Warhammer: Vermintide 2 News

On October 28th there will be new Premium Cosmetics available in Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders on all platforms. There will be one all-new character skin and hat for each hero, totaling up to 10 new premium cosmetics.

Each of the cosmetics will be available in bundles and as separate items on Steam.

Previews of the items follow below, but for a closer look at each piece, check out the Dev Blog over on the Official Vermintide Website

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[h2]TAAL’S HUNTSMAN[/h2]

Embrace your inner beast and roam the Stirland wilderness as a champion of King Taal.

Career: Huntsman


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[h2]ELLYRIAN HANDMAIDEN[/h2]

Don the garb of a temple handmaiden of Ellyrian; stern, austere and unflinching before those who would threaten Ulthuan.

Career: Handmaiden


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[h2]LONG DRONG'S LANDLUBBER[/h2]

It's time to set sail for plunder with the famed slayer pirates. Or it would be, if there was any sign of their ship.

Career: Slayer


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[h2]MOLTEN MOTLEY[/h2]

Garb fit for the most magmatic of magicians. Unleash the fury of Aqshy in inimitable style.

Career: Battle Wizard


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[h2]ACOLYTE OF SEA & STORM[/h2]

Though the shipwreck drowned your companions, Sigmar has saved you for a higher purpose - one steeped in skaven blood.

Career: Zealot

An absent-minded man of mysteries, Franz Lohner relies on his bulging journal to keep track of occurrences, intrigues and arguments around Taal's Horn Keep. Sometimes his notes are even useful, believe it or not. The Franz Lohner Chronicles are extracts from that journal.



Well, this is one of them red letter days. Literally, I mean, because I’ve had another missive from Okri in its usual natty red envelope. At least, I think I have. It’s hard to be certain of a letter’s provenance when you’ve never seen its author. Harder still when said letter shows up in a variety of unusual ways.

Okri - and let’s assume it is Okri, for the sake of sanity and wotnot - is an inventive soul. I’ve had letters sent down the chimney. Delivered by couriers of all shapes and sizes. Although that ogre had eaten half the envelope before I wrangled it off him, price of dying it in blood, I suppose. Carrier pigeon, that was another one. Bardin ate it, as I recall. The book of challenges was dropped off by airship, or so I understand. It was a cloudy day. Endless ingenuity at work. I admire a fellow who puts in the effort, if I’m honest.

Anyhow, everyone’s totally real dwarf has a new task for our delightful Ubersreik Five. Seems that a few grudges have gone past the point of aging gracefully, and have now become urgent business. Specifically, there’s a bunch of monstrous individuals lolloping around, and Okri has marked them for death. A Grudge Mark, if you will - and I would, if I could.

Alas, the hunting of ferocious beasties is long behind this grizzled grey head of mine, but it sounds like a splendid way for the Five to keep themselves limber, doesn’t it? Everyone wins. Okri gets his grudges settled. The Ubersreik Five get a bit of much needed exercise. And me? Well, never you mind. It’s win-win. Well, not for the monsters, but I think we can count them as being acceptable casualties, all things considered. Not that they’ll be easy targets - these are the worst of the worst, with a bevy of cruel characteristics that’ll keep our heroes on their toes.

Should be fun. Worthy of song, even. Might even have another crack at poetry, if I’m stirred to it. Five Go Slaughtering Monsters. Not sure about that as a title, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

Of course, I’ll have to be a bit more circumspect about the particulars this time. I don’t want to set Kerillian off, as she’s not one to respect the bounds of poetic licence. We’ll keep it all anonymous this time around. Yes! That’s the stuff of folk tales: desperate danger, slavering monsters, plucky heroes - an unspoken whiff of romance between Cerrilian the archer and Kroober the proud knight. All carefully separated from reality, and thus old Franz safe from the doghouse.

And if it all goes wrong, I’ll just blame Okri. It’s not like anyone’s to know better, is it?

On October 28th the free update Grudge Marks will be available on all platforms together with Geheimnisnacht. Besides the new content, we have also added some Quality of Life changes, and in this dev blog you can read all about the upcoming changes.

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[h2]ENHANCED TAB MENU[/h2]
The TAB menu has gotten a make-over. The new features will show the equipped equipment of all the players and a new, more condensed layout, makes it easier to see any incoming enemies even when viewing the TAB overlay. The new overlay also shows active modifiers for the mission in progress and maintains the original functionality you’re accustomed to, such as muting players or being able to click through to their community profile on Steam.



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[h2]STEAM RICH PRESENCE[/h2]
Steam Rich Presence has been added to Vermintide 2! You can now easily spot if your fellow ratsmashers need another hero to fight alongside them, what difficulty they are playing, and which mission.



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[h2]OPENING MULTIPLE CHESTS AT ONCE[/h2]
This hardly requires much of an introduction: in the next update players will be able to open multiple chests at once! It’s possible to see the quality of the items in opened chests which aren’t the current focus, so for those just grinding out reds, a cursory scan of the dots atop the screen will let you know if a red item was pulled from an opened chest.





The border on the [OPEN 5] button indicates the last action done, so you can repeat it by just pressing spacebar.

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[h2]BATCH REWARD POPUPS[/h2]
Whilst not the most common of problems, it’s certainly an egregious one when it raises its head. Previously, when a player was awarded a bunch of items whilst not in the game (say through the purchase of a DLC), each item would be awarded one a time when they next logged in. Now, when the player logs in, they will be presented with an interface showing them all the items obtained that they can browse at their leisure or simply close off and get back to the game. No more waiting to cycle through a train of pop-ups. Nice.



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[h2]MORE INFO IN THE MISSION SELECT SCREEN[/h2]
The Mission select screen has seen some love, now showing players information about completion statistics, such as which heroes have bested the mission and how many of the total collectibles have been found within each mission.



