Difficulty and fun

[skibidi groilet]

I'm glad 2.0 happened because it demonstrated a point people don't usually understand until they're forced to endure it : reducing the killing potential, mobility and overall efficiency of the player at certain difficulties is NOT fun. It is also, not the correct way to go about increasing difficulty.

Some variables need not changing, cleave does not need to be reduced, damage dealt to enemies does not need to be lowered, you get the point. Changing those core variables alters the experience in a negative way, not just because it is no longer the same nice feeling that we had before, but because it changed it to be much less engaging.
Bullet sponges are bad, sword sponges are much worse. Having to hit the same enemies more times does not make the game that much more difficult.
What it does is turn the great feeling of impact you used to get by hacking and slamming your way through enemies into slapping them with pool noodles. The pace of combat is lowered significantly. In short, 2.0 did not really make legend harder, or the game in general harder, it just made the player slightly less efficient.
(I did not personally experience a higher rate of failure when playing with friends, I believe the large influx of players means you're much more likely to get bad/average players as well as returning players who haven't played in a really long time.)

I am also not an advocate of having enemies deal a gazillion damage per hit, although cataclysm seems to not have made that mistake, the point still needs to be made. Reducing instances of one shot kills is good for the game. Mind you, there are obvious exceptions : really big attacks with slow windups, like with Stormvermin, Chaos Warriors, Bestigors, and so on. I am okay with weak characters being one shot by those, as there are many, many ways of preventing that damage from occurring. Whether it be dodging, staggering, or more simply killing the enemy outright.
What I do not want to see is a supermassive increase in killing potential of the average. Doing so diminishes player agency and removes possible solutions from the equations. Aggressive players with low stagger weapons will simply become much less effective than defensive players or players with very high stagger values. There could very well come a point where multiple simultaneous blows from a very dense (close to what hyperdensity could cause before the patch) horde could do way more damage than is reasonable, if not outright kill a player. Skimming alongside the horde while attacking, pushing, and dodging around it would no longer be viable, as the risk would far outweigh the possible reward, and the reverse becoming true for stagger heavy playstyles. Nerfing player power also plays into this.

You should not mess with the core of the combat, which felt great, and actually was great all around. ( The slight nerf to dodge is good, and the changes to horde behaviour are equally good.)

So then, if making the enemies themselves stupidly resistant to damage, or deal an insane amount of damage, and making the players less efficient are not good ways to increase difficulty, how can it be increased while keeping the core combat loop fluid and fun ?

Tweak the other variables. Horde timers, special spawns, percentage of elite enemies, etc.

The most fun difficulty enhancers available in vermintide 2 were Onslaught (normal or double), coupled with Twitch or Hypertwitch. You ramp up the randomized elements that make the game interesting and create the tough situations that require quick thinking from the players, while putting them under much more pressure through increased horde spawns and numbers.
Pace becomes invaluable, and players are forced to push through enemies to make progress. It doesn't just favour split second decisions and aggressive play, it outright forces you to be smarter and more aggressive than in the vanilla game.

It seems Fatshark took inspiration from the Deathwish mod, which alters enemy health, damage, cleave and stagger resistances. Playing through deathwish is an interesting experience, it's definitely more difficult, but also less fun. Enemies react less to your hits, they soak up a lot more damage before going down, pretty much what I condemned as poor choices for an increase in difficulty.

I believe what is best for the game is not to dumb down players and make the same situations more artificially difficult and the game as a whole less responsive, but increase the amount of difficult situations, to promote smart positioning and skilful decision making.

It is not my wish to insult or in any way belittle Fatshark or anybody who appreciates this sort of difficulty changes, I am merely writing this to express a very deep concern for a game I love.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. You have created an absolutely fantastic game, but the balance of its core mechanics can be very easy to mess up. Overall this update isn't nearly as gamebreaking as the negative review would indicate, there is a lot more placebo and paranoia going on than actual damage done to the game.

My post was meant as what needs to be prevented, rather than cured.

I would add that the idea of buffing damage to staggered enemies is a good one, so long staggering enemies provides an advantage, but you are not disadvantaged for not staggering.

[Gorok Delvedeep]

excellent post.
organic difficulty, not artificial silliness! Hear Hear!

[manx2007]

GOOD POINT. game is ugly,

[Moandor]

Great post OP, I'm not a big fan of 2.0 because I don't feel like the game is more challenging, I just feel weaker than before, and artificial difficulty like this isn't the best way to change the core gameplay.

Right now there are 3 things that really get me frustrated:

- I understand why FS wanted to prevent us to cleave through dozens of enemies in a single strike, even if I find this a lot less enjoyable now, but the problem with this is that now you can be hit during your attack, even if there are no armored enemies to block your weapon, sometimes it really seems like the game is punishing you for attacking.

