Regarding weaves that it my stance pretty much.
Also don’t forget the staggering results this “expansion” will have once it goes on sale. To be fair, how Fatshark even dares to call this an expansion when it’s filled with a useless feature nobody asked for (weaves with leaderboards) and a game breaking mechanic that changes the game completely (stagger) and a measley ONE NEW MAP is beyond me.
Imagine if they have put more energy into more maps instead of weaves and all that other stuff.
Imagine if this had been the beta for new versus mode and not weaves. I would not have had any issues then.
Well its nice to get a post about some of this stuff, a lot of people on this forum were asking for the design intentions behind all this beta stuff… and well here you go. You guys should keep this up.
No, what you think they need. This can be very tricky. For weeks, no for over a year, people here on this very Forum tell you what they want. But they are all wrong. They dont want what they say they want, you know better what they want. Am i reading this right? Or am i to Paranoid?
YES THIS! +1 to you good Sir.
I have the feeling that some people at Fat Shark the ones who are calling the shots have a vision what V2 should be. And they already made up there minds and work this game in that direction, not caring if the players like it. And its their vision there baby they own V2, they can do it(and i guess they will).
But everyone here on this forum who invested his free time and some $, feels ownership of this game too. I know i do, and it makes me sad that i know i will stop playing this game if i dont like the changes. Because it was so much fun.
Do you know this works both ways?
I know you want to sell me the Winds Of Magic dlc.
But i will give you what you need, a lesson. If you ignore the player feedback you where asking for, players will not buy your dlc, they will not buy your future dlcs. Because they have uninstalled the game an moved on.
I am sorry, i really dont want to be rude or mean. But thats how i feel about all this.
The only thing left to do now is waiting for the big update and see what they do.
Maybe it will be really good, but to be honest i dont believe in it anymore.
Well. As Winds of Magic is currently having a competitive board. If you want fairness in competition, you have to fix the rules so everyone play with the same set of rules. Therefore you need to remove all randomness from the equation.
Now, if you’re against any competitive mode in V2, that doesn’t mean weaves shouldn’t be “fixed” and follow season. That means weaves should not be linked to competition.
Therefore, the obvious solution, as you’ll never agree that V2 players could like leaderboards, is to have a competitive mode and a non competitive mode (random) at the same time.
Seasons are mostly another matter. Season bring “freshness” as they are linked to new content and new ways to play (through balances and content patches, as announced in the blogpost). Depending on the implementation (and depending on the grind needed), they can be pretty fun to play or… too grindy.
So you’ll come back each season, not only for the competitive mode, but also to see what has changed.
All in all, getting up a competitive mode AS well as seasons (with balance patchs) means that devs will be able to follow balance of the game far better than currently and we’ll see new content more regularly (and not wait half a year each time), as you’ll have stats on which career with which build will be the most played and stuff like that around a fixed environment.
Now of course it comes with downsides as well. And it will really depends in how fatshark will tackle thoses downsides.
This one quote about “you guys have no clue what you want, but we do” … it’s like they are trolling us.
Especially when they can just look at reddit now and see that massive wave of negative feedback on stuff that has been feedbacked here during the beta, just wasn’t implemented because they thought they know better.
We believe that Weaves, with difficulty scaling, a shorter in play time mode will push you to try new weapons, careers and tune your gear differently, and then keep tweaking your kit depending on the weave you are trying to beat.
This is directly contradicted by how you have designed the athanor grind though.
If I’m understanding you correctly here, your intented sequence when a player gets stuck on a hard weave is as follows:
Hit a brick wall → Try out new weapons or careers → Fine tune your traits / properties → Try again and hopefully succeed
What ends up happening instead is a slightly modified version of that sequence:
Hit a brick wall → Go back and grind a previous weave for athanor, preferrably by making some friends carry you through them if your power level is really low on said new career / weapon → Fine tune your traits / properties → Try again and hopefully succeed (because there’s no way you’re going to go back and grind yet another weapon if you still fail, that’s just not fun).
