[2020] Season 2 & Patch 2.1.0 is live!

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Heroes,

Welcome to Season 2 and 2.1.0 on PC! This update brings new exciting things to Warhammer: Vermintide 2, and we are thrilled for you to delve into the first chapter of the Curse of Drachenfels, and explore what Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders can offer. This update is free for all owners of Vermintide 2.

The full patch notes for 2.1.0 can be found at the end of this page, and if you are curious about the changes from the Season 2 Beta to 2.1.0 you can find it described with patch notes and comments from a Game Designer further down.

THE CURSE OF DRACHENFELS - OLD HAUNTS

Play the 1st chapter of The Curse of Drachenfels.

Folk from the villages in the Grey Mountain have gone missing, and Lohner sends our heroes back into the shadows of Castle Drachenfels to have a closer look.

LOHNER’S EMPORIUM OF WONDERS IS OPEN

Lohner is a man of practicality and has always been able to find ways to make a profit even in the direst of situations. There is no situation that cannot be fruitful if you have the right connections, and Lohner seems to have plenty of those considering he has now put up shop in the Keep. His customers? The Ubersreik 5 of course!

Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders is the in-game shop where you will be able to purchase cosmetics. The idea is to allow players to do daily and weekly quests and collect in-game currency to target the cosmetics they want. The store will at launch contain hats and hero skins, but we aim to add more content over time. There will also be a few Premium Cosmetics available for purchase for real-world money as DLCs through Steam.

The new in-game currency is known as Shillings and they can be earned by completing Daily and Weekly Quests. Anyone in possession of one of the existing Vermintide 2 DLC’s will get a one time bag of Shillings for each DLC as well as additional Quests.

DAILY & WEEKLY QUESTS
Cousin Okri is very generous and has decided to put some extra coins as a reward for the Ubersreik 5 for completing his quests. All his Dwarfen wealth has to go somewhere, as Okri himself has no need of it.

WHY DID YOU ADD PREMIUM ITEMS?
The reasons behind this are that we want to try to release content that involves gameplay for free while charging for a few premium cosmetics instead. By adding a few select cosmetics that you can purchase for real money you can support the studio and we can create more free content updates, such as the Curse of Drachenfels levels.

And do not worry, there are far more cosmetics available to purchase with Shillings than what is available on the Downloadable Content tab!

Ultimately the purchasable content will function as small DLCs and if you wish you can also purchase them through Steam as with the DLCs Shadows over Bögenhafen and Back to Ubersreik.

QUICK-PLAY WEAVES

A new and swifter way to play weaves. With separate queues divided in 5 difficulties you can now join at any difficulty you would like. The Weaves have also been reshuffled.

Quick-Play Weaves will now also be playable with bots!

NEW CHALLENGES & UPDATED ESSENCE DISTRIBUTION

With each new Curse of Drachenfels mission there will be new challenges provided by Cousin Okri.

We have increased the amount of essence received at completion of Weaves, as well as added a larger essence bonus for completing a Quick-play Weave.

What has changed from the Season 2 Beta?

Thank you for participating in the Beta of Season 2, and we are grateful for all of your feedback. For patch 2.1.0 we have taken a closer look at feedback received regarding the weekly/daily quests as they were reported feeling too grindy, and we agree with you.

Balance was also one of the major feedback points, specifically Battle Wizard Kaboom! builds have been investigated, as well as cooldown reduction from attacks across the board.

LEVELS

• Against the Grain
  • Fixed an issue where a player who dies during the escape sequence respawns in an illogical location.
• Convocation of Decay
  • Fixed a patrol path to stop a particular patrol spawn from getting stuck.
  • Fixed a location where enemies would do a long leap to players at a specific location instead of just pathing as expected.
  • Players should now be able to complete “Feed Me Sinner!” on Cataclysm difficulty.
• Fortunes of War
  • Fixed a spot where players could mitigate enemy attacks entirely.
• Old Haunts
  • Fix for lamp oil and explosive barrels (and general pickup tweaks).
  • Fixed a situation where a player who died could respawn behind a closed door in the Gargoyle area.
  • Fixed a few sticky spots where players could get stuck.
  • Enemies can no longer phase through the closed tavern door in the village area.
  • There was a particular place where bots loved to suicide. We gave them some jump assist in this area.
• Skittergate
  • Fixed a spot where the AI navmesh was floating ever so slightly above the terrain.
  • Fixed a few hang-ledges so players don’t just drop off an edge to immediate death where intended.
• Weaves
  • Changed how bar is filled to complete the Weaves, now objectives are always 80% of the bar and the rest of the 20% is collected by killing at least 80% enemies spawned by terror events (roamers are worth very little).
  • Enabled Bots for use in Quickplay Weaves.

