Vermintide 2 Tips and Tricks

Seeing how much interest is there in playing game, I think it’ll be a good idea to create a place where we could pool together advice for all players, new or old. I’ll try my best to update the main post from responses, to start off here are some tips I’ve found around. I’ll update this guide over the next few weeks depending on what other players have to add to it.

General

• A simple one would sticking together, or keeping a close eye to any team mate who is separated from the rest . Also be aware of where everyone is, in case someone gets jumped by any assassin's or hook rats.
  • when approaching some ledges, make sure you jump off the ledge together. There will places once fall down into, you cannot climb back up or come back to. one team mate will get hooked, pounced, downed and there'll be nothing you can do but watch them die.
• when encountering a swarm hugging the wall, or finding a funnel would be for the best for dealing with the horde
  • hordes come in 3 waves, if in an open area 2 will come from the front and 1 from the back sometimes.
• spotting (by spamming t) would greatly help with relaying information, not just where an item is but where a bright storm is and where they'll teleport to
• Commendation Crates you get from leveling will give items which will scale with your max power level.
• If you decide to play on champion or higher there is friendly fire.
• After any player is freed of any grab (assassin, hook rat, life leech etc) they'll be catching their breath and vulnerable, they should be protect for a few seconds after.

Weapons

• Understand which weapons for your character would be good for which situation. Armor penetration would be great for armored units, while others are good against dealing with hordes.
• For example for Sienna her flame-thrower staff is great for dealing with hordes but will have trouble dealing with bosses, and armored units. The bolt staff is better for dealing with those units.
• When using melee, swing around your melee weapon and learn where your weapon will land for regular and charged swings. This will be great when dealing with storm vermin, who need to be killed with a head shot unless you have armor penetration
• If anything, you can practice trying out the weapons in training dummy area, which is in the courtyard directly to the left of the spawn area. You can try out against armored dummies too to see your effectiveness.

Potions, bombs and healing items

• Healing items reset your wound counter which determine when you are killed vs downed.
  • The number of down counts decreases as you increase in difficulty. So Recruit allows 3 downs before dying, next difficulty is 2, so on and so forth
  • If you see a healing item don't always use it right away, and think about what scenario will happen in the next area. Most maps are linear and you`ll rarely revisit a place again. HOWEVER there are scenarios where will you have to stay and defend and an area until you fill a cart or slowly push a battering ram. Perfect example is the map empire one fire (the one where there are fireworks at the end and you're running through a burning city). This is an area where you have to deal with hordes, specials and at least 4 storm vermin while collecting and slowly pushing explosives, in close quarters.
• The flame bomb will be great for hordes
• The explosive bomb will be great for armored units and can stun bosses.
• The strength potion can combo with bombs and abilities, making it stronger

Blocking, Pushing and dodging

• Block whenever you can, especially when facing armored units or being attacked by bosses.

• • The Blocks is for a 360 angle but will use less stamina which blocking attacks in infront
  • You can also block while reviving, simply by holding the block button while reviving

• Pushing is great it will use blocking stamina, used by blocking then attacking

• • This can create opening for teammates to attack the stunned skaven
  • An advanced technique is to pushing and attack, do this by pushing and holding down left click to do a charged attack only using 1 block stamina

• Dodging will be great if blocking and pushing are not your style

  • For those of you who jump sometimes instead of dodging, you can rebind the keys to separate functions

If you combine the above 3 you should be able to last a hell of a lot longer against any horde

Bosses

• For Specific bosses
  • Stormfiends have a little caged rat on their backs that are a weakspot. Go for that whenever possible.
  • Bile Trolls regen health when they're down on the ground. They won't attack during this phase, so go in and take as many whacks as possible to reduce the amount they regen.
  • with the chaos spawn, some abilities can set free your teammates. Abilities which deal damage, push or a explosive bomb

• Bosses have a long melee range so don’t chance them hitting you and block their attacks if they charge you, especially if you’re not host

• Pushing them will have a chance to agro them, however it will alway favour the most damage from a person

Grimoire+Tomes

• Both are curses, if you are have an item which gives resistance to curses
• Tomes will take up your health item slots
  • they can be dropped and picked up by anyone, so feel free heal up if you spot a healing item
  • In general will be easier to find

• Grimoires will lower your health and take up a potion slot

  • you discard these once picked up, but this will destroy it
  • pretty hard to find, as they will require some environmental puzzle or jumping
• Locations are something you may have to look up as you go through each map

TLDR if you don’t want to see the helpful guide we have, here's a fun one

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1323025383

Thanks to big_denim, grandCurator, bollard, mike

Some Typos in here, but overall a pretty good list of tips. My other one is just a reiteration of the first one, and has more to do with the map design. If you find one of those points of no return, ALL OF YOU SHOULD JUMP DOWN AT ONCE. I cannot count the amount of times someone is late jumping down and gets hooked to death because we can't reach them. Sticking together is seriously one of the main things that will keep you alive in this game.

That Steam Community guide is friggen fantastic! xD

And here are a couple other tips for new players. These are more or less of the top of my head so they're not in any particular order.

• Stormfiends have a little caged rat on their backs that are a weakspot. Go for that whenever possible.
• Bile Trolls regen health when they're down on the ground. They won't attack during this phase, so go in and take as many whacks as possible to reduce the amount they regen.
• Bardin Ranger's evasion ultimate is super useful when you're team is down and you're the only one left in a horde. You can usually get at least one free revive if you throw the smoke down near a downed enemy.
• Medkits reset your wound counter which determine when you are killed vs downed.
• The number of down counts decreases as you increase in difficulty. So Recruit allows 3 downs before dying, next difficulty is 2, so on and so forth

Will post more when I think of them!

