Why melee feels useless

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
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I’ve been playing Vermintide 2 now for 144h, played Vermintide 1 for 166h. I always liked how the two play styles where used in higher difficultys. In Vermintide 1 a range may take out specials which were marked and switched then back to melee. There are a few reasons I remember why this was common:

  1. Friendly Fire was a thing
  2. Ammo was a thing
  3. You were slower clearing waves
  4. Less classes were strong with ranged weapons

So, what happened with those points?
Friendly Fire:
Yes, there still is friendly fire but… no not really. Maybe a BH Ult in your head doesn’t feel so good but everything else is no threat at all. At the current state adding more friendly fire wouldn’t help as ranges are better at clearing waves.

Ammo:
Who the f* needs ammo? Neither with Bounty Hunter nor with Waywatcher someone needs ammo. They have infinite ammo and can shot at everything without even spending a single thought on their ammo. This is quite sad as you could completly remove ammo and nothing would change at all. I’m quite upset that this decision was made.

Clearing waves:
“Hey look a dwarf with a flamethrower, okay lets just wait till he cleared that wave.” - Uhm, yes that works, but doesn’t feel great for any other player, does it? Same goes for Sienna, beamstaff and waves are cleared. Why should a melee even bother to stay at the front line if he just gets some friendly fire? There is no reason. Using melee weapons is slower and only used if either Bardin or Sienna overheat. Hah, Sienna does never overheat and Bardin only does so after clearing more than one horde. It’s not intuitive and just feels like any regular wave shooter as this is was Vermintide 2 became. As it has melee wepons it should be a Wave hack and slay… er.

Class desing:
Some classes had overheat, that has been removed (there still is a bar but I think thats some kind of bug (just joking)). Some classes were stronger in melee and were used to tank by pushing waves back from their melees. Thats not usefull anymore as one of those characters now is the best wave clearer ingame and the other one… well has a long range weapon everybody uses. Specials? Well who can shoot at them - nobody, they are in your waves or far away so just use your ult which is up all the time to kill them. No need to aim or anything.

I’d really like to see a balanced game where melee is just as important as range but currently you just gave us a shooter. Okay, there is for example slayer Bardin who can jump in quickly - and dies often. Okay still handmaiden who dashs forward - and gets hit while dashing and dies often. Okay we have shade who can deal huge amounts of damage - if a boss doesn’t die instantly when playing whith a BH or Sienna. We have that 3rd Sienna (no idea what her name was) which is quite good for melee - but why use her and die when you can deal a lot of damage by using the 2nd?

So all I’m saying is, melee currently is useless and there are some points which need some tweaking. You should get less ammo (for example add the 20% per shot to get ammo back and REMOVE all other traits / skills), Bardin should overheat before he cleared one wave, Sienna should not be able to not overheat anytime and last but not least, you should be able to fend of hordes by using 4 melee characters but not using 4 ranged characters.

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Strong words, try to roll with pure ranged comp and tell me the results. You need people to deal with the crowd

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There’s a vid up which demonstrates the absolute ridiculousness of ranged power. Bardin drakefires (more broken than drakegun), Sienna pyro and BH, (there’s a foot knight but he doesn’t do much). It’s on Legend difficulty (the hard version from a previous patch).

Search ‘Vermintide 2 easy mode)’ on YouTube, it’s on Convocation of Decay.

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Can you replicate it with ease? Or because someone achieved everyone should be able to?

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100% yes. We aren’t even the best players. It’s just point and click and everything dies.

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Then why there is a lot of people struggling on Veteran and Recruit?

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A lot of people can’t point and click.

There’s the fact a lot of people don’t know about these builds, refuse to use them, don’t have the level to get them yet. My point is that the end-game currently is just too easy with ranged. I’m not talking 100s of hours end-game, I just mean max level end-game. Once you have access to these weapons and classes, you have the choice of making the game easy-mode, which is by definition OP. Just a demonstration to highlight what needs balancing is all.

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Oh, I absolutely do not know.

That said I can see why the Footsoldier did nothing.
Its next to impossible to do anything as melee with FF and one flamethrower in the party, let alone two.

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And these flamethrowers aren’t even the ones everyone associates with murdering hordes. These flamethrowers kill all ambients, all specials, all bosses… EVERYTHING. There’s nothing left, it’s boring. Ranged literally crowds out all melee options for the other players.

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They also kill pretty much everything you see, literally. You cant see enemies anymore with a flamethrower shooting from behind.

But I do not agree on the melee part being useless.

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Bright wizard and beam staff is just too good.

Dwarf flamecannon shouldn’t be infinite ammo. He should pick up an ammo stack or lamp oil barrel to charge it or something.

BH and waystalker infinite ammo is silly.

Melee is not useless but some ranged need some rebalancing.

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They should buff melee pg… playing a crowd control pg like Mercenary, I feel like useless

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Well take Slayer into consideration here.
It’s a Melee Only class and while I thoroughly enjoy the hacking and slashing and hacking and slashing…
There is a lot of Disable in this game that the Slayer can’t do anything about, a lot of Ranged that the Slayer can’t counter.

