Vermintide 2

[Firuthi Dragovic]

AKA "Left 4 Dead with ratmen". Well, mostly.

So I used to play this game a ton. 307 total hours in the game so far.

I recently picked it up again after over a year of hiatus... and since Champion is actually too easy now and I really need to start working on Red-tier weapons, I've moved up to Legend.

Plan is, do every Helmgart mission with every career, and do all other missions once per character - with no consideration for tomes or grimoires. And try to get the first 40 weaves done for portrait frames. At which point I'll consider the game completed and put it down.


....I may wind up regretting the decision though, as the first career I'm doing is Huntsman. I'm familiar with Kruber's weapon set, unfortunately Huntsman is probably the worst career in the game. His big thing is ammo conservation... and that's not exactly useful compared to other career talents.

That's actually why I'm doing his Helmgart set first, frankly. Get the worst careers out of the way and save the good stuff for later.

That career also gets a unique longbow that can take down most special units in one shot, but I'm REALLY tempted to swap for something like the Repeater Handgun given it's much faster as a weapon....

 

[Marius Merganser]

I picked it up a few weeks ago during a Steam sale and I'm addicted.

I can't even come close to finishing Tower of Treachery on recruit! Everyone gets slaughtered at the well of souls thing. But I did all of the other included campaigns with Sienna and Saltzpyre on veteran. Just started with Kerillian.

 

[Firuthi Dragovic]

I picked it up a few weeks ago during a Steam sale and I'm addicted.

I can't even come close to finishing Tower of Treachery on recruit! Everyone gets slaughtered at the well of souls thing. But I did all of the other included campaigns with Sienna and Saltzpyre on veteran. Just started with Kerillian.

I'll admit I've only done Tower of Treachery once, with Sienna's Unchained career on Champion. The part with the Well of Souls was pretty much entirely luck and clutch plays - we knew to throw the barrels into the well, but we kept screwing that part up and getting swarmed.

I don't know what level you've built each character to so far, but I know with my Sienna build that I definitely took the "blocking vents Overcharge" and "Living Bomb gives everyone temporary health" talents. The latter in particular is an immense lifesaver.

 

[Marius Merganser]

Sienna was maxed at level 35 and Saltzpyre was 30. We got close once but I distinctly remember throwing two barrels in and neither of them counting.
I think it's mostly a lack of coordination; everyone split up and they weren't protecting whomever was going for the barrel.

 

[Khafra]

I've recently noticed that it now only needs 55GB of free space to be installed instead of the ridiculous 110 GB it was at one point. Might be enough for me to pick it up again, the world could use some more of the better Warhammer.

 

[Marius Merganser]

For any other Vermintide 2 players, they opened up the alpha of Versus mode until March 17th 2024.
If you have the game, the 6th anniversary update will install and Versus will be added to the main menu.

Basically, there are 2 teams with 4 players each. One team will play as the Ubersreik heroes who try to complete the level as usual but with only with their choice of starting weapons. The other team gets to play as Skaven specials! I think it's a little unbalanced since the Skaven can only take 1 or 2 hits but firing off a rattling gun is very satisfying.

 

[Khafra]

It's only until next week? Damn, I though they had opened the alpha for good now.

 

[Firuthi Dragovic]

So I have a reason to conduct thread necromancy this time.

The game got a big Versus update and a new standard map.

Yes, Versus released in full not too long ago. You can play as some of the special rats and there's finally rewards for doing so. Only five maps at the moment I think, but it's a start.


Given this, I decided to go back and beat every mission on the first game on Normal (I won't call this equivalent to Recruit difficulty in the second game, as the enemies do still have some toughness to them and the weapons are frankly shitty. I basically cannot play as Bardin in the first game as everything of his is way too slow). At time of writing, I only have four more to go - including Waylaid, the one that serves as a transition from the first game to the second.

When I finally get back to Vermintide 2 proper, I have a lot of sorting to do with equipment and setting up the bots, as I'm finally going to try to take Legend more seriously. The bots are there if I don't get players coming in for some reason. (I have orange gear of basically every type so I probably should be graduating out of Champion shortly after coming back.)



While I'm prepping for this, any strategies for playing the specials anyone wants to impart? I've seen a couple "from downtown, literally" Gutter Runner jumps watching a video of the Versus alpha... I wonder if that's still possible?

