I’ll share my experience as a seasoned vermintide 1 and 2 player that is capable of solo legend runs in pre-WoM.
Rigidness
The game feels very rigid. Where movement was more fluid and smooth before. Now everything moves like it’s a robot. Especially the assassin has become very hard to hit due to unnatural, jittery movement. It feels like the game was a finished product and it went back into pre-alpha state.
Movement speed
Every single living breathing being in this game moves a lot faster. It feels like Unreal Tournament instead of Counter strike. It feels bad, rushed and unrealistic. This also makes it much harder on slower weapon to create some breathing room to swing. Most slow weapons windup is so slow you’ll easily get hit because they close the distance immediatly. This promotes an EXTREME backdash, fearfull, low dps, boring playstyle to stay alive. You want to promote weapon diversity, not exclusion. Back dashing to get a ranged shot in on an elite, when you got a lot of thrash on you, is also very difficult. This means people will start to rely on classes like pyro/waystalk to deal with elites.
Hordes and the Director
This bring another problem, the robotlike AI and lazy spawns that come in 360 degrees around you INSTEAD OF HORDES COMING AT YOU (which you can hear and anticipate and position for) will instantly surround you, pushing and attacking your way out of that is even more difficult due to stagger nerf. There were many instances where the director lazily dropped 60 rats 180 degrees in someones back where they could have NEVER been. Have the gutterrunners taught their “vanish” to every damned skaven? This lazy spawning mechanic takes any skill of listening and good positioning out of the equation. If you hear a horde coming, hug a damn wall and backtrack a million miles to deal with this random teleport nonsense, so fun.
Stagger
Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, staggers in this game on Legend. You can swing a broad sword of 10 kilo’s on their head and they’ll be stunned for 0,25 secs. It takes the weight out melee and again makes it feel unrealistic. It is very hard to control anything, even slave rats are poorly controlled and cleaved.
Your problem:
This is not vermintide 1. Where you fight skillfully, clanrats/slave rats take multiple hits and where pushing and stamina were valuable. It was fighting on a smaller, intimate scale. Which suits the narative of this band of misfits. You made a swarming game that has “specials” that feel like normals, silly ults that are necessary to deal with unsolveable situations.
But even then, Pre-WoM was a sweetspot for this weird swarming game and you broke it.
Once you remove stagger as any means of control and give them increased movement speed their is little left. Stamina is irrelevant in a game where every 10 sec you get swarmed by 10+ slave rats that can instantly break anyone’s guard and pushing is worthless as it doesn’t generate much stagger and the new rats (welcome the new AI) instantly replace the staggered ones and come in SWINGING.
If your goal was to nerf things, fine, you could have done this in the context of the old system.
Nerf dodging? fine, it was powerfull, and making it weaker will introduce pushing a bit more. Why you never nerfed the matrix like dodges on salts axe and falchion and Elf in general is beyond me. I had to short dodge like a bum with executioner sword. Didn’t feel that OP to me.
Promote teamplay? You already found great mechanics for that, like footsoldier kruber’s talent for 5% dmg reduc for every nearby ally. You can use mechanics like that to bring people together. Rewarding them instead of punishing them.
Very unsatisfied with the current state. I view this as my staple game. But that view is changing rapidly. Already discouraged multiple friends not to buy this in it’s current state and they all agree with my stated points (They have experienced it through my twitch plays).
Sword arent that heavy irl. 2hander is 1.2-1.8 kgs, with up to 2.5 maybe with exceptions. Same for hammers/crowbills/axes just being top heavy (center off mass closer to the cutting edge so heavier to stop/manipulate swings) but about same wieght
Those giant 2h hammers of probably 12+ kgs weight (unless head made of aluminium) makes really no sense.
