[2019] PINNED: Vermintide 2 - Patch 2.0.5

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.

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.

Originally posted by Moandor: Btw, I'm just curious, but what were the reason for the 2.0 changes ? Some people asking for it ? Or you just wanted to try something new ?

What the changes bring us are more dials to turn in order to create difficulty that isn't just artificial inflation of HP or reduction of output relative to enemy HP.

We're now turning these new dials to get things back feeling more like they were before in terms of how combat feels, whilst removing some cheese. We're not removing the new systems, just tweaking them to get that classic feeling from Pre-WoM, so we're in a place where we can ramp up difficulty in more interesting ways than we could before putting these systems in place.

Originally posted by Moandor: Yep, and that's a great idea, new system really has some interesting mechanics, but I wasn't able to enjoy this mainly because of the cleave nerf (and some other things, but clearly not as frustrating as cleave).

Thank you for answering :)

No worries, hopefully these changes are on the right track. :)