Warhammer: Vermintide 2 - Left 4 Chaos

Ah! Personally I think the swords/daggers feel pretty good as well, but it sounds like you need to play slayer + pickaxe, or kruber + halberd. Can’t really bisect rats or send them flying with a little sliver of metal.

I would assume @kevinc hasn’t unlocked Slayer. Witch Hunter Captain also has access to the Two Handed Sword, but I don’t recall which level you unlock it at.

Tough crowd! ;-)

I’d love to see a ‘flat’ loot-free mode in Vermintide because the gear chase and menu faff just gets in the way of the actual game for me. I love the risk/reward friction of collecting the grimoires and tomes though.

Try Bardin @KevinC with a two-hand weapon. I think he feels the most weighty and he’s certainly the most entertaining. (He also has the same English dialect as me which is rare to hear in a game!)

Even if you don’t care for the loot (I also didn’t, I just used whatever higher level of each weapon type), the game offers several different classes and subclasses that expand the gameply in ways that L4D did’t.

Thanks for the feedback, guys. I’ll give this another go then, probably once the expansion drops. The lack of any sort of classes or specialization turned me off in L4D and it was pretty weaksauce in the first Vermintide. When the second came out, I got distracted by other games and never played it past the beta weekend.

Sometimes I still pine for the mid-to-late aughts when most games didn’t need tacked on progression systems, loot, and unlocks. Left 4 Dead 2 used to be my most played game and I never felt like it needed progression; it stayed fresh for me. Sometimes it’s nice to know that you are starting on a level playing field (mechanics wise) with other players and not worry if you didn’t put in the time to have ultra-rare unlocks and are falling behind the meta-curve.

That’s already a losing battle.

For example the other day I was reading some news about how Apex Legends was already clearly behind Fortnite, and lots of people were commenting it was only natural, they had returned to Fornite because the progression and unlocks systems wasn’t rewarding enough in Apex to motivate them. It seems playing the game itself isn’t enough anymore!

For me it wasn’t the lack of progression, it was just the lack of roles or specialization. If the different characters had strengths and weaknesses I would have enjoyed it more. A scout, a demolitionist, a heavy weapons guy, etc.

You would like Deep Rock Galactic!

I own that! Just waiting for a couple friends to pick it up before diving in.

I know this won’t bother most people, but from a ‘friendly competitive’ point of view – because let’s face it: the stats at the end of a game are a lot of fun to compare when you’re playing with friends! – the class and loot system muddies that competitive aspect if a player has better gear as, say, a ranged class who can pick off all the rats and specials before Bardin’s little ol’ legs can get to 'em.

One of our friends has played this solo with randos so he’s ahead of us now on the power curve and that friendly competition isn’t quite as much fun when he tops most scores! In L4D there was no power curve so it was always exciting to see just how well (or badly!) everyone performed on a level playing field. I always loved that co-op competitive aspect.

The power curve has an end, weapons are capped at 300 power. Hell, veterans argue that’s when the real game starts.

That’s priceless!

We are talking of people who played 300 hours or 400 hours. For them the first 50-55 hours (which is where most of the progression happens, less if you focus on fewer classes) it’s like the intro.

Some classes always won the “meter” game at higher levels anyways.

Yeah, I don’t buy into the meters thing. Bad players are players that don’t stick together as a team, don’t understand the level, run by grims and tomes, and always go down.

If you can avoid doing that, I don’t care how many or few kills we have at the end.

That’s exactly my point with classes undermining that friendly competition. It’s asymmetric at that point.

I agree with randos, but I’m talking about friends who know how to stick together, cooperate and communicate and get through levels with tomes and grimoires already. The stats are fun to pour over and trash talk about but they’re also useful at showing you if you’re not pulling your weight. If one of my friends is consistently taking less damage, dealing more damage, reviving more etc. then I need to up my game. It’s score chasing. Think Gimli and Legolas. You can’t really measure up when someone has higher level gear and/or a class that excels at higher levels.

As I said before, I don’t expect most folk to be bothered about this but it was one of my favourite things in L4D and the flat nature of it played into that.

I feel like playing a round or two of this tonight on PC, so if anyone wants to join, pm me on steam.

Thanks for the two rounds @Balasarius , I now have 2 characters over level 15.

Its fun game in spurts, but all the frantic slashing strains my eyes after awhile.

It was fun. :) Yeah, Vermintide 2 used to cause me eye-strain as well. It stopped and I’m not sure if it was something I did with the graphics settings or my eyes got better.

(When it came out in March 2018, that was about four months after my ICL surgery, so my eyes were still adjusting. They had to give me monovision, so it took around nine months for my brain to adjust.)

But the first thing I noticed at launch was how washed-out everything looked and how difficult it was to pick out the ratties from the background. Like the bloom was too high or something. I managed to get that under control after a lot of graphical tweaking. Here are my settings if anyone cares -