Winds of Magic - Season 2 Blog Post

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Announcements
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Heroes,

Season 1 of Winds of Magic is steaming ahead (partially due to Saltzpyre), and while there is still some time before the next season, we wanted to introduce the changes, updates and additions coming with Season 2 and update 2.1.

Season 2 will bring several things to both Vermintide and Winds of Magic. But before we dig into the changes we wanted to thank you once more for your feedback, we have heard you loud and clear. We designed these changes with the feedback from the forums, Reddit, Discord and social media together with the in-game telemetry from the last month in mind.

We are committed to improving the game and during the past weeks we have pushed many smaller patches to address the most common issues, thank you for your patience!

Season 1 is going to end with Geheimnisnacht event to line up with Halloween, and Season 2 will start before the end of the year.

Warhammer: Vermintide 2

Reworked levels from Vermintide: End Times - Drachenfels DLC

As a part of Season 2, we are going to revisit the dreaded abandoned castle in Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide’s Drachenfels DLC. Something appears to have taken a liking to the castle and our heroes have to once again visit the castle to learn more about what’s happening in this all-new storyline. We are aiming to release 3 reworked levels from the Drachenfels DLC during Season 2. The first part of Drachenfels will be released at the start of Season 2, and the following 2 levels later during Season 2.

All Drachenfels levels will be free to all owners of Warhammer: Vermintide 2!

Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders

We are introducing an in-game shop where you will be able to purchase cosmetics for in-game currency. There will be fancy hats, skins and other cosmetics for you to pick between. All content will not always be available, but instead will return from time-to-time as featured items. You will find these items under the Featured tab when the shop goes live.

How do I earn the new in-game currency?

With the release Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders, Shillings can be earned in two ways; by completing Daily and Weekly missions or by owning one of the existing Vermintide 2 DLC’s. Players who already own existing Vermintide 2 DLC’s will be retroactively awarded with Shillings.

Anything else?

Yes! Besides the in-game currency items, you will be able to purchase a few exclusive pieces. The reasons behind this are that we want to be able to bring you more free content and keep the studio running at the same time. By adding a few select cosmetics that you can purchase for real money you can support the studio and we can create more free content updates, such as the above mentioned Drachenfels levels.

And do not worry, there are far more cosmetics available to purchase with Shillings than what is available on the Downloadable Content tab!

Ultimately the purchasable content will function as small DLCs and if you wish you can also purchase them through steam like with the DLCs Shadows over Bögenhafen and Back to Ubersreik.

Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders will arrive with the start of Season 2 in Winds of Magic.

Weapons & Class Balancing

We received a lot of feedback after the release about balancing, and as you noticed, we have continuously patched the game with both stability and balancing updates. Mostly the patches have revolved around stability. The reasoning behind this is that we wanted first and foremost focus on game stability and push patches to address the bugs being reported. Some of the bugs have affected the weapons/classes and the core mechanics, which makes it difficult to know if it is the bugs causing the imbalance, or if we need to look over the numbers. This also includes enemies such as the Beastmen.

We are continuing to look into the reports concerning the imbalance (we see you Beastmen), and we will continue to push frequent patches to address balance, tweaks and fixes over the coming months.

Winds of Magic

We are committed to evolving the Winds of Magic and for Season 2 wanted to talk about some of the bigger changes to the Weaves, as well as how we reward essence for playing. We have been looking at how best to address your feedback and believe we have something worth bringing to life for the next Season, we hope you agree.

Leaderboards and Progression

We previously announced that we were taking some time to tweak the specifics of how this will work and we are now able to share the details with you. All of your Season 1 Athanor progress will carry forward into Season 2. You will also be able to jump into any ranked Weave 1-40 up to Legend difficulty from the beginning of the season, but from that point onward you will need to unlock them sequentially. We will reset the leaderboards, we also plan to shuffle the order of Weaves and change some of the existing ones to freshen up the experience from Season 1. With Season 2 “Quickplay Weaves” will also be added.

Weaves

Quickplay Weaves

In Season 2 you will be able to quickplay into unranked Weaves in a similar fashion as you currently quickplay into an adventure level. You simply select your desired difficulty and enter the matchmaking queue. Playing weaves via Quickplay will be seperate from playing Ranked Weaves. Any weaves played via Quickplay will not generate scores or place players on leaderboards.

We take on board all feedback, and one point we frequently saw was making Weaves more accessible, Season 2 will be this next iteration of Weaves. When this comes, we will continue to take note of any feedback we get, and look at what we can do for Season 3 and beyond to future Seasons with new iterations and innovations.

Essence

With the release of Season 2 we will be changing how essence is rewarded. We will be removing the first time completion bonus from Ranked Weaves however we will be increasing the base amount of essence gained from playing them. In addition to this, playing Quickplay Weaves will grant bonus essence. You will also continue to gain essence from playing Adventure missions.

I have questions, where can I ask all of my questions?

On Friday the 6th you can tune into the Fatshark stream at 4 pm CEST to ask all your questions over on twitch.tv/fatsharkgames

We are also hosting an AMA where you can ask a couple of our developers your most burning questions related to the above. We’re open for Questions right now, so pop on by the Vermintide sub-reddit to put those to us. We will be dropping answers on Thursday at 5pm CEST (3pm UTC). See you then!

