Vermintide 1 + 2

So far as I know it's just me, Emmes and Bushpilot that still play this on a regular basis. Best bet is to just friend everyone and message them if you see them online. I typically play at least once a night to get my daily mission done.

Discoursian still plays too.
Feel free to send me a friend request, then send me a steam message if you see me playing to see what I'm up to. I mostly play legend but I'm happy to play other difficulties for a GWJer, provided I'm not already waist deep in a pre-made lobby. If I don't respond, try again, as I often miss the steam notifications in the heat of battle.

I played a bit right when the game came out. Only made it to 100 ish power if I remember correctly. How hard is it to jump back in and get to a place where I wouldn't be bringing a group down?

At what difficulty do you actually learn to play the game? I remember on the first two difficulties people could basically do what they want and run off solo and you would completed the maps no problem.

I mostly bop between 2nd and 3rd difficulty. I'd rather do 4th on the comms with someone, since its pretty unforgiving.

Malkroth wrote:

I played a bit right when the game came out. Only made it to 100 ish power if I remember correctly. How hard is it to jump back in and get to a place where I wouldn't be bringing a group down?

Easier than it was before, all kinds of loot chests except for those from recruit now boost your item level to a max of 300 so there is no real point in saving your chests for later and you can progress to the cap just by playing veteran.

Other than that you just need to master the basics. Dodge, block, kill specials, kill elites, know when to use your ult and when to save it. You can worry about more advanced concepts like dodge dancing bosses later, if you can just learn those game mechanics it will make you better than half of the people expecting to be carried through legend. I can write you a basic guide if you want.

Yeah, I’m still here, and I still play.

Friends and I picked this up about a month ago and just completed our first runthrough of the base game on Recruit earlier this week. I think we wiped on the first couple attempts on Righteous Stand at the beginning before we got familiar with the game and it's been pretty smooth sailing since. In fact, probably too smooth as I've been keenly aware how much lazy behavior we've been able to get away with on Recruit.

We hit Righteous Stand on Veteran last night and bounced off it resoundingly roughly 5 times before we finally made it through, and even then two of us were down with the other two frantically fleeing into the Bridge of Shadows gripping our hard-earned tomes tight. It was a learning experience and seriously... I love this freaking game. I now feel like Recruit is a poor showcase for what this game is all about and I can't wait to keep diving in and get through this lovely mess.

Question: Chaos Spawn. Is there a trick to dodging or avoiding its grabs beyond mobility and keeping your distance? We ran into one of these almost right off the bat last night and wiped both times because the bugger kept healing cus we didn't know how to escape its grabs.

Alot of the speacial abilities will momentarily kick the spawn off balance and it will drop your Ally. Knight charge for one, but I don't know all of them.

Thanks we suspected that. I am playing WHC so I'll make a point of having my CA for that.

Bombs will also knock allies out of a chaos spawn grab. If you're still learning and getting grabbed a lot, it's wise for your team to hold onto some bombs and certain class abilities (mercenary, ranger, witch hunter captain, pyromancer, battle wizard, foot knight) to knock your allies free and stop the spawn from healing.

The spawn has four or five sorts of attacks. Two look pretty similar - one is the grab that you know, and the other is a slap that sends you flying. The slap doesn't do damage (or does minimal damage?) if you have your block up when it hits you, though I think it drains all (or at least a lot) of your stamina. Another two also look similar - a quick triple slam attack, and another one with 4 or 5 slams it does a bit faster. It initiates both of them when you are farther away at the start of the attack and moves quickly toward you as it attacks. These attacks will drain your stamina, but won't damage you if your block is up. Finally there is a stationary ground slam attack that will deal considerable damage, even through a full-stamina block.

The trick to avoiding damage from the spawn is to dodge at the right moment. The ideal technique isn't necessarily to keep your distance, but rather to get in close to bait out a grab/slap or slam attack, then dodge when the animation starts. With practice and timing, it's possible (though tricky) to get a chaos spawn to pretty much stand still. This is ideal, because it lets you keep the spawn in a safe place if there's too much happening for your team to help, or to allow your team to easily DPS the boss instead of chasing it everywhere. This "dodge-dancing" is tricky, though, and you're punished pretty harshly if you dodge at the wrong time.