GENERAL TWEAKS / FIXES

• Various Kerillian and Kruber weapon illusions displayed the wrong illusions, most notable in first person - this has been corrected.
• Added a bit more constraint on random item drop locations on player death so they would be far less likely to clip into the floor and disappear.
• The painting selection UI now shows which paintings are in use throughout your Keep.
• Changed the Kill Critters quest so that critter kills are recorded for all players in the group not just the critter-killer.
• Complete 3 daily quests and “Complete the weekly event” will always be available each week.
• Changed weekly challenge requirements to always have the same requirement values, eg. if you get the painting scraps weekly event it should always be 10.
• Reduced the number of painting scraps required to complete the associated weekly quest to 10 from 10, 20, 30.
• Fix for darkness Weekly Event so that it doesn’t crash when closing the game or ending a mission.
• We fixed a crash caused by the game having a level selected that doesn’t exist in the build a player is playing on (such as when switching from beta to live after having played a beta mission).
• Fixed cases where completing a host migrated game would reload the level even after pressing “Back to Keep”.

COMBAT TWEAKS / FIXES

• Reduced the range of Ungors normal attacks and running attacks.
• Smiter stagger damage talent no longer prevents stagger damage on targets after the first. Damage will be calculated as normally.
• Witch-Hunt and similar effects (Blade Barrier, Hunter etc) now lasts up to 15 seconds (the full duration of the tag). Durations refresh should the target be tagged again. A tagged target can be tagged again to re-apply the debuff.
• Fixed an issue where bleeding effects would not stacks properly (Witch Hunter Captain Flense, Waystalker Serrated Arrows).
• Cooldown reduction on attacking rebalanced - All non-melee attacks now only grant Career Skill cooldown on the first target hit. This has been problematic with the Battle Wizard and Shade careers primarily where they could use area damage ranged weapons (Conflagration/Fireball Staff and Hagbane Shortbow) to gain an extreme rate of career skill cooldown recovery. This change should tone down the outliers without significantly affecting other careers.
• We’ve looked to smooth out the reliability of the system which weighs enemy damage with enemy density.
• Heleborgs’ Tutelage (Mercenary) and Smite (Zealot) will no longer have their critical strikes consumed by pushing.
• Fixed huntsman longbow not triggering reload when the player gets interrupted during firing action, but before the reload event gets triggered

WEAPONS

• Two-Handed Hammers - Light attack 1 weapon switch window start increased from 0.5 to 0.75 seconds.
• Two-Handed Hammers - Light attack 1 chain to Light attack 2 reduced from 0.85 to 0.7.

“A Slayer build utilizing two 2h hammers together with the technique known as QQ-canceling was outperforming almost every other career in the game when it came to armored enemy DPS. To compensate for this without reducing the power of two-handed hammers, which otherwise is in a favorable spot right now, the time where you can start your weapon switch with the weapon has been slightly increased for the first light attack, and the chain time into the second light attack has been decreased. This should reduce the power of the QQ-canceling technique slightly for 2h hammers while increasing the output of the weapon when using it without the technique.” - Kasper, Game Designer

• Greataxe - Light attack 1 to light attack 2 chain window has been reduced from 0.7 to 0.65.
• Greataxe - Light attack 2 to light attack 3 chain window has been reduced from 0.65 to 0.6.

"Greataxe has a similar function as Two-Handed Hammer and has been tweaked in a similar fashion. It already had a slightly slower equip window so it has been unchanged, only the attack timings have been buffed in this case.” - Kasper, Game Designer

• Beamstaff - Stopped resetting beam staff hit counter if player hits environment, still resets if player hits an enemy (dead or alive)
• Tuskgor Spear - Reduced the push power from a heavy (think shield weapons) to a medium push (think 2h hammers).
• Huntsman Longbow - was not triggering reload when the player gets interrupted during firing action, but before the reload event gets triggered. Fixeeeddd.

TALENTS

• Sienna
  • Battle Wizard
    • Fires From Ash - Now has a 0.5 second internal cooldown.
    • Kaboom! - No longer triggers the improved explosion at Siennas starting position.
    • Kaboom! - Reduced the radius of the improved explosion from 8 to 5.

“Utilizing Fires From Ash together with the talent Kaboom! allowed close to 100% uptime of Fire Walk when playing Battle Wizard. With the other changes to cooldown reduction this had to be targeted to stay in line with other similar talents.Kaboom! could in some cases apply double the powerful burning effects to enemies with a recent change. This proved too powerful in practice and has been reverted to the previous state.” - Kasper, Game Designer

For a refresher on the Beta patch notes which precede the above, please check this earlier announcement with the notation:

Indeed, at the cost of QQ abuse

No all new armor skins at the moment. We’re holding back with the WOM illusions as we have plans for those to solve, or mitigate at the very least, one of the core complaints with the Athanor vs Vanilla Crafting*.

*plans may change

I’ve passed this on, thanks!

There’s still more to add to the store from the existing game files. As for rotation, I understand it to be on hold for now at least.

We’re looking in to it.

We’re going to fix that. Seems to have slipped through a crack.

Our aim was and is platform parity in 2020. It wont be an easy process however, and we will do all we can to keep releases as close to each other as possible, but this might not always be so.

The commendation chests remain unchanged for now, same hats and rates. I doubt we’ll ever change them but if we wanted to alter how it worked we’d make a new box or something and deprecate the old ones (of course not just delete them, but no longer allow acquisition of them).

Cosmetics haven’t been added to them either, so anything that wasn’t in the boxes before 2.1 will only be in the store.

We’ll be dropping in the remaining Curse of Drachenfels maps.

Similarly to adventure the bots should be using the same loadouts as your last used loadout on the hero in the Athanor. Is that not the case for you/people?