Game balance and why I will be leaving this game for now.

Everyone makes their own fun I guess. For example, yesterday I was in a random pug where the huntsman was bragging about no melee kills.

What he didn’t realize is I was playing as his bodyguard because he was the type to run ahead while plucking a bowstring and didn’t even notice me swift/daggering all the crap he missed behind him. I’ve always been a support player so stuff like that is fun for me and often more challenging.

You need to join an elite discord group. Most of them will do trial runs with you to see if you’re “gud” enough. But the group I run with, normally has 2-3 groups of 4 going at peak times. And they do a lot of deeds. Most of them have already got the deed portrait from clearing so many runs.

Well, it worked for VT1! It tacks another couple hundred hours on the game, easy. That said, there will always be a mix of people who insist on being as effective as possible (“meta”) and people who are willing to loosen up for the sake of having more fun. But if you want to find your tribe, so to speak, you really are best served reaching out and friending people or joining a discord or something.

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The OP raised some points that i felt about the same way. And i believe this feedback is spot on, tackling one of the major problems of Vermintide that i can relate to.

First off, focus on what is the fundamental fun of the game. In a game where your objective is to run a map from point A to B killing things - it is melee combat, ranged combat, and active teamplay.

Lets’ start from the fun from melee+ranged combat.

The selection of weapons and careers define it. You choose one career and melee+ranged, and play it for the next 20-30 mins (1 run).

Now lets imagine for a moment, that you can play only 1 build (career+weapons) in the whole game. In the game, each weapon is designed to have only a few available attacks or moves. Means you’ll get burned out very fast. You need build variety.

Now to illustrate my point i’ll have to divide Legend players into hypothetical groups:

  • A) players who don’t find Legend easy at all, or even struggle with it.
    Somebody said already here, that they’re the bulk of the playerbase. From my QuickPlay experience with randoms i think the same. Those players are very encouraged to find most OP, most strong builds to make Legend doable, to increase success rate, to not wipe/die because its unfun.
    Problem: game pushes them to play in a certain, most effective way, severely reducing career+weapon variety.

  • B) good at Legend and play off-meta
    Play any underpowered builds they want while still pulling enough weight for one player.
    Problem: on normal legend its fine. For deeds though, they’re heavily encouraged to equip meta stuff, just like group A for basic legend.

  • C) good at Legend and play meta
    Those won’t shy away from using most optimal career+weapon setups, they’re the deleters that trivialize basic Legend.
    Problem: little equipment variety, too easy game (for basic Leg).

For quality solution you need to solve all of these 3 problems at once, PLUS another problem which is rightfully was brought by the OP:

  • Not enough incentive for active teamplay. By active teamplay i mean fighting in melee sticking together, assisting each other in melee blender, taking good position, etc.
    I see the roots of the problem in how much power a player can wield with the best careers&weapons. Active teamplay won’t appear from nowhere, you need an incentive, a strong one to unite the players, to make them think a bit differently. Currently, groups A+B get enough power to get by, group C doesn’t have to care at all. I think the current mindset is as follows: get the best gun, the sharpest melee, and git gut with individual skill. You got gud with individual skill? Congruatulations, you’re in group B, or C!
    People don’t get to learn teamplay, because it’s something alien and unpredictable, because your own skill and power is enough to win with non-coherent randoms.

In my mind, all is solved by adressing three important things:

  1. weapon&career balance.
    The idea of weapon&career balance is obvious, yet hard to execute, partially because the weapon&career variety is an enemy of balance - while balancing you have to keep in mind the fun aspect. For example in 1.2 mace+shield was brought up good, but it became a very boring weapon.
    The balance task is closely tied with the next one:

  2. how much power one player can wield.
    Imagine overall effectiveness of a weapon is one slider. In ideal world, when everything is balanced, all weapon’s sliders are on the same level. The question is about where is that level should move:
    -To the current halberd/dual dagger level (everything is super strong)?
    -To the current pickaxe/repeater handgun level (everything is weak)?
    -To the current greataxe/exec.sword level (everything is average)?
    I have a feeling of power with careers&weapons, and the best way to go is for the average, imo. To do it you’d have swing the nerfhammer hard though (but just as much as buffhammer), which you should have courage to do, because of the problems i mentioned:
    -weak incentive for teamplay on basic legend;
    -the game is too easy for veterans who use meta builds.

  3. some adjustments in difficulty balance.
    Bring down the intensity of difficulty spikes a little (patrol, special simultaneous attacks, less elite roamer spam - see Athel Enlui or WarCamp). Bring up the danger of overall gameplay - add ambient clanrats that spawn in groups of 2-4 and chase players (just like in Verm 1), increase the difficulty of hordes, especially of slaverats.
    ^I don’t like how this game can be extremely easy for 95% of the map, and extremely hard for 5% - possibly resulting in a wipe. You run the level bored and - oops! - get destroyed all of a sudden from simultaneous 4 specials, some roamer elites, plus horde.


my opinion, is that there isn’t an end-game progression loop that keeps players interested, which gives rise to problems like the one OP is facing (burnout)

things like:

  1. seasonal resets - start a season profile which lets u start afresh with everything, possibly with a global modifier (50% less healing, etc) and at the end of the season you get a red you have never gotten before. profile is deleted after season ends

  2. resetting your character gives tokens to redeem for some stuff

  3. trading system within game

vermintide’s core combat is fantastic, just wish there was more to keep us coming back at it

Have you tried true soloing?

But I see your point about class balance. From what I’ve heard, I think balance is the next big thing on Fatshark’s radar. I imagine they will be tweaking down a few classes and buffing others. Things I’d personally like to see:

-Flaming Skull having a longer recharge time and get rid of wigglemancer tactic to charge ult obscenely fast. Honestly, Beam Staff itself seems like it’d work better in the game as being a weapon that shoots a short beam (like 1.5 second), then has to stop, rather than a continuous beam. Especially if it had recoil afterwards, it’d require more skill than just “hold cursor on target”, which frankly is kinda boring. Letting you do the burst to end faster would still be cool, and I think work fine with high-level players, but prevent low-level players from just wiggling it to instantly fill ult bar.
-Changing Waystalker’s ammo regeneration to being something requiring active (basically giving her a chance to recover ammo on melee hit would solve the spam, I think). Maybe her ult needs a slightly longer cooldown as well.
-Slightly weakening Bounty Hunter’s ult and/or tweaking his broken passive. Letting it reset on melee kill just lets him never have to worry about ammo.
-Nerf the Invis talent for Handmaiden to 1) break after attacking, or 2) last 1-2 seconds instead of 3.

Maybe some of those aren’t good, just my personal thoughts.


Why not join the Fatshark Discord