[2020] Big Balance Beta - Patch Notes [Updated 05 Aug]

Patch 8

Huntsman

• Sure Shot, changed - Headshots grants a stack of Sure Shot. Ranged hits counts as headshots. Max 4 stacks. Headshots don’t consume stacks of Sure Shot.

• Free Shots - No longer grants a stack on Blunderbuss bash attacks.

• Distance Reduction, changed: Every 8th Melee kill grants a stack of Sure Shot.

• Longshanks - Damage reduction stack granted on both Special and Elite kills.

• Reset - No longer grants 30% cooldown reduction.

• Waste Not, Want Not - Removed (The functionality to remove it went live in the first rework patch but the tooltip was not updated properly).

The intent of the Huntsman rework was not to remove the reward for skilled play, but rather open up for a subset of players that might have felt daunted by the high reliance on headshotting to trigger effects in his kit. While the idea of Sure Shot as a resource is interesting, the amount of stacks you could gather became eggregious, aswell as the way you gained them being too static aswell as encouraging some weird gameplay. This change should reward skillful players while also opening up talent options for those that want a more straight forward approach to Huntsman. We will continue to monitor the feedback and performance of this new itteration and make changes accordingly.

Bugfixes
Fixed a range of issues with inconsistencies in the original beta patchnotes for some changed weapon properties. Fixes include:

• Kruber & Sienna Sword Heavy headshot damage not being increased.
• Kruber & Sienna Sword light attack 3 damage being reduced, instead of increased.
• Kerillian Sword light attack 3 not receiving it’s headshot and armour damage buff.
• Kerillian Spear Light stab attacks not receiving it’s intended damage increase.
• Sienna Mace Heavy 1 not receiving it’s intended damage increase vs super armour.
• Bardin Dual Hammers gaining an unintended damage increase on diagonal heavies.

These are the most eggregious issues that have been reported throughout the beta period. If more issues are found, please report them in the bug forums and we’ll make sure to look into sorting it out.

Additional Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue where 2h Hammer push attack counted as a heavy attack.

Statement from Design

The time period we had alloted for the summer balance beta is drawing close to an end. The beta will run throughout next week, then the results will be finalized. Most of the goals for this beta, namely experimenting with a set of balance changes to weapons largely based on community driven feedback aswell as testing out some new directions in regards to career design, have been successful. The amount of engagement and discussion by everyone in the community shows once again that balance in PvE co-op games does indeed matter.

Speaking personally, I would love to be able to run these kind of events as a regularly re-occuring thing, but they are very resource intensive endeavours and thus must be scheduled as such. Outside of balance there’s alot of cool things coming in the future of Vermintide 2 that requires the attention of the sharks working on the balancing beta right now. As stated in a previous post, we are planning on running another round of balancing later in the year, primarily focusing on the careers that were not touched upon in this beta. Until then I’d like to thank everyone for their participation and commitment to help in making Vermintide 2 the best co-op game it could possibly be.

Patch 9

Bugfixes

Huntsman

• Sure Shot - Fixed an issue where Empire Longbow shots did not count as headshots when determining damage following a consumed Sure Shot stack.

• Sure Shot - Updated tooltip to explain that the effect to grant stacks only triggers on ranged headshots.

• Free Shot - Fixed a crash that would occur when using the talent.

General

• Hammer/Mace & Shield - Push attack now chains into shield slam again.

Patch 10

Huntsman

• Mostly reverted back to pre-bbb version. Longshanks damage reduction functionality is split out from original talent and replaces Master Huntsman. Stacks are no longer removed by friendly fire. Free Shot replaces Maim. All other talents and passive restored.

• KNOWN ISSUE - Blend In does not function appropriately, fixed internally, will be deployed tomorrow.

Let’s chat Huntsman for abit. Originally one of the most difficult careers to design for, Huntsman has always been somewhat of a black sheep when it comes to fulfilling a niche while keeping a clear identity. Starting out giving some insight, there’s a slight discrepancy between Markus Krubers identity as a character (design wise) and the Huntsman career in that originally Markus was never a career that was supposed to be the premiere “Skullcracker” kind of character where the player is encouraged to chase after every headshot they can go for. Around came Huntsman and we needed to figgure out a theme that worked well for that kind of career. Rewarding precision shots came naturally with the “one shot, one kill” kind of idea of a Master Huntsman, but it clashed with the notion of Markus core identity. The decision was made to go ahead with the concept anyway since it felt pretty rewarding for pulling off skillful play.

