Vermintide 2 - Patch 1.5 - Weekly Events & Paintings!

Heroes!

Welcome to Patch 1.5 - bringing you two new features and of course some fixes and tweaks.

Introducing the new Weekly Events! We hinted at these live on our Fatshark Stream a few weeks ago and we're pleased to bring you the first set of Weekly Events with this update. Think of these like Mutators that shake up the gameplay and add new interesting twists to the Vermintide experience you know and love.

This update also introduces the long awaited chance to populate the Picture Frames found on the walls of your Keep. You can start accessioning your collection of fine works as of today. Details on how the current batch of available art is acquired can be found in the patch notes that follow.

We'd also love it if you could spent a couple of minutes with our 1.5 Feedback Survey once you've had a chance to check the patch out. Feedback is anonymous there, but if you'd also like to discuss feedback with your fellow rat slayers, the Fatshark Forums are still open for business!

Now on to the notes:

Features

• New Weekly Events are now available to play. These are 'mutators' which change the way the game is played.
• You might have seen those picture frames in the Keep for the last year - well now it's finally time to populate those frames.
• Every level has now been populated with scraps of Ravaged Art. Collect all these and complete your collection.

Tweaks

• Updated the Collector's Edition Soundtrack with additional music from DLCs.
• A new Challenge has been added for owners of the Shadows Over Bögenhafen DLC. Once you have collected all Bögenhafen cosmetics, the weekly quests will no longer be available and the new Okri's Challenge will be completed, rewarding you with new artwork for your Keep.
• End of level experience gains from difficulties beneath Legend now match those of Legend.

  We want to smooth out the progression curve for players across the board. If a player doesn't feel comfortable playing on a higher difficulty their level progression would be severely stifled, further increasing the time it takes for their character to reach a Hero Power that would make it easier to bridge the gap.

• We have made some adjustments to the Warpfire Thrower:
  • Increased stagger resistance, especially while shooting the Warpfire Thrower.
  • Increased damage of the explosion when the power cell explodes on players and other enemies.
  • Increased damage of the Warpfire Thrower to other enemies.

• We have made some adjustments to Burgersauce Haybale:
  • Increased stagger resistance.
  • Lowered the time of each phase to 20 seconds, down from 30 seconds.
  • Increased the teleport animation speed by 40%.

• Bödvarr Ribspreader now a uses a different stagger animation when staggered by abilities or bombs, several staggers in a row will switch to a shorter animation, followed by an uninterruptible pushback attack if he gets staggered too much.
  
• Bödvarr Ribspreader will now exit his defensive phase earlier if an amount of his spawned allies have been slain.
  
• We've made changes so that the escape music is triggered on objective change instead of triggering using the objective counter for reasons. It makes sense. We promise.
  
• Slightly increased the speed you move at when carrying the gargoyle head (on Garden of Morr) to prevent quickly switching between moving and running animations.
  
• Upped the amount of ragdolls that can be spawned simultaneously to minimum 10 and maximum 24, up from minimum 7 and maximum 12.
  
• Changed crossbow zoom position in first person to be more centered to work better with the dwarven crossbows, also raised the bolt position a bit so it won't clip into the crossbow as much.
  
• Changed Kerillian's dual swords idle so the left sword won't obscure the center point of the screen as much.
  
• Added dynamic UI scale to support 4k.
  
• Added settings to scale down HUD components.
  
• Made some improvements to bot teleport and the conditions that trigger it.
  

