Balance Patch, versus mode and the Future of Vermintide

[Bib]

OK Guys, i know its a very dividing topic for us but lets not fight each other because we all want the same thing, and thats to have fun in vermintide. But we all have different views and tastes of fun in vermintide, for some its bonking rats on the head, for others its spamming javs into hordes. Some like burning heretics in pitfires and others love the chainheadshotting monsters with ults.

Unfortunately some of the gameplay styles might be detrimental to the fun experience of Team mates such as javspamming or coruabuse and might need a little bit of tweaking. But its a thin red line in balancing and not decreasing the overall fun experience of the playerbase. And i believe they missed the Red Line with the BH nerf as they took away the big endorphine rush a BH Main gets from chainult while it never was a fun killer for the majority of players as teammates.

But after the fatsharkstream today and the revive of the "versus" Project the changes start to make sense in a bigger picture, where a BH Main could with a Pot staggerchain ult a humanplayer controlled Monster without the later one having any means to counteract or react to it. From a designer perspective that might be bad gameplaydesign. Thus some of the Balance changes (ig the sacrificing of the BH mains playerbase) now and in future might be part of the preparation for this big thing memed and named "Versus".

If my assumption is right, then they really should have been honest about their intentions with the Balance Patch and Future Things to come instead of publishing a Patch dev blog, that had some paradoxical statements.

If they manage to make versus work, it would really help our playerbase grow again. I still keep dreaming of the day when Vermintide will dethrone Left4Dead.

[Red Sabre]

That's a really dumb approach. Basically, you are telling me they want to use the same build for every single mode across campaign, chaos wastes and now versus instead of making their own specific rules like they did with Winds of magic. They could just made BH nerf only specific to versus without having to kill his killer boss habilitiies.

[These stairs go up!]

They have said that VS would be a standalone game. Not an additional mode for this game.

There is no possible way they can use the live version of this game for VS and expect any modicum of success.

[Bib]

Well in that case i stay corrected and for the love of Sigmar i cannot find any convincing reasons for some of the changes

[[死] Nirim]

Except they didnt nerf him, they just fixed a bug on him that has been abused for years, and then buffed him by moving his CDR from 40% to 60%.

[Ragnarr Loðbrók]

PvP`? RIP Chilled Coop playerbase... every game that has PvP is infested with absolute toxic members that will affect PvE............
There is a reason why PvE Only Games tend to have a usually more friendly and kind playerbase than most PvP games.....

[Vance]

They will never manage to dethrone Left4Dead. Various horde games can't even reach the standard of this 15 years old title that set the baseline of the genre without messing up along the way.

Can versus be decent? Sure, but keep it in their own category while others enjoy their campaign without enemy player interaction.

And who knows, in 2 years after it's release it might be actually playable.

[DragonPunched]

The balance patch that just dropped showed the devs sheer incompetence when it comes to game balance with several questionable decisions, bugs making it through that proved they didnt even play test some of the changes and some changes that were just beyond moronic(BH nerf). VS mode will need its own balance or for the games balance to massively improve to be fun to play otherwise its just gonna be incredibly U5 sided with ♥♥♥♥ like trollhammer stunlocking bosses to death, RV melting bosses in seconds, Waystalker aimbot sounds really unfun to play against even thinking about it.

[Gorwe]

Right. Now they are going to add in the PvP balance too. When they can't even do PvE balance properly.

Oh well, is going to be popcorn time, for sure!

[Frostbeast]

Im not a fan of it, either. It will split up the playerbase even more. Should they sell it as a stand alone game...Maybe.

[Adelion]

Originally posted by Gorwe:

Right. Now they are going to add in the PvP balance too. When they can't even do PvE balance properly.

They have to do a complete separate balance for Versus anyway. With how overpowered everything on heroes side is, the pactsworn will never have a chance. Especially if they decide on one base difficulty somewhere below Cataclysm. Everything will be nuked away.

Though it would be amusing, the powergaming advocates turning to the other site and complaining how the heroes power is to strong :P

Don't think though that it will influence the player numbers on PvE side. These two groups may have an overlap but are for the most part separate.

[[Fatshark] Quickpaw]

Originally posted by Bib:

But after the fatsharkstream today and the revive of the "versus" Project the changes start to make sense in a bigger picture, where a BH Main could with a Pot staggerchain ult a humanplayer controlled Monster without the later one having any means to counteract or react to it. From a designer perspective that might be bad gameplaydesign. Thus some of the Balance changes (ig the sacrificing of the BH mains playerbase) now and in future might be part of the preparation for this big thing memed and named "Versus".

If my assumption is right, then they really should have been honest about their intentions with the Balance Patch and Future Things to come instead of publishing a Patch dev blog, that had some paradoxical statements.

I know we said we wouldn't be responding to any questions for now and leave them all for later, but we'd like to nip this one in the bud, so we'll make an exception in this instance!

The balance changes that came with the latest patch, and any and all balance changes that we make to the base game, are not and will not be made for the sake of Versus. This is because Versus will have its own separate balancing from the other game modes: if something is problematic in Versus specifically, then it will be changed for Versus specifically.