These two difficulties are tutorial difficulties which is solidified by the fact that they don’t give you level 300 gear. Beyond that they become obsolete with enough power level as EVERYTHING gets one shot and bossess are about as hard to kill as a Chaos Knight. The early game isn’t meant to be balanced but to teach you how to play, give a sense of progression and be enjoyable. Enjoyable and balanced are not synonymous. Quite honestly Veteran should have friendly fire to get you prepared for Champion where the game actually starts.
13 Likes
Friendly Fire should indeed be introduced in Veteran to get people used to it, made my first few runs of Champion hell because I kept shooting a teammate or vice versa.
That being said I honestly believe the game should be balanced around Veteran AND Champion myself, as the former is what most players will probably stick to even if the latter is the final difficulty.
Veteran alone is still fairly challenging for a more casual player until they get kitted out with loads of “optimal” gear, and honestly I just think balancing for Champion alone will just alienate the majority who play on Veteran.
4 Likes
I’d like to see Recruit have friendly fire even, just have it deal 0 damage just so that the hero callouts about it are utilized and players can start learning how to not shoot each other.
Veteran could give an incredibly minimal 1 damage from FF.
The difficulty selectors would need a description on them to indicate what the levels of FF do.
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no just no, just go to a higher difficulty if you want FF, don’t start forcing your way of playing unto others, especially new players
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How is 0 damage friendly fire “forcing my way of playing unto others”? It’s literally 0 damage?
I’m really curious as to how letting new players know that there are difficulties where friendly fire actually deals damage, and providing them a non-damaging environment to practice being better at not shooting people in the back is a bad thing?
15 Likes
because it’s not everyone that wants to play champion or above or not everyone that wants to play with Friendly fire. 50% of the difficulties are not using friendly fire and it’s perfect that way.
Actually an option to turn your idea on or off would be best!
I’m not sure where you lost him on the “0 damage” part. 
It would just have characters saying “Stop shooting me” basically, just as an audio cue to pick up on for your brain to say “Oh, don’t shoot allies, it hurts, got it” so that if you ever want to go into Vet or higher, then you won’t be slapped with a whole new mechanic. Brilliant, I say.
3 Likes
Yeah, an option to turn on or off would be okay I suppose.
Basing off of the V1 experience, I fully expect that Champion will eventually land as the absolutely most played difficulty level. Training players towards the desired behavior should start as early as possible, in order to not have to unlearn bad habits.
In Recruit and Veteran you can unload through someone’s back into an oncoming horde, and litter the ground at the party’s feet with Bombs and Hagbane poison. Is this a good habit to get into? My personal belief is that it is bad for the person who is trying to get better.
In V1, it absolutely was detrimental toward players progressing towards higher difficulty levels, as they “learned” that this behavior was safe and effective and then had to unlearn it in order to continue advancing. Muscle memory being what it is, you would see frequent mistakes in dealing with scenarios on Nightmare+ in the manner that they had become accustomed to dealing with it in Hard-, periodically causing a total party kill when throwing a Strength bomb at the feet of the party.
I believe that having 0 damage friendly fire would result in learning better behavior from the get go, but without the Champion+ penalty associated with failure to do so.
4 Likes
Sometimes it’s fun to go to the lowest difficulty and just chill and do stupid stuff, look at the scenery, enjoy rats heads falling off and not always be thinking about FF and how you should optimize your every move to go to higher diff. I feel sometimes people are forgetting it’s a game and are taking it way to seriously…
4 Likes
I understand that. I play the game a lot at recruit when I don’t feel like tryharding. However that is no reason not to promote good habits this is supposed to be a hardcore game akin to Darksouls. Idk if you know anything about the Warhammer universe but its a terrifying place and this game isn’t committing to that. Having Recruit have it so that friendly fire dialog is always present even if there is no friendly fire is a great idea
Are you high? Play the game for 5 hrs and one shot everything in veteran because your power level is so high up. You don’t need to be geared for the power level to get there. Your base power from levels is more than enough to make Vet a snooze
Again good habits for who and for what? What if I only want to play recruit. What if what I enjoy in this game is a simply grabbing a weapon and killing rats? Terrifying /= hard to play. Also humour me as to why this isn’t an hardcore game?
Pls dont lie, I just had 7 games on veteran in Againt the Grain wiped before team reached farm.
If it was that easy I would not rage so hard.
After 5h you might get 250/300 but it dont mean Vet cant kill you, it means you kill slaves/clan/zombies faster and wont be drowned by 5 of them.
1 Like
Good habits for new players who want to actually progress in the game. And if that’s what you want go right ahead, no one is stopping you. But abhorring a change that a voice line goes off when you hit them with range with no actual change to gameplay that can help new players learn a mechanic of the game that they will encounter is absolutely selfish and petty. The point of this post is that it is a difficult game and people keep asking for changes to be balanced around a crazy easy portion of the game.
Recruit and Vet serve an amazing purpose which is to allow people to get a feel for the game and once you have to kill some time and enjoy the slaughter. I do not find the difficulties to be irrelevant. Rather I want them improved in a way that helps them support the game once people can do champion where the game is intended to be played. Legend is for the crazy hardcore people. Have you stepped foot in that nightmare? Champion IS the easy late game. When you get to ~level 20 the game becomes a pushover at the lower two difficulties because your character has made the progression through those difficulties to build you up to champion. THATS what an early game is. A progression, not a balanced product. The end game is the only thing in any RPG that can be truly balanced due to the fact that it is the only place in an RPG that you stay. This isn’t to say that the early game should be ignored, but that the early game can’t be 100% balanced. e.g. Old Waystalker regeneration. I thought it was a terrible ability in every sense. It was blatantly overpowered in Recruit and Veteran but rather weak in Champion. It gave new players a sense of immortality and promoted horrific habits for when they left the early game. Not having indications of friendly fire in Recruit is no different than Waystalkers old regeneration
I legitimately can’t tell the difference between recruit and vet anymore. I don’t even block in Vet, i just incoherently spam left click and ignore a bunch of enemies because I can kill them as I walk forward. If you just gained the ability to get into Vet I will not argue with you. It feels a lot scarier than Recruit. But you don’t need gear to get to the point that you can roflstomp it, just keep playing and get levels.
Well I certainly don’t want to have FF in veteran simply because I rarely went above hard in thfe first game because i didn’t care to deal with it. Me and my friends could handle nightmare decently, but FF just took the fun out of it.
That being said, 0 damage FF that gives players some feedback on when they’d be hitting team mates in veteran doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all. I really couldn’t complain about that, though I honestly don’t think its necessary.
Champion being harder because you have to unlearn bad habits is simply part of the process of getting better at the game. There’s all sorts of things you could get away with in easier difficulties that won’t fly in champion besides FF.
as a new player , i did wish i was more prepared for above veteran and FF, so something added in the non FF modes to indicate when your doingit is good to break the habit earlier. would not be bad.,
today i started changing my attack angles with Sienna as i know it will be difficult…i love the Beam! so it may not be so bad it is accurate.
but i am happy to have veteran as it is with no FF
Champion level ff is still pretty lenient.
Tuning it down a little would be fine for veteran.
Thats actually a solid idea of how to introduce new players to the mechanic.