Vermintide 2

Heroes!

Welcome to Patch 2.0.3 for Vermintide 2.

We wanted to get some changes in which we hope bring a bit more of that classic weapon feel to the difficulty settings you're accustomed to prior to patch 2.0. Putting some weight behind your strikes is an important part of the combat systems in Vermintide 2, and we can appreciate that a few of the adjustments in the 2.0 patch were removing a big part of that.

We are keeping all your thoughts and feedback close to heart, and we genuinely appreciate you all taking your time to bring those thoughts to us.

Balance Adjustments

• TempHP on Cleave: Increased healing per enemy hit to 0.75 from 0.5. First enemy hit now heals you for 50% of the initial value, instead of not at all.
• Changed stagger resistance multipliers per difficulty from:
  • Recruit: 1.0
  • Veteran: 1.7
  • Champion: 2.75
  • Legend: 2.75
• to:
  • Recruit: 0.85
  • Veteran: 1.25
  • Champion: 1.7
  • Legend: 1.7
• Cataclysm remains unchanged.
  
  This means enemies will react stronger to weapon hits compared to the previous version. These values are more in line with the values before the Winds of Magic expansion.

Fixes

• Fixed a hardlock on Weave 31 which was hindering progression.
• In some situations the Activated Ability bar would appear to be unfilled, yet the ability was available for use, we have fixed this so that the bar represents the true state in such situations.
• Fixed an issue where Olesya's VO was incorrectly synched betweeen host and client(s)
• Magic Barrels should now explode when thrown (after having taken damage) as expected.
• Fixed an issue in Horn of Magnus where enemies could spawn beneath the final elevator during the escape sequence.
• Fixed an issue where enemies spawned with the Standard Bearer could spawn in locations too far from the Standard Bearer
• Fixed an issue where Rasknitt could be stunlocked by multiple pulls from Salty's Billhook.
• Fixed an issue where the Slayer Leap could be aimed through blocker volumes, causing you to at times be stuck in the air. A side effect of this fix is also that you shouldn't be able to jump off a cliff to your death anymore.
• Fixed an issue on Life/Ghyran Weaves where expired thorn brambles would be visible and non-functioning for hot-joining players.
• Upgrade/Unlock texts are now properly displayed and do no longer get truncated in Athanor menu.
• Dark Omens: Re-opened hole in mountain for the alternate path that was previously accidentally sealed up
• Dark Omens: Fixes ambush event getting stuck occasionally
• Fixed an issue where "prestige" levels, or progress toward new levels after 35 doesn't show in the hero view.
• Fixed an issue where the end state wouldn't animate the experience bar after hitting level 35.
• Fixed a crash at the end of Dark Omens involving the Minotaur.
• Fixed various other crashes.

Tweaks

• Changed the behaviour when using Sienna Unchaineds Living Bomb skill while doing any action. Previously using the skill while doing an action would make you to revert to an idle animation after the detonate animation was done, but keeping the weapon action going. Now the detonate animation will not play if you are already in an weapon action.
• If you do not own Winds of Magic, the lobby browser should now correctly show that weave matches are unavailable.
• Subtitles are now visible in cutscenes.
• Dark Omens: Added Minotaur to end event on Champion difficulty and above

Heroes!

Welcome to Patch 2.0.5.

Whilst we continue to fix and test fixes on bugs you've been reporting, we wanted to make some quick balance adjustments which should further address feedback on the flow of combat since 2.0.

With the systems in place now we have a lot more flexibility in scaling difficulty in a way that doesn't just inflate numbers, but provides us with a selection of dials we can tune in order to create hard yet engaging combat situations. There is of course a process of adjusting to keep that familiar meatiness of Vermintide 2 of old. This patch turns a couple of those dials and should bring further familiarity to your weapon swings.

Originally posted by "--- A note from Game Designer ---":
For WoM beta we added a lower stagger threshold and upped stagger resistance, overall but specifically on Marauders and Gors, since everything was throwing stuff around and cause balance and difficulty (there were a bunch of ways to use headshots/crits/chaining attacks to get around it). This hit fast/light weapons the most since some light attacks now required +power builds or headshots/crits to stagger enemies at all.

This was tweaked with an across the board lowering of stagger resistance last week, but since the lower stagger theshold and specific tweaks to Marauders/Gors is still in play we end up in a situation where we effect ALL enemies.

So we've reset Marauders/Gors, removed stagger threshold for hordes/roamers (So everyone hit by anything will interrupt attacks again) and returned power to light, fast weapons to have more control WHILE maintaining some challenge and not making the jump between champion/legend to Cata a huge thing. Basically just finetune of the a bit rougher fix from earlier.

Should help with "phantom hits" feeling aswell as the new fix removes instances of "you hit and damaged 3 guys, but only 2 of them was staggered and aborted their attacks". And people won't chainstagger elites with "lighter" weapons as easily as they currently do (which is a bit too easy)

One last thing: Every attack has a stagger strength, every enemy has a stagger resistance and some have a stagger reduction. we compare Strength minus Reduction with Resistance to see what level of stagger you get, if any. The levels are by default 25%, 100% and 250% of stagger resistance to reach Light, Medium or Heavy stagger respectively. Light threshold was 0% on pre-WoM builds, which all horde and roaming enemies have now been reset to.

Click to expand...

Balance Adjustments

• Removed light stagger (lowest) threshold for all horde and roamer enemies (slaves/clan rats, fanatics/marauders, ungord/gors). All of them should now stagger when hit/cleaved through by anything, like old Live version. Previous WoM Betas had a threshold at 25% of stagger resistance to initiate stagger.
• Increased Raider light stagger (lowest) threshold from 25% to 40% of stagger resistance.

Below some changes that target the stagger resistances of enemies, where we remove all cases of ignored staggers from horde/roamer enemies specifically to ensure lighter weapons can maintain similar levels of control they have on pre-WoM. Note that stagger durations and levels have still been tuned but everything hit should react. Headshots and crits still boost stagger strength but are no longer to required to stagger outside of elites:

• Reset all elites, specials and berzerkers to previous WoM Beta stagger resistance scale of:
  • Recruit: 1.0
  • Veteran: 1.7
  • Champion: 2.75
  • Legend: 2.75
  • Cataclysm: 2.75
• Tweaked horde and roamer (slaves/clan rats, fanatics/marauders, ungor/gors) stagger resistance to:
  • Recruit: 0.85
  • Veteran: 1.4
  • Champion: 2.25
  • Legend: 2.25
  • Cataclysm: 2.25
• Reduced stagger reduction of Marauders (from 0.6 to 0.2) and Gors (from 0.4 to 0.1).

Fixes

• Fixed a crash in the Prologue UI.