Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide

[baelthazar]

They say that the Humble Bundle version comes with DLC, although I am not sure what that means.

Also, you get a 10% off of their store for the month, but the Steam sales are likely to eclipse that.

[ColdSteel]

So, I picked this up and finished up the Horn of Magnus map on easy playing with bots. Everything went fine and it was fun though it would be really nice if they included a mission map in-game so you could see where you are and where your objectives are.

The combat is quite fun and visceral. There certainly are a lot of rats to kill, that's for sure. I played as the default Dwarf Ranger but I'm wondering if I should switch to the Empire Soldier as he has a blue 2 hand hammer I got from the daily holiday loot chest. Does it really matter which class you play or do you need to level each one up separately? I wish there was a manual because a lot of things aren't very clear. For example, I got 100XP for finishing my first mission map but I don't see any kind of screen that shows how much total XP you have.

[ColdSteel]

I've completed 4 missions solo now and have the forge unlocked. I salvaged some extra weapons and upgraded both the blue 2H hammer traits for Empire Soldier since that's the class I've decided to play for now. I gave the Blue 2H axe that was the daily reward today to the Ranger Dwarf and upgraded the first trait on it as well.

The recent 1.5 update had a lot of improvements to the bots and I must say they do a really nice job of helping out. When I get jumped by an assassin rat or grabbed by a hook rat, they really hustle over to my rescue. They rapidly shoot down machine gun rats and poison grenade rats from a distance too. I haven't seen them doing anything stupid at all so far. Plus, they stay right with you and don't run off which is probably better than most PUGs.

So, this game seem perfectly viable solo and I'm having a lot of fun with it so far. Getting items is very slow going though. Thanks goodness for the daily holiday equipment chest rewards. I just wish I didn't miss out on the first 20 days of those.

[ColdSteel]

10 of the 13 missions are done now and the Shrine unlocked. The dwarf and soldier have a blue 2H axe and hammer respectively and the rest all have green melee weapons. I've been getting quite a few of the green melee weapons but haven't gotten but 1 green ranged weapon so far. I guess eventually I'll be able to forge one or pray for one at the shrine. The combat in the game is really a lot of fun and I love playing with the bots because of their personalities and the witty repartee they all have. I guess that will get old eventually but for now I'm enjoying it. The missions designs are also really nice on most maps. Some of them are a joy to play. I'm looking forward to completing all 13 levels and unlocking the contracts and quests board.

[GreenGoo]

My son picked this up so I guess I will too so we can play together. We tried it another time when it was a free weekend. I thought it was good but not great.

[ColdSteel]

I finished all the main missions a few days ago and have been working on a contract for an orange empire repeater handgun named 'Ursula'. It will be my first orange so I'm looking forward to finishing the needed quests to get it. I need 6 quest keys to unlock it and I can only do one of those quests a day so it's taking a while. I have 4 of the 6 so far so another few days. The items and quests on the board change every day but once you accept a contract, you get to finish it. Pretty nice system and a great addition to the game.

I also unlocked the Shrine and that allowed my to spend some blue shards to change traits on a few of my weapons. I have a green empire gun which is awesome for sniping specials so I replaced the crappy trait it had with the master crafted trait using the shrine and now it reloads faster. Pretty nice.

I've gotten to where doing missions on Easy is pretty trivial so once I get some more equipment for my bots, I'll give Normal a try.

[ColdSteel]

I'm up to level 33 now and am able to reliably finish missions on Nightmare difficulty. That nets me orange equipment on a fairly regular basis so I've been able to equip all my bots with orange weapons. I started playing the bright wizard with an orange fireball staff and it's made a huge difference. The problem with the bots is that they play very defensively and rarely (if ever) use their charged attacks. Or any attacks, really. They mostly block and push instead. When I play Kruber with his 2H orange axe, I massacre hordes of rats with his charge attack but bot Kruber never uses it. So I play as the BW and use fireballs to provide massive dps for my party. It's trickier on Nightmare because of friendly fire but it still works. I can carry all my bots that way through Nightmare missions and the BW is an awesome machine of rat destruction.

