Simple Concepts for Nightmare and Beyond

For those looking to step up their game and learn how to play on Nightmare.

Foreword

The tips and strategies in this guide revolve around mitigating damage. This style of play emphasizes consistency and reliability. A group can easily carry a bad 4th player through a Nightmare run with 2 grims and 3 tomes using the techniques I will outline, even if the players aren't particularly well geared or skilled. Better strategies and techniques exist, but they are more risky and rely far more heavily on individual player skill. Once you've mastered the basics, get well geared and find a solid group, you can move onto more aggresive and expedient strategies such as bypassing item spawns to avoid enemies and accelerating your pace to minimize the amount of hordes that will spawn over the duration of the map. Can you get away with fighting in open areas? Can you get away with splitting into groups of two for short periods of time? Sure. Competent groups can handle moving as a cohesive unit without any need for communication, even during a horde. You will not find this level of coordination in public games frequently. This being said, here are some techniques and strategies you can employ to get you through your early days of Nightmare play.

Group Up

This is the simplest and most important concept to succeeding as a group. If you ignore any tip in this guide, this is not the one. Even if you're speedrunning Cata, maintaining line of sight of at least one other person at all times is absolutey paramount.



The closer the four players are from one another on average, the less chance there is for any single player to take damage overall. More swords swinging closer together means less chance for rats to hit you, and a better chance to get an assassin or packmaster off your team faster. Try to get least damage taken. Be a team player and stay tight with the group or at least one other person at all times.

Practically speaking though, you're going to see players off by themselves quite frequently in public games. You have two options, either let the player run off ahead, die alone, and cut your losses, or go out of your way to cover his a-s-s. If he has a Grimoire, you often don't have a choice but to try and make up for their lack of situational awareness. Regardless of how pro you think you are, running ahead alone is going to get you jumped by a Gutter Runner or grabbed by a Packmaster.

Staying with your team will cause less specials to spawn over the course of the match. To summarize briefly, the game is continually computing a "lonliness" value for each player based on their position and distance to other players and/or bots. Should your lonliness value reach a sufficient value, then a request for a Rush Intervention will be made, at which point the game will spawn an Assassin or Packmaster. The function actually prints to your console logs every time the function is called, and even specifies your lonliness value, distance, and what the game spawned in response. Open up one of your console logs within %appdata% and do a ctrl+f for "rush" and you will find entries like these:

12:51:56.472 [Lua] rush intervention - spawningskaven_pack_master 12:52:17.746 [Lua] specialspawn: ahead == lonliest --> 12:52:17.747 [Lua] spawning mini patrol 12:52:20.648 [Lua] released hold action_two 12:52:21.304 [Lua] specialspawn: rule: only_ahead --> 12:52:26.676 [Lua] going to make a rush intervention, sinceloneliness_value= 33.970733163561867 and dist=11.991680145263672 12:52:26.676 [Lua] rush intervention - spawningskaven_gutter_runner

On the other extreme, I see many new players constantly falling behind the group fighting 1 or 2 rats and getting downed. This is something I have a very tough time getting through to newer players when I tell them to stack up. If you encounter a handful of rats and you're at the back of the group, don't stay and fight them where you are. Push them away and bring them to the team. If you see two players as tiny dots in the distance ahead of you, you might want to do whatever you can to make your way to them and keep up. If you fall behind, you're done for.

In summary, don't run ahead, don't fall behind.

Cornering Up

If you're struggling to stay alive, you can think of the map as a long chain of safe spots. The moment you hear an ambush, run to the nearest one. Spend as little time as possible in any area without a nearby choke point / corner / wall / etc and avoid engadging hordes in open areas. While this approach is far superior when handling large amounts of clan rats and trash you can be royally screwed very fast by specials if you're cornered in a static location without anywhere to go in the event that a globe is thrown into the group.