When I was learning it helped to try and dodge diagonally back and to the left (as the grab comes from the right side), and to take weapons/classes with long dodges and high effective dodge counts(witch hunter captain, handmaiden, one-handed weapons). If you've got a shield, not only is your dodge shorter than with a 1-handed axe, but you also only get a single full-size dodge before it needs a brief recharge (spammed dodges will quickly become short and ineffective - the number you get depends on the weapon). It's still possible to dodge-dance with a shield or big 2-hander, but there's much less room for error.

If you just can't dodge-dance no matter what, focus on keeping safe while you have aggro and letting your teammates do damage. In the absence of dodge dancing that means a lot of kiting, as the spawn is fast and aggressive. When the spawn is in between attacks, you need to be looking at your kite route to make sure that you're not moving into a wall or some other piece of debris that will slow you and get you grabbed. A running spawn is far harder for your teammates to damage, though.

Also, watch the off-target attacks and grabs. They do just as much damage as if you're the intended target.

Beyond avoiding damage, the less time the boss is alive the less damage you'll take. Some classes and weapons have excellent boss damage (dual daggers shade with class ability, waystalker with hagbane, fireball staff, etc) and can end a boss quickly before it can do substantial damage to a team.

Oh, and if you're in voice chat with your team, call out the aggro switches. Getting grabbed when you're looking the other way and fighting a horde isn't much fun. If you get thrown a long distance by a slap attack, an aggro switch is very likely.

This is fantastic stuff, thank you guys. I knew about the multi-slam attack and the big slam but don't think we've seen the big stationary slam yet.

Dodging: I wasn't aware there was multidirectional dodging. Since I use the keyboard arrow keys for movement my setup is a bit unusual. I started dodging by using jump (right mouse button) and a directional key simultaneously, but for some reason this was really unreliable so I turned on double directional tap (which obviously will prevent me from multi-directional dodging).

I didn't mention this, but even though we tried to avoid this, both fights with the Chaos Spawn happened concurrent with horde rushes. It was just not happening with our lack of experience.

Good calls all around, thanks again.

Arrow keys...double tap to dodge

Back-dodging also works, I just think it's a little riskier. If you've got a horde and a boss at the same time, the name of the game is for one person to take the boss away from the team/horde so that the team can kill the horde first and then everyone can focus on the boss. Easier said than done, I know.

I tried double tap to dodge for a day or so, before I realized that I wouldn’t be able to effectively react with a dual key press in time. If your setup work for you, great, but I’d try to see if you can get dodge with the jump button working. Once you get the hang of it, just the lack of time to push the button the second time might save your bacon.

I'm not sure why but double tapping is nearly impossible for me, at least at the speed required for dodging, QQ cancel and stuff. If I try to rapidly tap any given finger it sort of paralyzes the rest of my hand momentarily. I use left shift for dodge and hold it down while tapping an arrow key, I find this much more ergonomic.

I'll have to mess with the timing on jump dodging again to see what the deal is. The issue so far is running around while not fighting I can do it consistently w/o issue by holding a direction and then hitting jump (right mouse) to dodge. However for some reason in battle a significant amount of the time doing it in that same order results in a jump rather than a dodge, which sucks. Is there some kinda trick to it that I'm missing?

If you're jumping instead of dodging, in my experience that usually means you're spamming dodge and you have dodge and jump on the same key. Happened to me all the time before I split them onto two keys. This is how a lot of people play, but in my opinion the inputs are cleaner and there are fewer mistakes if you split them onto separate keys.

I personally have been much happier since learning to have them on separate keys. Keeping jump on space and moving dodge to shift is probably most common, but I prefer jump on shift and dodge on space, as dodge is the more important action in this game.

