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Merc Report - Witch Doctor Winter's Changing Field Conditions

Mercs,

Out with the old and in with the new, or at least, that is what some say. As you may know, this time of year approaches quickly and we’ve got new intel to share about changing field conditions and new outbreaks!

Satellites have spotted new outbreaks we believe are heading your way. The lab coats have been analyzing the images and finalized their initial conclusions of what strange new mutations are coming.

BossRush.jpg
The first outbreak looks like it is the big ones, no, the really big ones. The lab is calling this one “Boss Rush”, and all your favorites are coming right after another. The Patriach, Matriach, Hans, King Fleshpound and Abomination are racing to see who can get to you, and probably kill you, first. They appear to be coming one at a time, but we suspect that with each new wave, the following Boss will be even more motivated to kill you!

ShrunkenHeads.jpg
For the second outbreak, well, the coats keep saying something about a Witch Doctor having gotten their hands on some Zeds and shrunken their heads. It has also been noticed thanks to the sacrifice of a field agent, that those in proximity to this pack seem to pick up the same affliction. We suspect that headshots will be ineffective against this lot, but that lucky sacrifice... the field agent also reported back that several Zeds appear to have new weak points. Keep your shrunken eyes on the lookout.

Those heading out into the field to take on threats both previously afoot and new, we do have some improvements coming down the line that should increase your likelihood of survival!

For mercs who find themselves in the field for what seems like “Endless” amounts of time, they will soon find an option to take a break, and “pause” the action. Mercs working as a team will of course need to vote on this course of action to proceed, and will need all hands to succeed.

Adding on to this, mercs who use a controller will find that aiming around the head will be a bit more forgiving in helping you find your intended target, that being the head and not the chest. So keep those fingers on the triggers and put some rounds down range, now with more effect!

And while details are currently still being worked out, Mercs should also be prepared for slight improvements to the VLAD-1000 Nailgun, and the Make Things Go Boom skill for Survivalist. You may need all the help you can get as recent field reports have suggested the Abomination and Fleshpound are shaking things up a bit in preparation for Winter!

Make sure to stay tuned for details on your next assignment and arsenal additions in the coming days.
 
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Intriguing although I hope we can begin looking forward to KF3 because as enjoyable as this game is and has been it would be great to see how much this can be expanded and improved upon.

Also it would be great if you could fix the glitch in Neverhold's 'hidden' room where Zeds seem to have issues tracking and engaging with players as shown below:

Exhibit A
Exhibit B

A somewhat similar problem seems to be what occurred here too.
Hopefully quirks like this can be found and rectified in future Betas as they appear to be a recurring oversight.
 
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I just want to take a moment to complain about the berserker. You keep making the zeds more aggressive and more organized, and you keep making the berserker weaker. Try to remember that not everybody plays on a server with 5 other experienced players. Some of us play a lot of solo games, or games with just 2 or 3 less experienced players. At a minimum, you should restore the hemoclobber to the way it was. 3 rounds in the magazine, 12 rounds back. That at least gives you a chance to get out of zed traps where you find yourself suddenly surrounded.
 
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Regarding the "slight improvements" of the VLAD-1000, will one of them be a $600 price tag + a slight damage reduction to compensate for the reduced cost? I remember mentioning that there should be some parity between base game Berserkers and Piranha Pistol buyers.

Perhaps 30 damage per nail could still make for an effective ranged Zerker weapon?
 
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I'm not sure the improved head aiming with the game controller would be a good thing. I have a nephew who played the back4blood beta on PS4. He hated the auto-aim that zeroed in on the zombie heads there. He finds KF2 on the PS4 just right to keep the game from becoming boring and I kind of agree. If the auto-aim just homed in on a zed's head mindlessly, then all that's really need to do is spam LR and R2 continuously to win making it a bore fest.

I just hope it's not going to be like that.
 
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Please;
-Buff the Patriarch on 5p&6p games. He can't flee when he goes to healing. At least %90 of 6p hoe teams kill this boss before his first healing. This is more important than buffing the king fleshpound. It must be due to broken coop difficulty scale per player.

-Nerf medic and healthrower too. Medics are still soloing all the game (like previous op berserker as a last man standing), we wait for long time to finish waves. I suggest that removing the passive %10 movement speed skill. Medic has already self healing buffs (including speed).

- M32 grenade launcher is useless, give it more utility.

- Nerf stumble power& range of kaboomstick. It is already powerful weapon with high damage potential and mobility skills.

- İncrease the husk suiciding threshold from %15 hp to %30-40 hp with less damage (it shouldn't kill zerker with 1 blow). It will give us more fun&omg moments.

- Give us a chance to play weeklies whenever we want. We shouldn't wait during months to play certain weekly modes. There are tons of modes not to waste them.
 
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We suspect that headshots will be ineffective against this lot, but that lucky sacrifice... the field agent also reported back that several Zeds appear to have new weak points. Keep your shrunken eyes on the lookout.
"Oops! All EDARs!"

Mercs should also be prepared for slight improvements to the VLAD-1000 Nailgun
This thing's already one of Berserker's best weapons, and it's been buffed before.

