Would Stagger Meta be better Without the Talents?

[Drakonhammer]

@Voidq

The lack of frontline and lack of understanding of this was painfully obvious during the blatant ranged meta period where people were just straight up wiping to stupid skaven hordes because they refused to play (melee) aggressively and were too concerned with keeping their distance. This is also why I don’t think the stagger dmg should be only exclusive to heavy/shield weapons, those should simply achieve a roughly one stage higher stagger perhaps (?)

I can’t honestly remember having a group wipe at the end of the ranged meta. If you had a talented Sienna, huntsman, BH or WS you could literally stand there headbanging while they killed everything in Legend and it wouldn’t endanger the run. It was ridiculous.

@Voidq

I get why this being limited sounds appealing and it would definitely create a clear role for heavy weapons but I’m also all for any feature that promotes good plays in general and there’s a MASSIVE difference between playing with 3 randoms who are too passive or having just 1 more player on the team who understands the importance of melee frontline and pushes through the horde with you when and where it makes sense. It feels like a completely different game then and the team’s pacing is 666% better and I just wish more people started doing this - I was kinda hoping the stagger mechanic would teach them that buuuuut, looking at how “outraged” people who refuse to learn are now, I was clearly naive

The problem is that it doesn’t promote teamplay. Teamplay in VT2 with its weight of numbers enemies means often hitting different enemies coming in from different angles and having good situational awareness so you don’t get swamped, the only time you’re hitting the same is if you’re in a chokepoint (which anyway trivialise hordes) or there aren’t that many enemies around (not much danger either way).

What having blanket stagger values on all the weapons in the game does however, whether you like it or not, is create inherent balance problems, as some weapons have great single target damage but no CC, others have CC but bad damage output (first and foremost, shielded weapons) and finally, the group that benefit the most from the mechanic as it is atm, some weapons have good damage and CC (exec, dual hammers etc.).

There’s also the problem that we can’t change loadouts while joining to adapt to our team, so if the game becomes too reliant on certain compositions to win it’d effectively kill the idea of QP.

Really what most promotes teamplay in line with what VT2’s combat has been like up until now is the AI director being punishing and hard, or having enemies that punish positioning more.

I’m all for having Legend be harder and Cata at least should be much harder a difficulty than the others, but it needs to be in a way that’s balanced and enjoyable.