 

[Marius Merganser]

I love the idea of playing as Skaven but the alpha and beta were so frustrating. There was nothing that explained how their attacks work. The rattling gunner and gas rat are pretty intuitive but I couldn't get the others to work.

Since then I saw a few youtube videos that show off their mechanics, so I tried again, but it crashed as soon as it joined the match. I'll try again when I have some more time.

From what I saw, Skaven are most effective when working together. Trying to ambush the heroes as a group in tight spaces and use hit and run tactics.
I notice the pack rats like to drag the heroes off a cliff for an instant kill and you get to respawn.

 

[Firuthi Dragovic]

I love the idea of playing as Skaven but the alpha and beta were so frustrating. There was nothing that explained how their attacks work. The rattling gunner and gas rat are pretty intuitive but I couldn't get the others to work.

Since then I saw a few youtube videos that show off their mechanics, so I tried again, but it crashed as soon as it joined the match. I'll try again when I have some more time.

From what I saw, Skaven are most effective when working together. Trying to ambush the heroes as a group in tight spaces and use hit and run tactics.
I notice the pack rats like to drag the heroes off a cliff for an instant kill and you get to respawn.

I.... cannot overlook the irony of that one statement, knowing the lore of the Skaven. The one race in the Warhammer universe that pathologically cannot cooperate with others?



Anyways.... I decided to not bother finishing the rest of Vermintide 1 on Normal. Problem is... The White Rat, the boss mission? Basically impossible for me to do alone on Normal with how utterly dumb the bots are, thanks to having to fight a Rat Ogre in an EXTREMELY confined space after your healing is almost certainly spent. I'm really, REALLY spoiled by the Vermintide 2 bots (up through Champion, you basically only have to worry about their gear's power level being high enough).

So Waylaid was done on Easy, and I'm declaring that done. White Rat and Waylaid were the only two missions I didn't do on Normal at least once for the first game.

Let's just say.... EVERYTHING improved with the sequel. I'm just going to describe one case - the way the first game handled loot.

The way loot worked in the first game, you collected dice and rolled randomly to get decent gear. Seven dice. Default dice have a 2 in 6 chance of giving a point. Loot dice have a 3 in 6 chance. Dice acquired from collecting tomes have a 4 in 6 chance. If you're lucky enough to carry a grimoire to the end, that die is guaranteed to give you a point. Tally the points and you get one piece of gear from a randomly-generated list.

At Normal and Easy, you basically need a full 7 points on the loot dice to get even a blue-tier item.

And say you are getting bad rolls and want to enhance your gear. You have to combine 5 items of the same tier to get 1 item of the next tier - and that new item is fully random. (There may be better chances if you fuse gear of the same type, but I didn't play enough to determine that.)

Compare all this to the second game - three items per mission from a chest, the chest's quality depends on a meter with up to five bars. Loot dice give a quarter bar, tomes give two quarters, grimoires give three quarters. So getting all the tomes and grimoires already fills three bars. Combine with the mission completion bonus and the bonus for quick play? Generally getting four to six loot dice (mainly from fighting monsters and the occasional Sack Rat, I swear the sack rats are way easier to kill in the second game) will be enough to push the loot meter to full and get you an Emperor-quality chest with the best odds of good loot for that tier, and that's assuming you don't get good luck on the random bonus modifier.

And upgrading's a matter of dust from breaking down items (which was used to unlock the traits in the first game, among other things).


Anyone interested in the series should jump straight into the second game and ignore the first - and not just because the first game's essentially dead (I actually managed to get 3 brief team-ups while doing these missions somehow, never more than one mission in a row).

 

[Marius Merganser]

I.... cannot overlook the irony of that one statement, knowing the lore of the Skaven. The one race in the Warhammer universe that pathologically cannot cooperate with others?

It's pretty amusing but it's also fun to see a pack rat "post" a hero in a hallway, only to have the gas rats keep it flooded with gas and then the rattling gunners open up while the others try a rescue.

Anyone interested in the series should jump straight into the second game and ignore the first - and not just because the first game's essentially dead (I actually managed to get 3 brief team-ups while doing these missions somehow, never more than one mission in a row).

Yeah, the first one was really fun but I could barely finish it on easy because I didn't play it until years after it released so there were only the incompetent bots you mentioned.

2 seemed to fix most of the issues with 1 and I still don't have an issue getting live players.

Btw, did you see the pusfume videos?