Levels

• Athel Yenlui - There was a spot in the finale in which enemies could not reach you. Now they can.
• Horn of Magnus - Fixed a couple of stuck locations.
• Fort Baconbranches - Fixed a location where players could get stuck.
• Taal's Horn - There were some items in the keep surrounding Lohner that used to disappear at certain distances. Now they don't.
• Taal's Horn - Made some optimisation changes to have the keep be a little less resource hungry.
• Blightreaper - Fixed a stuck location (between an ammo box and a wall).
• Blightreaper - Fixed broken objective markers during the end event.
• Blightreaper - The VFX for the curse should now be visible to all players as intended.
• Blightreaper - Enemies should no longer be able to path through the wagons and boxes.
• Hunger in the Dark - An objective marker during the barrel run is no longer misleading.
• The Pit - Fixed a flickering light seen on the wall at the 'Enter the pit' objective.
• The Pit - Enemies should now be able to path narrow ledges and passages more effectively.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed so that Slayers with Dual Hammers in their secondary weapon slot can get progress on the Grungni's Chimes challenge (slay all Lords on Legend difficulty with Dual Hammers).
• Fixed issues where enemies that were disabling a bot would get removed whenever the human players walked too far away from them.
• Fixed an issue where Bödvarr Ribspreader and Skarrik Spinemanglr triggered their defensive pushback attacks when invisible players were nearby.
• Fixed an issue where the game could crash if a player left the game within three frames of a lifting platform coming to a stop.
• Fixed one issue where Gutter Runner could instantly pounce without windup.
• Fixed crash that could occur if a bot that was dead (but not yet despawned) looked at a player that disconnected.
• Fixed a weird transition in 2h hammer/axe when going from push attack back to parry.
• Fixed ranged weapon trait Barrage sometimes failing to reach max stacks with slow firing weapons.
• Changed sweep attacks to finish the current sweep when being interrupted by a chained attack. This should solve issues where certain attacks wouldn't hit enemies just before a new chain action was started.
• Fixed an issue where a player using a Career Skill and getting grabbed by a Corruptor Sorcerer would get stuck in a static pose.
• Fixed a situation where Monsters or patrols or Sack Rats could spawn later than intended.
• Fixed a rare crash caused by Pyromancer Sienna's activated ability when used during combat.
• Players should no longer be able to hotjoin underneath lifting platform, instead the game will put the joining player in play once the party have left the lifting platform.
• Fixed not being able to give away Incendiary Bombs with the "Defend" keybind when have the gameplay option "Give on defend enabled".
• Bardin - Fixed the hammer that was offset from the gun in one of his handgun illusions.
• Mercenary Kruber - Fixed clipping issue with Kruber's leg protector whilst wielding the mace & sword.
• Mercenary Kruber - His left gauntlet no longer clips with his left arm when holding larger objects like barrels or dummies.
• Huntsman Kruber - Fixed so that the chain action window for reloading matches his reload speed so it doesn't break the animation during reloads whilst under the effect of his activated ability.
• Battle Wizard Sienna - Fixed an issue where using a Flamestorm Staff wouldn't reset Tranquillity until the left mouse button was released.
• Saltzpyre - Brace of Pistols now uses a projectile with a radius, making them hit more reliably.
• Saltzpyre - Fixed animation transition quirks with his repeating crossbow.
• Witch Hunter Captain Saltzpyre - Fixed an issue where the critical hit chance buff wouldn't be refreshed if triggered again before the duration had ended.
• Kerillian - The dual sword chained heavy attack was missing swing sounds. Now it isn't!
• Kerillian - Fixed an issue where her 1h axe would flip around in third person when she jumped.
• Kerillian - Fixed an issue where she would get stuck in her parry pose in third person with dual daggers.
• Kerillian - Fixed an issue where she would get stuck her 2h sword idle after performing the heavy stab attack.

UI/UX

• Fixed a dwarven 2h axe illusion using the wrong icon.
• Fixed two dwarven Hammer and Shields using the wrong icons.
• Fixed localization string for shield breaking weapon keyword. Armour piercing and shield breaking was swapped. Should now function properly.
• Updated keywords for Ubersreik weapons: Axe/Falchion, Dual Hammers and Mace/Sword. Functionally the weapons remain the same:
  • Axe/Falchion has had the keywords changed from Armour Piercing to Crowd Control.
  • Dual Hammers has had the keywords changed from High Damage to Crowd Control. It has also had Armour Piercing changed to Wide Sweeps.

• The position of the background art of the ammo counter now correctly re-aligns when the window size has been modified.
  
• Fixed line-break issues for talents on certain languages.
  
• The HUD should now be correctly hidden when counting down for a mission to start.
  
• Adjusted career info window size in hero selection and talent screen to solve text overlapping on certain languages.
  
• Fixed so that buff stack counter is hidden when going back to 1 from a higher buff count.
  

Sound

• Fixed an issue where overcharge sounds would still be playing after using a Career Skill and having a Talent that clears all overcharge.
• Fixed an issue where the VO for hitting armour would be played when pushing an armoured enemy.
• Fixed several cases where sound effects from Career Skills would play in 2D when they should play in 3D, and vice versa. Most notably when bots where using the Skills.
• Fixed a case where sound effects from Skaven would play in 2D when they should play in 3D.
• Fixed an issue where blood splatter and hit sounds would be played when pushing a dead enemy.