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[nenjin]

It's comical how much worse the dual axes are than the dual hammers for example. I don't enjoy being forced to use a certain type of weapon to not feel like I'm fighting with cardboard. The idea is probably to encourage more teamwork, and employ a sort of 1 guy staggers, 1 guy kills tactic.

Yeah, fast weapons probably did get short shrift in this update, as they lost something without getting something back. On the other hand, it is very likely that people playing at the same difficulty they were pre-patch are definitely feeling that missing 50 hero power, which would affect stagger and cleave and a number of other things.

The AI changes are a mixed bag. I like that they are smarter about trying to encircle you and that they have tracking. The problem is that, especially for the latter, it's a little too much. I've seen enemies do straight 180 degree turns to acquire new targets, and they seem to have inflated range compared to before. It pushes the game more towards the VT1 tactic of picking a corner and then just mashing M1 until the Horde is over, especially considering how strong stagger stacking is now.

The swing turns are bad but honestly I think it has more to do with the encircling AI now. You're just guaranteed to be getting stabbed in the back by something now, pretty much all the time, if someone isn't watching your back. I've had guys materialize in a hot second behind me to hit me. It's super goddamn annoying.

(Blocking not working has returned

Oh good, I'm not crazy then. I kept experiencing this, especially during boss tanking, and was thinking that I had completely lost the plot on how 2 block.

Which does what, let you run away from allies to die alone faster?

In Weaves it helps you get to the end faster, which everyone should be doing but doesn't once the portal pops open. Also helps you make space to defend yourself in a better spot easier, keep pace with rambos charging through the level, makes it easier to perform jumps when under pressure....move speed has a lot of uses IMO.

and they seem to have removed some of the "infinite ammo" builds that were present before.

Yeah they took away Waywatcher's infinite ammo capability, and my friend almost quit over it. Frankly I don't have much sympathy, I was sick of Elf Supremacy bullshit long before this patch. Welcome to the dirt bitch, where the rest of us live.

Weaves are just kinda there. Buddy and me couldn't find a group in over 4 hours of playtime, and I've seen lots of people say they can't find a group. I don't see the appeal either way, I was already mad I had to reach Level 35 to get my ult-talent back, so resetting my progress to zero and running around some recycled assets didn't exactly excite me either. The fact that they don't affect the "regular" game at all is just sort of odd.

It's a weird beast. Some days I will find no games after a long time of looking, other days I will get consistent games and consistent groups for a good hour or two. Where you're at in the weave I think has a lot to do with it. It's not a well thoughtout system by any means. There's multiple ways to find groups or start groups, there's weave power matching, there's whether or not your class (that you have to invest heavily in) is available, and THEN there's the actual weave you need to run. That's a lot of variables to try and match make over and it's clearly not all that great. I think they need to increase the amount of essence for a previously completed weave run slightly just so people are willing to run weaves they've already completed and keep the playerbase numbers up. Or there needs to be some other reward for running lots of weaves other than a fucking worthless Commendation chest. That shit kind of pisses me off, Commendation chests are NOT REWARDS FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE PLAYED LEGENDARY AND MAXED OUT. Yet so many of their in game achievements are now just "have a shitty loot chest." They could and should do better. It really should be rewarding chests that are high enough level that you can get cosmetics. Fucking NO ONE needs more crafting mats at this point.

I'm taking a friend through weaves right now, and at Weave Power 400+ or so, we can duo up through Azyr (Celestial.) So maybe to progress what you should do is run some regular campaign missions to completion, which gives quite a bit of essence, level up your gear, then go back and solo/duo the lower level weaves until you hit the range where there are other people playing, at your weave power level.

I'm still enjoying weaves for the challenge and the chance to see what weird shit happens. (I've gotten far enough now that the final weave challenge can be two simultaneous bosses, that gets pretty spicy.) But I don't fault anyone for being annoyed by the whole thing. What they should do IMO is introduce weaves on a random basis to regular campaign runs. Like, midway through a mission you might get a chance to dip in to a random weave for a bit. Something like that, so there's way more crossover between the two modes right now.

[nenjin]

Ok, Amethyst is the first actually difficult weave IMO. The ones that came before added some challenges, some twists and quirks. Amethyst is the first weave where I've felt like the weave mechanic is honestly more difficult to deal with than the actual enemies.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoopy ghost balls appear after you kill an enemy, and slowly follow you around for about 10 seconds apiece. If they touch you they explode doing a decent amount of damage. They're easy to outrun and outpace, but it requires a rethinking of your playstyle. You can't be aggressive in attacking because pushing forward just get you exploded on. You basically have to fight everything in a retreat, constantly doing looping circles when you've got too many spoops going. You can't stop moving for very long or the spoops catch up to you. It doesn't sound hard, and maybe I was just tired after doing all of the Light Weave. But when you've got 10 or 20 of the things chasing you, as one more thing you have to pay attention to, it starts getting tough. Especially in narrow and closed environments. The moment you forget the Amethyst weave mechanic is the moment you lose half your health.

