While trying to fix a wide array of completely nonfunctional talents, Vermintide 2 developer Fatshark recently uncovered another massive issue: the scaling system that's supposed to limit player power was not turned on in the live version! In other words, heroes are currently dealing around 40% more damage than they should be, while their weapons are managing to stagger and cleave through enemies with far too much ease.

A single day has passed since that announcement, and already Fatshark has managed to release a beta update that corrects the issue, as well as fixes some of the more egregious problems with weapons and talents. You can find the full list of changes over at the official website, but if you're just interested in the short version, allow me to highlight all of the important tweaks. Have a look:

• Scaling has been tweaked for damage and cleave (using a 3.5 ratio rather than 3.0)

• Marauders have had their cleave hit mass reduced by 75% (they’ll be easier to cut through and hit an additional target)

• Talents and passives that would boost your Hero Power should now be boosted appropriately.

• We’ve fixed some weapons that were using single target priority while not being single target attacks. This caused some swings to ignore other targets hit during the same frame as the aimed target.

- The affected weapons are Sienna’s Mace, Kerillian’s Elven Spear, Glaive, Dual Swords, and Sword and Dagger, Kruber’s Executioner Sword, and Halberd.

• We fixed ranged weapon switch priority. If a weapon switch is triggered, it should enter the input queue with the highest priority. Which means that pressing ‘Q’, following by an instant RMB to go to “panic-block-mode” should work better now.

The goal behind these changes is to prevent players from relying only on ranged weapons to clear hordes, while simultaneously making different categories of melee weapons more viable in their own niche. So in theory a 'perfect' party would have an armor-piercing melee weapon, one shield tank to keep everyone safe, a two-handed weapon that excels at clearing hordes, and some sort of ranged weapon to help clear out pesky Special enemies.

While this is a neat idea in theory, I must admit I'm not a big fan of how it works in practice. Difficulty should be achieved by putting the players into dangerous situations where they need to use all of their tricks and tools in order to survive, and not by making the enemies take more hits to kill.

Not only does this go against the feeling of power I praised in my review, but it further cements the 'meta' and essentially forces everyone to run the most mathematically optimal weapons, regardless of how much they actually enjoy the playstyle. In my eyes it would've been much better if Fatshark simply increased the difficulty by nerfing ranged weapons and adding more elite enemies to contend with, because that way you'd still feel powerful, but so would the enemies!

How exactly all of this is going to turn out, I am genuinely not sure, so if you're a fan of Vermintide 2 I would highly recommend you give the beta test a try. You can find the download instructions, as well as deliver your feedback, over at the Fatshark forums. Oh, and it's also worth mentioning that all of your experience and loot will carry over to the full version, so don't worry about 'wasting' time!