one shot things I couldn’t before it may help me two shot certain enemies I can only three shot otherwise, etc. There’s always some kind of benefit to that extra damage in my experience. As to the question of premade teams, well those are always going to alter difficulty and balance drastically. Good luck ever balancing the game around that without making it unplayable for everyone else. In the end, I know what careers bother me when they are on my team and what careers feel like cheating when I play them. WHC only starts to feel a bit like I’m cheating when I use the rapier. Otherwise it just feels good to play and good to play with in my experience.

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What’s wrong with Rapier WHC? Light crit fishing?
Could just reduce his crit chance buffs, that would discourage light crit fishing to some degree.
Killing Shot would be on the backburner outside of Animosity.

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honestly my only problem with Rapier is it has higher cleave than it probably should (in comparison to V1 at least iirc) but eh idk how healthy nerfing that would be

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High cleave, fast attacks, good against armor, super precise for head shots. The rapier is kind of ridiculous, almost as if it were an elf weapon or something. :wink:

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Killing Shot needs the “man sized targets” line. The proposed change flat buffs monster dps and damage against CW. That shouldnt happen. As you mentioned, WHC dps is quite good without that monster of a passive.

Witch Hunt should also not affect range damage anymore. He absolutely doesnt need to be as good in sniping as he is atm. That would take away a fraction of his good at everything status.

Wild Fervour still is a map wide 5% crit chance buff, if your mates keep pinging elites and specials. I dont know if thats something other Talents can compete with. (Atleast thats the case if it still does trigger on every marked target kill, and not just on the WHCs kills.)

I Shall Judge You All just seems extremely weird to me. The 20% more damage Talents never got picked alot in the last row, thats why they died long ago. It would atleast need Unending Hunts CDR to be even something I would be willing to try, but I doubt it would fair a different end than the other Talents like it. Crits, for the team or just yourself, are just too good in the current game.

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Just like @Incandescent said, rapier is the biggest problem of WHC. Making a rapier which has an axe cleave maybe fix this OP situation.

or make his Killshot like GK’s row2 no.2 talent only works for a man-sized enemy.

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That’s exactly how it works. Maulers and Bestigors are considered man-sized enemies. Chaos Warriors and Wargors aren’t. Switching the classification of said enemies (if possible) would make more sense than going about nerfing a career that in my opinion doesn’t really need much nerfing at all in terms of its kit.

Verm1’s rapier was imo the worst weapon in the game, or in any case close to being so. Slow light attacks would hit 2 targets for measly damage, while charging heavy attacks was extremely slow and frankly didn’t really achieve anything. I don’t know of anyone who ever managed to elevate it beyond meme status. That being said, Verm2’s rapier is an entirely different weapon and a very strong one at that. Keeping it mostly the way it is but reducing it’s cleave slightly might not be that bad of way to experiment with it.

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Killshot works like GK’s talent? I thought it was insta-death thing.

Then nerfing the damage would work? Making killshot only works If enemy got health lower or equal than WHC’s head crit damage x2.

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Oh, I thought you meant something else, sorry for that. Yeah GK’s talent is limited by how much hp an enemy has and, to a point, by its size (lords and monsters get a reduced effect). WHC’s perk is tied to the enemy’s size and scoring a crit headshot. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it intrinsically. Rapier is the big offender but it’s mostly a weapon thing rather than a perk thing imo.

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Excluding the ones we all think should be nerfed, I think Merc, IB, BW and UC need nerfs, mainly to their tankiness or in UC’s case the power stacks granting stagger strength be lessened. A few other specific things I believe are too much, like BH’s Double-shotted, infinite cleave aoe staffs/any forms of infinite cleave.

There’s a bunch of non-career related things that I view as too strong as well, that happen to favour specific careers over others (imo enemies take too much damage when climbing which benefits hyperdesnity stacking and infinite cleave, as well as high damage careers that can sit there and just whack at climbing enemies).

Roughly a bit better as a career than BH without Crossbow and without Double-shotted on Cata is probably a decent baseline in my eyes.

As an example, for Merc I would suggest MtM being lowered to 4 stacks/20% power and the other talents on its row being buffed to that level. Then make Merc receive less ult cooldown on taking damage. Outside of that it’s just Mace & Sword being very strong that pushes Merc too far. With those changes to Merc, the suggested WHC should be about on par with something like a Bret Longsword Merc.
I’m open to being wrong about the degree of changes. It seems like the tag one is the most controversial.