It lets you spray at minor enemies from early waves which gives Berserker an early ranged option, and magdump Fleshpounds and Scrakes at close range for easy decaps. It's been on the meta loadouts since the Berserker Early Access rework.

Why is this getting buffed?

Make Things Go Boom skill for Survivalist
ok i guess
But even better, why not just give Survivalist faster reloads for Survivalist-themed weapons? Y'know, the Freezethrower, Killerwatt, and Arc Gen?

I just want to take a moment to complain about the berserker. You keep making the zeds more aggressive and more organized, and you keep making the berserker weaker.
No?

If anything this perk wasn't nerfed for 5+ years and the Zeds sure haven't gotten "any more organized," whatever that means. It's just being brought back more in line with the other perks.

Try to remember that not everybody plays on a server with 5 other experienced players. Some of us play a lot of solo games, or games with just 2 or 3 less experienced players. At a minimum, you should restore the hemoclobber to the way it was. 3 rounds in the magazine, 12 rounds back. That at least gives you a chance to get out of zed traps where you find yourself suddenly surrounded.
It's already the easiest perk in the game tied with right-side Field Medic to survive with, let alone solo with (where everything has low health, does low damage, and there are fewer Zeds in total and on the field at any given time).

If you're depending on the free heal weapon on top of your other survivability to just scrape by then you just need to learn how to play the fundamentals of Berserker better. Players have been doing fine with it since before the surge of stupid weapons and they'll do fine afterward.
 
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This thing's already one of Berserker's best weapons, and it's been buffed before.

It lets you spray at minor enemies from early waves which gives Berserker an early ranged option, and magdump Fleshpounds and Scrakes at close range for easy decaps. It's been on the meta loadouts since the Berserker Early Access rework.

Why is this getting buffed?
Probably because the Piranha Pistols exist. The current Berserker balancing has him pretty damn vulnerable against large groups of weaker enemies (even if you time your parries correctly), and a having $600 perk weapon means that the Single Piranha can be bought as early as Wave 2 without selling your crovel. This makes Suicidal a lot easier for Berserkers than if they solely relied on the base game's offerings.

See my previous prediction about possibly rebalancing the VLAD around the Single Piranha's price point.
 
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Probably because the Piranha Pistols exist. The current Berserker balancing has him pretty damn vulnerable against large groups of weaker enemies (even if you time your parries correctly), and a having $600 perk weapon means that the Single Piranha can be bought as early as Wave 2 without selling your crovel.
If you're burning the money on Wave 2 for that thing just to survive then there's other problems. The Piranha Pistol is in no way necessary to make it past Wave 2 where you still one-tap basically everything that isn't a Husk, and that just sets you back extra money for a loaded VLAD which you could have by Wave 3 for when Scrakes spawn in on Hell on Earth.

Husks are more of a problem, sure, but they're sort meant to be Zerk's counter-force to a point. You can still just shoot them to death with the 9mm.

This makes Suicidal a lot easier for Berserkers than if they solely relied on the base game's offerings.
See my above point, except Suicidal takes even longer to actually dump harder stuff on you. If close-range combat is proving that difficult then just roll Firebug for a round or two to farm money for a worthwhile loadout.

But the Piranha Pistols don't make much of a difference on either perk, let alone enough to warrant spending real world money.

- İncrease the husk suiciding threshold from %15 hp to %30-40 hp with less damage (it shouldn't kill zerker with 1 blow). It will give us more fun&omg moments.
Now this, I don't follow. The Husk sudoku is meant to be a punishment for not making a clean kill on a largely ranged enemy. Why should it do less damage?

- Give us a chance to play weeklies whenever we want. We shouldn't wait during months to play certain weekly modes. There are tons of modes not to waste them.
I can agree. Left 4 Dead 2 already has that giant list of all the previous weeklies to pick from.

Shoot, even the latest Warioware title lets you replay all the weekly events...
 
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If you're burning the money on Wave 2 for that thing just to survive then there's other problems. The Piranha Pistol is in no way necessary to make it past Wave 2 where you still one-tap basically everything that isn't a Husk, and that just sets you back extra money for a loaded VLAD which you could have by Wave 3 for when Scrakes spawn in on Hell on Earth.
Thing is, even if you can do well with a pure melee loadout, reaching a certain skill level won't magically make it so you need MORE effort to do well with the Piranha Pistols than with pure melee. In fact, the sword and pistol combo would still require less effort from the player to get similar results to a higher skilled player who didn't buy the Piranha on Wave 2.
Now this, I don't follow. The Husk sudoku is meant to be a punishment for not making a clean kill on a largely ranged enemy. Why should it do less damage?
Does the Husk suicide even do damage? I always thought it wasn't a damaging explosion but rather an instant kill script that plays within a certain radius. IMO, i think the better solution would be to turn that instant kill script into a "HP = 1, Armor = 0" script. That way, bad players will still die all the same while good players can actually be saved by a medic.
 
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Thing is, even if you can do well with a pure melee loadout, reaching a certain skill level won't magically make it so you need MORE effort to do well with the Piranha Pistols than with pure melee.
While true, that's largely irrelevant to my point.