Swords are thin. Know why? They are made to cut. And when you want to cut aomething, you want it to be sharp (apply as high pressure to the as less surface as possible) and you want it to be thin (push apart material just as much as you need for steel thickness to withstand stress on hit)
Don’t forget that they messed up the temp hp system!!! Goodluck getting your temp hp up as a WHC for instance…and since staggering is gone you lose any (small amount) temp hp you have since they hit you easily
Aye, ceremonial blades are 10kg as they are never actually used in combat. Even 16th century Zweihänders, which were massive and often over 2kg, were used more like polearms in combat (emphasising reach/chopping power) than earlier blades. And sabres are generally as light as possible as they’re designed for slashing not chopping (the exception being cavalry sabres which you want to have a bit more weight on as they’re swung downward at infantry from up on horseback and hacking/chopping is the more easy method to utilise there). Falchions are like 1kg with more weight toward the end of the blade to help with chopping things. Metal can look deceptively heavy.
Aside from that point, those are all valid concerns brought up in the OP. One would expect hammers and handguns to CC enemies.
Personally I only had a chance to run the new map a few times now and to me it’s just to much beastmen, but I think Bad omens is at fault for a lot of the complains. Again I haven’t played the old maps yet therefore I dont now if they behave the same way. (Hopefully not)
I think it’s a very interesting idea that the beastmen do what beastmen do- which is ambushing. Therefore running into a wave of beastmen when turning a corner just makes things more interesting to me. However, on Bad Omens the absurd amount of terrain, corners, ledges, etc… makes them crazy powerful, especially once there is a standardbearer that you cant see.
Same with backtracking. It think it could make things more interesting if you would need to switch up tactics against each faction. F.E. it’s normally a good idea to throw yourself against a skaven horde in order to prevent them from surrounding you. Against beastmen however it might be wiser to fall back and pick them off one by one (giving you the seemingly much desired intimacy of close combat). Again this is what makes Bad Omens such a slog as you just have too much beastmen. However in standard maps where they are mixed in with skaven and chaos this could make things more interesting.
And also I kind of enjoy getting my butt kicked on legendary again. To me Vermintide just got challenging. And it’s kind of nice to be challenged on Legendary again, knowing that there is a more difficult mode still waiting for me.
Also keep in mind that this currently still is a Beta-state and i hope FS has some qucik-fixes for some stuff which can be implemented until launch.
There are good ways to introduce a challenge and bad ways. Even an idiot programmer/designer can make something hard. Everything one shots and has 10x health. There it’s harder, having fun? I’ve described in detail that the way they went about it is bad and produces undesirable effects. Just saying it’s hard so that’s good/fun is a very dangerous and slippery slope approach that I disagree with.
I think that map perfectly highlights why standardbearers are simply over tuned right now. If the banner is placed in a say “bad spot” its relatively simple to go and kill it in a timely manner. However if the banner is on some spot in the high ground or behind some corner while you are swarmed by other beastman enemies its pretty much impossible to kill the banner without having a dashing/stealthing character in your party.
Not to mention the tunnel like design makes it so you really cannot even backtrack most of the times to get out of its range which i find is still absurdly massive for something so powerful.
Sure its fine to get butt kicked by good challenge but i can count the amount of wipes to anything but standardbearers right now with 1 hand (it has not happened yet). Cataclysym will be just worse in every single way since there is almost double the enemies and hp.
Not to sound like i’m spreading some doom here but they already had multiple betas and some of the most discussed issues like beastman hyper density is still there after beta one(almost 3 months ago) not to mention the talents have barely been touched. At this point i’m not expecting too much to change in 1 weeks time.
Kinda related, the whole deal for DLC is that it brings two harder (supposed to be harder) ways to play the game: Weaves and Cata. But for some reason this overhaul also happened.
Of course just pumping numbers up is not good design, and also sure there are some issues with the current state.
However I don’t think that is so much the case here. I mean what is the point of a new faction if you could just apply the same skills as before? I personally would have been much more dissapointed with beastman that just feel like reskins of existing enemies. And FS did create a faction that needs to be handled differently and I would argue that much of the complaining arises because previous tactics of blindly spamming away at enemies can be you doom. In my oppinion it’s a interestingly designed trap to challenge player behaviour and the meta by mixing things up.