Your current athanor system does not incentivize trying out new weapons or careers, it literally does the exact opposite. When I got stuck on a high level weave and felt like maybe my current weapon/career was the problem, I was left with two choices: Go back and grind another career and/or weapon up to speed for a couple hours, or just stop playing weaves.
I stopped playing weaves. This isn’t what I play Vermintide for.
Same here, honestly I like the way you upgrade weapons in weaves, they should have the same system for all weapons, also make traits more fun, like we had in V1, but Weaves? Oh god no!
I responted to most of the points in previous conversation with @Yzneftamz.
For the other points:
Yes yes, I agree on this, I already mentioned this solution multiple times. I also asked about this on last twitch (the one before the map designer)And answer I got was basically, no we are not doing it, we are doing fixed mode and seasons, that is what we are focused on.
I hope that reddit thread will make them reconsider this approach. Since there is like … no controversy at all going on, in terms of what people thing about this.
Well if you have to level all weapons and classes again, than I know what it is, it is horrible pain in the … and nobody likes that and it makes no sense to do it, just to p*ss of majority of player base.
And yes they say they will add more content for the season etc, but than Robin is mentioning on reddit how it takes so much time to do few maps, well than how are they doing some big content updates that changes things so much that people would not mind leveling everything again ?
That is not happening.
Even different guy pointed out that in PoE, it’s very different, when I play new league I got so many new things to play that I’m happy to level up multiple new characters and I still can’t try out all the new stuff.
What is going to be new here ? Are we getting 2-3 new classes and 10 weapons along different weaves, maps and mutators every season ?
They could balance it well if they actually took feedback from beta testers, and it’s not about me… there is many other people who played all the weapons quite a bit and have solid experience with them and could do proper balancing. (chocoB, Fattigkussen (btw, I did not see him post right before this post! ) and many others come to mind as an example) They don’t need year to balance weapons, they just need to take time, get some very experienced players, and do fast iterations.
This could be done in a week probably, with small dedicated group of players very familiar with all weapons.
Ideally they could provide tools (mod) so those testers would be able to actually tweak the weapons themselves and than just send devs the result. Dev or those testers itself could share that between themselves retest other testers builds and come to some agreements on what is as close as possible to the perfect balance.
There would be many ways to do it well. None of those would require months or year.
And most certainly not adding another convoluted stagger mechanic on top of it all, to make it even more complex.
Devs can’t tweak the weapons properly, they don’t have that much experience with the gameplay. Do you think Yamaha engineers are the ones who are riding on the circuit and doing all the tweaking or is it the Doctor who actually rides it and tells them what they need to tweak to make it as good as possible ?
I can understand why the team would want to avoid that as part of their design philosophy. If maps and spawns were truly randomized, I could see people regularly dropping groups to avoid certain maps on their quest for a top leader board spot. This is how people grind Diablo 3 Greater Rifts, and it can be a very lame experience.
The more I think about this, the more I think I could really enjoy a curated experience if it was significantly more curated. Imagine a scenario where everyone starts the map with no ammo, and the characters are spawned in an open area with limited cover and a firing line of gun rats on the horizon. You could create some pretty fun, unique curated scenarios with assets already in the game.
This. What they are doing now isn’t balancing the weapons, they are changing the meta over to different weapons, it’s not balancing, it’s just moving the meta. If they wanted people to use the 2handed mace for instance, apply a the stagger bonus to THAT weapon, not on every weapon. That would give players an instentive to actually use them.
Also, if they want people to stop running ranged. Well, that’s easy, do what they did in V1! Make players having to go melee to get ammo back for instance, why the F is scrounger a ranged weapon trait? It worked fine in V1 as the Elf, running out of ammo? Draw melee weapons and get some kills. Now if you run out of ammo, you can’t do anything (unless you are waystalker).
