For those of you that might not know, Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide is the premier co-op rat-slaying simulator set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe. In gameplay terms it is most similar to Left 4 Dead, but with far more abilities, weapons, and enemies to constantly worry about.

While it was already a good game Vermintide has just become even better as the latest update has brought in a variety of bug fixes and balance changes, as well as a Lorebook which you can fill out in order to learn more about the Warhammer world and its inhabitants. If you're interested in all of the details you can find the full patch notes on Steam, but if you're just looking for the important balance changes, here they are:

General

• Reduced Ogre damage on a lot of weapons, most notable:

- 1h Axe light attack

- Falchion

- 2h Hammer light attack

- Glaive heavy attack

• Increased Ogre damage on a lot of weapons, most notable:

- 1h sword light attacks

- Crossbows (Note: Regular Crossbow, Not Volley Crossbow)

- Warpick charged level 2 attack

• Fixed Skullcracker not properly triggering headshots when used with a projectile based weapon

• Added buffer to all push chain actions to remove accidental double pushes

Bright Wizard

• Fireball Staff:

- When not charged the fireball explosion has a radius of 0.75 meters and deals no damage to Stormvermin. It still applies a burn effect which damages Stormvermin.

- When fully charged the fireball explosion has a radius of 3 meters and deals damage to Stormvermin as well as applying the burn effect.

- The heat cost of the charged fireball has been reduced

• Bolt Staff:

- We reduced the general damage output of the staff since in most cases it just resulted in large amounts of overkill damage.

- The headshot multiplier was increased to compensate for the above to not reduce it’s effectiveness as a dedicated special killer weapon. When you lock onto something, it should die.

- The amount of time needed to acquire full charge has been cut in half. So you should get fully charged bolts out in half the previous time.

- We reduced the heat cost on level 2 and level 3 bolts.

• Conflagration staff:

- Tweaked dot damage applications to be more consistent (The dot damage applications were bugged and very polarised where your dots either did a lot of damage or barely any damage, should now work more consistently)

- Conflagration staff:The fire-patch now staggers unarmoured targets in the area of effect, meaning they will take more Damage over Time (DoT) applications and be stunned for longer.

Waywatcher

• Increased dual wield daggers blocking move speed from 85 to 90%

• Reduced dual wield swords and sword/dagger blocking move-speed from 95% to 85%

• Changed Sword and Dagger sweeping heavy attack from 3 to 2 targets

Witch Hunter

• Fixed a bug with the Rapier charged attack would not reach charge level 2 (piercing an extra rat and having added knockback) when charging the attack fully

And finally, if you don't already own Vermintide you can grab it, among other games, through the currently ongoing Humble Bundle. It will set you back €6 in total, and given how much playtime you can extract out of Vermintide I would say that's one hell of a deal. So if you're even remotely interested in some co-op Skaven slaughter, make sure to give it a look. Have fun!