In the upcoming Quality of Life update arriving on March 15, there will be some changes to two of Kerillian’s careers: Sister of the Thorn, and Shade. In this dev blog, you will learn more about these changes and what they mean for both careers.

Kerillian’s latest career has undergone a bit of a renovation. The changes to Sister of the Thorn will add tools and opportunities for Kerillian to become an asset to the team in more ways than previously through debuffing enemies and controlling the flow of combat.

The goal with changing Sister of the Thorn is to address the most problematic areas of the career, make it into a stronger thematic role in combat, and lean more into the fantasy of the Sisters of the Thorn.

• Perk 1 Blackvenom Blades: Melee attacks apply Blackvenom, dealing damage and increasing damage taken by 12% for 10 seconds.

• Talent 2-2 Atharti's Delight - Changed to applying bleed when striking poisoned enemies instead of on critical strikes.
  
• Talent 2-3 Isha’s Bounty replaced with Briar's Malice - Casting Thornwake grants Kerillian 2 critical strikes.
  
• Talent 4-2 Bonded Spirit - Reduce the cooldown of Radiance by 50%, taking damage sets the cooldown back 2 seconds.
  
• Talent 4-3 Radiant Inheritance - Consuming Radiance grants Kerillian and nearby allies 15% power and 5% critical strike chance for 10 seconds.
  
• Talent 5-1 Pale Queen’s Choosing replaced with Recursive Toxin - Blackvenom can now stack 2 times.
  
• Talent 5-2 Moral-Heg’s Doomsight replaced with Lingering Blackvenom - Critical Strikes apply Blackvenom to enemies near the target.
  
• Talent 6-1 Ironbark Thicket - Now also increases the width of the wall
  
• Talent 6-2 Bloodrazor Thicket replaced with Tanglegrasp Thicket - Thorny vines now erupt from Kerillian and travel towards the targeted area. Enemies hit are dragged towards the target area.
  
• Talent 6-3 Blackvenom Thicket - Thornwake instead causes roots to burst from the ground, staggering enemies and applying Blackvenom to them.

We felt Shade wasn't in a good place as a niche melee career, and that she needed more emphasis on positioning as well as allowing her to get behind enemies more often as a core part of her career. In order to support different playstyles, we also wanted to create a clearer intention with her Career Skill talents.

We wanted to remove the need for certain talent combinations and free up some more choices as a result. We added two new perks to get her more in line with other careers.

We have made an effort to make sure the Shade stealth minigame is a bigger part of the second to second gameplay. Players who utilize this well should notice a big improvement to backstabbing.

• Main Passive: Changed to Assassin's Blade: 100% additional damage when attacking enemies with melee attacks from behind.
  
• Perk 1 Murderous Prowess: Charged critical backstabs instantly slay man-sized enemies.
  
• Perk 2 Blur: Parrying an attack and quickly dodging grants Kerillian stealth for a short duration.
  
• Perk 3 Dagger in the Dark: Melee attacks from stealth are always critical.

• Talent 2-3 Exquisite Huntress - Increased duration of the headshot damage buff to 10 seconds, up from 5.
  
• Talent 4-1 Ereth Khial's Herald replaced with Chain Killer- Successive Charged Backstabs increase Backstab Damage by 25% for 5 seconds. This effect can stack up to 2 times.
  
• Talent 4-2 Vanish replaced with Focused Slaying - Killing an enemy with a Backstab grants Cooldown reduction for 3 seconds.
  
• Talent 6-1 Cloak of Mist replaced with Shimmer Strike - Leaving Infiltrate grants Kerillian Stealth for 3 seconds. Killing an elite or a special enemy extends this effect by 1 second.
  
• Talent 6-2 Shadowstep replaced with Hungry Wind - Leaving Infiltrate grants Kerillian 10% movement speed and 15% Power with the ability to pass through enemies for 10 seconds. Infiltrate no longer grants bonus damage.

Heroes, we‘ve come far and slain many a Skaven and Rotblood along the way. The 4-Year Anniversary of Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is now live on all platforms! Between March 8 - March 21 all players can play the celebratory level ‘A Quiet Drink’, and on March 15 the Quality of Life update will go live on PC.

Keep a close eye on our social media, PC launcher, and website throughout this week to learn more about the upcoming Quality of Life update, new Premium Cosmetics, and more!

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for playing our little rat-smasher, Warhammer: Vermintide 2. We’ve said it before, but it deserves to be said again: your support is invaluable to us and we want to assure you that there are more great things coming!