On the other hand, I would like to point out that it may be easy to misinterpret some of this blog post, because in the end it’s . . . well, it’s info we asked for and wanted, to know their thoughts on this stuff. We asked for this. And it’s also very corporate jargony - which is just unavoidable for some reason. No matter how much they had messed up, no company would, in a bad position, say “Okay, we messed up bad, we’re sorry guys, we had a crappy idea”. Fatshark came close to this honesty when they admitted some of their early errors, which I can respect them for owning up to.
My point, though, is that the corporate PR-talk will always try to spin things in the most positive light, and offer nice-sounding phrases that may not mean anything at all. That may not be the case, but it’s worth bearing in mind. They did do this kind of post for that reason, so . . . that is, objectively, good.
Except we’re not talking about completely random maps (that’s a separate topic, having an actual random weave mode), we’re talking about having randomness/RNG on the existing weave maps.
Sort of like going QP vs doing a specific map in the base game, in the former you don’t know what you’re gonna get at all, in the latter you know what map you’re getting but not what unscripted bosses are going to appear, what pots/bombs you’ll get, when/where you’ll be fighting certain hordes or specials etc.
I really appreciate that someone has actually taken time to write a lengthy post to the community discussing the thought processes. Not bad.
However…
I got fed up with the weaves in the Beta before I even got past Weave 5. I’ll not be stepping into the weaves in WoM unless there is fundamental changes to them. This blog post somehow makes me even more salty about weaves, as you could have the finest seasonal content, and really great promotion and marketing and even have some scripted boss fights in the weaves, but the problem is that the actual gameplay design and whole ethos of Leaderboards/Grinding/Anathor upgrading and fixed spawns is so out of sync with why the majority of the community play you’ll never convince me the Weaves are going to be any good.
For huge swathes of players, the weaves are basically not what they play for and never will be. The Leaderboard could have Queen Elizabeth II name at the top and the vast majority of players wouldn’t know or care because they never even go near the leaderboard anyhow.
As @BizarreSalp says, the post is a massive step forwards when it comes to communicating with us, but the problem is that the Weaves are just a broken concept designed for a different kind of player than the ones who play the game now.
You can’t change horses during a charge though.
I feel the Weaves are such a bad idea and concept but there’s no option just to keep barreling along with the release and hope to not tank completely. The whole Dev process now is quite possibly all about damage limitation.
I think as WoM is a new release it’s not going to be protected by the new Steam review bombing policy, so I expect it to be a great result for FS if it gets “Mixed” reviews rather than just being bombed into “Overwhelmingly Negative”.
This is without even mentioning the Stagger mechanic that completely changes everything.
So you ‘fish’ for easy maps with easy winds of magic with easy objectives.
But i agree with you that randomizing spawns should override most of the ‘ease’ that comes with those factors.
Also why not have a leaver penalty like in other games ranked modes? (leave a weave and for 30 min the score of your next weave is reduced, or you just strait up cant queue for that duration)
You have no idea how grateful I am to see a post with some insight, thank you. It means a lot to finally hear what’s cooking in your head and what the overall intent is of something, rather than me speculating and giving my own perspective. Even if we don’t end up agreeing on issues, I can at least understand what’s going on inside Fatshark.
Beastmen
I think they all offer an interesting challenge, although the Wargor just felt too strong and weird to fight in certain areas. I think my biggest issue with him was that, out of all the specials that have massive AoE effects that can wipe a team, I didn’t really feel like he had something to exploit to our advantage as part of his ability kit. Yeah, you can fall back and wait for him to pick up the banner to snipe him, but let me contrast that with other similar specials:
Blightstormer: really dangerous to keep alive due to his teleporting and huge unblockable damage the storm can cause in tight areas. However, if you don’t kill him before his storm comes up, you can at least retreat and let it scatter and disperse a horde a bit.
Globadier: Dangerous because if one pops up suddenly when you’re backed into a corner, you’re taking some major damage. However, it works both ways: they can wipe a horde for you if you can maneuver around the gas globe.
Ratling Gunner: Colloquially known as “the fifth team member” when they pop up because they’re almost always going to mow down a horde when shooting you.
