Warhammer Warhammer: Vermintide 2

[Great Deceiver]

Pretty much every team game is only playable with friends. Playing with random retards is just asking to get pissed off.

 

[Talby]

Been playing this co-op with a friend. We tried playing online with matchmaking, but found the bots to be more intelligent than most random players. The bots at least stick close to the players and don't run off by themselves to get killed.

 

[thesheeep]

Pretty much every team game is only playable with friends. Playing with random retards is just asking to get pissed off.

I generally agree, but I've found Deep Rock Galactic to be a notable exception.
Maybe it is because the game is more forgiving towards players venturing off on their own a bit (in fact, I'd say it is part of the core gameplay to not stick together 100% of the time).

Anyway, in Vermintide, Quick Play is just asking for trouble, unfortunately.
Especially on the first two difficulties. The latter ones are fine, IMO, as those are not usually reached by idiots cause they suck too much for them.

 

[Average Manatee]

Especially on the first two difficulties. The latter ones are fine, IMO, as those are not usually reached by idiots cause they suck too much for them.

Yep. First two difficulties are basically baby mode for people who are fucking around or new. Champion can be a bit sketchy, Legend (the minimum I play) is 90% decent players who aren't going to fuck around, and Cataclysm gets you good players fairly reliably (though cata has a lot less players in general so sometimes you gotta wait, or suggest cata to a group who you just annihilated legend with). Usually anyone who is running off in legend is actually just really good at soloing and also will move back into the group as soon as things start to get tense.

A theory I've developed for teamwork-based games like this is that the average player will adopt the playing style that gets them roughly a 75% chance of victory on their chosen difficulty. A higher % and either they get bored and start taking more risks or increase difficulty a notch, lower and they either drop down a difficulty level or learn to git gud. I do almost entirely quick match and I've found that my success rate seems to barely drops down from champ->legend->cataclysm despite the rather huge disparity in difficulties because the quality of players rises with the difficulty. Probably like a 90%/80%/60% success rate respectively.

One good thing is that due to the way the item system works you aren't really limited from playing champ/legend with low level characters. I've never seen anyone in quickplay object to a level 20 in the team on legend and 15 is probably fine for champ. So you don't have to suffer though the retards and baby difficulties much on other characters.

EDIT: Also take note that players who run off a bit might be going for either tomes or grimoires. It's kind of assumed that every group wants to do full books except on cataclysm. Good players can do this safely and know how to avoid being ganked in a 1v1 by any of the specials but lower difficulty players suck at it.

 

[Morenatsu.]

This game looks like shit.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I get that you don’t have friends, but for those of us who do it’s a pretty good way to waste time and shoot the shit.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

uses easyanticheat therefore unethical

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Beowulf]

Oh, that was unexpected.

 

[Zombra]

I wish they would just make more proper campaign missions. I found Chaos Wastes very dull; wandering around looking for slot machines did not make a great first impression. More Chaos Wastes doesn't thrill me.

 

[Zombra]

From the Darktide thread:

I've never played one of these things before (the Vermintide, L4D, etc. style of game). Are they any good? This is the first one that's looked interesting to me because I don't care about fighting rats or zombies.

I like Vermintide 2 a lot. It's very good, high pressure co-op if played with friends. Even one or two friends is fine; you can fill the team out with bots. As ever, playing pickup games with strangers is dull and annoying. If you're really hard up for company, it's even decent solo with just you and a team of bots.

Despite being about button mashing through a million 1hp ratmen, V2 succeeds at supporting a lot of different playstyles with its 15+ classes and multiple weapon loadouts per class. Shooting, melee, stealth, and support all have different niches. Coping with trillions of grunts while maintaining awareness of various special enemies (AOE, kidnappers, wizards, melee ambushers, etc.), not to mention giant monsters and endlevel bosses, all under constant time pressure, really demands your attention and coordination with your team (assuming you're playing at an appropriate difficulty level. Tune it too low or too high and you'll get bored very quickly. If you win or lose 3 sessions in a row, adjust accordingly).

Note I'm only talking about the main campaign here, with very strong level designs focused on clear progression and objectives. The "Chaos Wastes" expansion is a boring procedural slog looking for slot machines to give you random upgrades, making everything feel meaningless.

 

[mediocrepoet]

From the Darktide thread:

I've never played one of these things before (the Vermintide, L4D, etc. style of game). Are they any good? This is the first one that's looked interesting to me because I don't care about fighting rats or zombies.

I like Vermintide 2 a lot. It's very good, high pressure co-op if played with friends. Even one or two friends is fine; you can fill the team out with bots. As ever, playing pickup games with strangers is dull and annoying. If you're really hard up for company, it's even decent solo with just you and a team of bots.

Despite being about button mashing through a million 1hp ratmen, V2 succeeds at supporting a lot of different playstyles with its 15+ classes and multiple weapon loadouts per class. Shooting, melee, stealth, and support all have different niches. Coping with trillions of grunts while maintaining awareness of various special enemies (AOE, kidnappers, wizards, melee ambushers, etc.), not to mention giant monsters and endlevel bosses, all under constant time pressure, really demands your attention and coordination with your team (assuming you're playing at an appropriate difficulty level. Tune it too low or too high and you'll get bored very quickly. If you win or lose 3 sessions in a row, adjust accordingly).

Note I'm only talking about the main campaign here, with very strong level designs focused on clear progression and objectives. The "Chaos Wastes" expansion is a boring procedural slog looking for slot machines to give you random upgrades, making everything feel meaningless.