EDIT: Also, you may want to move this to the Vermintide 2 board? Just a thought, since it may have a chance of sticky on there, whereas it will just get lost in the depths of general discussion very quickly. @mike You or one of the other mods able to help with that?

I did not know this, hot damn. That is very useful information!

It's worth mentioning (on a Steam forum thread) that the developer has mentioned multiple times that by doing this you are just hurting your progression. You're removing at least a third of the crates you get to open and will drag out speed you can gear and level (by making it take longer to be able to do higher rank missions). See this post and the one above it: https://steamcommunity.com/app/552500/discussions/0/1694914736001316234/?ctp=3#c1694914736003683233

@bollard: Ya...I haven't actually tested that out yet, just something I saw on reddit yesterday. But aren't you supposed to believe everything you read on the internet!? ;)

@grandcurator: @big_denim:

those are some good tips I'll add, the Med kit/healing draft thing was something that was inherit in vermintide 1 so I'd expect it to carry over.

Also good thought on putting it on the Vermintide 2 board, I cannot find anyway to go about doing this so I will need a mod or Mike to do that.

@bollard:

That is a good point, I've never heard the side to opening the boxes whenever, as personally I've been saving them to the end. However I would still like to point it out for those who wish to save a few for later.

Spears are OP

Does anyone else find this game insanely hard? My group can't even complete missions on Recruit without getting wiped over and over. We are low level to be fair, but you'd think the difficulty spike wouldn't screw you right out of the gate...

@sarnecki: i wonder if people have trouble dealing with armored enemies. You gotta do a charged attack generally to pierce it. Cuz at low levels i havent had much issue, if you guys are grabbing tomes and grimoires youre jacking the difficulty quite a bit. As far as the armor goes, at the bridge of shadows theres dummies in the courtyard you can test your weapons on. Normal attacks do like .5 dmg to armored enemies.

Another thing about Medkits - if you're carrying a potion and are at full health and find a medkit that no one else needs that is otherwise going to go to waste, drop your potion and take the medkit. You can then either heal yourself or a teammate if needed whereas a potion is only good for yourself. This is more of a big deal if someone is carrying a Grimoire, they're going to rely on either talents or teammates for healing.

Some weapons do have innate armor piercing even if it isn't explicitly stated in the tooltip. For instance I was previously using a shield and hammer with Bardin which just staggered armored enemies. While the hammer was good for shield breaking it was inneffective against armor. After I unlocked Ironbreaker, I switched to Shield and Axe, and that pierces armor with all attacks. Whenever there is an armored enemy of any kind now I just get right in their face and easily kill them.

If you want I can jump into some games and run some recruit missions with you. I'm no expert or anything but I've moved on to Veteran difficulty. It's probably just a few small things here and there or the pacing that you guys are missing.

To expand on this a bit, each weapon has a blocking angle. In the weapon's tooltip you will see a blue arc which represents it's ideal block angle. Attacks blocked outside of that arc will cost you double stamina. Bardin has a talent which increases the effective block angle by 50%. As an example, his shield sets have a 180 degree blocking arc, with the talent that expands to 270 degrees which basically means he can block attacks from almost any angle except directly behind him for no additional stamina cost. Pretty nice.

I think the stamina cost listed in the tooltip is currently busted, though. So you will have to experiment and figure out how many shields blocking light attacks will cost your character.

THERE IS FRIENDLY FIRE IN CHAMPION DIFFICULTY AND HIGHER.

Please stop shooting me in the back of the head. Thank you.

@squirrelgod: get a smaller head, big head. :p

@travisrex: The thing is, I play as the Dwarf Ironbreaker. And I crouch when I'm in the front, holding off the swarms of enemies. Which means, you have to be an AMAZING fucking idiot to be hitting me.

@squirrelgod: woof, that is bad. The fights can get pretty chaotic, have to imagine on that difficulty people are getting sliced up by teammates pretty regularly as well.

One other good piece of advice would be to keep in mind that when you free someone from a hookrat or a sorceror,they are stunned for a few moments. So, keep protecting them if there's enemies around, because it'll be a few seconds before they can even move to protect themselves.

Do you mean Tomes? Grimoires take the special potion slot, not the healing slot.

Thank you very much for this guide! We played a bit of Vermintide 1, got dismayed by the loot system, and have joyously come to Vermintide 2. These tips will help immensely.

Pretty basic one, but I didn't realize it at first: If you're carrying a tome and come across a healing item, you can drop the tome and use the healing item and then pick up the tome again. No harm, no foul. The tome doesn't disappear or anything.

This is incorrect, if you select the Grimoire (4 by default on PC) you can throw away and destroy it. This can be good if you think you can't make it with the lower healt, but it's also easy to do by accident. Be careful when selecting items if you are carrying one.

@zaccheus:

good catch fixed it up

When you see a Hook rat or assassin rat or sorcerer HIT T PLZ. Light them up Blue so my Elf can snipe them before they even know what happened.

Also, when you get into a big set piece fight put your backs to a wall Left 4 Dead style to defend yourselves. The more you can funnel a horde into a situation where you've got walls all around you the better. Getting surrounded is an easy way to get dead.