Witch Hunter Captain Rebalance

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
81

A good way to nerf Flense is to limit the DoT stacks to 1-2. Normally with most weapons you attack fast enough to apply 3-4 stacks on most enemies, which does a ton of damage.

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82

I’ve updated the main post with some new ideas. Here’s the ones I changed:

Level 10 & 20 Talent Changes

  • [Riposte/Killing Shot]
    Put Killing Shot here and make Riposte a passive. Make Killing Shot not apply to any range attack past its first damage drop off point. Killing Shot is deactivated during Animosity (credit to @Adelion for this idea I feel I didn’t give enough credit to earlier).

  • Templar’s Knowledge
    “Enemies Victor tags now take 15% more damage from Witch-Hunt but only for allies and receive an orange outline.”
    This gives a good team focused leader option for WHC that encourages them to actively tag for the benefit of their allies. 15% is quite a powerful damage boost. High synergy with I Shall Judge You All.

Level 25 Talent Changes

  • Cast Away
    “Your block now raises and lowers 30% faster. For every 2 seconds you hold block, a stack of weariness is added, up to 3 stacks. Each stack increases the stamina damage you take from blocking by 20%. Stacks reset upon dropping your guard.”

  • Always Prepared
    “Reloading gives Prepared stacks which last for 2 seconds and increase reload speed by 5%, up to 20%.”
    Here’s some other ideas for this talent I didn’t put in the main post:
    “You do 15% more damage to specials that are not attacking yet.”
    This encourages a WHC to be on point and aggressive with getting specials early. Another option is the opposite.
    “You do 15% more damage to specials that are attacking.”
    Attacking is defined as when a special is firing, leaping, or attempting to grab a player.

Level 30 Talent Changes

  • I Shall Judge You All!
    “Applies Witch Hunt to enemies hit by Animosity. Radius increased by 20%. Animosity now stuns enemies for its duration.”
    The radius buff is so it’s more useful against patrols and hordes, and because it’s inline with what the talent is thematically. The stun would come from Victor absolutely ripping enemies apart verbally (doesn’t make sense but neither does Kruber’s OIII!).

  • Unending Hunt
    "Every enemy hit by Animosity gives 3% cooldown reduction, up to a maximum of 15 enemies. Radius and stagger strength reduced by 20%.
    This would make Animosity a very frequent team buff that is unending, require a few more enemies for full effectiveness and require better positioning due to the reduced radius. I’m worried that if all the ult changes went through players wouldn’t have access to an mechanically unaltered version of the base ult.

Any thoughts?

83

This is completely at the team’s mercy. It’s zero benefit to the WHC, himself. Worst thing you could pick for a pug because you can’t control when, how, or if they use it.

But why? The con here outweighs the talent’s purpose.

I don’t see what’s wrong with the current one. All of these are too outside the box and don’t really match WHC. Reload speed is BH’s shtick and 15% more damage to specials seems unnecessary with tagging.

Stunning is going to be too strong. Closest we have to that is FK’s charge and it should stay like that (since FK doesn’t have a lot to work with anyway).

I don’t know if this is the minority opinion, but I think Unending Hunt is fine and frequently switch between the other two for different playstyles. I don’t think it’s OP to warrant a nerf. What’s the point of WHC’s ult if it’s weakened? Also why raise the cap, but then lower the radius? It’s just too much.

84

Templar’s Knowledge

I’ll admit I’m not entirely happy with this one either. Not only is it boring, it’s also a no-go for pugs. Would it really be worse than the current version of Templar’s Knowledge though?

  • Alternative 1
    “Enemies Victor tags now take 10% more damage from Witch-Hunt and receive an orange outline.”
    This a flat 10% damage increase for the entire team on taggable enemies but requires the WHC to tag them. Completely in control of the WHC and always useful, but not just an easy upgrade from the base effect.

  • Alternative 2
    “Witch-Hunt causes enemies to take an additional 15% damage from Victor and 5% more from allies.”
    Kind of makes sense for Saltz to be better at making use of his own knowledge. Really this one is a numbers game. How much is too much/too little?

  • Alternative 3
    “With-Hunt causes enemies tagged by Victor take an additional 15% damage but only for himself. Allies deal 5% more damage to tagged enemies.”
    This is like 2 except it’s more active.

Cast Away

Consider that you would be able to get away with lowering your block much more easily, even in-between the attacks of multiple enemies. As such, the negative is almost negated by the positive. The highest synergy weapons on WHC (Billhook, Rapier and the Axe and Falchion) are very good for block cancelling attacks which would only further this. It would encourage making good use of the block speed and only punish kiting with block up nonstop. It’s indirectly a dps increasing talent which is why I thought a drawback would be appropriate. If not, then just 30% block raise and lower speed would work I think.

