Where are the balance patches?

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
41

between 4- 8 seconds with the right team?

I jest.

But the discrepancy between a tank heavy party (FK,IB, WPoS and Unchained) and Boss Killer (GK, Shade, BH, and Ranger MWP) is absolutely idiotic and a nightmare to balance. I consider the onlyreal balance changes that are viable are nerfs to Boss killers ULTs, so they still cause chunk damage but have some kind of damage cap somehow. Or you make Skarrik behave like he’s been on a warpstone fuelled 3 day drinking bender and can shrug off a BH ult to the face while attempting to fight the police, his friends and the floor.

[edit] this still doesn’t make any difference to Hunstman Strength Pot Ult Crit shot to Skarriks face one shotting him. Damage cap for EVERYONE!

4 Likes
42

I wonder if giving bosses something akin to the slayer’s ols Oblivious to Pain would have been a good idea?
So anything above X number is reduced drastically.

Also! I thin Skarrik needs to be immune to damage until he finished landing (same with the Bodvarr 2.0 in Skittergate during transformation). Maybe even add a shockwave when he lands (like the one Bodvarr does when slamming his axe)

2 Likes
43

Could even have it stack on damage above the threshold and slowly go away again, so e.g. the first hit above the threshold does full damage, then huge diminishing returns kick in fast and hard (e.g. damage gets halved, then quartered, then eighth’d etc (likely can’t go too far or it’d start to eat into exec, crossbows and other weapon’s niche which is honestly a lot more interesting than ultspamming the boss to death)), but if time passes eventually you can get a full damage hit again. There’d actually be some play there with spamming ults that just do worse and worse chip damage vs keeping them to snipe the boss when they’re low.

The main problem I can see with nerfing the boss damage ults themselves is it will make them feel incredibly lame if it makes them worse vs non boss targets. Especially since (apart from BH 80% CDR and Conc pots) they are mainly abusable due to spam, which could be remedied by CD increases and some sort of hardening mechanic like you suggested vs burst.

If FS can bring it to a good level they can make adjustments to HP to make bosses less troublesome for tank parties.

Edit: I guess a hard upper cap would still be needed as Huntsman + Strength pot and other crazy combos are totally busted, even with halved damage they scale way too high.

44

I would also like to shine a little light on Chaos Wastes boons if we ever get a balance patch.

I am well aware it’s all RNG, but I still feel like some should really be changed a bit. For example the ranged crit explosions boon is really egregious by itself, but it completely breaks the game on anything remotely faster firing and not even Rampart is safe from it.

1 Like
45

Sounds like a lot of footwork with “not so sure” results.
Would really need someone to test this to find out.

Yeah, you are right.
Because if soft cap gets introduced, people would probably juse fight against it rather than working around it (which might mean even more power stacking)

Yeah, agree, it would definitely need to be addressed.
Chaos Wastes be Chaos Wastes, but having an elf with a wood staff just casually push the boss off the ledge in a single burst shot is only funny for the first few times (and mainly when you are the elf doing this)

46

Potentially. I picture it as a stacking barkskin (longer duration and stacks fall off individually, DR is per stack and multiplicative not a flat % but tuned to higher damage not just regular swings.

But in the end FS will do what works for them. I just hope they do address it in the not too far future.

Maybe soft cap for ‘reasonable’-ish damage levels and hard cap for when the damage gets a bit more bonkers? A hard cap would have to be chosen well too though, else it could be useless or, going to the other extreme, simply encourage Conc pot cheese as opposed to Str pot or Concoction.

Variable DR does have an advantage there, e.g. a barkskin-like anti-burst mechanic.

47

That… sounds creative.
I am not entirely sold on that idea, but consider me counting my shillings xD

Yeah, and said hard cap would probably also have to scale with difficulty and different game modes (since Weave/Chaos Wastes have different “reasonableness” criteria for the power numbers)

1 Like
48

In regard to monster and bosses, i would like to see a tweak in the numbers, so that anti-boss ultimates would need 2x Power vs. Chaos/Skaven and 2x Power vs. Monster to even do the damage to monster they do now. Wouldnt change that much, but at least the peeps would need to build for it and it gives Power vs. Monster a more significant existence.

1 Like
49

So give them a negative modifier for monster damage? That could work.

FS would have it apply to Shade and SotT criticals from ult too, I don’t know how feasible that is coding-wise.

I don’t think they should be able to do the damage they do now however. It needs to be less even so.

50

I mean, would it be possible to give the burst ultimates a reduction on boss damage per difficulty?

Like on legend, they do -30% damage to monster, so they have to build either 1x PvC + 2x PvM for Chaos and 1x PvS + 2x PvM for Skaven, like sniper weapon need on legend for specials. On cata it would then be -40%, so they have to build 2x PvC + 2x PvM to do the full damage on Chaos monster. So in Cata they have to specialize, much like most sniper weapons on Cata have to specialize too.

1 Like
51

Damage caps are messy and obtuse. Not really something the game needs more of.

Much rather see some numerical nerfs to the usual suspects and then slap on a moderate concentration potion nerf as well to help reign in the ult spam. Which has the added bonus of also reducing knockback spam as well.

1 Like
53

As I see it, the biggest problem is the ultimate spams. Which, although it has proven to be an unpopular opinion, it would really be solved by nerfing the concentration potion. That would work like this: “A concentration potion, when drank, instantly refills your ultimate bar. The end.”
That would still be a good potion to have, for those instances where you think “oh man, if I only had my ultimate” and it could still be used to increase boss damage although in a less broken and more time consuming way than it currently is, IE: BH (or shade, or whatever) uses its powerful ultimate, then has to drink a potion to instantly use it again. unless potion duplication kicks in, it has to fight normally from there, which, it seems to me, it is the desired goal of the monster/lord discussion.

