Before I get into the nitty gritty I wanted to take a moment to thank FS for making Vermintide 1 and two, and to thank @Hedge for being such a good sport throughout my time playing these games. Now moving on.
Winds of Magic wasn’t the beginning of the end but it was certainly the straw or multiple straws that broke the camels back. There have been some reoccurring issues in development starting at V2s conception, that are generally speaking negative factors involving the health of the game, these range from unnecessary balance issues, rage inducing RNG, and arbitrarily massive grinds.
Winds of magic did little to fix these issues and in fact exacerbated them, forcing players to do repetitive content to even unlock the newer maps or weapons added to the game, before once again embarking on seemingly never ending grinds for a few thrown together cosmetics that still dont match armor sets.
The new units while conceptually very interesting have infested the majority of maps making the game feel less like vermintide and more like beastmen tide, not to mention the changes in combat while toning down the power creep that was cleave, created a whole new slew of issues that basically forced us back to square one. While cleave itself it not as powerful, the talent trees make for easily abusing certain weapon types to be just as deadly as their prior counterparts. The unfortunate byproduct is that weapons still have a tier list, where certain ones feel useless or unnecessary , and the combat in general seems to be slower and feel a lot clunkier, what adds to that fact is super poorly designed attack animations / cycles, and lack of more usable stagger mechanics.
The added difficulty theoretically was something I was highly anticipating hoping it would be closer to onslaught or deathwish but instead its kind of just legendary + 1 and after you relearn timing to compensate its the same gameplay loop as legend and it feels like nothing has changed outside of combat generally being worse (feeling) and games lasting longer with slower pacing.
Class redesigns also felt bad, some seemingly way more complete than others and there was a ptheora of uncompleted, buggy, or useless talents which is mad worse by constant balance changes that seem to gut any interesting build while leaving the most glaring issues unchanged for elongated periods of time. The nerf bat response as opposed to actual balance adjustment seemingly ends up to be “pruning” making each career lose its flair, eventually grinding them down into boring dull husks of what their career was intended to be as opposed to actually trying to find a nice middle ground where classes have distinct differences or situational utility.
Also weaves haven’t had a positive impact on the game, urging players to abuse unfixed issues, bugs, and cheats while pushing developers to balance around a very specific style of game-play due to its competitive nature.
TL;DR the game is grinding to ad nauseam for no substantial reward as it has always been, but the core gameplay was always fun and engaging no matter how many hours I sunk into the game I loved it, till slowly the life seeped from not only the career paths, but the gameplay itself which feels, sluggish, clunky, and a farcry from its former glory.