The Slayer NEEDS a ranged character to help him, a Ranged character doesn’t need a melee character.

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He is a wave clearer, he still needs backup, a choke-hold, and someone to clear armored and specials in between, this argument is totally invalid. I love having someone in team that, can do his job. I can win more games with it, i don’t care how usefull I am untill we win with full run.

Specials? Well who can shoot at them - nobody, they are in your waves or far away so just use your ult which is up all the time to kill them.

What? Even now you need skilled players to wipe all specials if not you are dead. I guess you always plays with premades that, are doing their job well. Or you are extremely lucky, I had on legend/champion last days so many bad WS, that had like 3k dmg and did not clear specials when needed.

Some classes had overheat, that has been removed

In V1 with good traits, you could use drakes constantly. Same like this, but in V1, they were stronger than here.

So all I’m saying is, melee currently is useless and there are some points which need some tweaking.

That not true, you need a melee class to handle of the wave and especially armored.
In general, I think that you are carried hard by good players, once you get worse players in your quick games, you will see how the game really looks like.

But, I agree that infinite ammo on ranged characters is kinda problem and was not planned. You talked about Slayer, which is actually fine compared to Ranger. His specials thing is dropping additional ammo - laughable when most of the team don’t need it, totally useless class :smiley:

It still all depends on the skill, once I go on Legend have 3 other decent players and it is quite easy, you still lose, but you can win 8 / 10 games. Other time I go for Champion and we are wiped out after 5 mintues, becuase players are not skilled enough for it (even that they have ‘op’ classes).

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I wouldnt mind some changes but Id still like ranged classes to be able to use their ranged weapons other then just for specials. Its actually nice being able to use your ranged weapon more freely as these classes…

Also BH is entirely reliant on traits for ammo recovery unless you are only shooting every 10 seconds. Also Try using Brace of pistols and having a decent amount of ammo.

But yeah I agree melee is very much not useless. They already reduced the amount of ammo and non ranged classes have jack all ammo to work with. I feel like ammo wouldn’t be the issue if there were less things that can be instantly killed at range.

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tldr: melee is good in some scenarios, range is good in some scenarios. learn how to optimise your runs using both. relying on just range makes your runs slow.

uhhh… yet another thread about someone not understanding how to carry the team as melee, then coming to the forums to rage about it.

i’ve made countless posts about it so i’ll just summarize:

  • if you are letting X player deal with a whole wave by himself then feeling useless, that is your choice. you can be that player instead, but you choose to let others do it. All classes have their own way of dealing with hordes that are equally efficient. if you don’t know how to do it, learn or ask how to for specific classes.
  • It is a playstyle choice to sit back and let ranged do the dirty work. If you feel that melee is risky, it is a matter of learning how to avoid damage easily, which you can improve on. If you are giving the excuse of avoiding friendly fire, refer to the point above.

i’m sorry but in my experience this just shows you don’t know how to play a melee class. I’m guessing your games have a lot of sit-and-wait for things to die, which is a lot slower than if you had a strong melee stack to complement your ranged party members.

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IMO, the current bug of phantom swings is my main issue with melee at the moment.

I’m taking too much damage from enemies which should be dead, if not staggered.

I can understand if there was an elite unit, or a shield unit in the midst which stopped my weapon from cleaving. But when my weapon swung from right to left, all the way, I expect to hit things in my melee range. And not miraculously having my weapon phased through them with no effect.

So yes, Champion/Legend, i would rather let range take care of enemies before they reaches us, or at the least thin out the horde, so it is safer for me to clear out the stragglers.

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last night in a pug champ run on last stand the sienna asks us if she can for a laugh solo the crescendo after ringing the bell, We actually let her try , standing off to the side against he wall (where the light beam hits the floor) and they damn near did it , there was one moment when we had mass chaos from one side and skaven from the door where the elf got a bit nervous and shot some chaos but other than that nothing got within 10 meters of us.
its bad when a class can solo waves , its utterly broken when they can solo crescendos , at least they do low damage to bosses …
and this at level 9 btw.

sure the player was good. not everyone can do that , and i firmly believe that a game must be balanced across all levels not just for est <0.5% of harcore that run legend all day. but when one class makes the other 3 irrelevant something has to be changed , either the game becomes a solo fps or it needs balancing.

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ah so i’m not the only person who notices this. there are times where my swings just pass thru slave rats without getting stuck on anything - it’s like the hitbox didn’t register at all, but a second swing will connect. it almost only happens when rats are running past me though, i don’t normally have that issue when fighting them head-on.

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More like melee is good in some scenarios and very specific situations, ranged is good in all scenarios tbh. I don’t have a problem with the nigh unlimited ammo, having so little ammo available was frustrating in V1. What I do think though is ranged is way too predominant and needs to be toned down a little. A run with lets say, Sienna/BH/Waystalker/Drake Bardin and mostly using ranged is totally doable and actually much easier than a mostly melee run. There needs to be a balance between ranged and melee but right now it’s just leaning way too much towards ranged and I doubt that’s what fatshark intended so be prepared for some incoming balance changed favoring melee.

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