Developer Stream
This Friday, March 11 at 2 pm CET, Community Manager Asqhy will be taking you through some of the goodies coming in the Quality of Life update on March 15.

Live on all platforms
The 4-Year Anniversary will run across all platforms from March 8 - 21. All future Vermintide 2 anniversaries will happen on all platforms at the same time. This means that the previous Xbox and PS4/5 specific events will happen simultaneously to PC on or around March 8.

A Quiet Drink
Follow the heroes out on the town in search of the famous Bugman’s XXXXXX. Let’s hope that the Skaven and Rotbloods don’t stir up too much trouble.

Quality of Life Update
Throughout the week you will find out more about the Quality of Life update. Which is our 4-Year Anniversary gift to you! The update contains features inspired by some of your favorite mods, new Premium Cosmetics, and more!

Stay up to date with what’s coming by following us on our social channels!

Content Creator Streams
Join some of the Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Content Creators as they celebrate this 4-year anniversary with us!

Schedule:

• Moopshark - Tuesday, March 8 - Thursday, March 10, 2 PM PST
  
• jtcLIVE: Friday March 11 & Saturday March 12, 9PM CST
  
• FuPlaayz: All week 6PM CET
  
• WetMagic: Sunday March 3, 5pm CET

For the past 4 years, you’ve fought your way through Helmgart together with the Ubersreik 5. We’re incredibly grateful for the love you’ve shown Warhammer: Vermintide 2. Words aren’t enough to show our gratitude.

Join the Fatshark Stream this Friday at 2 pm CET to celebrate with us as we take a look back at the past 4 years, and talk about what’s to come.

The 4-Year Anniversary will start on all platforms on March 8 and finish on March 21. The celebratory level ‘A Quiet Drink’ will be available on all platforms during this time.

A birthday is not complete without a birthday gift. On March 15 a Quality of Life update will be released on PC, containing content inspired by some of your favorite mods. This update will come to console in April.

Thank you for these past 4 years, and for the coming years!

/the Vermintide 2 Team

Hello! We’re Fatshark, and we’re a game studio that creates four-player co-op games such as Warhammer: Vermintide 2 and Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. We’re looking to learn more about how our players and community members felt about our content releases in 2021 and what content they’d like to see in Vermintide 2 in the future.

• This survey will take approximately 5 minutes to complete
  
• Most of this survey is multiple choice and will walk you through our content that we released in 2021.
  
• This survey may be used to influence how we approach the community and game in the future.

Thank you! We really appreciate your input!

https://forms.gle/1rMeK2ibv8yjB9WM9

Throughout February, there will be some intermittent interruptions of the (now legacy) tech that drives Twitch Mode in Vermintide 2. This will ultimately lead to a “permanent” shut down on the last day of the month. We still have some work to implement the changes needed to retool the Twitch Mode to work with the new tech in place.

As soon as the changes are implemented and verified on our side, we’ll work to hotfix the issue for our PC players. There will be a more protracted downtime for our players on PlayStation and Xbox as we will likely place fixes into the next content updates on those platforms.

Twitch have published the schedule for the planned downtimes of this service:

• February 9, 2022 – 2-hour shutdown starting at 11:00am PDT (8:00 pm CET)
  
• February 14, 2022 – 4-hour shutdown starting at 11:00am PDT
  
• February 16, 2022 – 6-hour shutdown starting at 11:00am PDT
  
• February 21, 2022 – 24-hour shutdown starting at 11:00am PDT
  
• February 28, 2022 – Permanent shutdown

We truly understand how important Twitch mode is, whether you’re a Streamer or just enjoy the extra spice Twitch Mode delivers in your games. We will do all we can to minimize the interruption to the game mode and keep you updated on this situation as soon as we’ve got more info to share.

As 2021 winds down, we—the community team—wanted to take some time to highlight where we’ve been and where we’re going.

First off, we wanted to thank you all for the incredible three years, swimming through the current whirlpool of COVID bumps and hiccups. The studio has grown a great deal these past couple of years, and with growth comes some teething pains. We’re still finding our voice and figuring out how best to be the studio we want to be and the studio you wish us to be.

Throughout this year, though, we’ve achieved many great things together, including:

• Introducing a new game mode to bring rouge-lite/like mechanics into Vermintide with the free Chaos Wastes expansion.
  
• Adding Hedge into the game and letting Kerillian get in touch with the Queen of Athel Loren by releasing her newest career: Sister of the Thorn.
  