Warpfire Thrower: Ratling Gunner except a lot more close range and a lot more knockback potential. The sixth team member.
Bestigor: Not a special, but will push everyone out of the way to get to the group to clear himself a path to charge down.
Contrast these with
Wargor: His AoE effect only benefits the horde by buffing them and making them much more resilient. They get briefly distracted to cheer when a banner is placed down, but they’re constantly empowered by it until you finally kill the Wargor and his banner. To my recollection, he offers no potentially manipulable ill-effects to the horde that we can play off of. You’re pretty much forced to kill him immediately or retreat. If something as simple as “destroying the banner staggers the horde previously buffed by it”, you could build some counterplay into the Wargor that isn’t just “kill him before the banner goes down”. Maybe you can wait for him to place the banner so you can risk challenging him and his big axe so that it pays dividends if there’s a poorly positioned banner. Maybe you keep an otherwise defenseless banner alive after you kill the Wargor until a large group of enemies approaches so you can stagger them.
You can manipulate almost all of the specials in ways to work to your advantage. You can bait a Gutter Runner pounce to go off a cliff. You can have the Blightstormer, Globadier, or Ratlings into killing half their team. I feel like the Wargor stands alone as “we really need to kill him right now 100%”. I feel like this balance can be achieved, but that was my main issue in the final iteration of the beta, since obviously the overall balance of the Beastmen was wacky at various points in the beta.
Stagger/Dodge
I think the overall intent displayed here with the dodge and stagger changes was to dispel the kind of cheese tactic of “dodge dance around everything with a light weapon until you win”. I feel like the intent was to make there a place for control weapons like shields or hammers on the heavier classes especially, but the overall net result felt like it could be “TL;DR - dodge meta out, tank meta in”.
The stagger changes seem like good ideas, but they were maybe too broad in scope and heavy-handed to be well-received. Introducing an entire talent tier built around them seems heavy-handed. If you think it’s a mechanic that is worth investing in and you can figure out the weapon balance such that I can readily consider Dual Axes or a big-ass Hammer as equal weapons that I’d want to use depending on context, I think the change seems okay. It didn’t feel like that in the beta where it seemed like every other game had a Sienna or Ironbreaker with a flamethrower, if not both, while the others mopped up the leftover specials. It seemed like a dramatic over-specialization in roles that made the game less fun.
The dodge changes seem like good ideas on paper, but the client experience for this game is still very rough for me to think that dodge is in a good place. With how small the community has gotten, it becomes almost unplayable when I have to reach across borders to play with 120+ ping. Changes will, I think, make the game more meaningful and skillful in controlled environments where I’m hosting and playing with local friends, but make the quickplay client experience with triple digit ping miserable. Here’s a clip that speaks for itself:
Weaves
I feel like the intent where I customize and tweak my kit to suit the Weaves I’m playing on is almost diametrically opposed to its progression system. I have no incentive to swap weapons and customize things within the Weaves because I have to rebuild my stuff from scratch and re-earn everything. If I’m purely progressing through the Weaves until I fail and I think “oh, this weapon might not be good for the enemies I just got slapped by” I really can’t easily just switch to a different weapon without grinding Essence to get more power to try again.
Easiest example I have. I was playing Ranger Veteran and Slayer with the throwing axes because it’s a hugely fun weapon to use. There were Weaves where far away enemies like Blightstormers came into play and I couldn’t quite reach them with the axes. There also were the suicide rats that came in large groups that I just didn’t have enough throwing axes to deal with. In this scenario, I would think “hmm I should switch to the crossbow or the grudge-raker to better deal with this scenario” but then I would have to re-level that different weapon to achieve the same Weave Power. How do you propose I get that? Replaying previous Weaves gives a pittance of the original Essence, and if you just say “oh go grind out the regular game to grind Essence”, why do I have to switch back to the other progression system to progress in this system? It’s asinine.
Leaderboards
I don’t care about Leaderboards because they’re going to be purely occupied by people with thousands more hours than me or hackers. It’s not a selling point to me at all, especially because I will never be as good as Cousin Okri, anyway.