I also have jump on shift and dodge on space, for exactly the reason Bush said: I was already used to hitting space to dodge when I had them on the same key, so I moved the less important one off. Still takes me a few seconds to remember every time I load up.

Of course, keybinds don’t matter at all then the game is so laggy that you get hit when nothing is swinging at you, but that’s just my internet giving me problems. Which is funny, because people half the world away (literally, we play with some) don’t have the same type of latency issues I have. Frustrating enough to force me to stay away from the game for weeks at a time.

funny enough, I had a bit of that lag yesterday which was causing obviously missed attacks to hit and some other strange stuff. Played more at night and no such issues.

I think I am gonna try sticking with double tap dodge for now, mostly because (since I use the arrow keys for movement) it's going to be hard to find an easily-accessible key for it that I don't already have bound to something else. I did a bunch of 3-bot-and-me runs on Righteous Stand yesterday to level up some of characters and by the end of it I was dodging a lot more intuitively.

I started playing Zealot yesterday for the first time and it's quickly become my favorite career. So.much.damage. His role is a little clearer to me than the WHC too, which makes it an easier choice when the group doesn't have much crowd control/tanking.

What are your preferred characters/careers?

I'm a fan of the hammer knight. I like giving the buff aura to my allies, and double tapping the Chaos knights in the head to death.

I don't really have a favourite. I spent my first 400-500 playing Kruber almost exclusively, mostly mercenary and huntsman with a little FK on the side. Since then I've been doing one character at a time, picking one class and doing 100 missions or more until I feel like I have a good grasp of all the different weapon combos. Besides mercenary and huntsman I've done Ironbreaker too and I'm about 15 games away from 100 on WHC. After that I'm thinking of doing Shade or Pyro.

It also helps to spread the veteran items around a bit, I'm only missing 2 red weapons on kruber, bardin and saltz now.

Holy cow. I'm hoping I still find the game interesting thousands of missions in.

Side note: Is any of the DLC worth picking up?

The shadows over boganhaven DLC gives you access to 3 weekly quests with cosmetic rewards and 2 more missions.. The back to ubersreik DLC gives you access to 3 remastered missions from the first game and a new weapon for each class. If you think you'll stick around a while it's worth it from a gameplay perspective, but whether or not you think it's worth the price is another matter. If in doubt just wait for the inevitable sale.

The collectors edition doesn't have anything special, just some green outfits and a statue for your keep.

Gracias, think I'll pass for now. The friend group I've been playing with isn't known for longevity with any one title and I'm not doing quickplay, but maybe if we're still playing this together in 6 mos.

I've been playing the butt out of this lately but unfortunately haven't been able to get four friends in the game at once, so nearly all the runs have had at least one bot. I've learned that the bots copy the last role, gear setup, and talents the host of the game last used for those characters, so I've started logging into those characters and setting them up specifically for party balance. Last night a friend and I completed a couple of Heroic Deeds back to back with Kerillian and Sienna respectively, with Kruber and Bardin bots configured as Mercenary and Ironbreaker, with defensive talents and gear oriented toward crowd control. The trick is both deeds had the Nurgle's Rot trait, which is that party members take damage over time. To counter this, we had Kerillian talent "Rejuvenating Locus" so her passive heal under 50% health affected the entire party, and I took my "30% more healing" talent. This resulted in me very slowly regenerating health over time and the rest of the party maintaining parity once they hit 50% health.

This actually worked out really well. We got through the first one (double damage/health elites) + the dot without too much issue, but came precariously close to wiping on the second (more hordes + dot) with one of the coolest sequences I've seen so far. We were on the last probably 5-10% of the level without much of a care in the world when a mini horde with 2 Chaos Warriors dropped right on top of us in a very narrow passage. Before we knew it, Kruber and me and my buddy were all down with the Ironbreaker standing alone with both Chaos Warriors still alive along with a couple of minor Chaos grunts. We thought we were doomed, but after trying and failing to pick Kruber up twice, the Ironbreaker went to work with us cheering him on and was somehow able to kill EVERYTHING and got Kruber back up, with Kerillian and I being saved a moment later. Go Bardin!