Always Prepared

BH has 15% reload speed. It’s not really something I identify BH with. Rather, it’s more like a wasted passive with BH’s current kit (reload on melee kill). The current talent is kind of useless on WHC. Even with ammo hungry bop 20% crit chance + Scrounger ammo sustain is enough without the extra ammo on WHC.

I Shall Judge You All

Could be reduced to 3-4s. Just needs to last a little longer than the default stagger.

Another option is for it to only stun and not stagger instead. That way it doesn’t displace enemies (makes it harder to push a horde back with it) but still opens them up to dps for the entire team for longer than the normal ult. I would still have it stagger specials however.

Do you think a buff to its radius (15% instead of 20% would be inline with the radius increase Fatshark implemented for Booming Taunt) and a buff to Templar’s Knowledge would make it strong enough to compete with the other two?

Unending Hunt

It’s too easy to proc. It’s basically a passive 40% cooldown reduction talent. Reduced radius means players would have to position well. Raising the cap slightly (by 5%) is to help compensate slightly for the risk and make it more unending when it’s currently just commonly-occurring.

You use I Shall Judge You All? Any good builds for it? The best synergies I could fine were 1 shotting Cata Marauders with Rapier lights and getting the Rapier’s full charge to kill Cata SV.

Alternatively, the current form of the talent could have a higher requirement with no other changes.
“Hitting 15 or more enemies with Animosity refunds 40% cooldown.”
This results in the ult being used just as frequently but a WHC would have to really get into the frontline to get the full effect.

85

I suppose not.

That’s a reasonable question. The tag’s 20% damage bonus is enough for most builds to reach a new threshold, but 25% doesn’t cut it. 30% would probably hit another breakpoint for everyone, most frontline classes already reach up to 30% or more power/damage through talents.

You got me there, but 15% reload speed is sort of a ranged class thing. And your initial ideas aren’t as out of character. Guess the hard truth is current Always Prepared would have more worth on Volley or Rep pistol, both of which I rarely use unless I just to joke around.

There’s several things, but a wider radius ain’t bad. Speaking of…

:sweat_smile: Not as often as the sentence you quoted made it sound. Sorry about that, should have phrased that differently. I did some experimenting with my team, mostly while we were beating sticks against FOW. Mainly against trash and with a BW. Haven’t actually touched it sense BBB 2, or the changes to Witch-Hunt. First thing to improve it is list how long Witch-Hunt lasts on enemies hit by Judge because I just don’t trust most of the talent tree’s tooltips. Tell players in writing that I Shall Judge You All puts a debuff on enemies for 15 or whatever seconds and people might start picking it. Some simpler, but not nearly as exciting, tweaks could be to make Animosity’s affect last as long as the tag debuff as well (obviously a no-go as long as Killing Shot exists, but it would raise some eyebrows). But, back to my team’s experience, we dropped it because our IB guy can bring Oath and give everyone an pretty clear 20% power boost for 10 seconds. Since tag doesn’t stack, we just roll with that instead. We’d need a guarantee Templar and Judge stack plus clarity how long it lasts and then we’d probably play around with it seriously again.

But back to the thing I disagree about: Stunning would be a kind of new thing. Right now the only enemy that has a true stun animation is the shielded SV, and he’s only like that because for the longest time fighting him without a flail was complete horse doodoo (que Vietnam flashbacks of SV’s instant 180 turn blocks against Shades). I don’t know if that’d be right for WHC, but I can imagine it being the choice for modded content, easily. As dense as those hordes get, just telling them to stop, would make dealing with multiple bosses or unfortunate patrols so much more forgiving. Just literally make them stop or the hordes stop so the team can choose who to deal with first. That’s so good that I want to see that on a whole new class.

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86

A lot of these changes aren’t really needed, some suggestions are extremely situational or niche.

Killing Shot + Animosity is Witch Hunter’s biggest synergy within his kit and you want to take it away?
Basically turning a very homogeneous career into a mismatch of niche bonuses.

Which part of WHC do you think is broken? It seems like everything is being changed, rather chaotic and hard to follow what the actual core issue of WHC is.

He is stacked but what can you nerf or change without changing his core gameplay?

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87

Yeah a lot of it is just brainstorming really. The only things that really need to be changed are:

  • Flense nerf (2 stacks instead of three)
  • Minor Cast Away nerf (from 40% to 30% stamina recovery)
  • Templar’s Knowledge buff (just make it a flat 10% boost to Witch-Hunt)
  • Minor Unending Hunt nerf (from 40% to 30% cooldown or upping the number of enemies required to be hit from 10 to 15).
  • I Shall Judge You All buff (20% radius increase and duration increased to 8 seconds, buff to Templar’s Knowledge gives better synergy)

Then something needs to be done with Riposte. It could be made into a passive and have a talent added to it’s place (my preferred idea so long as Sigmar’s Charm is removed).