This being said, if you can handle fighting in a more semi-open area with some mobility I would encourage you to do so. At first this might not be possible, especially if you're not properly geared or ready for the difficulty you are playing on. You'll have to use discretion on this one to make a proper decision and only time will give you better judgement on this matter. As a general rule of thumb: reduce the number of possible directions of attack and (when possible) allow yourself some mobility to GTFO when things go south.

^ I made a whole video about positioning. It's for V2, but the concepts still apply. Check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hnezm0M9pRk

In summary, cornering up is good at first, then it's bad.

Healing & Inventory Management

Pay attention to others inventory/health/trinkets. Potion share people get potions. Heal share people get heals. You'll waste much less time deliberating over who should pick up a particular item if you're already aware who has what and how much health they have. Instead of running ahead when someone swaps out their healing item for a tome, you will already know it is there, saving your group from playing an obnoxious minute long game of "Hey there's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ med kit here". On the other extreme, don't fall behind the group trying to heal the missing 10% of your health just because it's there. It's a waste. What if something terrible happens and both your grim holders are suddenly in the grey? If you don't need the health, don't waste time topping off. Instead, utilize the fact that there isn't a horde and keep moving. You'll spend less time dallying, less hordes will spawn, less damage will be taken and you won't be needing so many of those healing items. In other words, if you come across a healing item half way through the map having taken 1 hit of damage, just keep moving. You got this.

Give precedence to healing your grim carriers. You can always pick up tomes off the ground. Grimoires, however, are gone when the holder dies. If the guy who has healed 5 times before 1st grim tries to pick it up, make sure you try to snatch it before he can or spray him with the water bottle. Nobody wants to babysit the grim carrier that really shouldn't be holding it. That being said, if you're a newer player, or you're venturing into a higher difficulty, or you're maybe playing a class you aren't very good with yet, let someone else hold the grim and give the grim holders first dibs on healing.

In summary, give potions to damage dealers, take potions or health or bombs if you have trinkets that increase their utility.

Block Reviving

This is an extremely useful mechanic that I've noticed a lot of players are not aware of. If you hold your block, then hold "E" to revive your teammate, while continuing to hold your block, you will actually block any incoming attacks while reviving. This will allow you to literally revive teammates in the middle of a horde, as long as you have enough stamina.



Once you get one teammate up, chances are the two of you will be able to get the others up (assuming you were close to one another to begin with). Leave them down and you are likely to join them quickly.

Note: As of Patch 1.2 players no longer have inifinte stamina while block reviving, meaning each hit taken reduces your remaining stamina. Stormvermin will drain your stamina completely in one hit and block revive can now be interrupted by ogres, rattling gunners, etc. For this reason, high stamina characters are more likely to get off a successful block revive than others.

In summary, hold right click before and during a revive.

How to Fight the Ogre

The Ogre has 3 basic types of attacks. The specific attack the Ogre will decide to use is based on the distance of the target player to the Ogre.

Ground Pound - When target player is close in proximity (cannot be blocked)
Uppercut - When target player is medium distance (can be blocked but sends you hurtling away)
Jump Attack / Leap - When target player is far away (cannot be blocked)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jlbWBj0tIk

In an ideal situation, you can quite literally stop the Ogre dead in its tracks without even swinging a sword or blocking (Example: http://imgur.com/a/8ju7v ). The key is to walk up to the Ogre in order to bait out an attack, then simply dodge away as the attack starts. Obviously this isn't easy if there are a load of other rats around but being able to do this will set up your teammates to NUKE IT, DOT IT, and it can also save you if you kite an Ogre into a dead end. I made an in depth tutorial on dodge dancing you can find here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9tH6V-DYTs&t=1s

If there are rats on you as well, it can be useful to block the Ogres attack in order to create space between you and the horde. Just make sure you don't block the ground slam attack or you will take damage. You'll learn to read the Ogre's animations with practice and if you really want to progress quickly, I'd recommend giving Grimalackt's Stormvermin Mutation mod a try.


