[Update]: Vermintide 2's Winds of Magic expansion has now arrived for PC players. The console versions are still under development, though no release date has been announced just yet.

Vermintide 2's Winds of Magic expansion is set to arrive in the near future, bringing with it a series of increasingly more challenging content. So in order to set the stage, as well as to iron out some of the balance problems, Fatshark has recently released a massive update that has reworked combat from the ground up.

As you might imagine from such a big update, not everything has gone exactly according to plan. In other words, the update brought with it a rather massive spike in difficulty, so much so that even the veterans of the series found themselves struggling with the lowliest of ratmen. This was especially apparent on some of the faster weapons as they simply could not stagger the enemy hordes in time, which would then quickly lead to the players getting drowned under an entire sea of Skaven and Chaos fanatics.

Thankfully, this has only been a short lived problem as Fatshark has already released a second balance update. This one has greatly increased the stagger value for weapons on Legend difficulty and below, which means that the combat should feel pretty much the same as it always was, just with a couple of different weapons being at the top of the meta.

As for the newly introduced Cataclysm difficulty, that one has not received even a single change. So if you do decide to drop into Cataclysm, make sure to stick with your team at all times and don't do anything particularly stupid as it will be punished with almost immediate death. A bit overly brutal, but beating that sort of 'impossible' challenge is half of the fun!

You can read more about the most recent balance update, as well as check out all of the numbers, over at Steam. Have fun smacking Beastmen around!