Vermintide 2 official screenshot for the Shade career

Fatshark has recently unleashed the biggest update Vermintide 2 has ever seen onto the beta servers. It has rebalanced just about every single weapon and career, tweaked all of the enemies in order to prevent annoying behaviors and instantaneous 180° attacks, as well as reworked the balance of power between melee and ranged weapons, especially when it comes to how temporary health is distributed.

Given the size and scope of the aptly named Big Balance Beta, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to hear that in an effort to get every weapon up to par, some have become far stronger or weaker than their competition. In order to address this, as well as further rebalance the flow of combat, Fatshark has now released a brand new update filled with yet another batch of intriguing changes.

If you're interested in all of the details you should head on over to Steam as the full patch notes can be found there, but for now allow me to highlight what I believe to be the most important changes:

Increased the base delay of stamina regeneration from 0.5 seconds to 1 second. This should put it at the same regeneration rate as it was before the beta.

Increased the delay of stamina regeneration after pushing from 1 second to 1.5 seconds. This should put it at the same delay rate as was before the beta.

Resourceful Combatant - Reworked: Melee critical strikes reduces the cooldown of your Career Skill by 5%. Effect can only trigger once every 5 seconds.

Natural Bond - Reworked: Provides health regen, healing from healing draughts and first aid kits become temporary health. Still clears any wounds.

Barkskin - Reworked: Taking damage reduces the damage you take from subsequent hits by 30% for 2 seconds. This effect can only trigger once every 2 seconds. This damage reduction is calculated after other effects such as career perks.

Additional tweaks (read as "mostly nerfs") to the temporary health gained from Heal on Kill, Heal on Cleave and Heal on Stagger talents. Health gained should be more normalized across the talents.

Personally, I don't feel comfortable commenting about most of these changes without getting at least a couple of games under my belt. What I will say, however, is that I'm not a big fan of how temporary health is being distributed under the new systems, especially for classes that rely on getting kills for their healing. Since basic rats provide essentially nothing and big boys like Chaos Warriors and Marauders offers loads of free health, the patch has created a bit of an unhealthy meta where the most efficient way to play the game is to leave your team behind so you can single-handedly kill as many armored targets as possible.

I would be much happier if it was done as a percentage of your damage dealt instead, so if you and your allies kill a Chaos Warrior together, that health would be distributed to all participating players depending on how much damage they've done to it. This would create some other problems, mostly when it comes to fodder enemies, but I feel it's a necessary compromise to help keep Vermintide 2's focus squarely on teamwork.

Whatever the case may be, all of the contents of this Big Balance Beta are currently up for debate, so if you have a bit of free time I would urge you to participate and give Fatshark some much-needed feedback. Have fun, and do remember that your progress will carry over between the beta and live versions!