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THREE Free maps? Damn, I am grinning ear to ear.

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Wow what a post! Bravo!

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So this is Castle Drachenfels, Dungeons, and Summoners Peak? Fantastic!

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ok im done with this game

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Most of this sounds good indeed. I doubt the Weave changes will do much to my interest towards the mode (though that remains to be seen), and I would’ve hoped the Emporium to be also a resource sink for our existing resources rather than just bringing in a new one. Be very careful with the exclusives, though; while I personally don’t mind real-money options as long as they stay cosmetic, even that is a step down a dangerous path in many people’s opinions.

Three more or less new maps sound very good, though, and free to boot. Still wishing for a revisit to the Wizard’s Tower, though…

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Implementations seems logical. Use the money from the cosmetics to actually keep the company afloat and serve to allow the development of free dlc. People that want all cosmetics to be free but also want all maps to be free are tryin’ to have their cake and eat it too.

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V1 had paid skins and headgear. I agree with you but I would like to think better of FS than to do anything beyond that.

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I agree, but I’ve seen enough complaints of any kind of microtransactions to be wary. Some people will likely take even the cosmetics as something to abandon the game over, and if at any time things go beyond mere cosmetics, the slippery slope is complete.

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Microtransactions for Fatshark cosmetics aren’t new. They had them in VT1. Some were pretty slick, to be honest. FS has stated they’re against paying for lootboxes/P2W, so I hope, at least, they won’t go beyond cosmetics (the fact they’re giving us three maps is pretty generous too!).

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I love pretty much everything in this post. Can’t wait! New maps! Lohner’s Emporium! Continuing in the right direction! Hype. :slight_smile:

Like some others above said already though: About the introduction of cosmetics for real money… Now, I don’t think that in itself is a bad thing. Logical move. No problems with them, really. Buuuuuuuuut; like some of the others I can’t help but fear how they could become a slippery slope to paid gameplay bonuses. Now, I actually trust Fatshark as a developer on this one based on previous history, but I - and I’m sure a lot of us as well - would feel infinitely better if somebody could just confirm that Vermintide will never ever offer gameplay advantages for money. Cosmetics: cool. Affects gameplay: please, no! That’s usually the first step to making a game suck…

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Drachenfels eh? Geneviève Dieudonné is on the way boys :wink:

Looks amazing. I can’t wait, 3 maps and Cosmetics baby. Oh yea

About the shillings? What do you mean by owning previous DLCs? Do we just get a certain amount of bonus shillings to start? Or do we get extra shillings from doing quests?

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This all sounds really great.

When?

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I know about the VT1 paid cosmetics. Never found them to be worth it myself.

As I got several responses already, I’ll try to reiterate my point: Personally, I don’t have anything against microtransactions as long as they’re kept only cosmetic. I also know and understand that revenue to keep up content for the game has to come from somewhere. Other people aren’t as forgiving though, and in conversations about paid cosmetics and microtransactions in general some have raised the point that they take even paid cosmetics as a significant warning sign. Combine this with the existence of Weave Leaderboards (and, according to some, the perceived superiority of DLC weapons in general), and I can understand the fear, even if I don’t subscribe to it.

Part of my thinking (well, suspicions) now may be just because I’m tired and slightly ill, but there were multiple strange decisions done with the Weaves and 2.0, so even my faith in the game and its future was shaken. I’ve gotten the feeling that many things weren’t thought through far enough, and this could end up another. I’d prefer to avoid that.

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Shillings?

So once again all players with thousands of hours of play get to start from zero…

10s of thousands of scrap and dust and 100s of thousands of essence still totally meaningless. Maybe right now is the best time to quit.

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While nice, it is disheartening to see no mention of QoL or even mods for that matter. Into the pile with servers it goes?

And competition’s getting harder next week.

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Wizard’s Tower and the secret level would be incredible. Easily the coolest map in that game. I liked the On the Reik maps too though.

I dig some cosmetics. I’ve been wanting a bit of Fashion Tide for a while. It’s really cool there will be some you can earn in-game but also buy. I’m fine with supporting something I enjoy. cough Warhammer: Total War 2 cough . I’m invested in both VT2 and that pretty heavily.

People aren’t left in the dust here.

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Or you know… we could just ask for a scrap converter? Still, I can see the point. It’d be kinda lame for the Emporium to drop and on the first day we unlock every single cosmetic. :joy: I dunno, I like the idea of having to do weeklies and stuff. And by the sounds of it, we’re gonna get a bonus amount of shillings anyway.

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Buhahahaha… full price game, 20$ garbage WoM DLC and now this? Real money shop? Gj FS you start to be like the “favorite” of all players - EA

And Leader boards when many cheaters in game. LOL
Fix actions like that firstly.

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Yeah, you’re fair and right to question their choices, considering the direction of WoM, but I remain optimistic the feedback from this expansion was loud enough they’ll be wary of such a large mis-step, particularly since they have mentioned in the past through PR interviews and press-releases they were staunchly against having players pay for lootboxes.

Their audience isn’t happy, so if they are wise (and I hope they are at this point), they will make wise decisions.

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