The best comparison would be Commandos buying the Bullpup on Wave 2 instead of saving for the AK: the extra money spent buying and selling it back actually sets you back another round for when things legitimately get spicy, when you WANT that round 3 AK because that's when Scrakes start spawning in on Hell on Earth, which the Bullpup won't help with.

Or Medics buying the 201 instead of saving money for the 401 or Healthrower: the doubled-up sources of healing should not be necessary in Round 2 and unless your team is extra generous with their dosh, you'll be left wanting for a better weapon once problems start rolling in.

In fact, the sword and pistol combo would still require less effort from the player to get similar results to a higher skilled player who didn't buy the Piranha on Wave 2.
My point being they should be learning to play without using the Pistols in the first place because, like the scenarios above, it sets them further back on econ for a mild boost they ideally shouldn't need to begin with. Ideally you should be banking for a round 2 or 3 VLAD because that's where you get your actually good weapon.

Like I said in that other thread about the thing, and like that other dude said in that other thread about the other thing, it's not really a game-changer in shaking up the Zerker meta. It's a fun weapon but calling it P2W is a stretch because Zerk is still powerful enough to not need it in the first place.

Does the Husk suicide even do damage? I always thought it wasn't a damaging explosion but rather an instant kill script that plays within a certain radius.
It's an explosion centered on the Husk's model that does base 190 damage with exponential falloff past a certain radius, with any multipliers for solo/multi and difficulty coming into play. So whle it's not a "dead = yes/no" script, that damage just effectively happens to instakill everyone that isn't a roided Dreadnaught Berserker.

Husks are slow ranged enemies that have two methods of punishing players that allow them to get close in Suicidal and Hell on Earth. One is the flamethrower (the thing you should actually be scared of). The other is the kamikaze, which the Husk must be weakened to initiate and even then the Husk actually has to run up to an aggroed player to complete the attack.

The telltale sign of a Husk running up to a player should be a major cue to either kill it or break away. The threat of lethality is what keeps them interesting.
 
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I mean Patriarch & Abomination should be buffed at least on hoe primarily.

On solo, 2p&3p: These bosses are hard. They focus on you directly and you have to fight them face to face besides minions (spawns) distract your attention much more. So, you don't need buff these bosses for solo,2p&3p games.

On 4p,5p&6p: These bosses are like a joke. Only 1 player can kill all of the spawns and the others shoot the boss constantly. Your team most likely kill the Patriarch before his first healing. There are tons of stopping & incapacitation methods while he is fleeing. In the same way, you can kill most of the abomination spawns with 1-2 magazines. It would be better with tons of pukes, elite crawlers, bloats or abomination spawns (blinding chaotic zeds).

Please don't buff bosses movement speed. It means you kill slower perks and buff faster perks indirectly. Most important thing is number of spawns (maxmonsters&spawns at a time) per player. Increasing the spawns of boss, makes trash killer perks useful on boss waves as well.

I don't know how to buff King Fleshpound but it will be better.

There are only 2 bosses are balanced on hell on earth multiplayer: Hans Volter & Matriarch. There is already a little gap between the suicidal & hoe, these difficulty scale regulations can also fix it.

Nerfing medic and HRG Healthrower, reviving M32 Grenade Launcher are the other topics.

It's an explosion centered on the Husk's model that does base 190 damage with exponential falloff past a certain radius, with any multipliers for solo/multi and difficulty coming into play. So whle it's not a "dead = yes/no" script, that damage just effectively happens to instakill everyone that isn't a roided Dreadnaught Berserker.
I want to say they had better make husk explosion damage between 90-99 instead of 190 with larger radius of effect. It may cause multiple instakills with more evading chance and brings players skills/team spirit/risk-reward relations into the forefront because this is hell on earth. Even if you are veteran of this game, you should be able to face surprises. We need better mechanics rather than nore weapons imo. This game has already good content but need new modes, mechanics, little tweaks& regulations (all weeklies in the endless mode).
 
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I want to say they had better make husk explosion damage between 90-99 instead of 190 with larger radius of effect. It may cause multiple instakills with more evading chance and brings players skills/team spirit/risk-reward relations into the forefront because this is hell on earth. Even if you are veteran of this game, you should be able to face surprises.
I don't think this would quite work out like you've envisioned.

Effectively this would only mean a real threat for early-game Firebugs since Zerks and Medics could both easily get out of the way or survive the explosion due to their stats, Demos have explosive resistance, and everyone who doesn't have just a Caulk/flamer else can easily shoot the Husk down. You'd have to change the Husk's mechanical nature substantially to make this a threat with reduced damage, because unless something literally one-shots players, they're most likely going to bounce back all the same.

In my experience, the current Husk suicide usually does get at least one player because nobody expects a Husk to be left half-dead and he usually aggros on a person within a group.

We need better mechanics rather than nore weapons imo. This game has already good content but need new modes, mechanics, little tweaks& regulations (all weeklies in the endless mode).
Honestly, I just want the spam-friendliness of this game toned back some. That's really all I could ask for at this point. IDK if I trust the devs with making anything new, just fix what's already there.
 
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