Video Game / Vermintide II

"The Darkness always returns"

Warhammer: Vermintide II is the 2018 sequel to The End Times: Vermintide. released for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

Set in the End Times of Warhammer Fantasy Battle world, the five heroes have returned to face an even greater threat: the Skaven horde of Clan Fester has allied with the Chaos warrior Rotbloods, servants of Nurgle, the god of Pestilence.

This time the characters have fifteen different careers to choose from, as well as talent trees and a large arsenal of varied weapons to create a more personalized play style. The careers function as What If? stories with the characters; such as Bardin being forced to take the Death Seeker Slayer oath, or Kruber finding himself as an unlikely Bretonnian Grail Knight. The lore posts on the official website indicate that although all three of their launch careers are canon, the premium (i.e. paid DLC) class options are what they will ultimately evolve into post-Castle Drachenfels. So far that's the Grail Knight for Kruber, the crankgun-toting Outcast Engineer for Bardin, the magic-wielding Sister of the Thorn for Kerillian, the hammer-swinging Warrior Priest for Saltzpyre, and the skeleton-summoning Necromancer for Sienna.

Multiple pieces of DLC have been released, with Fatshark announcing early on that they planned to support the game into at least 2023. Shadows Over Bogenhafen added two maps and some cosmetics. Back To Ubersreik added five weapons and four maps remade from the first game. The Winds of Magic expansion added the brutal Beastmen enemy set to the fray (six enemy types), as well as five new weapons, one new map, and the "Weaves" challenge mode. The Curse of Drachenfels was a free addition adding three more maps. Finally the free Chaos Wastes expansion added 16 maps as part of a Rogue-lite adventure mode, a marathon of missions with random challenges and event and the ability to purchase upgrades and buffs along the way; it was also released alongside another five weapons. Coinciding with the story-based DLC are the aforementioned five premium careers, DLC classes charting the characters' futures, that each also come up with two to four weapons.

Fatshark followed with a similar game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide.

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This game provides examples of the following:

• Ability Depletion Penalty: Characters expend Stamina to block incoming attacks and shove enemies. If their Stamina is exhausted, they're briefly "block broken" — Stamina regeneration is paused, they're unable to attack or block, and their speed is drastically reduced.
• Action Bomb: In addition to the Globadiers with their usual Taking You with Me move, the Winds of Magic DLC introduces Skaven suicide bombers during Weaves who charge at players while wearing a lit cask of gunpowder on their backs. If you let them get close enough, they'll either send you flying, or take you with them.
• Adaptational Wimp: Some weapons have been massively nerfed when introduced to the game compared to their tabletop counterparts.
  • Nowhere is this more apparent than in Bardin's Drakefire weapons. In lore, Drakefire works like the fantasy counterpart to napalm, and burns white hot for days on end while lingering where they stuck as area denial. The heat produced was so intense that not even gromril plates could protect the Ironbreakers from them, so Runesmiths had to create improved Irondrake armor to prevent the dwarf operators from roasting themselves alive. Additionally, these Drakefire weapons were invented to deter enemy hordes, specifically Stormvermin charges, while the in-game counterpart has pitiful performance against even cannon fodder by contrast.
    • The Skaven Warpfire throwers fare no better; in lore they're supposed to be almost as dangerous as Drakefire, with Bardin even remarking that he's "seen scores die in a single burst." In game they're damaging but hardly a TPK.
  • As with the first game, Kerillian's Hagbane arrows take a while to actually kill anything they hit, and deal decreased impact damage overall compared to normal arrows. In lore, Hagbane poison is so potent that, to quote official description, "should one of these arrows so much as break the skin, their target is destined to end their life in screaming agony". On top of this, they are still arrows through and through, and so would still hurt when shot the normal way.
  • Kruber and Saltzpyre's repeater handguns are given lower per-shot damage than the normal handguns to avoid making them straight-up upgrades, which they were on the tabletop. On the other hand, both the repeater and regular handguns also only take a couple seconds to reload, presumably because taking 15 to 60 seconds to load a single shot into your flintlock/matchlock musket wouldn't be fun.