I have an updated video on dealing with bosses. Check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaKB2-KbTio

In summary, don't just run away. Walk up, bait the attack, dodge away, repeat.

Public Horn of Magnus - Tips & Commentary

I often get requests for tips on how to play off-host. So recently, I did just that, and recorded a session of off host public Horn of Magnus on Nightmare. I watched back the footage and recorded a bit of commentary on my thought process, things the others players were doing (for better or for worse), and tried my best to provide some insightful narration at key moments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-ikRn9o05w
I touch on a fair number of things I mention in this guide during this run, as well as some map specific strategies you can employ (where to be, where not to be, etc). I'm hoping this provides some insight into what is going through my mind, as well as how to play in public lobbies when you are not the host. There are four episodes in the series so far, on four different maps, and as four different classes. I discuss map specific strategies, general game mechanics, and class specific combat techniques. I tried my best to make this series both insightful and entertaining, and the feed back has been overwhelming positive so far. I read all of the comments on all platforms (Reddit, Steam, Youtube) so if you have any suggestions for future content that you wish to be covered in future episodes, don't hesitate to leave a comment below.

Summary/Conclusion

- Hold block, then revive while holding block to continue blocking during a revive.

- Don't run ahead, don't fall behind. Maintain line of sight of at least one other player at all times.

- If you're struggling, try the corner up strategy during hordes. Once you're better, just hug a wall to reduce the number of angles you can get attacked from. This gives you more options to relocate.

- Cornerning up in a room with one entrance may get you through your early days of Nightmare/Cata but is a less than a fool proof strategy for dealing with specials.

- Keep it moving. Moving through the map quicker will cause the Ogre to spawn earlier. Dallying will cause more hordes and specials to spawn over the course of the game. Faster runs = faster loot.

- Keep it tight. Straying away from your teammates causes Assassins and Packmasters to spawn.

- Let the rats come to you. Don't spam your Trueflight or Bolt Staff into every group of stray rats in the distance, when you can just simply walk by. The rats are not the objective, they are simply in the way between you and the objective.

- Pay attention to the bars at the bottom of the screen. Keep track of other people's health, inventory and trinkets. This will be tough at first. Keep trying. Anticipate who should drop their healing item in exchange for the upcoming tome. If that person is you, be there when they are.

- Don't be a health toilet. If everyone is close to full health, pass up the healing items. In the event your grim holders wind up in the grey you'll be grateful to have a med to fall back to.

- Adapt to the situation. Try new strategies. Don't just simply accept "the meta". Think critically and always strive to learn and be a better player.

- Take risks. You'll never learn and grow as a player if you always play it safe.

Good luck, and may RNGesus be with you.

-SneakyPanda

[Flytrap]

Block reviving MVP, spread the word, that shit can be a game changer

[-=(SOTN)=- nachtmensch]

Special "THANK YOU" for the "Block Reviving" Tip ^^ Very Usefull, and i dont read it somewhere else yet :D THX

[pandu]

I still play the game but I noticed you're located in Spain which is easily 200 ping. It will be tough to play together.

[xxSiNeDxx]

Do you still playing?¿ 'd like to be trained in nightmare...no joking...

[Slunks]

Awesome guide. Appreciate the hard work!

[pandu]

On Nightmare & above, ranged weapons and bombs deal friendly fire.

[Chummy 8]

Quick question from a dude who's just geting into Nightmare. Do Grendades do FF damage? I would assume they do, but have been afraid to ask in game.

[Orthodox Sinner]

Good guide for new players

[Crimson13]

I ran a public game with you about 10 minutes ago; Digital Tilt mentioned that you made a guide and lo, here it is. You, both ingame and this looks to be a good deal of help, thanks man.

[Longeth Dayv (fake)]

Well, thanks for all those tiny bits of knowledge ! I'll be sure to make Sigmar proud.