It's also kind of annoying you can see everyone else's spoops even though they can't hurt you. Makes it hard to tell which ones you need to worry about and which you don't.

[nenjin]

So I'm starting to get annoyed with all the weird shit going on VT2, now that weaves are effectively legendary difficulty.

-The AI likes to read when you're doing a charge attack and either backs up or stops moving to avoid it. They don't always do it, especially in a horde situation, but 1v1 I've noticed it happening quite a bit, especially with Stormvermin.

-Armored/horde mixes are staggering their attacks in such a way that it's basically impossible to get a hit in sometimes. You can be fighting two stormvermin and a few slave rats, and the slave rats will hold their attack to just the moment you have an opening to do a power attack, and give you an nice little running attack to the guts. Maybe it has to do with the changes to how they react to back dodges. But when the rule for many weaves is "back up or die", you don't have many choices. Back dodging now basically seems like a delaying tactic and nothing else. If you actually want to dodge and attack and be effective, it's circle-strafe dodge and attack or GTFO.

-Everyone's ranges have been buffed to what feels like an absurd degree. I've watched a stormvermin swing their glaive, and miss due to being out of range, while a slave rat starts a running attack behind him, stops behind him and hits me with a knife. And if spears were bad before, they're insane now. It's like characters have an orb of a hit box, to the point you can see the tip of an enemy weapon feet from you, and it still registers as a hit. It is utterly not worth the range buff players got to be getting shanked from half a mile away.

-Enemies are just straight up spawning in behind players in the open, in attack range. You can see absolutely nothing behind you, turn around, and by the time you've turned 180 degrees, you've been hit by an enemy behind you. Guys are spawning inside walls and attacking through them. They're attacking through terrain objects in ways I've never seen before, terrain objects that theoretically are longer and broader than their actual weapons.

-Blocking just seems to make no sense to me now. I've blocked regular, non-block piercing attacks with stamina remaining, and ended up getting killed because it somehow went through all my stamina, and did my remaining health in damage. It used to be that if you had stamina, you got that one block in, after which all subsequent blocks got you damage. Now, I have no idea how it actually works. (When it actually works like it's supposed to, and just doesn't straight up ignore your blocks altogether.)

-The balance of weave is super mushy and unclear. Intentionally so. I have 2x the hero power I have in weave power, yet I'm getting my ass kicked all over the place. What does weave power even mean? How do enemies scale between weaves? What actually gets scaled?

It was fun when the damage was lower and you could laugh things off because you were winning. But now that I'm in the difficulty where literally every hit matters, I'm seeing a whole ton of wildly inconsistent shit that now makes me understand why, for example, one of my steam friends changed their name to "Fuck Fatshark Forever."

[nenjin]

So the Chaos Wastes update is out.

Ironic reading my last post because the Chaos Wastes are largely inspired by weaves.

Luckily, it's a lot more fun on pretty much every front.

It has essentially created a game mode that is like a long-form Roguelike play of Vermintide.

Where a normal map run of Vermintide might take between 11 and 20 minutes, and a single weave might take 7 to 10 minutes, Chaos Waste expeditions run around 2+ hours. If you want credit for beating the whole expedition, it's gotta be completed in one sitting.

You load in and get a small map of the Chaos Wastes with branching paths for which map you want to play next. Each map has modifiers like More Hordes, fewer Specials. More Monster Spawns, more "Pilgrim Coins." Every once in a while, a level will be cursed by one of the Chaos Gods, which adds another cheeky modifier to the whole map. Like a Wizard that follows you around doing Chaos Wizard stuff who can't be killed but can be temporarily driven off. (Sorta like Death from the Gauntlet games if anyone played those.) Bolts of Change that come down from the sky to blast you, and any enemy in the blast radius can be instantly changed to another enemy type. (I watched a Slave Rat mutate into a Chaos Spawn right before my eyes.)

Each map also has a boon that, when you complete the map, everyone is awarded the boon. I've seen his like +4 Stamina, +20% Cooldown Reduction, +10% Crit Chance, +40% Crit Power....serious buffs.

The Roguelike part comes in like this: when you start the Expedition, you ONLY have your Career Talents, and two white weapons of the type you had equipped when you started the Expedition. No rings, no trinkets, no necklace and none of the buffs you enjoy from your gear in normal play.

As you work through each map, you'll find Shrines. These shrines take Pilgrim Coins to interact with, which are randomly scattered around each map. So as opposed to regular Vermintide where veteran players try to get through maps as quickly and efficiently as possible, the Chaos Wastes encourages you to explore every nook and cranny of a map to find Shrines and Coins to spend at those shrines.