  • Magic as a whole, at least when it comes to Sienna and special enemies. This is to be expected, as the flashy tide-turning power of magic from the tabletop is balanced out by a Russian-Roulette level of random risk, which would be anathema to a squad-based game like Vermintide. Sienna may not be as powerful as your standard Bright Wizard, but she's a good deal more consistent.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: "A Quiet Drink" mission, though the idiocy's pretty downplayed and limited to funny voice lines, wandering around Helmgart's to find a tavern still standing (mostly not their own fault), and dropping a cask of Bugman's which brings the pactsworn to the Obese Megalodon tavern which leads to it burning up.
• Alien Landmass: Due to being warped by Chaos, the Chaos Wastes have some strange or outright impossible terrain, like stone pillars above a sea of fog. Then there's the matter of the landscape rearranging itself with every visit.
• All There in the Script: Keep dialogue plays randomly, which means there's no set order to it even though the conversations were clearly written with a set order in mind. Sometimes it's obvious what the order is, other times the only way of determining it is checking the game files, as each line in each series of conversations is specifically given a number. For example, following the file order for Saltzpyre and Sister of the Thorn Kerillian's Keep dialogue depicts the former as going from suspicious, to threatening, to restrained, and finally to understanding and empathetic, an arc that is not apparent by default (indeed, it can even play in reverse order and follow the opposite direction).
• All Your Powers Combined: The Concoction trait grants this for potions. When equipping a ring with Concoction, every potion the player drinks grants all the effects of Strength, Speed, and Concentration, in exchange for a 30% shorter duration.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Reaching levels 17, 22 and 27 with a given hero unlocks a headgear for each of their three career paths, and completing 100 matches on Champion+ with each skill tree also grants a rare helmet for those respective classes. Additionally, completing every Helmgart level on either Champion or Legend as any character career also unlocks one of two high-quality reskins of their outfits.
• Angrish: All five heroes tend to mumble curses and other angry exclamations if the player is spamming melee attacks, which can be easily observed by repeatedly hitting the training dummies in the Keep.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • As per genre standards, most special and elite enemies make very distinctive noises when they spawn near players, allowing keen heroes to prepare for their arrival. Those that don't are typically called out by AI teammates (if any), and is especially useful when encountering Monsters, who are silent otherwise until provoked.
  • Gear scores for crafted and/or items looted from post-game chests are calculated after the highest-leveled hero one has, meaning it's actually easier to outfit other characters after reaching level 30 with one. Gear items are also shared across all five characters and their respective career paths, so if you've scrounged up a set of Veteran-grade accessories, you could then equip your level 1 heroes with them and give them a boost.
  • Many of Okri's Challenges are rather lax in terms of requirement: those that demand you perform a certain task in a certain map (e.g. finding all three runes in Ubersreik maps) could be accomplished by a teammate and those would still be tracked for you. Better yet, progress is still counted should you join a team after they've done the deed, like those that has you kill a certain boss on Champion or Legend. The only ones that can't be cheesed this way are those that specifically demand progression made by you, such as those of Grail Knight Kruber, or the weapon illusion challenges that require a certain amount of kills made before they will unlock.
  • AI teammates that take up the free hero slots will use the builds you've set up for those characters, and will assume the career you last played as, so having a 600-power level 30 Ironbreaker on the bench will have the Bardin bot on your team emulate that specific loadout, giving you an easier time during missions.
  • Bots can be commanded to pick up tomes and grimoires when playing solo. Books that are placed in out-of-reach locations will have the commanded bot magically teleporting up after you, or just nabbing the item from a close distance. A grimoire will often just be added to a bot's inventory upon requesting them to pick it up, since their AI can't path up to it.
  • If an enemy hits you and ignites the fuse while you're carrying a powder keg to an objective, you could still toss the barrel into its highlighted spot and it would still count.
  • You and your teammates, human or AI, are Friendly Fireproof to all melee attacks, which helps tremendously when swarmed by hordes.
  • Bots can now be commanded to pick up, swap, or drop a much wider variety of items compared to the previous game. This makes book hunting that much less of a chore, since bots can carry grimoires now, and can be made to discard them in a pinch to regain some health. That being said, the prompt to have them toss the grimoires are disturbingly huge, which could lead to players accidentally telling them to discard those while trying to get another to pick up something else.
  • Bots won't use consumable items like buff potions or grenades, because Fatshark wisely decided they simply couldn't program their AI to know when would be the most appropriate time to use them. Instead, bots will still pick these items up, and as soon as you use up the one you're carrying they'll hand it to you instead.
