Hey everyone!
Today we put live Vermintide 2 v1.0!
The hype in the office is real, we cannot wait to show you the rest of the game. With that in mind however, we will not be publishing a full list of patch notes for those who have taken part in the beta up until now. Do know, we have put in heaps of fixes and tweaks based on your feedback.
Importantly though, we have fixed elements of and overhauled the rest of the damage system for the release of Vermintide 2. A result of this should be far more balanced burst output, no more melting bosses in seconds, because you had to be a mad-man if you thought some of your builds were intentional! 
So Hero Power (“powerlevel”) does this: Scales your damage, your cleave and your stagger values.
All three values are a base property defined by each individual attack of each weapon. So a sword will have a different profile than an axe, which is then scaled by your total power level fo make stuff happen on enemies hit.
Now for killing stuff, on top of this very basic core damage value, you have the ability to boost your output in a couple of different ways; let’s call them Finesse (for crits/headshot/fiddly bonuses) and Strength (for drinking a certain named potion, being a murder hobo or other powerful ability boosters).
Your damage output is the sum of your core damage, Strength boost and Finesse boost.
So how does boost work? Simply by being a 0-1 scale of how much of your boost you get. Stacking different boosts will just work the boost upwards until it reaches 1 for max boost. So chugging a strength potion and using the huntsman ability will stack ontop of eachother and grant a bigger boost rather than multiply each other.
How much is max boost then? It is your core damage multiplied by whatever the weapon attack says it is. So a fencing sword will have a high ( 2.5x) Finesse boost but average (1.0) Strength boost for it’s charged attack.
There is a trick to it though; Strength boost will always use unarmoured damage as its core damage for setting boost AND on top of this, any Finesse boost will use whichever is highest between core and strength damage. Basically, it is a good idea to still crit-headshot after drinking that armor penetration strength potion.
Apart from this, we’ve just made sure that all powerlevel buffs are applied after we actually cap and scale your powerlevel. (Yes, we cap and scale your powerlevel to get a nice smooth ride across the difficulties.) Caps are currently: 200 for recruit, 400 for veteran and 600 for champion. No cap on Legend. Note that powerlevel buffs/increases from talents/gear can go beyond the cap, they’ll just use the cap as a max starting point.
As for the scaling, we scale stagger and cleave to a 3 times starting output at max powerlevel and stagger at 2 times (felt terrible not being able to stagger/stagger all the things otherwise)
All damage multipliers are applied last, so increased damage dealt from different tag/block/crit/headshot talents will incur a flat multiplier on the final damage. Note that these things won’t stack, no tagging a blocked enemy that got hit by a crit for exponential damage multipliers…
Final thought of the day. All damage and boost settings are individual for each target for each attack, so don’t expect to get the same headshot boost on the second clan rat you hit with the same sweep. Unless you’ve got a executioner, they get solid headshot boost for at least three targets for each sweep.