I know that this is used to increase the importance of teamplay, but now individual and heroic actions are almost impossible to do at higher difficulties (for example when you're the last hero alive and must cut through a hordes alone to save your teammates). Focusing on teamplay should not prevent people from acting alone imo.

- The Stormvermin are now ridiculously weak, they used to be a threat, but now with the stagger mechanic, the possibility to permastun them and increase the damage they take at the same time, and the fact that normal enemies like Gors are doing the same (if not more) damage than them while being quicker, almost as resilient and a lot more numerous makes the Stormvermin really seems like a joke despite being Skaven elite infantry (and way stronger than a regular Beastman Gor in the lore ).

- The overall increase in enemies stats increase is not a good thing, like the OP already said it: "Bullet sponges are bad, sword sponges are much worse."

I don't have any problem with elite enemies having a lot of health, damage and mass, but when it comes to the regular infantry you encounter at every corner of the maps, it's just not fun to hit an enemy for years before he dies while you are surrounded by a Horde.

Yes, you can kill them way quicker than before if they are staggered, and I like the idea of this mechanic, but players should be rewarded to stagger enemies, not punished for attacking non-staggered enemies.

__________

I also have some problems with the Beastmen in general, like the standard bearers, and some animations, but this is just a beta, so I'm not gonna complain about them... For now :p

Anyway, I've been reading post around here since the release of the DLC, and even if right now I'm not having fun on Vermintide because of the problems I've mentioned, it's nice to finally see someone create a post with arguments rather than insults to criticize the current state of the game :)

[CureAga Wine]

Originally posted by Moandor:

I know that this is used to increase the importance of teamplay, but now individual and heroic actions are almost impossible to do at higher difficulties (for example when you're the last hero alive and must cut through a hordes alone to save your teammates). Focusing on teamplay should not prevent people from acting alone imo.

Still very much possible at legend.

[Moandor]

Yeah, "almost impossible" was a bit too much, but you get the idea :p

[HunApo]

Originally posted by Moandor:

... but players should be rewarded to stagger enemies, not punished for attacking non-staggered enemies.

Uhm, que???
I mean the opposite of reward is literally punishment.

The reward itself is being the fact that if you attack staggered enemies:
A, you dont get damaged by them
B, you do increased damage on them
C, both applies to your teammates as well

[Moandor]

Originally posted by HunApo:

Originally posted by Moandor:

... but players should be rewarded to stagger enemies, not punished for attacking non-staggered enemies.

Uhm, que???
I mean the opposite of reward is literally punishment.

The reward itself is being the fact that if you attack staggered enemies:
A, you dont get damaged by them
B, you do increased damage on them
C, both applies to your teammates as well

I never said the game is not rewarding players for staggering enemies, and like I said I find that this is a good idea in fact.

The problem here is that now attacking enemies without applying at least one stack of stagger feels like you're hitting a wall, since you'll need a lot more hit than before to kill them.

Having small damage/cleave increase to staggered enemies (and not the insane modifier we have now) would have been a great idea to make people use the push more often, but I really don't like the fact that you are forced to use stagger if you want to deal damage.

[Hingie]

Originally posted by telopots:

[...] there is a lot more placebo and paranoia going on than actual damage done to the game.

A negative placebo effect is called a nocebo.

[s0laris]

In the past few days you all have seen a lot of people changing their opinion on 2.0. Play the game. Get used to the new approach and build yourself accordingly. With a little practice, youll find the game just as rewarding or even more than it was previously.

My observation is that the game in its pace is very similar to pre-2.0, you gonna spend the same amount of time on a map as in the new iteration, as long as theres no beastman on the map. All that is despite the much larger concentration of enemies. The moment beastmen come into play, the game feels drastically different and i think this is where most people miss their previously strong stagger with normal atk (+spearmen are pain to most).

There is this old Baer Girls meme, "improvise, adapt, overcome" - you can do the same in VT2. If i use my own experience: First 2-3 days i was losing almost every map on legend but was winning all on champ so i was stuck in between with my premade (3 people including myself). A few days later my group could do most legend maps but we are not quite there with consistent 3t2g yet. Its learning the game, testing, trying different careers, builds and composition(UC+Merc THP spam works almost like a cheat). The game definitely feels harder but while you overcome it, youll become a much better player (i can already see significant improvements in my block reflext, attack patterns, positioning and flick shots). Again my own experience: I wasnt really using dodging in the previous iteration as you didnt need it, maintaining your stam was easy. Now i dodge left and right like a squirrel in a forest fire because of those spearmen and specials.

[Humping Koala]

You are making too much sense, dawri. You are not gonna go far with reason and logic here.