• April Fools' Day: In keeping with the first game's tradition, FatShark have also "released" a bit of joke content on April 1 in the form of Bardin's official Song Book, featuring all-time classics such as "Over the Mountain" and "Where Have All the Gobbos Gone?", complete with David Rintoul delivering his best ham. As with Vermintide 1's Pub Brawl, fans were extremely dismayed that the Song Book wasn't an actual thing they could get their hands on.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Although there are five characters, only four can be played on any mission. Lampshaded by Kruber during one of his battlecries.
  Kruber: Oi! We're the bloody Ubersreik Five! Or four, it doesn't matter!
• Armour Is Useless: Averted. Armored enemies are impervious to most non-charged attacks not aimed at weak points, and Kruber and Bardin's Knight/Ironbreaker skill trees have health and damage resistance traits to represent their heavy armor. Likewise, if armor is seen as health, each of the three careers a character takes can have different base health. More armored versions of each character tend to have more health. Similarly, armored enemies also have more health than unarmored ones even independent of the separate armor mechanic. For example naked Skavenslaves on Legend have 13 hit points, Clanrats (who usually wear leather jerkins and shoddy iron helmets) have 26, and Stormvermin (clad in full plate armor) have 52, plus the aforementioned damage resistance.
• Artifact Title: The sequel is no longer just about the Skaven and their eponymous Vermintide. There are now Norscan Rotbloods and Beastmen joining in on the fun, as well. The Skaven are still the most numerous enemies by a good margin, though.
• Artificial Stupidity: As per the last game, the team A.I.s were purposefully made to be incompetent in order to incentivize players to play with each other.
  • The AI bots that you get if you don't have four people are generally okay-ish, but they have one glaring problem: They are too good at defending. This means bots are terrible at fighting hordes, as they will stand around blocking until the horde surrounds and overwhelms them because they never stop blocking to kill anything.
    • On the other hand, sometimes they're just plain stupid. It's not unknown to see a bot on 10% HP or less, with enough wounds that the next knockdown will kill it outright, and a potion in its inventory that it stubbornly refuses to drink. And then it gets hit and dies, dropping the unused potion as it does. At other times, they may be completely out of ammo for their ranged weapon, but will flatly refuse to pick up more, no matter how much is lying around.
    • Bots also cannot (or more accurately were not scripted) to do block-revives, meaning they will stop reviving a player if they get interrupted. Often times, this will lead to the death of the player in question, since the bot will abandon them as it tries to clear out the enemies around the area. Bots that are playing as characters with a dash skill will also not take advantage of dash-revives to break out of a crowd, usually dooming themselves as well.
  • Of all the things in this game, they seem to struggle the most with ledges and bottomless pits. More accurately, they don't seem to grasp the danger of a ledge and will often blunder right off the edge of some maps and hang there until rescued, or they die. Most of the time, they will fall right back down after being pulled up, or the other bots that come to save them will come tumbling down as well, and if the AI doesn't perceive there to be enough room for them to approach, they will not help you. Or each other, for that matter.
    • To make matters worse, on the occasions where they do acknowledge that they could come and save somebody, a bot will come tumbling down themselves, and any other bot that come to their rescue will do so as well without fail. It's not a rarity to see all three bots hanging from a ledge at the same time, many times in the same spot on top of each other. It's as if one is playing with a pack of lemmings than actual bots.
  • On occasion, a bot might fail to grasp that it has a ranged weapon and will charge headlong after a teammate nabbed by a Packmaster, only to be swarmed by nearby Clanrats or worse, be grabbed by another Packmaster strutting around. At other times, they will try to rush a firing Warpfire Thrower or Ratling Gunner with their dinky swords only to be downed in an instant. This seems to happen the most with bots who are using melee-based careers, like Mercenary and Ironbreaker, but the rare exception does exist.
  • Bots may occasionally pick up tomes on their own, without input from the player. Said bots will also drop those tomes the instant they find a healing item of some sort, often causing no ends of frustration to players who will then have to either waste time combing the surrounding areas for it and be attacked by a horde, push on without that tome and be denied its loot value, or restart altogether. It's a good thing that they don't (or can't) do this to grimoires, however, though they won't automatically pick those up, either.