I personally agree.

It seems like the main issue is the combination of the tag change and dps nerf. I wanted to be overly harsh with the nerf ideas and then take a step back instead of the reverse.

I think you’re right. My angle on this has been from too much of a modded realm/premade perspective.

Yeah it’s pretty difficult.

A solution like this would likely be easy for the developers to accept, much easier than my suggestions. If it moves Killing Shot from encouraging light fishing to a bonus that just sometimes happens occasionally it’s a good change. It’s as simple as removing an unlisted crit chance passive and taking a look at Wild Fervour, then possibly Fervency and Unending Hunt.

It’s true, but I’m comparing fairly high headshot percentages. AnF’s monster dps would be less because of the Flense nerf, so it’s mainly Billhook and Rapier (the others get boosted too but still wouldn’t do much).
The 30% increase on crit headshot doesn’t hit any Chaos Warrior breakpoints for Billhook or AnF, and only saves Rapier one property compared to now for a full charge crit headshot to 1 shot a tagged CW with Deathknell. For monsters, Rapier would go from 230 to 267 on full charge critical headshot vs a tagged monster with Deathknell, which isn’t that much of an increase and is still only on headshot.

Still, I don’t see a need for WHC to be better vs CWs and monsters, so it wouldn’t bother me if it kept the man-sized enemies criteria.

That’s fair. WHC is still very competent at killing specials in melee anyway, so the range special killing is not exactly needed.

Something like wild fervour grants the team 5% crit chance for 5% when the WHC kills a tagged enemy? That would make it less completely free and dependent on the WHC doing their job. Could make it require the WHC to tag the enemy as well. Would be more interactive at least.

I’m a fan of this idea. I think Dual Dagger’s cleave would be more appropriate though, which is just enough to cleave an Ungor and nothing above if I recall correctly. That or cleaving up to Fanatics and nothing more. Currently Rapier cleaves unstaggered Gors, which is a bit much. Could also make the inner block angle more narrow to match Dual Daggers and Sienna’s Dagger, which have some similarities as finesse weapons. Would be fitting for a duelist-like weapon.

This could work as well. 2x conveniently stops Rapier lights from 1 shotting SV but lets the 1h Axe’s lights still do it, which is fair, and makes Killing Shot benefit from team work instead of overriding team work as it does now on Official.

The main issue with Rapier is the high reward for the low risk. I think all of WHC’s meta weapons are problematic for this reason as well, and to a lesser extent even Falchion can be because it light chains into mixed hordes safely.

One of the reasons I figured a damage increase on crit headshot would work was because it would make it so Rapier was less damage per hit than other options but faster, which is how I think it should be. Rapier light attacks can still be higher sustained dps than the light attacks of other melee weapons, but that should require sustained multiple headshots rather than flailing into a horde and letting statistical probability handle getting just a few safe headshots for high value.

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No, thanks.

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Personally I think all these ideas are completely fine and won’t ruin the feel of the class outside of addressing Breakpoint dependent ranged weapons, general team damage boost from Tag, and Killing Shots infinite scaling on higher difficulties. Just gonna run down the list of my thoughts on the changes.

  • Witch Hunt - Making it only work on Victor I think is a bit iffy since it does strip the classes main utility. I think if you were going to change this to just offer less but still keep the original intent by Fatshark and it’s team utility it would just be to lower Witch Hunt’s Damage boost from 20% to 10%, retaining it’s stacking damage effect, and let it still affect allied damage.

  • Templar’s Knowledge - In conjunction to the one above making this talent do the original 20% that’s in base game. Now theres a choice in a premade do you get the BPs this could offer you, do wild fervour for more SS uptime, or just go selfish and say deal with just 10% and have more AS yourself as WHC. At least there’d be a moment of deliberation instead of just being handed a fat 20% damage increase on a silver platter.

Note: even though this is a lowered value than whats in the base game 10% damage across 4 people is still huge increase on things like monsters or if multiple people are ganging up on elites. Not to mention it can be used to apply to 4 different taggable enemies. Even more so when you pick Templar’s Knowledge increase up to 20% at the cost of CRIT/AS.