Because THERE ARE ways to deal with standard bearers and YES they can catch you in bad positions, but they are no worse than getting caught by a blightstorm, gas, gunners, flamers, etc. . Heck you can even get easily wipped in some old maps by boss spawns in a certain space.
However I must confess a dirty little secret: after getting wiped repeatedly on legend I just swallowed my pride and switched to champion and it’s great fun. After playing a few rounds there and understanding the new mechanics better legendary got easier as well.
Again I dont argue for difficulty for difficulties sake. However I think that a lot of FS work was to throw players off their feet and judging by all the salt flying arround in forums they kind of achieved that. I don’t think WoM is too unbalanced it just challenges skills and player-behaviours in a new way.
yeah I think this whole remastering thing was a bit too much on top of everything else. However I kind of enjoy having to figure out everything more or less from scratch.
Sure there are ways to deal with the banner but they are really specific and normally dependent on the class you are playing. Stormers/gas/flamers, etc are really not comparable because everyone can just press 2 key and point and click at these enemies to make them go away.
They normally require at least basic line of sight to be a threat to you and are not normally accompanied by a horde or bodyguard unit. (Standards can spawn with hordes as elite units)
So the threat levels are not even remotely comparable. Not to mention a single banner can mean a wipe if its awfully placed while you can use gases/storms/flamers to even your advantage versus a massive horde. There is no interaction like that with banner. Its either down or up.
Sure. However this is a special that needs a tank to fight (or someone super slippery) and in addition to that I don’t think you can just shoot the thing. Again my point remains that it’s not broken it just doesn’t work in the same way that literally everything else did until now.
And yeah a single banner can spell doom if you OR the banner are in a bad spot accompanied by a ton of enemies. Because if the banner is in a bad spot but you aren’t then just move away and deal with it later. If you are in a bad spot and the banner isn’t then you can just push there to get it. But the same goes Gas attacks as well. Sure you might use it to your advantage but then you are not in a tight spot are you? If you are trapped in a bad position and gas comes in you are just as f***ed. And you can also get a gasrat during a horde which is more or less the same.
Just learn and be willing to reposition of you can’t get to the banner. Saying it’s broken because when both the banner and you might be in bad spots results in a wipe is a bit silly. That goes for literally anything else in the game.
Again what I would argue is that Bad Omens is broken because the terrain favors beastman just in a really extreme way. Again I would argue that the map is at fault not necessarily the mechanics.
Also it’s not really true that you can just press “2” as every class and get rid of a special. Blightstormers can sometimes also just call in storms from positions you can’t reach or shoot at. And they also can teleport to locations where they are essentially untouchable.
I really don’t have time for extreme arguing atm so i tackle few points.
I’m not exactly sure how you can even remotely compare the 2. While yes gas can potentially kill you if you are stuck in the worst corner possible its more likely you will just take extreme damage from it while pushing trough whatever enemies are in-front of you. (These enemies won’t have suddenly double the stats)
With banner you really just cannot go “oh crap we got banner push trough” you are stuck there mashing the enemies who now have nearly double the hp, stagger resistance and hp regen.
If for some reason there is elites or heck even that gas/stormer now it becomes actually an deadly enemy because you just cannot go trough the trash to deal with them in timely manner.
Banner amplifys everything and from flat threat level i still argue its currently the scariest possible special/elite enemy in the game.
I’m not saying the mechanic itself is flatout broken i’m saying its currently overturned for how much of an impact 1 well placed can have. Also re-positioning is not really as simple as that. Got a boss in front of you and all the sudden you are dealing with beastman horde who has 2 banners? Yes tell me how to re position there properly.
Not to mention positioning is not exactly something you can work with especially with random groups on the fly. In this scenario you got 1 person kiting boss, 2 dealing with horde/specials and potentially 1 person dealing with 2 banners. Its a absolute shitshow at this point and you really need some next level players to be able to deal with them without any issues.
1-2 gasses and stormer is not even remotely comparable threat in this scenario. You could mostly ignore them while banner is not something you can ignore if you want to survive here.