• Creating a new event for October’s Geheimnisnacht and beefing up the Chaos Wastes game mode by adding Grudge Marks.
  
• Letting Saltzpyre extol the virtues of Sigmar even more with his new career: Warrior Priest of Sigmar on PC and Xbox (with Playstation to come in January!).

We’ve been rigorously reading your feedback, and while we cannot fully share what is in our content pipeline just quite yet until we get closer to some internal mile markers, we can share some things you can expect from us going forward as a community:

• More communication! The community team has grown in 2021, which gives us more opportunities to communicate with you and listen to your feedback. We’ll be aiming to provide you with honest, clear, and transparent communication within our limitations on our various platforms (Steam Forums/Fatshark Forums/Reddit/Discord). This is a strategy we are still growing into and finding our voice in as a studio and may take some time, but our end goal is to cultivate a relationship with you all that fosters trust, respect, and open feedback.
  
• Community surveys! We want to make sure you all have ample opportunity to speak to us and reach out to us on concentrated topics directly. So, starting in 2022, you will see surveys on different aspects of the game, content you all want to see, and more. We want to better understand where you all come from, what you expect from us, and how you play; which will help us create a better game for you!
  
• More streams! Streams on the FatsharkGames Twitch will return fortnightly every other Friday starting January 7, where we will host games with the community, fireside chats, community highlight reels, and more. This will be your place to talk to us in real-time, get to know other community members, kick back, and discuss all things Vermintide!
  
• The return of the newsletter! If you signed up for our email newsletter, you’ll see those returning in 2022 as well, which will be your digest to community-created content, in-game events, gameplay tips and tricks, lore tidbits, and much more!

We’re looking forward to the exciting things we have in store for you for Vermintide—and hope you are too! So from all of us at the community team, thank you so much for playing our game, sharing your feedback, and continuing to be so passionate and excited about Vermintide! We’re excited to go along our journey in 2022 together with you, and hope you’re just as ready to see what the future holds!

Stability and Localisation

• Improved localization.
  
• Fix crash when opening the playerlist while in a deed.
  
• Fixed crash when player hits a dead actor with a melee weapon.
  
• Fixed crash when always blocking boon is picked up or gets disabled while new weapon is loading in.
  
• Fix DLCs not being changed to installed when buying a DLC while in-game for PC.

Playerlist
While we orginially implemented privacy options based on reports of player toxicity, we heard your feedback and have added new privacy features to the in-game tab menu as well as improved existing ones to give players a greater choice of how to show and hide their builds.

• Added a public option for build view privacy setting.
  
• Made the privacy option asymmetric: now if you set your build to public others will be able to see it regardless of their setting.
  
• A label should now show for others when another player's build is hidden due to privacy.

Levels

• Into the Nest: Fixed an issue where players could get left behind in the Into the Nest when two players pulled the lever at the same time (sometimes resulting in crash at the end of the elevator trip).

General

• Warrior Priest's Implacable should now work as expected. The delayed damage effect was doing too much damage.
  
• Revives from the Warrior Priest's The Comet's Gift talent now count in the scoreboard.
  
• Ironbreaker's Gromril Armor should now refresh on clients.
  
• Ironbreaker's Vengeance talent should now activate when Gromril Armor is triggered.
  
• Grail Knight, Outcast Engineer, Sister of the Thorn and Warrior Priest of Sigmar have a chance to do mission briefings when loading into a map.
  
• Fixed curse resistance not affecting Twitch mode curses.
  
• Corrected rarity for one of the nonruned Choas Wastes weapons.
  
• Fixed an animation in 1h Spear and Shield.
  
• The gamma setting no longer affects text rendering.
  
• Chaos Wastes: Corrected rarities of weapon illusions.

Welcome to Patch 4.5, which introduces Victor Saltzpyre's new career: Warrior Priest of Sigmar, as well as various fixes and some tweaks, with some specifically made to address some of the feedback regarding the most brutal, maybe unfair Grudge Mark combinations in the Chaos Wastes.


New Features

• Victor Saltzpyre's new career: Warrior Priest of Sigmar, is available now!
  
• Daily Login Rewards: Daily login rewards are now available in Lohner's Emporium of Wonders. Earn more shillings by visiting him daily!
  
• Added AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution (FSR) to help boost performance from lower resolutions.

Stability and Localisation

• Fixed various unspecifiable crashes.
  
• Fixed various localisation issues.
  
