Warhammer: Vermintide 2 News

Hotfix 4.2.2.1

• Okri's Challenges have been temporarily disabled in Modded Realm to prevent a crash while we work on a more robust solution.
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur if a player that had left the game was votekicked.

Hotfix 4.2.2.2

• Nothing player facing changed here.

Hotfix 4.2.2.3

• Made changes to reduce cases where DLC seemingly gets unlinked from the players account, causing DLC weapons/illusions/frames (etc) to disappear
  
• Fixed some cases where the Minotaur could charge and cause a crash.

Heroes!

We just put live patch 4.2.2 which fixes a few crashes as well as some additional changes to bots and a few other fixes and tweaks.

• Fixed a crash when a player joined a game at the defeat screen.
  
• Fixed a crash when opening the player list (tab) menu while a player was joining. The player list should no longer show 5 players in this case.
  
• Added more conditions to bot healing now. They heal when they are have less than 40% current HP (including Temp HP) or they are on last life and have less than 40% permanent HP - unless they are under heavy curse (usually 2 grims with no resistance) resulting in having less than 50 max hp, then they also heal if they are on last life regardless of their current HP.
  
• Bots now try to revive players around bosses.
  
• Made bots attempt to revive player around ratling gunners if they have not been hit for 1 second.
  
• Improved bot target obstruction behind static objects logic, made it so they would no longer try to disengage into ranged combat if they don't have line of sight to the special they are trying to escape from.
  
• Fixed bots getting stuck in place refusing to move if they lose sight of priority target that is marked to keep distance from (such as Warpfire Throwers).
  
• Fixed an issue where Okri's Challenge 'Unfriendly Fire' couldn't be completed.
  
• Fixed a rare bug that allowed blocking while being downed (special thanks to the community for the detailed reproduction steps).
  
• Fixed clients not seeing player join/left system messages.
  
• Re-added the bottom-left chat alert button that had gone on a brief vacation.
  
• Steam achievements can no longer be progressed accidentally in modded realm.
  
• Changed a flag to try to prevent Maulers phasing in/out of existence. Please do let us know if you see it still happening.
  
• Once more allowing players to interact with the change hero interactable during matchmaking.
  
• Bounty Hunter's 'Blessed Combat' talent no longer considers his ultimate as a melee hit.
  
• Bounty Hunter's 'Indiscriminate Blast' now has the same cleave modifiers as other shotgun-type attacks.
  
• Fix "It's Bloody Teamwork" not working as described in the tooltip. Tooltip says it increases the damage resistance provided by the Protective Presence aura. However what it does is provide another separate buff that stacks multiplicatively. This fix makes it so it works as described.

Hotfix 4.2.1 just went live:

• Fixed the ‘drumming’ sound heard whilst “Impenetrable” is active on Ironbreaker whilst venting overcharge/THP decays.
  
• Fixed Grail Knight not receiving THP when killing an enemy with Blessed Blade.
  
• Fixed an issue where Hagbane could doubleshoot, causing unecessary ammo use.

Welcome to patch 4.2 on PC. This patch brings the bot improvements that Gameplay Programmer Ričardas spoke about in the lastest Dev Blog. If you have not read it yet you can find it here!

Patch 4.2 also brings more fixes and tweaks.

Misc.

• Fixed various crashes.
  
• Fixed various localisation issues.
  
• Deactivating DLCs in the Steam client should now deactivate them In-Game.
  
• Made alterations to the telemetry tracking the networking issues being reported (increased pings between players, and more frequent lobby breakdowns).

Bot Improvements

• Bots are now more willing to give their healing items to players.
  
• Bots now use healing potion if they are at 40% health rather than 50%.
  
• Bots are now more accurate with Drakefire Pistols.
  
• Bots now have sturdier legs if they decide to take fast way down the ladder (they no longer take fall damage).
  
• Removed ping cooldown on bot commands to make pickup and drop grim commands more responsive, they are still bound by social wheel event count limit.
  
• Bots now stick closer when under high threat (many aggroed enemies).
  
• Bots no longer take ammo pouches if any player is missing any ammo.
  
• Bots no longer heal if they have natural bonds unless they have been already been downed once and are about to die again.
  
• Fixed Sienna bot not using heavy attacks on armored units while wielding a dagger.
  
• Reduced damage importance for infantry class enemies, causing bots to prefer faster wide sweep attacks on them.
  
• Added ranged weapon type classification, so bots should only use ranged weapon against targets that match weapon type eg. they won't fire handguns at infantry.
  
• Bots now fire faster with rapid fire weapons like Bolt Staff.
  
• Bots now try a bit harder to leave poison clouds if they land on them.
  
• Bots should no longer run off cliffs if they are in ratling gunners fire cone or other long sticky AOE threat.
  
• Bots should now be more aware of pinged targets.
  
• Bots should now consider shooting at specials from a bit further away.
  
• Fixed bots getting stuck in Hagbane charge attack.
  
• Ratling Gunners now update bot threat box when they switch direction of fire, so bots have better chance of escaping direct fire.
  
