Nerfing flame weapons then releasing a war bond with only flame weapons has to be the worst marketing move ever.
Even if the nerfing is totally fine, the messaging is awful, hey we just made this stuff worse come buy it from us now.
I’m convinced the conversation went something like this:
“Hey we made these primary and secondary weapons that are mini flamethrowers, they don’t shoot as far but they’re still pretty cool, right?!”
“Cool, so you can kill a Charger with your pistol now?”
“Oh shit… Guess we’ll just nerf all fire damage then and say we’re doing it for ‘realisim’.”
“Sounds good, Chief.”
Perhaps they need to stop nerfing stuff nobody asked to get nerfed. The flamethrower was fun to use, but it was also necessary because of the broken amount of charger spawns that made it a vital weapon in battling these.
It’s not a competitive game, there should be no need to nerf stuff unless it’s broken beyond comprehension. In this case the charger spawns were utterly broken in many difficulties and missions, but instead they chose to “fix” the weapon instead of the spawns.
It’s not a competitive game, so why do people feel the need to play the highest difficulty if they can’t deal with an enemy you learn in d4 mission?
There is no broken amount of chargers. There are people incapable of dealing with them, which makes situations degenerate into chaos, which is exactly the point of this kind of enemy.
This is not a difficulty level thing, it’s a broken feature thing.
It also wasn’t consistent every mission. I did level 9 all the time and sometimes it was easy as fuck with next to no spawns, and other missions we had 10+ chargers (I’m not kidding) and bile titans on top at the same time during extraction.
It was physically not possible that the four of us could spawn in enough anti-heavy weapons to deal with all of them while trying to stick around the extraction area. Even despite the fact that we were all equipped to deal with these enemy types.
Which is when it stops being a skill issue and just becomes a broken game issue. Devs have already changed how enemy spawns work in this game multiple times, and admitted that it hasn’t worked as it should’ve before.
Tentacles make it worse. I’ve just been juggled by them for like 30 seconds or more at a time. If you get hit by one and ragdoll into another, you just bounce around until the game decides you’re allowed to play it again.
When those things spawn on the extract, it gets 10x more difficult, even on top of bile titans and chargers.
Different things will affect your feeling : different missions have different enemy distribution for one, and biome and modifiers will make a massive difference in difficulty. I am also comfident sometimes MO planets have increased difficulty too.
And again, you don’t need anti heavy to kill a charger. Shoot the yellow part of the tail and even a primary can do it.
What you’re telling me here is that you weren’t coordinated with your team and not even trying to help eachother. Or that you were all clueless about how to kill a charger without AT weaponry.
If this is really the clueless part, this is very sad tbh.
Large swings of the nerf bat will always be met with equivalent backlash and negative feedback tends to overshadow the positive.
They acknowledged that they should not nerf the fun stuff and proceed carefully with balance going forward, and then deliver this update. On the one hand the nerf to the incendiary breaker is small enough and feels fair, on the other the complete neutering of the flamethrower feels like taking away our toy entirely.
I have to respectfully disagree. I think that the breaker nerf was massive. I don’t find it fair at all. They should have nerfed the outgoing damage rather than make it impossible to actually use as a primary. 4 mags is functionally nothing. My friends run supply backpacks pretty often and I just kept hearing a chorus of “damn, you’re out of ammo again?”
I switched to the Slugger and it’s just a better weapon all-around, even with the changes. The recoil is heavy but the armor pen is choice against everything. Mag size is fine, single reload is great because you can’t fuck that up, and when it hits you feel the punch.
Flamethrower nerf is a huge travesty. Makes me really upset overall. It was the only tool consistently good at clearing chargers.
Same. I’m finding myself constantly out of ammo having to use my secondary a lot and running out of ammo there too, as I wait for a resupply.
They mentioned they mostly do their testing at difficulty 5, which is nothing.
I tuned into the live stream the other day to get the orange armor and it was massively painful watching the devs play the game worse than your friends. Watching them try to deal with chargers by mag dumping them in the head was kind of infuriating. Apparently the “peel the leg” meta is not obvious? They said something about thinking the easiest way to kill a charger was to attack the head, which is for sure not the case.
It was the only tool consistently good at clearing chargers.
I feel like this is maybe the root cause issue more than anything else
I enjoy the slugger again, adding back the punchy stun was all I wanted for it, and adjusting the falloff and accuracy to match is a fair compromise to their initial issues with it.
Now you get a real choice of the punisher for light pen damage, and the slugger for medium pen stun but lower damage overall. It makes both of them useful.
I’ve been happy with the update, but I also rarely use the flamethrower or incendiary breaker. I normally play on 7s and my friends that use the incendiary said they are mostly fine in groups, but soloing objectives is harder.
The flamethrower change made chargers harder… But I prefer rocket pods for them anyway.
The nerfs don’t bother me at all, and I like all the things they added.
It seems clear to me though that they need some sort of community beta testing group to vet their changes, and they need to space those changes out better.
The flamethrower nerf is what people are actually mad about, and that ruined a huge release of new enemies and then also the release of the new war bond with fire weapons.
Those all should have been released one a week or something to keep momentum up.
The flamethrower is still bonkers good, even against chargers. The community (really just the main subreddit) is just toxic af, reactive, misinformed, and educated only by what someone else on YT or Twitch tells them.
The takes over there have me legitimately questioning if any of them actually play the game and at what difficulty.
I totally agree that the community has been toxic as of late, but they’re not totally unfounded. If you’re playing diff7 or higher, the plethora of chargers choke flamethrower users. You simply don’t have the space and the time to target the butt of every charger, doubly so if you’re playing with randos.
I do agree that the main sub on Reddit is pretty toxic.
It’s okay to be upset, but I think people want to be upset about something, and have been stewing in this too much that they’ve least perspective that this is v a small studio game they paid half the price of a AAA for.
This patch is weird. The nerfs don’t bother me as I will drop the difficulty down or change my loadout depending on how much fun a team of 2 divers wants. I never did hard in Vermintide 2 because of the friendly fire and lack of skill.
What raises an eyebrow are the mission ending bugs. Bug breaches not spawning in the high value asset mission and rockets not launching. Weird disconnects and crashes that were not there pre-patch. I hope we get more stability patches until the next content patch.