There are a couple different kinds of shrines:

-Temper shrines. Spending coins at these both upgrades the rarity of your weapon from white to green and green to blue etc....getting you a few random traits while also buffing the weapons's hero power. (Which is higher starting out than in the normal game to compensate for the fact you're missing 3 pieces of gear.)

-Exchange shrines. Here you can, mid game, exchange your weapon for a random different one from your career options. It gets a boost in hero power over what you're currently using and also tends to bump you up to the next rarity level too.

-Boon Shrines. This is where the real meat of things are. Spend some coin, get a random boon. This can be any one of the traits from the base game that comes from gear, OR it can be one of the Talents on your Talent tree you don't already have equipped, OR it can be a brand new trait they made specifically for the Chaos Wastes.

-Trial Chests. These are mini events that spawn a monster and some enemies. When you beat the monster, you can open the Challenge Chest and choose one of three random boons, with a good chance one of those boons will be one of the rare funky ones.

For the longest time I've felt Vermintide's gearing system was kinda miserly. You're wracking your brain to create a class build around stuff like....10% extra attack speed. 20% extra cooldown reduction. Small buffs that have a minor impact or average synergy with your class.

The Boons in the Chaos Wastes say fuck that, let's become stupidly OP. These new Boons are stuff like "Every block becomes a parry." "Heal yourself every time you parry." "1HP/sec health regen." "Heal 15 health every time you pick up ammo." "Gain up to 20% increased attack speed based on missing Career Skill bar." "Gain 50% cleave power for 3 seconds after you push block."

There are quite a few buffs, and they all stack for the entire run. As long as you have Coin, you can get more buffs. It can end up such that you get every talent on a row of your character's talent tree active at the same time.

It's fucking wild, man. You become so strong that you're cleaving through seriously large hordes and just laughing it off. You can take each class well beyond the most powerful they could ever be in the base game.

If you fail the Expedition or finish it, you can take any remaining Pilgrim Coins into your next run, but all the buffs and stuff you acquired are reset.

Additionally, there's some poorly explained mechanic where the power of Chaos waxes and wanes. So some maps will be relatively calm, and other maps will be just a non-stop rush of hordes, monsters, elites and specials.

All in all it's the most fun I've had in VT in a while. You finally get to feel stupidly powerful rather than just adequate for the difficulty level you're playing at. You get to watch your personal build become disgustingly powerful.

I feel like the Chaos Wastes are a compromise between the randomness of Weaves and the flow of normal play. I've always wanted VT to be playable in a longer form and this comes pretty close to what I imagined.

[Kagus]

That sounds pretty wild, but potentially a bit difficult to plan for (at least as a pubber). I still haven't gotten to try out VT2 yet, but I'm looking forward to when that time finally comes

[nenjin]

We had a lot of drop-ins, drop-outs while we were playing with a spot open.

Honestly, what actually seems to matter is just finishing. If you show up for the last run of the Expedition, you get it "completed" and unlock the cosmetics that come with it and...that's pretty much it.

But there's a lot of stopping and decision making, initially, that probably doesn't jive with pubbies who are still pedal to the metal. But I feel like most of our time the first night was eaten up by just excitedly exclaiming "Holy shit!" as we saw a new buff. I imagine after a week when you've seen everything, even CW Expeditions will get the 'ol Vermintide efficiency rush to gameplay.

Also, I think there are plenty of pubbies out there who would be willing to settle into a long run with a good group. Finding them would be the hard part.

Also also, bizarrely? You make more coins on lower difficulties. Not sure why. (We started immediately on Legend.) I wonder if the buffs you're offered in lower difficulties are on average of a lesser rarity than on higher difficulties. Or maybe they expected you to farm for Coin on lower difficulties before trying higher ones. Either way, I don't think we found things too terribly difficult on Legend starting out. We need every coin sure, occasionally have to pass some shrine up because we're broke, but both Expeditions we finished we all ended fairly OP. So I don't feel like there's much incentive to play the lower difficulties just to amass coin.

I think CW Expeditions definitely favor people with a lot of time in the game and a lot of experience playing a given career and its various weapons. Being able to make due with changing circumstances is a strength in Expeditions. Being able to swap between weapons for the power boost and be ok is valuable. If you're the kind of player that is like "I can't function with base +10% attack speed" or "I can't function without my Executioner's sword" you're not screwed but you may find you struggle a little bit starting out. That said, once the Boons start flowing, it all evens out.

[nenjin]

Oh there's also funky new potions found only in the Chaos Waste. They make the potions in the vanilla game look like a joke. My personal favorite is "Endless Bombs." For the duration, like 15 seconds, you have unlimited bombs. I watched my brother solo a Rat Ogre with just that potion. He chugged and then backed the Rat Ogre into a corner with repeated explosive bombs until dead.