  • Eternal Guard - I still don’t think this is a really huge deal that needs to be nerfed personally considering this would only really apply to attacks made by infantry units inside the block angle, though it is exacerbated by Rapier’s innate 0.25 inner block cost reduction. Wouldn’t another way to approach this be to say just give WHC an innate 20% BCR and strip the innate BCR Rapier has. This way all of saltzpyre’s weapons can benefit from this giving him an option to just not run BCR on weapon or necklace in favor of something else. It’d also help just being able to run Riposte without being encouraged to run Parry on your weapon over SS. Or alternatively you can just run 80% bcr and basically be guaranteed getting rezzes off on downed teammates. Though I realize this would also have the adverse effect of lowering overhead stamina damage on WHC which could be another problem.

  • Killing Shot - you know how I feel about this, I think its dumb how hard Killings Shot scales into modded content on a Damage Enabling Support Class. Given how very little impact Killing Shot already has in base game for the average player Im pretty sure touching it up for modded content won’t have any huge negative affects for the average player. Anything to bring it down while letting good players still benefit from a finesse style play is A okay in my book.

  • Deathknell/Power of Sigmar - The damage increase on HS to allow WHC to potentially use his others weapons is good my eyes. Having weapons be disincentivize on a class because of their innate bad finesse multiplier is pretty bad. Classes should incentivize using specific melee weapons but never feel like it’s penalizing picking weapons that you wouldn’t normally use.

  • Flense - Here is where I’m a bit on the fence, I agree that Flense should be brought down because its basically stifling everything else in that row especially Deathknell and weapons with high finesse. But I feel like a simpler approach to this without just messing around with Flense dot numbers is just doing what Ice’s mod did with flense which is just only have 1 stack of bleed be present on any enemy and subsequent hits would just refresh that 1 stack of bleed. But maybe I’m wrong and Flense was actually butchered by that change Ice did in his mod and your idea of a 30% bleed reduction is the proper fix.

  • Wild Fervour - I can definitely agree that Wild Fervour as it is in base game is just way to easy to get. There no work in getting it you simply just tag an enemy and now everyone has 5% more crit which is pretty valuable. Personally I think the only issue I have with your idea for Wild Fervour is it’s duration I think maybe putting it last 7.5 seconds would be best but I also think that this is really something you can only really notice in practice so this would have to be changed first and tested to see it’s uptime.

  • I Shall Judge You all - I said it before and I’ll say it again I love this idea. I think the only thing that might be holding this back from being competitive however with Unending as a support damage talent is Unending’s CDR condition and potentially the duration itself for this ult option. I think ideally this kind of thing would last for 10-15 seconds and would be able to stack with Witch Hunt/Templar’s Knowledge damage increase.

  • Riposte - this is basically just a minor buff to Riposte but considering Killing shot itself would be nerfed and this is the only way to retain killing shot it’d probably be fine. My only issue with riposte comes from the fact that by nature its not a proactive option which mean’s its dependent on the dumb enemy ai to do something along with also dropping your own guard which depending on the situation could be dangerous (like dropping it in the middle of a horde/fighting multiple elites just to get riposte refresh). But I also realize as a fellow riposte enjoyer that killing something off a parry is part of its charm despite the entirely reactive gameplay it emphasizes.

  • Always Prepared - I agree with you that these ammo increase talents are pretty bad overall. They don’t really offer anything great but I also don’t think the idea it reloading your gun’s magazine for you will really help in most situations as usually specials come in waves unless you deliberately just stagger them yourself. Honestly I’d rather all these ammo talents just get scrapped from bigger ammo pools to improved ammo conservation on Merc/WHC/HM or just give the class something else entirely.

I’ll reiterate again I think the changes you’ve outlined are fair changes to address current WHC’s weird state of being both a strong dps career to fill the elite killer role that would normally be filled logically by GK/Shade/Slayer and just giving him an out to skip the original intention of the class’s finesse heavy playstyle. Just trying to throw in a few other ideas into the pot I don’t want to make it seem like I think the ideas you came up with were off the mark at all. :kissing_heart:

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40

Also I would definitely be for weapons like Dual Axes/Dual Daggers/Rapier/Sienna Dagger all having that high finesse weapon low cleave trait of attacks cleaving very little but attacking fast, and inner block angle being fairly small (40 degrees) while also keeping it’s 0.25% innate BCR as a reward for keeping attacks inside that small block window.

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