• Fixed crash when selecting an item to salvage with gamepad in the crafting menu.

Enemies

• The Chaos Spawn will now deal less damage on grabbing a player, and more consistently deal damage when chewing or slamming a player. The Chaos Spawn will also now only either chew, or slam a player as opposed to both back to back.
  
• Stormvermin Commanders can now be cleaved through as expected after having mass modifiers added.
  
• Maulers no longer have an attack deadzone, where they would stand in an idle pose due to having a gap between attack-type distance requirements.

The following list of adjustments have been made to various Grudge Marked Monsters

• Chaos Spawn and Minotaur can no longer be marked with 'Shield Shatter'.
  
• Chaos Trolls can no longer be marked with 'Invulnerable'.
  
• Reduced chance of getting 'Invulnerable' along with 'Regenerating'.
  
• 'Crippling' and 'Shield Shatter' will no longer appear together.
  
• Reduced chance of getting 'Illusionist' along with 'Shadow-Step' OR 'Invincible'

Levels

• Empire in Flames: Fixed a location where players could get stuck.
  
• Fort Brendanfrasier: Fixed a location at the end event where bots could get stuck.
  
• Garden of Morr: Fixed a soft lock that could prevent the level from being completed.
  
• Horn of Magnus: Replaced a low poly vista house with one that looks more in-line with the neighbouring properties.
  
• Chaos Wastes: Players can now switch away from bombs while under the "Endless Bombs" potion.
  
• Chaos Wastes: The Chest of Trials can now spawn Minotaurs when playing a Skaven/Beastmen flavoured location.
  
• Chaos Wastes: Fixed some cases where the Chest of Trials failsafe would trigger too soon.

UI/UX

• Fixed game mode not showing correctly for Weaves and Chaos Wastes in Steam Rich Presence.
  
• The standard lobby browser's text should no longer get messed up while viewing a lobby in a Citadel expedition.
  
• Twitch Mode voting UI should now appropriately "ding" both hosts and clients when counting down in both Adventure and Chaos Wastes game modes.
  
• Fixed an issue causing the Athanor interface to glow an ominous red.
  
• When multiple monsters are in play, the HP bar shown will prioritize the monster that you either pinged, dealt damage to, or took damage from last (ping and dealing damage having a higher priority), and will display the closest monster's HP as a fallback.
  
• Chaos Wastes: Fixed an issue where Bile Troll HP bars would display incorrectly.
  
• Added an option for `Equipment & talents privacy` to control who can see your equipped items and talents in the new playerlist menu. The relationship is symmetrical: if you're not sharing your talents with someone you won't be able to see theirs either.

General

• Outcast Engineer's 'Field Trials' Okri's Challenge can now be completed if the player has selected the 'Gromril-Plated Shot' talent.
  
• Outcast Engineer's 'Engineer's Resolve' Talent multiplier has restored back to 1 from an unintentional change to 0.5.
  
• The Conflagration Staff casting location should now be visible to all players.
  
• 'Resourceful Combatant' should now appropriately proc on melee attacks.
  
• Bots should more reliably 'reload' Throwing Axes and Javelins.
  
• Ironbreaker Bardin's index finger should no longer have a strange marking on certain settings/configurations.
  
• Pinging a downed player should once again work as expected.

We are excited to announce that one of the most anticipated and well-guessed careers is now available on PC: the Warrior Priest of Sigmar for Victor Saltzpyre. The new career can be purchased on Steam or in the in-game store.

The Warrior Priest of Sigmar is a new career for Victor Saltzpyre. This DLC contains the new playable career complete with a new talent tree, new weapon types, new abilities, a new Warrior Priest of Sigmar skin, and more.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1782450/Warhammer_Vermintide_2__Warrior_Priest_Career/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1782451/Warhammer_Vermintide_2__Warrior_Priest_Cosmetic_Upgrade/

A Warrior Priest of Sigmar fights evil in all its forms, engaging in close combat with holy purpose. As a Warrior Priest, Saltzpyre draws upon faith to empower his blows and shield himself from harm. Wielding trusty hammers or combining them with a tome or shield, he calls upon divine might to inspire comrades and strike fear into his foes.

Smite the heretic with new unique weapon types: the Reckoner Great Hammer and the Skull-Splitter Hammer & Blessed Tome.

Career Skill: Shield of Faith
Victor blesses targeted ally or himself with a shield, making them immune to damage for 6 seconds. When the shield expires it explodes, staggering nearby enemies.

