Vermintide 1 + 2

Almost every weapon in the game has a block cost multiplier of 0.5x. Shields have have a multiplier of 0.25x which makes them twice as effective. Dagger however has a multiplier of 1, so it takes twice as much stamina to block anything in your effective arc.

Vermintide Versus mode is in development. I really thought they would never do this, but I guess the staff have been working on it during their 'hack weeks' and now they're going to put some actual resources into it. I have no idea if I'll like it long-term or not, but it looks pretty cool.

Every...single..game by now.

Razgon wrote:

Every...single..game by now.

At least it's not Battle Royale?

I like it! The coop is already golden so why not add a mode that was a big hit with L4D. Plus you get to play as Skaven and Chaos!

Who's in the beta for tonight? Me! Anyone else?

Beta for the expansion or something else?

There is a large beta for the Winds of Magic expansion running from June 11-18 (applications are closed), and a somewhat smaller invitation-only beta running from June 18 - July 2. Only the part after June 18th is under NDA so if you want to see some gameplay streams, now is the time.

Gotcha, thanks. I think I'd rather be surprised when it comes out so I'm good on streaming, but for those of you who are in the beta, enjoy.

Seems neat so far, I'm going to avoid the beta this time and just get into it fresh.

Also had a weird bug where the rat ogre froze mid-leap.
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The beta is looking good.

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2.0 patch dropped today alongside the pre-release beta of the Winds of Magic expansion.

The free patch includes a whole bunch of balance changes. Noteable changes include revamping the combat system to make staggering enemies much more important, increasing the level cap to 35, and a major rework of talents.

If you pre-order the expansion content you get access to the pre-release beta right away, making this the de facto release date for Winds of Magic, with some changes and tweaks likely expected in a week or so. The expansion includes a new enemy faction (beastmen), a new map, a new weapon for each hero, a new difficulty level (cataclysm) above legend, and a new game mode. The new game mode involves chunks of existing maps remixed in new ways with more objective-based gameplay and 'winds' which affect the maps and gameplay in unusual ways. Progression in the new game mode seems to be separate from the existing game mode.

ETA: progress from the beta will carry over to the release version.

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Ooof that patch size. Thankfully I'll be getting fiber soon and this will never be an issue again.

Be interesting to see what happens to Legend with the new hero power cap. A lot of the existing breakpoints will be obsolete since you won't need power bonuses to attain them.

Huh, might be tempted to jump back in after... a 1.5 year hiatus. Who's still playing these days?

I was tapering off for a couple months prior, I started playing other games like Vermintide 1 and Deep Rock Galactic while I was waiting for Winds of Magic. But I'll probably start playing daily again once it releases in full.

My first impressions have been kind of confused. They made stagger a whole new layer of combat mechanics instead of just being the thing that rats did when you hit them in the face. Almost all of the new talents they added are stagger related and they shuffled things around so that your ult talents are now at the cap of level 35.

I'm not quite sure what to think of the weaves, but one thing that irritates me greatly is that they made all of my old items sort of obsolete. You can't take your normal gear with you to do a weave, you have to grind weaves to unlock items and then grind more weaves to buff them up to parity with the red items you probably already have. Also they don't allow you to play them with bots.

Wow, sound like some very questionable changes there...What were they thinking with not bringing well earned weapons in along with no bots?

The new stagger system is incredibly convoluted. The basic PREMISE behind the stagger system is fine, staggered enemies are more vulnerable and take more damage, it makes sense right?

The part of the patch notes that details how the new stagger system works uses the word stagger THIRTY ONE different times, and in multiple different contexts.

Pre WoM stagger had exactly one definition:

- Stagger: The act of staggering an enemy with an attack that interrupts their animation and can stun or knock them over.

In the WoM patch notes alone (not even getting into the talent descriptions!) we have:

- Stagger: The act of staggering an enemy with an attack that interrupts their animation and can stun or knock them over.
- Staggered: An enemy that has been staggered.
- Stagger damage bonus: The damage bonus you get from hitting a staggered enemy
- Stacking staggers: Multiple staggers applied to the same enemy
- No stagger: An unstaggered enemy
- 1 Application of stagger: An enemy who has been staggered once
- 2 Stagger appplications: An enemy who has been staggered twice, but in quick succession
- Staggers stacked: The number of staggers stacked on an enemy.
- Unstaggered: Enemies who are resistant to damage because they haven't been staggered.
- Staggered ones: Enemies who take more damage because they have been staggered.
- Unstaggered: Enemies with no stacks of stagger who are resistant to stagger because they haven't been staggered yet.
- Stagger Threshold: The rising threshold of resistance enemies get from being repeatedly staggered:
- Stagger Count: The number of times an enemy has been staggered in a row (caps at 2)
- Stagger count to 2: The max level of stagge which is applied by pushes and some heavy attacks, instead of a single level of stagger.
- Stagger: Any reaction that interrupts an attack
- Stagger reduction: The resistance elites and marauders have to being staggered.
- Animation categories of stagger: The three different levels of animation performed by a staggered target.
- Staggers in general: The tendency for stagger animations to default to medium, instead of low or high, which reduces the movement of staggered enemies
- Stagger damage dynamic: The new stagger mechanic as a whole.
- Count everything as stagger count 1: Talents that make enemies take damage as if they have been staggered once, even if you haven't staggered them yet.
- Count headshots and crits as full stagger: Talents that make headshots and crits deal the full stagger damage bonus even on targets that are not staggered.
-Ranged attacks use the stagger damage: Ranged attacks always damage enemies as if they have one count of stagger. (but do they stack with talents or override them?)

Are you confused yet?

To be fair, you can pretty much ignore the stagger system and just play the game if you want.

Eventually someone will come out with a condensed guide that clearly breaks down all of the different stagger interactions, but until then I'm completely ignoring that entire line of talents and just trying to play as normal. So far it feels a bit off. They changed the dodge system again, and enemies in general are more resistant to being staggered by pushes and attacks.

I'm still not entirely sure how Weaves work but I heard that they will periodically wipe all player progress to zero when the ladder season resets. If true this makes me want to play weaves even less, what a flop.

6 months ago I was all in on this, but fast-forward to now and I'm on the fence. All my friends are done with the game and word of mouth about the new content has not been great. Any impressions of the full release would be welcome.

So I don't know what Fatshark are doing but they seemed to really miss on this expansion/patch. Why would they forego hard earned items and not allow them to be used in Weaves? That in itself would tick me off big time had I spent hours grinding for items. It seems like they had done very well initially as the gameplay itself is a ton of fun. People are getting tired of endless grinding. They want new maps, new classes etc and Fatshark isn't delivering. Hopefully they can salvage this.

I haven't played nearly enough of it to give a full review, so these are just early impressions. Be a little bit wary of what you read on reddit and the steam forums — so of the criticisms are valid, but a lot of it is just plain old resistance to change. The game needs change, or it gets pretty stale. Full disclosure: I received a gift copy of the expansion, so I don't have any real dollars in the race.

Spoiler:

The beastmen are great. They are properly scary, and I'm having to learn new ways to cope with fighting them. The new war-banner mechanics are interesting, and create ad-hoc objectives that you can work together to overcome. The new minotaur mini-boss is still an enigma to me, and I've not learned to fight it effectively at all. I've only run the new map twice, but it was pretty fun both times, and fighting almost entirely beastmen on a level is satisfyingly difficult. The absence of new special enemies is perhaps disappointing, but you might consider the banners and archers new specials...

I haven't played any of the new weapons yet. So far I've heard (from people I know and trust) that the spear and shield is good but a bit hard to use because it obscures your view, the fire flail is a bit underwhelming, and the billhook is great (possibly too strong).

I've barely played any of the weaves at all. I'm very disappointed that there's a separate grind for weaves, and that the randomness of the base game mode is gone, but I'm hopeful that playing them will at least be an interesting change of pace at times. Some of the effects seem really interesting, and even if I end up hating weaves in general I'm betting that I'll enjoy messing around with the modifiers in the modded realm. I should add that progression isn't totally separate anymore, as you now earn weave progress in normal mode, so it should be possible to level stuff up playing the normal game you're already familiar with — it will still take time, though. The weaves include a new leaderboard system that I (and perhaps most others) don't care at all about. There is sure some drama surrounding the top groups, though (surprise! some are hackers).

Requiring players to beat the new map before they can access weaves is a questionable decision. Requiring players to beat the 4 lord maps on legend (as I've done countless times before) before they can access cataclysm seems like a really bad choice to me. I bought the new content, just let me play it without needing to grind the old content again for 2 hours first!

They've added 5 levels to the level cap. Much has been made of this as evidence of additional grind, but that isn't really the case. Just play as you normally would and the additional levels will come pretty quickly. The practical implication of them (increased hero power) isn't actually all that earth shattering, unless you are poring over spreadsheets to optimize for breakpoints. Beyond the increased power level there is no content gated behind the new levels, as far as I know.

On higher difficulty (my experience with the new patch so far is on legend, I haven't tried cataclysm yet), the game is different than it has been, and it feels tougher. Naturally, this has upset a lot of people. The handful of pub games I've played have been less successful than before the patch, but I'm enjoying it more. It feels like you have to work together to leverage the new stagger system, and the gameplay has gotten more team-focused and interesting to me as a result. Horde enemies (especially clan and slave rats) seem much scarier than they were.