My other issue is: is this leaderboard what’s preventing a solo/duo experience with bots? I can’t even try out some of the Weaves because of the progression system having everyone at different points and there being no incentive in replaying a Weave if someone wants to go back and help me. If it’s not, fine, keep the dumb thing, it’s not meant for me. If it is, I think you’re intruding on the core gameplay experience.
Difficulties
I am perfectly okay with the core experience not being modified heavily for Recruit to Legend. I am perfectly okay with Cataclysm being a ridiculously low completion rate in the low single digits for the general audience. I’m okay with seeing a Cataclysm skin or portrait frame and being struck with awe.
If I want something above Cataclysm, I can turn to mods. If I want something between Legend and Cataclysm, I want to be able to turn to the existing infrastructure that we have in place that has been neglected to customize my experience. Twitch Mode, Weekly Events, Deeds, and even these Weaves seem like they are there to bridge the gaps between difficulties, but they’re imperfect. I want to keep a core experience and see what I can add onto it before it breaks me. Can you do Legend Skittergate? Okay, but can you do Legend Skittergate with all the books? Can you do Legend Skittergate with Twitch mode throwing stuff at you randomly? Can you do Legend Twitchergate with a deed modifier on? At some point along that line, I can ask “Can you do Cataclysm Skittergate?”
It just seems like there’s these modifiers and whatnot that exist already to customize the experience that we have to suit our needs, but the main answer still is to turn to modding and segregate ourselves from the progression system and significant chunk of the community. Twitch Mode and Deeds are so much fun and have so much potential that’s being squandered.
Again, I’ll re-iterate what I’ve said before. I love the new crafting system! I love the ideas and the UI associated with it, although it takes some getting used to, like anything new. I like the potential it offers and I wish you had doubled-down on this approach to fix crafting in the base game instead of just for this new game mode. It even opens up potential to expand the traits and properties system beyond what we have with more customizability. It’s great. It needs some work, but it’s a great start to something much better than rerolling.
The main ideas I like:
Selecting properties/traits directly instead of fishing for them with lucky rolls. It’s fantastic. Like you said, I can tweak the build to suit the needs of a particular Weave. Is one Weave all Chaos or Skaven? Great, switch it up for this one. Obviously, convenience factors in where I still want to keep the general-purpose, quickplay style of loadout, but the idea is great to let me experiment more freely.
Upgrading a weapon’s power to keep it useful instead of ditching it. I don’t remember my first orange in Vermintide 2. Steam says I found it within a week of release, but it was probably a low power whatever. The fact that I can bring my weapon with me through the Weaves and have it stay relevant is a much better approach that makes it feel special.
Variable slotting cost for stuff to allow for deeper customization of properties. Like, on the “Trinket” slot, 5% movement speed only costs 50 Mastery and one slot. 5% crit chance costs 150 Mastery and five slots. Unsurprisingly, this was pretty much the first time I ever considered movement speed when building my character. This opens a lot of customization possibilities.
The future potential: I think this could even be expanded to allow multiple slotting of traits like in Vermintide 1, in the future, assuming similar slotting costs was a factor. It opens a lot of potential for traits and properties to be expanded and added to the game in another balance pass, since we will be able to immediately select and try out new traits/properties in the game, instead of just rolling for 5-15 minutes until we get the new one that we want. It’s a much better system that has a lot of potential, and you’ve done a tremendous amount of work on it. It’d be a shame for you to keep this locked away behind a separate game mode.
Separating Progression
I think you’re conflating some issues. You separated progression but still made it heavily dependent on the base game to grind out for more loot in the Weaves. That’s not really separate. On top of that, to be blunt, the leveling experience with loot and whatnot is subpar in the game. It’s not really a draw to it and many players are not going to return if they’re hit with the blunt truth: “Oh yeah to try out the new content you’re starting from level 1 again”. Screw that.