This game rules.

Jow wrote:

I've learned that the bots copy the last role, gear setup, and talents the host of the game last used for those characters, so I've started logging into those characters and setting them up specifically for party balance.

Have you tried modding yet? Most of the approved mods are extremely useful.

The loadout mod in particular lets you set up equipment and talents and automatically override whatever your character is equipped with when used as a bot. This is important because what you use as a player can be almost useless in the hands of the AI.

No I sure haven't but I need to apparently. Are there any mods for looking at the cumulative effects of your gear? Does the loadout mod allow you to modify your layouts without having to log into every character? It's been kind of a pain at times trying to find which character variation has specific items equipped so I can unequip to salvage them.

Loadout manager gives you 10 slots for each class (i.e. 30 per character) that will remember what gear, cosmetics, and talents you saved into it, allowing you to reload them at the click of a button. To solve your 'unequip to salvage' problem, you might create a loadout with only the blueprint gear for each character so you can quickly unload everything. Some people even do this at the end of each session with a character just so that it will never interfere with crafting. I'm not one of those people, but I get it.

There's another mod called UI improvements (or something similar - not to be confused with UI tweaks, which is the best HUD mod) which changes a bunch of menu stuff, including letting you open boxes on other characters without switching to them. I don't recall right now, but it might let you change equipment without switching classes too.

Another useful mod for inventory management is called item filter. It has some quirks because of stuff the modder can't tweak so sometimes it resets itself during crafting, but it can be really useful to find that item you're looking for if you're like me and never clean up your inventory.

All three are sanctioned, so they can be used in the game without affecting your loot/progression/matchmaking. They will probably have some dependencies (usually 'vermintide mod framework' and 'penlight lua libraries'), but I think it's pretty straightforward. If you have any trouble, just ask in here.

I also highly recommend chat block (puts your character into a blocking state while you're in the menu or typing in chat), bot improvements (combat) (bots make some better/more useful combat choices), crosshair customization (change crosshair dot type and colour), parry indicator (helps you see the 'parry window'), sticky grim (avoid accidental book destruction), crosshairs fix (only needed if you've adjusted your FOV), friendly fire indicator (so you don't turn around to look for friendly damage), and, if you don't use UI Tweaks (which has the same functionality built into it), persistent ammo counter (makes your ammo count visible when you have a melee weapon out).

Thanks for the mod tips!

UI Improvements lets you freely swap classes in menus without having to switch your active character. This lets you use the inventory as if you were another class and do crafting and stuff.

In addition to what's recommended above I would add:

- Skip Intro: Self explanatory.
- Numeric UI: This shows numbers on your healthbar instead of flat colour bars, it also adds a timer for your ult so you can see how many seconds remain on cooldown.
- Notice Key Pickup: This tells you if someone grabs a key on the level.
- Host Quick Play Games: This lets you start a quickplay game with yourself as the host instead of being matchmaked into someone else's game.
- Third Person equipment: Lets you see your carried equipment, works on other players too. This will tell you what weapons they use and if they have a potion or not similar to L4D2 which also models carried items.
- Reroll Improvements: This makes the crafting menu easier to use in several ways, but more importantly it VASTLY speeds up the crafting animation.
- No Wobble: This removes the camera shake from all weapon attacks. They mess with your aim and can make you seasick sometimes, I much prefer gameplay without them.
- Scoreboard Tweaks: This adds a few more categories to the end game score screen, like friendly fire.
- Killfeed Tweaks: This makes multiple killfeed items stack, so it will say Berserker x 3 instead of Berserker Berserker Berserker.
- Mission Timer: This shows a stopwatch that tracks how long you have been in a mission, but it doesn't work if you join a game in progress.
- Armoury/Bestiary: These mods let you look up enemy/weapon stats, including weapon skins.
- Locked and Loaded: This adds an icon that shows if your weapon is loaded or not.