• Made bots stay away from Ratling Gunners and Warpfire Throwers if they engage in ranged combat with them.
  
• Bot Engineers should be less inclined to use his activated ability against every stray rat.

Levels

• Empire in Flames: Fixed an issue where early placing of the barrels to the cart could cause further barrels to not spawn.
  
• Empire in Flames: Fixed some spots where bots could get stuck when trying to retrieve a Tome, and a couple of other locations where bots had trouble traversing, including a ladder or two.
  
• Garden of Morr: Fixed a particularly troublesome spot where bots could and often would cliff-dive.
  
• Screaming Bell: Added some blockers to prevent dashing into places where you shouldn't.
  
• Screaming Bell: Bots should find grabbing the second Grimoire considerably easier now.
  
• The Blightreaper: Fixed a spot where Sienna's could Firewalk and find themselves beneath the map.

Social Wheel

• It should no longer be possible to Tag/Ping players.
  
• Pings while the 'social wheel is opening' should now work better (We have 3 different ping states: Direct ping (single keydown), when the social wheel's opening animation is running, and when the social wheel's animation is finished).
  
• Units should no longer be pinged if you try to tell a bot with a tome to pickup another tome (crossed out) through the social wheel.

Interface

• The Enter key can now be rebound as any other key.
  
• Lohner's shop now shows correct icons for Soldier's Mace.
  
• Fixed chat box overlapping 3rd player's equipment UI.

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.

[h2]Franz Lohner's Chronicle - The Eternal Flame[/h2]
Would you believe it, I managed to get Saltzpyre talking about Ulric? The God of Wolves and Winter’s always a touchy subject with Sigmarites, what with there being bad blood between the two churches.

You see, Sigmar is commonly held to have been a worshipper of Ulric, back when he was just a mortal man with a hammer and not the godly cornerstone of civilisation, bless his name. That being the case, there are plenty of Ulricans who claim that this jolly little Empire of ours actually belongs to Ulric, and not Sigmar, but Sigmar belonged to Ulric.

All stuff and nonsense as far as I’m concerned. The Empire’s literally on fire, and folk are squabbling over which holy rune gets scratched into the ashes? That’s what comes of the devout being promised a paradisical afterlife. They tend to forget about the perils of the here and now.

Our Saltzpyre, being the learned fellow he is, was musing aloud about the Flame of Ulric, which burns merrily away in the city of Middenheim. Supposedly, it was called into being when Ulric stuck his axe on the Fauschlag – yon mountain Middenheim was built upon. But then again, supposedly Middenheim’s never been successfully invaded, and I don’t reckon that’s one hundred percent truthful.

Anyway, this Eternal Flame’s been burning for millennia, and no one seems to know why. Not been put to much in the way of pertinent use either, unless you want to count crowd-pleasing ceremonies of making supposed heretics take the trial of walking through the flames. Saltzpyre’s got to wondering if the Eternal Flame might maybe, somehow, give us an edge in our never-ending labours. I mean, Ulric’s black-armoured bod hasn’t been see stalking the mortal world for time out of mind, but maybe he’s left us a bit of power we can wield in his name?

I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t see the Ar-Ulric letting us anywhere near the bloody thing. Emil Valgeir’s a stubborn old sod, even by Middenheimer standards, and if he gets wind that it was Saltzpyre’s idea, he’ll be even more resistant, what with church rivalry being a thing. On the other hand, No one seems to know quite where Valgeir is right now, so maybe we can take a bit of a look.

On the other, other hand, finding the Eternal Flame’s source likely means braving the depths of the Fauschlag, and there’s all manner of terrible things down there. I’ve even seen some legends claim that when the end of the world finally comes, it’ll start with the Fauschlag. Not sure I believe it. When the world ends, it’ll end everywhere, right? Stands to reason.

Maybe I should send one of the lads up to Middenheim? I’ll have a ponder.

We hope you are all well in this new year! 

We are cracking on with work on Vermintide 2, which includes the upcoming Chaos Wastes and, of course, continuing filling those hourglasses on the character select screen with new careers for the heroes! But this dev blog is not about either of those things. We want to take a few paragraphs to talk about bots - specifically upcoming improvements to bot behaviors coming to PC in patch 4.2. 

Gameplay Programmer Ričardas will talk a bit about the improvements that he and the team have been working on in relation to some of the feedback you have given. 



[h2]NEW RANGED COMBAT BEHAVIOR AND TWEAKS:[/h2]

One of the tools bots did not utilize very well that players do is ranged combat. Whilst ranged combat is not the focus of the Vermintide 2, it is still a very useful tool that helps to ensure the party survives against the bad guys - specials in particular.

Sure they know how to pull the trigger but ranged weapons, unlike their melee counterparts, are a lot more specialized and have a limited ammo supply. Wasting shots on poorly chosen targets is extra painful. So in Patch 4.2, we have added some ‘target categorizations’, which should make bots better at dealing with specials if they are equipped with snipe type weapons (eg. handguns, crossbows), select more fitting attack type if they have such available (eg. fireball staff, bolt staff). So for example they shouldn’t fire handguns at infantry, and won't try to kill special units with weapons like the Drakegun. 

