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Latest Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Update Improves Hero Progression, Eases Difficulty
Warhammer: Vermintide II's 1.0.5 patch is huge, making a number of adjustments to combat, difficulty, character progression, and more, and generally eases the difficulty of the game on multiple fronts.
Perhaps the biggest change players have look forward to is difficulty progression. Before, Veteran would only drop gear up that would up your character's hero power to 200. That cap has increased to 300, easing the ramp between Veteran and the next difficulty, Champion. Also, Champion and Legend (the hardest difficulty) have had their hero power caps removed, letting players get stronger and stronger until they can more easily take on the game's hardest offerings.
Speaking of Champion and Legend, the director, which determines when enemies spawn, will spawn more waves of enemies while you're already fighting baddies less often, leading to fewer situations where you're overwhelmed by one boss enemy while your'e fighting another (it's happened to me before!).
Next, every character class and subclass has had various attributes buffed, which should make everyone feel a bit more powerful while fighting the hordes.
Finally, combat has been tweaked to make enemies more resistant to being staggered by weapon attacks, putting more of an emphasis on crowd control and power attack timing. Weapons have been also been buffed to compensate.
Vermintide II Fatshark knows that one of the key issues with their game is how brutal it can feel, and while these adjustments should ease that issue (literally), they're not done updating. "Going forward, we'll keep a close eye on balance and will continue making changes and adjustments to all areas of play, in order to make this all fair and balanced," the developer said in the patch notes.
[Source: Vermintide II on Steam]
Our Take
The early hours of Vermintide II can prove crushing to new players, and while it gets easier from there, the harder difficulties are no joke. Before, there seemed to be a weird point where I'd be overpowered for one difficulty, but too weak to keep up in the next. Hopefully this will make those moments disappear, or at least less frequent.
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