IMO this would be better than giving the boss thresholds or time-based damage reductions, which could easily prove unfair in certain circumstances.

After all, if a Bounty Hunter, a Shade and a Grail Knight w̶a̶l̶k̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶o̶ ̶a̶ ̶b̶a̶r̶ all focus on a rat ogre, I expect it to die, or get close to dying anyway. While it feels more unfair to the bestie if a single player stunlocks and deletes it in seconds.
While we are at it, I’d maybe change double shotted so that it does even more damage to a boss, but without the 80% cooldown, which, granted, it is skillbased, but it also looks pretty ridiculous.

TL:DR: I’ve highlighted the most important parts, but basically: I think nothing would be better for monster/lords balancing than changing the way the concentration potion works.
For people concerned that it’s too big a nerf I can only observe that between the 2-4 potion slots, potion dup option, and the sheer amount (and popularity) of boss-deleters I think there’s still a way to reach the current “laugh at skarrik” level of unfairness, if it’s something you absolutely feel you can’t do without. Just, not as ridiculously easily.

PS: this would make concotion useless on purple, but I think it’s a good thing. It could also be a reason to run potion duplication. Decanter might need to be balanced though.

4 Likes
54

The obvious problem here is that making concentration potions work differently to the rest is that it plays merry hell with the charm traits. Not to mention how bad it would feel to pop the potion when you’re only like 15s away from getting your ult back naturally.

4 Likes
55

Maybe it could work the way SotT’s A Cluster of Radiants works?

You get 1 free ult charge instead of it filling your ult bar. The effect would not stack and would expire after 10s (5s for Concoction, 15 for Decanter), if you ult during that time it will consume the stack early and won’t affect your purple bar at all, which will be refilling as normal in the background (or stay full if it was).

OE would get a set amount of extra ult charge at the start that can exceed his usual maximum F ‘ammo’ (but he obviously won’t be able to maintain his F ammo over the maximum). How much ult ammo could then be set by FS to a reasonable amount (imo, lower than what he gets atm from his purple and all-fruits juice which allow nonstop firing from empty for 15/10/5s) and would naturally scale down with Concoction (-50%) and up with Decanter (+50%).

This gives an incentive to use purples on IB etc. too sometimes, as an IB ult is more valuable in some situations than a single, solitary damage ult, but not always. Instead of what we have atm where purple pots almost always go to burst damage dealers or knockback spammers. It’d also still be useful on OE and at the very least easier to (re)balance on him.

3 Likes
Rework the purple potion for fair monster/lord fights
56

Even though conc pot and also strenght pot have a significant impact, we have killed bosses in seconds without them too.

The damage gap on monster between a group that has no anti-boss career and a group with an anti-boss career is just too high in my opinion. Back then when we had only the original careers, it was somwhat balanced because BH and Huntsman had skillshots that actually needed to hit the head to do full damage and only Shade was a consistent boss killer, especially with conc pot. (Not mentioning specific builds like Hagstalker)

Now we have far too much stuff that deals effectively with bosses, that even the potions could be seen as overkill and most of the new stuff isnt even much of a skillshot anymore. Its far too easy to do massive amounts of damage to a boss and since there are so many options now, chances are very good you will have at least one of those damage dealers in the party.

Now that i think about it, Fatshark would need to nerf a damn lot of stuff to make V2 somewhat challenging again, at least for campaign.

4 Likes
57

One could argue that not including boss damage in a group is a comp failure. Similar to using a heavy melee oriented comp that forgoes special sniping.

1 Like
58

That could be argued now, but it was not really an argument back then. In fact, often times we didnt even want to play with Shade because she made bosses trivial.

I mean, we could also argue that every melee weapon should be brought to the new powerlevel of melee weapons and let ll of them be able to deal with both hordes and single-target armored effectively.

The powercreep literally destroyed the limitation we had to go through to make our build as efficient as possible to deal with most threats in the game. If you took a 1h axe, you had a severe disadvantage against hordes and could take a range weapon to deal with them, like a shotgun. But then you couldnt deal with far away specials. Now we just take the Coghammer that can deal with all sorts of melee enemy and thus we could easily go for one of the ranged weapons that deals with specials. As OE you dont even need that because of your ulti, so you take Trollhammer to just obliterate everything. You are effectively a counter to everything in the game as just one guy.

3 Likes
59

Between Cata and CW there’s also a lot more bosses in the game than there was before too.

1 Like
60

Ok, lets be clear here. I for one do not talk about CW. Its a joke mode with quite a lot of randomness. The mode itself has to be balanced instead of just the careers.

I am exclusively talking about campaign and we didnt really get a lot more bosses there since the game released.

2 Likes
61

This is true, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing: for example, pot dup is virtually never used, and concoction is king. If it ends up making more properties meaningful instead of just 1 or 2 that’s a good thing.

@theppekausen
I strongly agree with basically everything you just said. Except my definition of “a counter to everything” is the moonbow and not the OE. I like the engineer a lot, and it’s true the Trollhammer complements the guy perfectly, but it’s his only panic button, and once it goes off it’s 5 seconds to load. The ultimate is nice, but no good for sniping, and it takes a while to kill armored specials with it, unless you go with the AP ulti, which, like the default version is also slow to firing.
The guy can be a powerhouse, but it’s definitely not without its flaws.

2 Likes