I think if you’re doubling down on Weaves as a kind of “next step” after beating the base game to challenge yourself with this ladder game mode, you don’t need to take the seasonal progression reset approach. I think normalizing power level is a fine idea for the mode itself, so that players do not have an edge on this challenge mode because they’ve played more, but I don’t think you’re doing that well.
Instead of having everyone start at Level 1, have everyone’s power level set to the max so that everyone has the same experience! It’s so OBVIOUS that I feel weird saying it to you. That way, if you’re working your way up the ladder, it’s not because you grinded more, it’s because you played better! I can work up my way to Weave 10 and then hit a wall because I didn’t use the right weapon or I didn’t have quite enough power, so then I’ll go back and grind some more adventure mode or get carried through weaves so I can build up more power to tackle the challenge again.
I’ll say it again: If you’re going to normalize everyone’s power level so that no one has a competitive edge in the Weave mode versus the regular mode, normalize their power level to the max level so that the only factor for progressing through Weaves is their own individual skill in tackling its challenge, not their gear. I do not want to regrind a separate game mode again. If a new player wants to jump into the challenging Weave mode at level 20 with their higher-level friends, they shouldn’t all be at level 1, they should all be at level 30 (or 35, whatever).
New Talents
The changes were overall good, but there were many that were bad. I hope that the bad ones got removed and I hope you took feedback into consideration. I didn’t like the state of Slayer, Huntsman, Waystalker, or Shade… to name a few. I really hope they got changes guided by suggestions and feedback.
Seasons
Again, seasonal update isn’t a bad idea. I think it’s great for you to have a “season” that kinda guides you along a quarterly schedule to have your larger patches and reworks, wiping previous records from the leaderboards that couldn’t be beat because of balance changes. Providing new content with a regular cadence is something that you have really struggled with and adhering to a tighter schedule with smaller scope balance updates/reworks is good. You don’t need to keep torturing yourself by reworking every single talent tree in the game every time you want to change some. It’s cruel to yourself as a team and cruel to all the people who create helpful guides and research stuff for the community to have all of their work basically chucked out all at once. Every single guide on Steam or Youtube is almost entirely irrelevant each time you do a balance patch. Chill out!
Seasonal progression reset is weird and I don’t get why I would want to re-level every single time. The leveling experience isn’t the best experience in the game. The game is charming despite its weird progression and loot systems, not because of the weird progression and loot systems.
I am 100% excited for the new level and new boss and any other new surprises you have cooked up. I worry that you have lost your way by straying away from the core game that defines and makes your game fantastic, but I’m still hopeful.
This right here. This post is great. When you make a change with no context, like stagger or dodge changes, I’m not exactly sure what your intent is and what feedback I can give to you because I don’t know what you’re thinking.
Like, before, I could only speculate what the motivations were for changes. If I know exactly what your goals are, I can see where our goals align and how I can suggest alternative routes for changes with the same ideas in mind.
Like, with the ideas for Slayer’s talent tree… is the intent to encourage weapon diversity with the new Tier 2 talents that only give bonuses to certain combos? I feel like it’s discouraging diversity because only certain combos get the bonuses, so you pick the talent that best suits the weapons you’re already using. Like what I said with Weaves progression, I’m not going to necessarily be able to just switch weapons on a whim like I can talents. Talent choices shouldn’t be all-or-nothing with weapons. I think that’s bad design. I think talents will inevitably benefit certain loadouts more than others, but I think giving no benefits to certain loadouts with certain talents is poor design. I think it’s poor in all places it appears like Ironbreaker (Irondrake talents), Slayer (tier 2 talents), or any class that has “reload speed” talents/perks with some weapon options that don’t reload. It’s silly.
Is the boss-killer role where you make compromises/sacrifices to your other killing ability to be able to handle bosses not a role that you want? It seems like it’s going away with the update’s changes, which is a shame. It seems like it’s fading back into the cookie-cutter DPS and tank roles. Even a lot of support abilities seem to get shifted around oddly or removed. It makes me confused. If you had a focused rework on a career with explanations about the types of roles you had in mind for it, I’d feel better.