My dwarf has an orange axe and shield and drakefire pistols and I'd love to play him instead but if I do, the bot bright wizard does nothing except fight with her sword. If they could just fix the bots a bit more, this game would be just about a perfect SP experience. I guess that's why they don't do it but I think that's really counter productive thinking. Why spite your SP audience to try to retain a much smaller MP core? They'd sell a lot more copies of their game by promoting the SP play instead. In any case, I'm so glad I picked this up because the personalities of the bots are fantastic, the levels are really well done and the game plays smooth and fast. Great game.

[GreenGoo]

Took a run at Horn on easy with 3 bots, picking up a grimoire on the way. Then, for no good reason my internet broke for about 5 minutes. Well the game doesn't like when it can't talk to Steam, so it booted me out mid-mission. That was pretty obnoxious.

After my internetting returned, told the game to find me a multiplayer game running Horn on easy, which it did.

So I ran through Horn with 3 other people who were all level 1 or 0 with no real problems. I only took a tome this time because I wasn't sure the party could handle the decrease in hp from the grimoire.

I rolled a 4 at the end and ended up with a decent green gun for the Witchhunter. Considering I have an even better blue set of guns waiting to have their traits unlocked, it was sort of redundant. At least it can be shard fodder.

[ColdSteel]

The best thing to do with your greens is save them up until you have 5 and then fuse in the forge into a blue. The forge unlocks at level 5. Once you've completed all of the normal missions (13 total, I think) you'll unlock the Contracts and Quests board in the inn, which will allow you to get oranges pretty easily. I don't remember what level the Shrine unlocks but you can use that to reroll traits and create weapons from shards.

I've also had several missions aborted when Steam hiccups. It's really annoying.

[GreenGoo]

Yeah, I'm aware of how the forge works, mostly. I've saved everything I've found/been rewarded so far until I decide what to do with them.

I ran the castle mission (find the chalice, move statuettes) with a pickup group last night on easy. It went fine for the most part. The problem is that on easy you can pretty much button mash and get away with it. On the higher levels you need a more methodical approach to combat.

[Blackhawk]

Available on the Humble Jumbo Bundle, currently for $6.08 (plus all the other goodies.) Buy a copy and join us in the LFG thread!

[ColdSteel]

11GB patch today. Geeze, I sure hope that's the last time they do that. It sounds like it will be from the patch notes.

I've gotten good orange and red equipment on all my characters now. I still need an orange melee weapon for the witchhunter but I never get to play him anyway since I have to play the bright wizard instead to carry my bots through nightmare missions. Fun game but I'm a bit tired of the grind at this point.

[TheMix]

Hmmm... I wonder if that's where the pages came from. I ran Smug's earlier and picked up 2 lore pages. Not sure what I'm supposed to do with them.

[TheMix]

Awwww... there goes Blackhawk's day job...

[Blackhawk]

No kidding. At six bucks, I couldn't resist - I bought a copy for each of my kids. It's going to make me short this month, but should be good for a lot of family gaming nights.

[TheMix]

Nice! I wondered if you'd end up doing that.

Let me know if you ever need a hand in your group.

[TheMix]

Just completed the contract for Enemy Below w/3 Tomes on Normal. It was Herculean! Seriously, I probably should have just run it 3 times... I'm pretty sure I spent at least 20-30 minutes just hanging out waiting for someone to take enough damage to use their healing. I also screwed up and didn't get rid of the bots' trinkets. A couple of times I had the trinket proc that prevented them from using up their healing item.

Plus my trinket that kept duplicating healing items I would pick up...

It was a LOOOONNNNGGGGG run. Though not particularly hard. I was chatting with a friend most of the time I was hanging around waiting for them to take damage. Or, at the end, I kept trying to get myself hurt, but they'd come in and kill all the rats. I'd be standing in a group of 30+ rats and not end up taking any damage.