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[h2]OKRI'S CHALLENGES QOL FEAT. A SEARCH BAR[/h2]
Gone are the days where you have to flick through pages and pages of challenges to find the status of a specific ask from Okri. A search bar has been added allowing you to easily find a specific challenge and see its completion state. You’re also able to use text-based queries, such as reward:art or completed:true in order to bring up a list of specific challenges that meet the query.

These are the currently available filters:

The Chaos Wastes was released right before the summer, and you have been exploring these unpredictable lands ever since. In this dev blog, you can find out more about the next addition to Chaos Wastes: the Grudge Mark Update.

The Grudge Mark Update is free to all players and will be released on October 28th on all platforms together with Geheimnisnacht.


[h2]Let’s begin[/h2]
In Chaos Wastes you start out with a low power level and as you move through the expeditions you become increasingly powerful. With this update, we want to give you something to hit that is more resistant to the heroes’ ever-increasing power in the Wastes.

[h2]GRUDGE MARKS THE SPOT[/h2]
"With the End Times approaching, Okri's grown concerned that a number of long-held grudges might go unfulfilled. Accordingly, he's taken the unusual step of asking the Ubersreik Five to settle accounts (as drengbarazi, they're as near to being honourary dwarfs as makes no difference) for families wiped out by war."

The Grudge Marked enemies are not your everyday Chaos Spawn, Bile Troll, or Rat Ogre. Recognizable by the spears poking through their backs, a grudge-marked monster provides an extra challenge in the Wastes.



[h3]ATTRIBUTES CHANGE THE BATTLE[/h3]
The Grudge Marked monster receives a random set of attributes modifying their offensive and defensive behavior. Any hero wishing to survive should pay special attention to these attributes. There are 10 attributes total coming in this update, and we will reveal more about them leading up to the release.

The number of attributes applied depends on difficulty. A Grudge Marked monster can have a minimum amount of 0 attributes and a maximum of 3.

Within Chaos Wastes you will face a Grudge Marked monster at the end of an expedition in the arenas, and they also have a chance to spawn from Cursed Shrines.


[h3]NEW OKRI’S CHALLENGES & REWARDS[/h3]
Together with the Grudge Marked monsters, Okri is providing you with more challenges to complete with new rewards to be earned.

Each career will have a new set of challenges rewarding a new character skin color variation at completion. We are adding 60 new challenges and 15 new character skin color variations to unlock*. You can track the progress of these challenges in Okri’s Book from within the Keep.

*Owners of a Premium Career(s) will receive 4 extra challenges per career to unlock an extra skin color variation per owned career.

[h2]NEW PREMIUM COSMETICS[/h2]
New Premium Hats and Skins will be available for purchase in Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders.

This time we are adding new premium cosmetics to the following careers:

• Kruber - Huntsman
  
• Kerillian - Handmaiden
  
• Bardin - Slayer
  
• Sienna - Battle Wizard
  
• Victor - Zealot

An absent-minded man of mysteries, Franz Lohner relies on his bulging journal to keep track of occurrences, intrigues and arguments around Taal's Horn Keep. Sometimes his notes are even useful, believe it or not. The Franz Lohner Chronicles are extracts from that journal.



Well, they do say no good deed goes unpunished.

You remember my mate Rosalinde, who helped me get the keep a bit more handy for the purposes of everything we do around here? Used her mastery of Light Magic to shuffle the stones around a bit? Ringing any bells?

Well, part of the agreement for her doing that was that once we’d actually nailed down something approaching a safe route up to the Citadel of Eternity, she’d be welcome to take a look for herself. Not out of any spiritual necessity, I hasten to add. Rosalinde’s always been of the view that she’ll leave the gods alone if they’ll do the same to her, and so far it seems to have worked out quite nicely. Probably works out better for the gods, truth be told. Rosalinde’s the sort of person who redefines the word ‘clumsy’ and I’d imagine granting her any kind of divine protection is a larger job of work than most of our slacker gods are interested in taking on.

And wouldn’t you know it? The Rosalinde factor has struck once more. Happily, it wasn’t up in the Citadel itself. No, the Five managed to keep the Pactsworn off her back while she took her notes and made her sketches – Rosalinde does love her sketching – and everyone came back in one piece.

(Interestingly enough, Rosalinde didn’t hear a peep out of the gods at the pilgrimage’s end. Not sure what that means. Might just be that they’re not interested in speaking to anyone who isn’t prepared to listen, but I might give it a ponder.)

No, the trouble started upon Rosalinde’s return. Decided to try out some of the Citadel of Eternity’s architectural tricks in her own little mansions. I mean, I say “little” but it’s a good sight larger than this here tower. The advantages of reduced labour costs, I suppose. Anyway, things got a bit out of hand. I did warn her that techniques from the magic-suffused wastes might not work out quite how she expected in the considerably more mundane municipalities. And so it proved.

No sooner was the first spell completed than the whole manor twisted in on itself like Bretonnian knotbread. Corridors and rooms look alright from the inside, but somehow loop back around on themselves when you try to make any progress out. She’s now got a kitchen that somehow manages to fill seven rooms and one room all at the same time. And as for getting out? Well, I was the lucky one. Rosalinde gave me a big old magical shove out of the door just as she realised things were going wrong. Haven’t seen her since.

I only know what I know because her and Olesya have been nattering over the Winds of Magic. Olesya, of course, is about as sympathetic as usual – which is to say not at all – but I suppose we’d better add “help Rosalinde escape the prison of her own hubris” to our list of things to do. Morality aside, a good architect is hard to find, and a good architect who owes you a significant favour is a very good person to know indeed.