TL;DR of my post
Thank you for talking to us. I know you sometimes don’t want to talk to us because we’re outraged, but I think, if you talked to us more and told us what you’re thinking and asked what we’re thinking, we would be less upset. It’s upsetting that we can go 6-8 months without significant communication or changes, only to see all of the mechanics get “table flipped” in one patch each year. I think your approach to “seasons” in the sense of being able to stick to a regular update schedule is a necessary cadence to work off of, although I think some of the things you’re doing are misguided.
I’ll say it again: Vermintide 2 is a great game, for me, in spite of its progression system and loot system, not because of its progression system and loot system. The core game’s loot and progression system is meh. Seeing this new, cool crafting mode for the Weaves feels weird because it has a lot of stuff that I want for the base game but it’s restricted to this mode that I’m still unsure about. Not to mention, there’s Deeds, Twitch Mode, and Weekly Events + Quests which have stayed relatively untouched since their introduction, despite their faults.
I think making a separate progression system for the Weaves and having this disjointed progression in the game is a mistake.
I think normalizing power for the Weave game mode is a good idea, but it still makes me re-grind to get my power up to progress. I can’t experiment with different loadouts in the Weaves if I have to re-level everyone and grind the base game for Essence.
If the mode was purely progressed by skill, with everyone having a normalized power level that doesn’t change, I think it would be better and not have a barrier to entry where players go “Oh I don’t want to have to regrind that crap again”.
Stagger changes sound like they come from a good place with good intentions, but I’m skeptical. It didn’t play like everything felt viable. It felt like I was playing meta musical chairs where all the tanky, heavy stuff was the name of the game, and you should bring a flamethrower. If you wanted to make these weapons better, I feel like making stagger a new universal mechanic that the meta revolves around is… an odd decision.
I have an idea sir, let’s make em at least random !
You can’t do that, you get one map chunk with certain wind, you can’t change that. So there is no fishing. And you can’t tell from initial spawns if it’s going to be easy or hard.
Maybe I wasn’t clear when I started talking about random weaves, I mean random spawns same as there are random spawns in the core game. I did not mean like you are doing weave #100 and you get different map every run. I mean you get the same as it is now, you get fixed chunk of a map, you get some wind, but the spawns… those should be random, spawns of trash mobs, hordes, elites, ambients, specials, maybe with exception of bosses and big patrols.
I loved this game, but I threw it away for a year or so because ridiculous RNG drops of red items from legendary chests and the bogenhafen “skins”. On latest sale I got Back to Ubersike dlc and gave it a chance again. By theory the new difficulty and new stagger mechanic looks absurd for me. Do you know how many people plays this game at all? How many plays legend difficulty? There is Steam a achivement “Norscannihilation - Complete Skittergate on Legend” have 5.1%. Is this statistics relevant? If so, easy to get that the game needs not more difficulty or teamplay but degrindification and and being less harsh with players.
The step with legend exp amount for all difficulties is a step in right direction. What about degrindification? Give new players 5 red dust for every char on 30lvl, then do something with fail runs, few XP for commendatory chest in current state isn’t enought for 15 mins of playing the level. Don’t listen to these hardcore players. How many of them are playing: 50, 70, 100? The game should be popular for mayority and mediocre players, make the Norscannihilation have 25% at least. Not a problem to put engame content in Cata difficulty but that should be cosmetics only. Golden plate armor for a Kruber and let everyone see that the player is a pro player.
The game should be playable and enjoable even on latest difficulties in randon. If I want to play some runs I won’t go to certain discord or form a group with my friends. There is heroic deeds for such things, very teamplay based mode. Don’t listen to people who say “1h sword on a Kruber is great weapon but people can’t handle it right” listen to players who can’t complete champ difficulty with IB or a green elf. Appeal to broader audience than just power players; the game deserves to be popular.
) and many others come to mind as an example) They don’t need year to balance weapons, they just need to take time, get some very experienced players, and do fast iterations.