[Darth_Angeal]

Originally posted by telopots:

You should not mess with the core of the combat, which felt great, and actually was great all around. ( The slight nerf to dodge is good, and the changes to horde behaviour are equally good.)

The combat is still the same. Dodging, blocking, pushing, attacking...

Originally posted by telopots:

So then, if making the enemies themselves stupidly resistant to damage, or deal an insane amount of damage, and making the players less efficient are not good ways to increase difficulty, how can it be increased while keeping the core combat loop fluid and fun ?

Tweak the other variables. Horde timers, special spawns, percentage of elite enemies, etc.

How do you want to increase any difficulty with spawn timers? It´s not difficult to spam LMB and kill everything no matter how much enemies appear in the past.
It´s difficult, when you can´t oneshot everything and have to kite them all over the place without dieing.

Originally posted by telopots:

The most fun difficulty enhancers available in vermintide 2 were Onslaught (normal or double), coupled with Twitch or Hypertwitch. You ramp up the randomized elements that make the game interesting and create the tough situations that require quick thinking from the players, while putting them under much more pressure through increased horde spawns and numbers.
Pace becomes invaluable, and players are forced to push through enemies to make progress. It doesn't just favour split second decisions and aggressive play, it outright forces you to be smarter and more aggressive than in the vanilla game.

You can get a lot of buffs at twitch mode. This makes the game even easier than normal legend. If you´ve fun with it, then it´s ok, but you shouldn´t compare it to the difficulty of standard legend.

Originally posted by telopots:

Playing through deathwish is an interesting experience, it's definitely more difficult, but also less fun.

Don´t forget:

Just because you don´t have fun, doesn´t mean others don´t have fun too.
I´ve a lot of fun right now again. Before this patch, everything was a braindead LMB smasher.

Originally posted by telopots:

I believe what is best for the game is not to dumb down players and make the same situations more artificially difficult and the game as a whole less responsive, but increase the amount of difficult situations, to promote smart positioning and skilful decision making.

Tbh there were no difficult situations before. Everything got overbuffed and 9/10 random runs were successful on legend. Maybe it was fun for a bunch of players, but alot of others quit the game, because it became ridiculous easy.
The new legend difficulty is fine. Players are forced to play more together and probably to start with a good matchup (tank, waveclear, boss-burst). Atleast this increases your winchance drastically. But you can still shine as last man standing too, if you´re skilled enough.

Only the beastman are a real danger right now. e.g. hyperstacking or you destroy the banner in a lil passage. When a minotaur appears at this point, it´s gg.
But that´s all. Rats are still rats and chaos is still chaos. If you want to chill and just have some fun, you should stay on champion. I played 1 game with kruber, jumped around and slaughtered everything with LMB smashing like before.

There is no reason that everyone should be able to win legend 10/10. But there is a reason, that multiple difficulties exist. Play the difficulty you´re used too. There is no reason to change anything again. It´s all fine now. Everyone can have fun with the game again.

Get better, train you reflexes, try new builds, play with friends and you can have fun at legend again too.

[Moandor]

Originally posted by s0laris:

In the past few days you all have seen a lot of people changing their opinion on 2.0. Play the game. Get used to the new approach and build yourself accordingly. With a little practice, youll find the game just as rewarding or even more than it was previously.

I've already played around 25-30 games since the patch release, so It's not like I've decided to post here after a single game, crying because I lost and the game is unbalanced/unplayable.

I really wanted to learn (and like) the new changes (even unlocked cata to give it a try), but nope, I'm definitely not a big fan and now I'm waiting for tomorrow to see if something is gonna change.

I'm not gonna repeat what I just said above, but the game definitely feels less enjoyable to me, as I don't really find it more difficult, but rather feel weaker than before, while me and my friend used to play aggressive, now we're just camping from a corner to another, progressing slower than before, and overall having less fun, even now that we managed to get back our pre-patch W/L ratio on legend.

Originally posted by s0laris:

I wasnt really using dodging in the previous iteration as you didnt need it, maintaining your stam was easy. Now i dodge left and right like a squirrel in a forest fire because of those spearmen and specials.

I was dodging a lot, and now this is another thing that feels (and is) weaker than before. But since dodge was a bit OP before the patch, I don't have any problem with this.

[skibidi groilet]

Originally posted by Hingie:

Originally posted by telopots:

[...] there is a lot more placebo and paranoia going on than actual damage done to the game.

A negative placebo effect is called a nocebo.

I learned something thanks

[UltimeRazzia]

WOW, people actually using their words in an organized way instead of freaking out in the comment sections, maybe we'll see through this finally :p

[DeMasked]

I've mentioned Difficulty Specific Enemies a number of times as a way to help increase difficulty as opposed to arbitrary number changes.