Thanks, scheduling tends to be one of my main issues about these things re: co-op, so it's usually either solo or luck of the draw asshats on the internet play.

 

[Zombra]

Thanks, scheduling tends to be one of my main issues about these things re: co-op, so it's usually either solo or luck of the draw asshats on the internet play.

If you can get V2 cheap I'd say try it, even solo. Maybe do the Steam refund 2 hour window even. I didn't care about stabbing rats in the face either but I found the gameplay here good enough that I started actually liking the setting because of it.

A good experience with randos here is very unlikely though.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Thanks, scheduling tends to be one of my main issues about these things re: co-op, so it's usually either solo or luck of the draw asshats on the internet play.

If you can get V2 cheap I'd say try it, even solo. Maybe do the Steam refund 2 hour window even. I didn't care about stabbing rats in the face either but I found the gameplay here good enough that I started actually liking the setting because of it.

This is one of those games that goes on sale all the time (including now if anyone's reading this and cares), but has near-Paradox levels of DLC. Do you need any of that like the extra classes to make it interesting, or is it mostly whatever to get FOMO going?

 

[Zombra]

Do you need any of [the DLC]?

Nah. The only DLC I bought were the extra mission ones, and only after I finished the main campaign and was hungry for more. Back to Ubersreik has a few more missions which are pretty good (remastered maps from the first game). Shadows Over Bögenhafen has two more missions? which are forgettable. Winds of Magic introduces a new grinding system if you like doing repetitive things to make numbers go up (for your special magic weapons that only work in the magic grinding universe anyway, not any other game modes), which I regretted paying for almost immediately. I never bought any of the extra classes because the 15 (!) the game comes with are already diverse and fascinating imo. The Grail Knight looked kind of interesting because he gets extra side challenges but that is the only one that looks at all cool to me.

 

[Beowulf]

Yeah, no DLC is mandatory and the ones with new maps are really worth getting if you get bored with the main game. New classes might be worth purchasing if you are really hang up on one of the characters and already played it for hundreds of hours.

 

[Mojobeard]

Do you need any of that like the extra classes to make it interesting, or is it mostly whatever to get FOMO going?

Been a while since I've touched the game. From what I remember I didn't care about any of the extra classes, but the class/map DLCs tend to have the best weapons in the game. Lot of the dual wield options especially are very safe options, combined with the temp hp back from stagger talents.
I would try to get a hang of the game with just the regular weapons first though.

And playing with randoms can be really fun, Chaos Wastes especially. Plus, you don't even need any gear or levels for CW.
The playerbase is (or at least used to be) generally decent, and if you're unfamiliar with a map, someone else will 100% pick up or mark tomes/grimoires if they want them. Don't wander off, don't eat all ammo and heals, there'll be no issues.

 

[Average Manatee]

There's 3 classes for each character and a fairly large weapon selection so tons of content and combinations without DLC. DLC stuff tends to be overpowerd on release but they did a balance pass fairly recently that ironed out a lot of the issues like Sister of the Thorn having a braindead ult that melted bosses instantly. I'd say around 2/3rds of weapons are viable on Cataclysm difficulty and everything is viable on Legend.

The one big impediment to enjoying the game is the leveling system. Early difficulties are kind of simplistic and don't require much teamwork, which also means that random players probably won't be very good and you'll want to move up to at least Champion as soon as you can. But you have to level each class individually, even if your overall equipment level is shared between classes. Chaos Wastes does get around this though.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Picked this up for like $5 and played the tutorial thing. Seems cool, I like the depiction of the Old World and the archetypes given. It's a shame that Warrior Priest isn't in the base game, but at least they have stuff like the Bright Wizard, Slayer, Zealot, and Witch Hunter. Pretty sweet.

 

[somerandomdude]

I got the base game for like $5 or $6 awhile back. Maybe I suck at the game extremely hard, but it took me at least 7 or 8 attempts to beat normal mode skittergate using an Ironbreaker which was one of the few classes I could actually use without getting deleted easily. If I was that bad at normal, I didn't see much of a point in playing anything higher, so I didn't. Called the game once and done after clearing it once on normal. Most of the randos I teamed with were as bad, or worse at the game than me, which didn't give me much faith in multiplayer. I wasn't about to let a higher level player carry me, I'd rather take my repeated ass beatings, or simply stop playing the game at all.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I don’t know what the game is like now because I haven’t played it in years, but when I last played it Skittergate was infamously difficult in comparison to other maps and there was just not much point to trying to pub because the punnets were generally awful players.

 

[somerandomdude]

Yeah, it's been over a year since I played it, and randos got a vote of no-confidence from me. Even getting just 1 player of comparable level and equipment who actually filled the role of picking off the dudes that really needed to be isolated and eliminated immediately would have made it worthwhile to team while I could focus on clapping rat cheeks. I'm unsure which classes were best suited for special threat isolation and elimination, but Ironbreaker wasn't it. Pretty sure that was the ranger/rogue/mage character's job.

 

[throwaway69420]

You start off the game weaker than usual because your gear level is shit. Difficulty levels get more distinct at max character level and 300 (max I believe, or maybe it's 350) gear level.

It's a weird curve of hard due to shit stats > easy due to better stats > hard due to going up a difficulty for more challenge and better loot > repeat.

I will admit the initial grind should have been done better and it seems to have turned many players away.

If anyone wants to play, feel free to message me. I prefer Cataclysm but I can help you with some lower level stuff if necessary. I play everyone but the e*f.