But it’s always been abit of a pet peeve where we felt that there existed a subset of players that enjoy the idea of Markus Huntsman as a career but didn’t mesh well with his gameplay having a very high skill floor. The idea behind the experiment of Sure Shot as a concept was basically “How can we lower the skill foor of Huntsman without affecting the skill ceiling, still allowing existing players that have mastered playing a very headshot heavy career without feeling that the gameplay that enjoyed having been taken away from them”. We looked at the most popular builds of Huntsman and ensured that these would still have a place and remain largely unchanged. If a player has 100% headshot hitrate, then Sure Shot should change nothing in how you play the game, you should still be able to play the Huntsman you enjoy and keep doing so. Now this isn’t a realistic number to keep up with so even the most proficient Huntsman player does get some kind of bonus from Sure Shot where that one stray bullet that hit the arm instead of the head. The removal of Waste Not, Want Not was a decision made based on testing and data. A vast majority of players ran Conservative Shooter as is on Huntsman so ammo regen should still be available, the tradeoff for more consistent headshots fed by the trait while having to utilize abit more ammo management seemed to be sensible since during our testing it was showed that it was basically impossible for Huntsman to run out of ammo with Sure Shot and WNWN.

So the concept seems fine on paper, we decide to put it together and even though the beta is well on the way and feedback is rolling in so let’s try to add an overhaul to an additional career and see what the reaction is. And yeah, we should probably have kept the changes in the oven for abit longer cause he’s an absolute monster at 10 stacks with Reset making it Virtually impossible to run out of stacks. Amidst all the waves we do manage to get some valid feedback that the manner you gather stacks of Sure Shot is quite problematic, but the beta is rapidly running it’s course so we decide to try an implementation suggested by the community and see how it works. This turns out to be a problem because there’s always more to a problem than face value suggests and the solution to change the aquisition method to yet again rewarding headshots goes away from the original intent of Sure Shots starting out. It doesn’t feel great to play with and alot of voices have been raised regarding this the last few days. Instead of trying to push the envelope and rush a last minute fix out the decision was made to roll back the majority of the changes to Huntsman back to his pre-BBB state. Generally feeback has been positive regarding Free Shot over Maim and the Longshanks damage reduction being an interesting pick for row 5. This does not mean we’re giving up on Huntsman but rather that we really want to try and make Sure Shot an interesting feature in it’s own right while making it fit into the idea of Huntsman rewarding high skill play. The current beta period unfortunately does not accommodate for that and we felt it was better for everyone if we went back to the pre-BBB version of Huntsman while taking the feedback and lessons learned from this beta to try and create a better version the next time we get the chance.

Bounty Hunter

• Bounty Hunting - Reverted back to Just Reward. Increases cooldown recovery from 15% to 20%.

A similar case to Huntsman but on a smaller scale, the Bounty Hunting talent perfectly embodies the fantasy of a Bounty Hunting chasing down his prey and being rewarded for doing so. Unfortunately it was very tricky to try and make it feel good and just not this super random bonus that sometimes procs and yields a situationally pretty underwhelming effect, especially when it fails to stack up to relevant levels. We’ll keep this fantasy in mind for the future but for now we’re rolling it back to it’s pre-beta state.

Ranger Veteran

• Scavenger ammunition now drops at Bardins feet instead of at the killed specials corpse.
• Share and Share Alike - Ale now drops aswell as ammunition when it triggers.

This change should fix a few problems that arose with Scavenger caches where if you killed a special outside of the reachable boundaries, it’s basically wasted. Bardin is always the hero closest to the cache so he gets abit higher priority when it comes to picking up the bonus ammo or pickups. One worry was that it feels abit less logical that Bardin drops the pickups instead of it being something that’s scavanged from the specials clammy hands, but since it’s from Bardins special stash let’s just imagine he throws some out in celebration when the team downs an especially foul adversary. Regarding the Share and Share Alike, picking this talent should be less of a hit to his ammo sustain now since killing a special always yields atleast the base ammo cache.

Weapon Changes

Empire Longbow - Charged shot no longer deals less damage to Frenzied enemies. Should function the same as uncharged shot.

Executioner Sword - Restored 20% bonus critical strike chance to Heavy Attacks from pre-BBB.