Passive Ability: Righteous Fury
Victor gains Hatred when enemies die near him. At 100% Hatred Righteous Fury trigger, causing all hits to Smite the enemy a second time for 20% of the damage.

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’ve good news and bad news.

The good news is that Geheimnisnacht’s sort-of maybe over for another year. I mean, it doesn’t work quite like that because of our delightfully anarchic moons, but I like to think of it as being a year away. Perception is reality, after all, and the way reality’s been going lately I reckon the more I enforce my perception on top of it, the better it’ll be for everyone. If nothing else, it makes for a pumpkin-rich environment and everyone likes that, or so I understand.

Oh, wait. Two bits of good news. It’s been a bumper pumpkin crop this year, and no more than usual seemed to be infested with daemons. Good times. Is that perception? Is that reality? There comes a point where it no longer matters, so long as you’ve all the pumpkins you want.

When all else fails, take shelter in philosophy.

More than that, Catrinne’s definitely looking a bit more like herself. Colour to her cheeks, and daubing some truly horrifying paintings that I won’t have up in the keep, thank you very much. At the time, we all thought she’d simply taken a tumble on the stairs a couple of weeks back, but now she’s complaining about hearing voices. Says one of them goaded her into what she’ll only describe as “unladylike and precipitate action”, whatever that means. Not the first time I’ve heard of there being strange voices about the place. I hoped it was all to do with Geheimnisnact, but I guess not.

Anyway, the bad news is that our little burbling friend Blosphoros the Three-Eyed Watcher is still stinking up the place. You see, the problem with Geheimnisnacht is that while it only lasts for a night on paper, in reality (or possibly perception) it tends to drag on. The proximity of the moons weakens the walls between our world and the ghastly dimension from which daemonic denizens spill forth, and once they’re here, they’re in no hurry to go back.

So yes, the Five will have to be content with old Blosphoros for a little while yet, but hopefully they can keep the little blighter in check until he gets bored or runs his magical tether too thin.

Blighter. Heh.

As to Blosphoros himself, I’ve had Olesya doing a bit of digging around about his past. Not much to say about him, really, save that he’s definitely a curdling bag of faeces with his eye on the prize. Being a daemon’s a constant battle for supremacy over one’s peers, or so I understand, and the best way of earning points – beyond the usual, ahem, direct method – is to wreak havoc among us unsuspecting mortals. Still too early to say if Blosphoros’ rituals are directly dangerous, or are just a bit of a song and dance to get the Pactsworn wound up in his name. Doesn’t much matter, really. We can’t have that kind of thing going on.

Seems Blosphoros has been playing this Geheimnisnacht game for centuries, on and off, but has heretofore preferred to do so down in Tilea, for whatever reason. That makes him an import, I guess, and one we could well do without. I mean, from what I hear he sounds friendly enough, but then all Nurgle daemons do. Makes a change from skaven, and their claws-on-a-chalkboard screeching, but I don’t suppose it matters if he’s up to no good – and I can’t imagine that’s not the case.

The sooner he toddles off back to the Realm of Chaos, the happier I’ll be.

Not happy, happy, of course. Too much going on for that. But happier, all the same.

We hope you all have been enjoying Geheimnisnacht and have thwarted the Pactsworn in their attempted dark rituals!

• Fixed various crashes.
  
• Chaos Wastes - Fixed an issue where the exit portal would sometimes not spawn after a host migration had taken place during the run.
  
• Enchanter's Lair - Fixed an issue where Nurgloth the Eternal was, literally, eternal when players were carrying the Geheimnisnacht event skull on certain difficulties.
  
• Fixed a crash that would occur specifically on the 'Modded' realm.
  
• Fixed pop-up not appearing for players that were about to purchase a cosmetic they already owned.
  
• Fixed the 'Full Inventory' warning sometimes not showing in Spoils of War when chests could not be opened.
  
• Added an option to switch off the rumble when using a gamepad on PC.

In light of some players being unable to complete the Ritual Rampage - Enchanter’s Lair challenge across multiple difficulties, we have decided to extend the Geheimnisnacht event until November 15, 4am PST on all platforms. This issue has been solved as of Hotfix 4.4.2.1.

Some of you may have noticed that some new Forgotten Relic weapon skins have been showing up from Chaos Wastes weapon shrines. We’re glad you like them as much as we do, and they will be available to owners of the Forgotten Relics DLC in the next major content update and will be found in your player inventory when that update arrives.