Except for the one time I managed to stand in front of a gunner and go down. THEN they decided that they should hide behind a pillar. Wouldn't want to get shot by the gunner now, would they? I had 5-6 rats beating on me, and I can see the three of them hiding. I thought I blew it, but they did end up getting to me before it was too late.

[Blackhawk]

Nice! I wondered if you'd end up doing that.

Let me know if you ever need a hand in your group.

Thanks, although it won't be immediate. We need to finish our current Borderlands run, and then we'll be starting ESO with this as a side game.

[TheMix]

Also a good plan. As I was explaining to a friend earlier, this isn't really a game you get "sucked into". There just isn't that much to do. It is, however, a nice way to kill 30 min sometimes.

[McNutt]

I bought this game last night and played it for about an hour and a half. I really loved Left 4 Dead and this seems to scratch that itch. I played one mission as the Sorcerer, Witch Hunter and Dwarf. All three were very different in their approach and all three were a lot of fun. I loved using the Dwarf's shield batch and then hacking the rats before they could get back up.

I went ahead and pre-ordered Vermintide 2 just now since it was 10% off for a few more hours.

I'm looking forward to diving into this one.

[GreenGoo]

Having played with the LFG people I can say that the game is designed for multiplayer and that's where it shines. Tactics and support combined with a simplistic (but not easy) quest system and crafting system gave it legs far longer than I expected.

It's not really my cup of tea though, and without the group here on OO I probably wouldn't have played it half as much as I have. I'm not a fan of rats or wererats or ratdudes as a primary antagonist and I don't have any real interest in the setting.

I'm only vaguely interested in #2 and that's only because I want to see what they do to change things up and make things more interesting, not because I'm excited for another version of the game.

There's no question it's a good game (it's L4D with rats and gear) it's just not that interesting to me.

[McNutt]

The sequel looks to throw in some humanoid enemies too. Maybe undead vikings?

I read that the character classes branch off at certain levels, so each class has three subclasses. Is it like this in the first game or is it all weapon dependent?

[GreenGoo]

The first has several classes (some of which are actually races) and there are multiple weapon types usable by each class. The different types change the nature of combat for each class. For example Sword and Board allows for some tanking and defending of choke points and flanks, rapiers kill regular mobs fast with 1 hit 1 kill, dual daggers allow for very fast attacks and more rapid weapon procs (random effects that have a chance to occur per attack), 2 handed hammers are slow but hit AoE with knockback etc.

There are no skill trees that I remember and everything is done through weapon type and quality. It has been awhile and the details are a bit fuzzy now.

Unlike l4d, the weapons in Verm have very distinct tactics associated with each of them. As a primarily melee game positioning and tactics play a stronger role than in l4d.

[Freyland]

The sequel looks to throw in some humanoid enemies too. Maybe undead vikings?

I read that the character classes branch off at certain levels, so each class has three subclasses. Is it like this in the first game or is it all weapon dependent?

Undead Vikings. Lol! We need to delete the entire forum so the Warhammer fanbase out there doesn't find out about it and come here with pitchforks and spell books.

Chaos Warriors would be what you seek.

[Blackhawk]

They added chaos to the Skaven, yep. They've also added (just from what I've seen so far) trolls. The trolls really, really suck.

In V1, you had five characters. They were essentially pre-built race/class combinations. You customized them through equipment choice.

In V2, you have five characters, but each character has three specialization choices. Bardin the dwarf, for instance, has a ranger (what he was in V1), an Ironbreaker (tough tank), and a Trollslayer (rage fueled melee damage machine.) Each specialization has its own skill tree, and you can still further customize by equipment.

[Blackhawk]

Oh, and prologue bug.

[Blackhawk]

Just put in a ~five hour session with 3/4 members of the same group we farmed Vermintide 1 with on Nightmare difficulty. We never cleared a level. On recruit.

The combat is tougher, blocking and dodging is less forgiving, and the levels seem a lot longer.