• Artistic License – Physics: The Repeater Handguns available to Markus's three careers and that of Victor's Bounty Hunter kit are essentially perpetual motion machines once they've been spun. This is despite the barrels audibly ratcheting against the advancing gear inside, and will stop to a grinding halt once the alternate fire key is released.
• Ascended Glitch:
  • "Block-reviving" was a bug from the first game that allowed you to block incoming damage while reviving teammates. It was such a popular tactic that the developers left it in for the sequel, and then later released a patch that made your character do it by default.
  • At launch, the trait that increased the duration of Ranger Bardin's Smoke Out accidentally made it so that he could leave the radius of the smoke bomb and stay invisible. As of Patch 1.3, the duration increase was removed and the bugged result became the intended benefit of the talent.
• Ascended Meme: "A Quiet Drink" can have Saltzpyre mess up his famous "Holy Sigmar! Bless this ravaged body!" line as he drinks.
• Asteroids Monster: The Tzeenchian Twins deed modifier and the Twin Blight curse in the Chaos Wastes cause enemies to split into two weaker enemies upon death. Note that "weaker" is a very misleading way to put it, as the spawned adds can end up being more troublesome than their "parent" (e.g. killing a Ratling Gunner or Packmaster can spawn two Stormvermins or Plague Monks). Pack Rats in particular are turned into very dangerous Schmuck Baits, as they can spawn two monsters when killed. In a large horde, this can quickly spiral out of control as even the lowliest of Rotbloods or Skavens can still divide into two trash mooks upon death, and the usual spamming of bombs and crowd-controlling abilities will only make it worse by exponentially ballooning an attack wave into an unstoppable tide of meat and steel that can overwhelm even the most skilled of parties.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!:
  • Bardin's Slayer class encourages this playstyle, with not only a leaping attack to close the distance between himself and enemies, but a passive ability that incrementally increases his damage and attack power for every hit. Saltzpyre's Warrior Priest also encourages this, having a meter that fills up the more he attacks and conferring him a variety of buffs when it fills up, but begins to drop when he's not in combat.
  • On the opposing side, Chaos Savages and Plague Monks have this tactic, with them hacking and tearing at a hero without pause until the hero eventually dies. Finding an opening in their attack patten is tough, so they aren't easy to deal with.
• Attack Speed Buff: Several buffs speed up weapon attack animations by a given percentage:
  • Potions of Speed boost the drinker's movement speed and attack rate for a few seconds.
  • The Swift Slaying weapon trait grants a 20% boost to attack speed for five seconds after a Critical Hit.
  • As an Aggressive Play Incentive, the Slayer has a stackable attack speed boost that lasts as long as he keeps hitting enemies in quick succession, and his career skill "Leap" gives a hefty boost for ten seconds.
• Automatic Crossbows: A repeater crossbow is an available weapon for Kerillian's Shade career and all of Victor's careers barring Warrior Priest.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Throwing axes are this for a Slayer Bardin. While they provide him with an option to deal with enemies from range, throwing axes aren't counted as either one-handed or two-handed weapons, and thus don't synergize with two out of three of his level 10 talents. Said talents also happen to be the cornerstones of an effective Slayer, as without their attack bonuses, Bardin would be at a severe disadvantage on higher difficulties. Many players elect to forgo range combat instead of eating the drastic DPS drop.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game: The diverse variety of weapons in the game allows the player to do this to certain enemy types, such as killing a Globadier with the poison Damage Over Time of a Hagbane Shortbow, roasting a Warpfire Thrower alive with an Ironbreaker's Drakegun, slaughtering a Rotblood Frother as a Dual Wielding Slayer, or shredding a Ratling Gunner with an Outcast Engineer's Crank Gun. A Shade Kerillian backstabbing a Gutter Runner could also count as this.
• Belly Mouth: The Bile Troll has an additional grotesquely-fanged mouth on the left side of its toso.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Rasknitt has now allied Clan Fester with the Chaos Lord Bödvarr Ribspreader and his Rotblood Tribe.
• Bond One-Liner: A player character usually delivers a quick line upon killing a special or monster. Depending on the character and the enemy, they range from terse confirmation of the kill to outright mockery.
