While trying to figure out why some of the talents aren't working as intended, Warhammer: Vermintide 2 developer Fatshark came upon a much bigger issue. As it turns out, the scaling system that's supposed to give new players a boost and veterans a true challenge was not working at all, thus resulting in a bit of an inverted difficulty curve.

"Long story short, we have a system in place that is supposed to cap, scale and buff your Hero Power when calculating damage, cleave and stagger results for each attack. Unfortunately this system does nothing currently and instead returns your raw Hero Power unbuffed," Fatshark explained in a fairly lengthy forum post. "Recruit and Veteran are fairly on par but the difference is noticeable on Champion and Legendary."

"The main difference in gameplay with the current bug is; All classes become proficient vs hordes as everything has higher than intended cleave. Everyone can also stagger enemies with much greater ease as we should be scaling stagger output the most. Tank classes thus becomes slightly redundant. Higher damage output puts a lot of weapons over thresholds of oneshotting, often without intended crits or headshot requirements. Killing stuff faster means lack of enemies and puts a greater emphasis on ranged over melee combat."

Funnily enough, this massive bug got through because of a single two-line code change that was never brought over to the release version during the final days of the closed beta. As such, Fatshark was constantly balancing Vermitnide 2 with incorrect data in mind, which is yet another reason why we need detailed stats in-game rather than the completely ambiguous (and apparently completely wrong) Hero Power!

"Legend will be affected the most," Fatshark's Ratherdone added in a comment on Reddit. "Or rather, 600 Hero power is affected the most. The system only scales your hero power, not the base output of a '0' power weapon. So low power heroes will see little to no difference while high power heroes are affected the most."

The fix is expected to arrive in the near future, after which Fatshark will be paying close attention to the overall balance as this is bound to drastically shift Vermintide 2's difficulty curve. Personally, I am quite worried about how this will affect the casual part of the playerbase as there are plenty of people struggling in Champion and Legend as is, and this apparently with a hidden 40% buff!

You can learn more about this whole issue, as well as give Fatshark your feedback, by heading over to the official website.