[h2]BOT POSITIONING:[/h2]

Good positioning is a hard thing to achieve since you need to take in a lot of information and make some predictions, too. For players we have a bunch of visual cues that help them identify danger like toxic clouds or streams of bullets, however, bots don't see the way we do. So the way we try to keep our bots out of trouble is split into two parts. 

Navigation Mesh Cost Weights are used to help bots navigate around fixed static dangers, such as globe gas or lamp oil fires. 

Emergency Threat Areas are employed by bots to move them out of more dynamic threats. They tell bots that something bad is about to happen in an area and should get out as fast as they can, such as a Chaos Warriors hulking great axe bearing down towards their face. 

We have made some changes here, as well as added and updated a bunch of those areas to help our fellow bots avoid and react more quickly to imminent threats. Also, we have tweaked the emergency threat response behavior to be less "panicky" which resulted in them sometimes slipping off cliffs. ;) 

[h2]BOT MELEE COMBAT TWEAKS:[/h2]

Staying together is key to survival in Vermintide, making sure that bots stay close when a horde (or a patrol that someone just pulled) is approaching makes them more reliable at covering your flanks and saving you from a special. With that in mind, the higher the apparent threat on the battlefield, the more likely bots are to stand at your side, whilst favoring faster, sweepier attacks against infantry class enemies. 

As a bonus, it also reduces the amount of times bots charging forward into hordes and incidentally running into your crosshair, but that will still happen especially when there are less enemies around.

[h2]BOTS BEING TOO COMPETITIVE ON RESOURCES:[/h2]

Bots are supposed to fill more of a support role and make sure the player gets to be the star of the show, so when a bot claims a resource, whether that’s ammo or a potion, it indirectly steals fun away from the player.

For a while now, bots have been quite hungry for resources. We’ve made some tweaks to that in 4.2, such as restricting them from picking up ammo bags if the player is missing any ammunition, and made some adjustments to their dependence and willingness to picking up and chugging potions. 



Patch 4.2 will be coming in the next few weeks, and with it are also some general bug fixes for bot behaviours, and with it we’ll compile patch notes that break down in a bit more detail the commentary above. 

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, I finally did it: I got Kerillian to open up a bit about her past. I mean, not all the way, and she had a funny look in her eye, but it’s a start, right? And it’s not as though her eyes don’t look funny all the time.

Seems Athel Loren’s a bit of a melting pot. Most bloodlines stretch back to the times before the Sundering. You know, before there was dark elves and high elves, and there was just, well, elves. Or as Kerillian puts it, ‘pure’ elves, untainted by that big old civil war the rest of the pointy-ears are always embroiled in. But over the years, the forest’s also become a refuge for outcasts from Ulthuan and Naggaroth, and though they’re sworn to leave old ties behind, for some it ain’t that easy. Leads to some … well, let’s call them ‘suspect’ choices.

Turns out, our merry lass stumbled on one of these suspect choices right as it was being made. A mage walking parts of Athel Loren no mage should be walking, if you take my meaning. And it wasn’t just him alone. Whole bunch of them there were, midway through a ritual dedicated to Hekarti.

Now, elf gods are a mixed bunch, but Hekarti definitely sits on the bleaker side of the ledger. She’s the mistress of all that’s corrupting and terrible in the Winds of Magic, so it follows that those who worship her ain’t exactly looking for the wherewithal to bring peace and solace to this world of ours.

I’ll spare you some of the details I wish Kerillian had spared me, but let’s just say this was not a nice ritual. Seems this mage – Etrian Dunderhead, though I suspect Kerillian may have editorialised his surname – was petitioning Hekarti for sorcerous mastery, and offering forest spirits as collateral. Sadly for him, it all goes to a dog’s breakfast when Kerillian makes her entrance.

To hear our lass tell it, Etrian’s accomplices scarper at first sight of her. The thing about waywatchers is you can never be sure that the one you see is the only one what can see you, and with this lot being involved in some very mucky business, they weren’t planning on waiting to discover the truth. Etrian’s made of sterner stuff, or maybe he’s more afraid of Hekarti than Kerillian’s arrows? More fool him, as it turns out. Kerillian leaves him dead among the moss and goes about her business, job done and a righteous fire burning within.

Only problem is, Etrian’s a popular chap, and his mates raise hell at the next council of kings. Accusations of murder are levelled, and our Kerillian has no witnesses to prove her side, and plenty arranged in opposition. She’s cast out, and hasn’t been home since.

So that’s her tale … but I don’t know that it’s the truth. Not sure why I doubt her. I mean, apart from the fact that it’s Kerillian, and Kerillian’s an elf. Maybe it’s the way she was watching me all the time I was speaking, as if she was using my expression for a guide as to what she should say next? Could be.

Still, I reckon there’s some truth there. Or at least a little bit.

Maybe.

I hate elves.