There's also a Life Stealing potion which, combined with a Boon that gives you a 50% chance to gain the effect of the potion in your potion slot WITHOUT USING IT, every time you use your career skill.....practically makes you immortal from everything except an incap attack.

[Persus13]

The new potions are pretty great. I've only done one run of Chaos Wastes so far because I'm waiting for my friend to be able to play it but I found Endless Bombs was definitely my favorite as well. I was pretty impressed with the new mode overall, there's a ton of variety and it definitely changes the game.

I'm definitely agreeing with your point about having mastery over various weapons helps. The one run I did was as Saltzpyre and for a good part of it I regretted upgrading my pistols into a crossbow, but towards the end of the run I snagged a volley crossbow instead that with my buffs would just machine gun mobs of stormvermin to death.

[nenjin]

It's still a little unclear from an economics standpoint which is better. But it would seem that:

-Weapon exchange shrines are more common than Temper shrines.
-Exchange shrines are cheaper than Temper shrines.

So I think the optimal way they want you to play is to exchange up constantly from white to like blue or orange, then Temper up to red. For me, I love the Flail on Sienna and have no interest in using anything else. So I've been holding out for Temper shrines. In my two runs so far, I ended up with a red flail by the end. So I don't think you *have* to play it that way necessarily. Ultimately what matters is finishing the Expedition, so if you can accomplish that with a Blue weapon or w/e. then I think it's fine. But the enemies definitely scale up in power over the course of the Expedition. I'm pretty shit with Sienna's Bolt staff but I use it for backup special killing. So I've not been upgrading it at all over the course of the Expedition. And by the last level, yeah. A fully charged shot to a Storm Vermin's chest will kill them at the start of the Expedition with a white Bolt staff, but not by the end.

[nenjin]

Turns out there's a cap on the total # of Pilgrim Coins you can carry out. So there's no real stockpiling of coins. The amount may be set by difficulty level. Recruit does give you more coins, but there's some randomness in the size of every coin pile. So it's more like an average.

[Zangi]

Seems like you only keep a portion of the coins you are carrying over.

Jumped knee deep into a legend chaos waste.  Think I did relatively well, considering I didn’t know anything other then how to kill things dead.  We also made it through a cata expedition.  No one died except at the end cause disabler.

[nenjin]

I suspect that the Expeditions get harder. We breezed through the first Expedition on Legend. Wiped once or twice on the second Expedition but beat it.

On the third expedition, we've wiped 3 times on the second to last map.

The deeper you go into Expeditions, the more maps are cursed by the Chaos Gods. And I get the impression that when you're playing Cursed maps, the hordes are by and large endless. Trying to get through some maps, I felt like were fighting non-stop the whole time. While two people are trying to look for coins, the other two are barely holding back spawns. And if you got the map modifier +Specials.....

Every time I think the Expeditions are easy, we end up wiping. Possibly just due to sheer fatigue. If we can beat Expedition #3 and start on #4, that will be the real test.

Because yeah, some maps are short, the modifiers don't really seem to matter all that much and the hordes just kinda of trickle in with lots of downtime to explore and buy stuff. But then some maps, you're just swarmed constantly. We did a Beastman map with the Tzeentch curse where enemies split when killed into two lesser enemies.....at one point, I shit you not, we had _4_ banners at the same time. Every time we killed a banner, another would show up. So all the Beastmen were buffed to the point a single person couldn't kill them unaided, and when they did die, their numbers doubled, still under the effect of multiple banners. It was a complete clusterfuck.

[Cthulhu]

Decided to try the game out since it's on sale.  I'm not sure I get it?  Maybe it gets more interesting later on?  I'd heard it had kind of chivalry-esque combat, more involved than W-M1, but the match I played was pure W-M1.  Played the inquisitor.  Got a bunch of commendation chests out of it, says they go up to 300 hero power and drop items for the character you're playing.  Would I be fucking myself over to open them all now while I'm low level?  Or better off waiting until higher level and/or one of the unlockable character variations?

I dunno.  I wasn't super impressed by what I've seen so far.

[Persus13]

What's W-M1?

You get plenty of commendation chests. I've got like 10 sitting around unopened from the last 5 times I played or so, so don't feel like you need to hoard them. A lot of the best stuff comes from the chest you get for completing a match, especially ones where you did good and found some of the secrets like tomes or grimoires.

I don't really know what you're expectation is, but Vermintide 2 is basically Left for Dead in the Warhammer setting with more involved melee combat.

[Cthulhu]

I was expecting left 4 dead with more involved melee combat.  W-M1 meaning run forward and hit the melee button until the enemies died.  The only match I played so far that's exactly what we did.  I know I'm on recruit difficulty but does it get more interesting than that?  There was also only one other player in the game, I guess that might just be from playing on recruit difficulty in a game that's been out a while, but another thing that always raises a red flag for me.