I generally like the direction they've gone with the changes to talents, though there's a fair bit of fine tuning to be done. The loadouts that are 'strong' and 'weak' have been shaken up quite a bit. It was all starting to feel a bit stale to me, so I'm a fan of the changes.

There's also been a lot of fuss about changes to dodging, and I also feel like this is overblown. Rhythmic dodging still seems to work fine against hordes, and I played on transatlantic ping last night and it didn't feel substantially different than transatlantic ping before the patch. The biggest changes affect the end of the dodge and not the beginning, so it makes sense that it still feels OK on ping. While dodging feels mostly unchanged to me, there are two big exceptions. One is elites — if you've trained yourself to spam dodge against elites it is a much less effective strategy than it was, and more careful timing is now required. The other is running attacks of all sorts — if you, like me, like to back-dodge to avoid running attacks (I often do this when charging a ranged attack) you are about to get hit a lot until you break this habit.

TLDR: The new race is great. The new map seems pretty good. I can't comment yet on the new weapons. I can't comment on the new game mode, other than to say it seems interesting. Negative reaction to changes to dodging, the new stagger system, and the increased level cap are generally overblown. The changes to dodging, stagger, and talents feel positive to me. It is very disappointing that they not only failed to remove existing grind, but also introduced some new grind — negative reactions are more justified here, in my opinion (but still probably overblown, based on the nasty comments I've read). I'm also disappointed that they didn't make some changes to improve the vanilla crafting and loot system. Overall, having tried some of Winds of Magic for myself, I'm enjoying it and think it's mostly good content. As always, it's 10X better with friends than with pubs.

Thanks for the post and info BushPilot. I should say my comments are more of what I read from Steam reviews and Reddit than playtime so I will take a look myself. I appreciate it and looking forward to slaying some beastmen!

I'm going on hiatus from the game, it's just too broken to play right now. Not only is the balance totally out of wack but the game itself is highly unstable. Sometimes if you join a quickplay in progress it will make you a different class and one time i was in the middle of a match and time stopped for a few seconds before resuming at super-speed, at which point I was dead and had no idea what was happening.

And stuff like this in the latest hotfix...

We have just hotfixed the issue in yesterdays patch related to fire dot damage not scaling with hero power appropriately. Sienna mains rejoice.

So far my ratio of successful missions to missions that ended in failure or due to bugs is something like 1/3. Consequently I don't have much experience fighting them yet but beastmen seem to be a little overpowered. The big charging ones are annoying because they don't telegraph their attacks, they just lean forwards and zoom at you like someone riding a segway. The banner carriers are also really frustrating because if you don't kill the banner immediately you get dunked on by 20 night invulnerable hyper-dense regenerating beastmen. Depending on the terrain this may actually be impossible, like the tunnels on Blightreaper. Bots have also gone from relatively reliably to utterly useless. They can't effectively fight beastmen and when a banner carrier shows up they totally ignore the banner too.

Another thing I don't like is the beastmen colour palette. Skaven and chaos units are mostly brown but the different types have recognizable sillhouettes and some of them are coloured differently like red stormvermin and green monks. The beastmen on the other hand are mostly coloured the same, when you put a bunch of them together they just blur into a brown mess, like tree bark or something. They are much larger than the other two types of enemies and the ever problematic hyperdensity makes them clip into each other horribly.
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Seems like the last couple patches have been dialing in the difficulty and solving most of the bugs.

The major change I was waiting for is that they no longer have progress wipes for Weaves and you keep all of your items when the season ends. In addition to this they will add a quickplay mode for weaves that just matches you into a random game and doesn't score you for leaderboard placement (which is something I never cared about).

So I'm ready to pick up the game again after my break, but I'm still waiting for some beastmen balance fixes, the banner carrier in particular is kind of ridiculous.

Any word on when they will release the pvp part?

They released a dev blog (their first for versus) recently, but it didn't say anything about a release date. They're working on it, but I have no idea if it will be months or years.

BushPilot wrote:

They released a dev blog (their first for versus) recently, but it didn't say anything about a release date. They're working on it, but I have no idea if it will be months or years.

Thanks, I remember it being announced in the summer but didn't see anything about it since.

What's the consensus on Winds of Magic now? Steam reviews are still not good, saying essentially weaves are a total waste of time and the Beastmen add difficulty but little else.

Anyone still playing? I picked this game up long after the initial buzz died down and the friend group I played with petered out after about 25 hours... I really miss it.