Edit: I’ve incorporated most of the above ideas and simplified the suggestions to create a rework that would be more inline with WHC’s current form while nerfing overperforming talents/passives and bringing up the weaker talents.

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88

The core issue of WHC’s kit is the interaction between Animosity and Killing Shot and the dps increase of Flense. There are also a few talents that a little too strong and a few that are a little too weak. I’ve edited the main post to reflect this.
Hopefully having to use heavy attacks is more inline with WHC’s current gameplay, but I do worry it would be problematic for the Falchion and the 1h Axe.

89

Is that an issue though? That seems more like an intended synergy.
Bumps his Killing Shot chance for 6 seconds.

That’s like not allowing Huntsman to use ranged weapons during Hunter’s Prowl because the interaction is too strong.

Aren’t career skills are meant to make an impact?

90

Honestly? I don’t know. It feels excessively strong with Fervency, while with Unending it averages out exceptionally well but feels weak for an ultimate. Without this change the only notable nerf would be to Flense.

The reasoning for a nerf to the interaction is based on this logic: It is because it let’s him kill way too many elites while still being able to immediately block, buffing everyone’s crit chance and having one of the best forms of ult stagger in the game, an AoE. Hunstmen gets to be invisible for the ult’s duration (which can be dangerous for allies) with a talent choice or for only the first shot, and doesn’t insta kill everything that’s mansized with very fast attacks. Even then I still personally think Huntsmen is a very strong career.

The alternative I thought of was removing the support elements and making Fervency the base ultimate. Then a new talent would have to be added in its place (one that adds back in the support elements likely). A lot of balancing would have to go into this though. The other talents on the row would also need to be looked at. Reducing the ultimate’s base duration would also be in order. At the very least this would take out some of the rng of WHC’s ultimate and remove the arguably unnecessary innate range synergy.

Something like:

  • Animosity
    “Victor pushes back nearby enemies, and has guaranteed melee critical strikes for heavy attacks for 6 seconds.”
91

tbh I’ve always felt unending hunt is quite good considering how often it’s up and it helps the team, whereas fervency is more selfish with a longer cooldown but a vastly higher individual impact in exchange

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92

I like these ideas, especially Flense needs some looking at.
It’s a bit too easy to deal massive dmg to a large number of infantry targets with minimal effort. Limiting how often Flense can be stacked seems like a good way of alleviating this as it’s the same change Dual Daggers got for their bleed stacks.

Agree that Riposte is too niche and not centered around player agency.
It cannot receive the same buff as the HM block&push talent got since guaranteed crits after a push would be absurd.
Yet, being forced to not attack and just block at the right time is neither a very effective nor a very fun way to play.

Perhaps moving Riposte away from blocks over to dodges could work?
Interpreting it as “dodging an attack and then using the opening to move in close for the kill” instead of actually “riposting” it.
Instead of the guaranteed crit (it’s not like WHC is lacking ways to get crits) it could give some other buff, e.g. guaranteed stagger on a single target for the next attack (imagine it’s Saltz hitting the enemy in a weakspot that critically immobilzes them or sth. along those lines).
Only applicable to man-sized enemies and on a cooldown of X secs.

Might be too good and too far removed from the original Riposte to actually work.
I dunno, it’s hard to come with a talent that could compete with Flense or Deathknell; such a talent would almost have to be absurdly strong to give up the extra dmg those 2 provide.

For Fervency, while it is exceedingly strong, the synergy with Killing Shot is too much of a defining trait to justify its removal imo.
Restricting it to heavies could work but it would be inconsistent with the rest of his kit, e.g. Killing Shot working on lights in all other instances. I think that consistency in game mechanics is crucial.

Iirc, the removal of the aoe stun for Fervency has been suggested before?
It would make this talent decidingly more focused on raw dps as opposed to the utility of the other 2 options.

Yea, it could make it easier to move in for the Killing Shots when everything is NOT staggered away from you.
However, realistically, you generally want as much safety and cc as possible the more difficult the game becomes. It would mean sacrificing safety for dmg and vice versa with the 3 talents on that row.

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93

It’s good in effect but compared to other ultimates like Slayer’s leap it doesn’t have the same ‘wow’ factor if that makes sense. Fervency is definitely more self-centered (and arguably less useful in my experience). Still a very good ult though. The circular aoe stagger is probably the best stagger effect in the game imo.

I suppose it could always do both. So Riposte keeps its current effect, but gains an additional effect from dodging enemy attacks. Stagger would work, though it would only synergise well with the Rapier, as all of Saltz’ other weapons stagger individual elites well enough on heavy attacks. I almost want to suggest dodging an enemy attack gives the current riposte effect, but this would be too strong. Shame there isn’t a perfect dodge system like how we have with parries (would be ideal for Handmaiden).

I find it quite fun because it works very well with a more frontline holding WHC than a mobility one (Flense is still better though). It really does have issues with elites just getting staggered on normal Cata, and even on Cata 3 Deathwish the local GK just insta gibs them anyway despite the massive health values for enemies. Elites take time to wind up their attacks, and it’s difficult to get elite aggro when you can’t stagger them.

Oh and of course it’s pretty much like not having a level 10 talent at all if FK or aoe staff BW are present.

It makes it completely dps focused which would be inline with the purpose of the talent. I think this is the simplest and cleanest solution. It integrates well with the kit and is very easy to add to the talent’s description.

A part of my idea for making Riposte a passive was I thought it would be interesting to see more players parrying, since as a passive it’s extra dps in any context where you would have to block. Straight up adding it thought even if it replaces Sigmar’s Charm makes WHC’s passives really overloaded though (Killing Shot, Eternal Guard, 25% headshot power and crit on parry).

My personal gripe with Riposte is that you have to rely on it to deal meaningful dps simply because WHC’s single target dps without the other two talents is underwhelming outside of crit fishing.

Edit: Would it be too much for Riposte to be bundled up with Deathknell? I only get on average 10-20 Ripostes per Cata game, so its really not that much (this would be with the 25% less bodyshot damage Deathknell would also have).

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94

As an alternative to making Riposte a passive is riposte heavy attacks could be made to one shot headshot CWs and Wargors.
“Blocking just as an enemy attack is about to hit causes your next melee attack within 2 seconds to be a guaranteed critical hit. If this attack is a charged attack that hits a Chaos Warrior or Wargor’s head, it instantly slays them.”

If that’s still not enough, then parry can be bundled in.
“Blocking just as an enemy attack is about to hit no longer costs stamina and causes your next melee attack within 2 seconds to be a guaranteed critical hit. If this attack is a charged attack that hits a Chaos Warrior or Wargor’s head, it instantly slays them.”

95

Riposte could just proc on pushing attacking enemies as well but add a 3 second internal cooldown.

Should feel more fluid to play in addition to being more useful during hordes without being “crit on demand”

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96

The main issues (for me personally) with this idea is I would feel like I would have to reserve my pushes for elites, and it wouldn’t really be a Riposte anymore. It would still be pretty powerful though, without overshadowing the other talents or being overpowered. I’d be more interested in seeing your idea as a talent on a different career, like FK or even GK provided it was balanced.

97

i want my pistol to never reload back :smiley:

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98

Fun is indeed subjective and Riposte definitely does work when you can pull it off.
But as you say, it unfortunately is still less effective than Flense.

Giving it a stronger version of the Killing Shot passive could be interesting although it depends on how many CWs and Wargors show up during a mission.

This could also work. However, it might lead to a kiting playstyle where you push and then rapier pistol instakill everything to death from behing block (Weaves S1 PTSD intensifies).

Maybe just loading Riposte with a bunch of stat buffs could work too?
Guaranteed crit after parrying, paired with increased attack speed for that one Riposte attack plus increased power as well and built in parry.
Would not really solve the issue but tip the scales a bit in favor of Riposte, especially with a nerf to Flense.

My main issue with Riposte is that it’s mostly a reactive playstyle instead of a proactive one.
If it stays reactive, then it needs a bigger reward given its niche application.
If it becomes a proactive talent, then the guaranteed crit is too strong imo but it still needs a decent reward to compete with Flense and Deathknell.

If removing the aoe entirely was too much of a nerf, then just reducing the strength of the stagger could work too. Instead of a stagger that affects bosses, it could have the Slayer leap + Crunch stagger. Or a shield push stagger or sth. similar.
The complete removal might still be balanced though.

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99

Possibly. So long as its only for the Riposte itself it shouldn’t be unreasonable. This is what I’ve come up with.
Chaos Warrior Oneshot and Parry Addition
“Blocking just as an enemy attack is about to hit no longer costs stamina nor causes recoil and causes your next melee attack within 2 seconds to be a 15% faster guaranteed critical hit. If this attack is a charged attack it will instantly slay a Chaos Warrior or Wargor on headshot.”

Riposte heavy attacks could be made to one shot headshot CWs and Wargors. As the Rapier already has a good inner block cost modifier, the addition of parry would be to mainly help Riposte on Saltz’ other weapons. 15% attack speed just makes landing ripostes, particularly with Saltz’ slower weapons, more reasonable. Removing the recoil effect from blocking powerful attacks allows Riposte to be more effectively used against elites as the riposte can be done sooner after (immediately) after blocking an attack.

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100

The problem with Riposte is it slows down gameplay too much.
Adding stat buffs wont really help the talent too much.

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