  Kerillian: [killing a Stormfiend] Someone save a bit for the dwarf — we all know he'll eat anything.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Kruber and his three base classes embody this. From his weapons, to his fighting style, and his class skills. They're not all particularly flashy, but they get the job done. Saltzpyre's class skills also counts to a lesser extent. Special mention goes to Kruber and Saltz's 'Morale Boost' and 'Animosity' class skills in particular. It's not much else then them yelling really loudly at the enemy, conferring a short buff to the team and pushing enemies back. However, in the right circumstances these skills can be a godsend, especially when either of the are being swarmed from all angles.
  • Kerillian's ranged options include the rapid-firing Swiftbow and Shade-exclusive Volley Crossbow, the Hagbane Shortbow that fires arrows coated in a lethal poison able to thin hordes, the magical Moonfire Bow that fires burning arrows, and... the Longbow, which is just a point-and-click sniper bow with superior damage and armour penetration on headshots.
  • One-handed weapon types like Saltzpyre's Rapier and Falchion and Kerillian's Sword do not look quite as impressive as Dual Wielding or two-handed weapons and aren't in terms of raw damage output or crowd control, but they give big boosts to dodging distance and count (you can only dodge so many times consecutively before encountering diminishing returns). Being able to kite hordes and monsters while avoiding damage is an absolutely invaluable ability in a game where you are four heroes fighting an endless and legion foe, and combined with certain dodge talents like "Charmed Life" and "Wraith Walk" gives characters a lot of utility and mileage.
• Bragging Rights Reward: The black armor skins for each character's career paths are this. In order to unlock just one, one must brave all thirteen levels of the base game on Legend as any given character kit, and there are fifteen of them in total, one for each career, so have at it.
• Brutal Bonus Level: Fortunes of War, which can only be unlocked by finding the hidden runes in each of Back to Ubersreik's three regular levels, which are near-impossible to find without a guide. Your reward for doing so? An absolute slog of a Hold the Line mission, featuring eight waves of enemies and the occasional monster. And these enemies include groups of specials large enough to disable the entire party and huge amounts of berserkers which will barely let you get a hit in on even one of them. And these groups only increase in size the higher up in difficulty you go.
• Carry a Big Stick: With the exception of Sienna, who largely favors one-handed melee weapons except for her Necromancer scythe, the other four all have access to some manner of big stick to whack their enemies with. One of Kruber's weapon options (and the one he starts with in the tutorial) is a large two-handed maul, Bardin can choose from a Powerful Pick and two flavors of heavy hammers provided the requisite DLCs are bought, and Saltzpyre's Warrior Priest DLC grants him a comically-large Reckoner hammer.
• Chain Lethality Enabler:
  • The Ranger Veteran automatically creates an ammunition pickup whenever a Special is killed. Similarly, the Huntsman and Bounty Hunter both have Talents that grant them bonus ammunition for killing Specials and Elites, respectively.
  • A Bounty Hunter Talent causes Victor's melee kills to reset the cooldown for a passive ability that grants him a guaranteed ranged Critical Hit.
  • A Pyromancer Talent negates Sienna's Overheating for 10 seconds after killing a Special, allowing limitless Playing with Fire during that time.
  • A Waystalker Talents gives Kerillian a free Multishot within 10 seconds of a melee killing blow.
  • A Shade capstone Talent prolongs Kerillian's undetectability whenever she uses her career ability to kill an Elite. With timing, this can let her efficiently Back Stab through an entire Patrol unseen.
• Challenge Run: Deeds are a way to test your skills of the game by imposing numerous changes to handicap the team, such as disabling respawns, making it so that killed players remain dead for the rest of the level, or replacing standard roaming enemies with elites, so on and so forth. Deeds come in varying grades as well, and award additional lootboxes upon completion, with harder ones giving out better chests.
• Changing of the Guard: The interquel mission of the first game and the opening narration of the second imply that the heroes of Ubersreik have finally been defeated and hint that new heroes will be required. The game then begins with Ubersreik Five busting their way out of captivity and escaping to continue the fight, instead.
• Character Class System: From the get-go, the 5 heroes can take 3 character careers, each with their strengths, weakness, passive and active abilities, and weapon specializations. Generally, however, they fall into the categories of Tank, Ranged, and Melee, with the tank excelling at taking or avoiding damage, the ranged excelling at killing from a distance, and the melee excelling at dealing damage up close. Additionally, character classes can focus on killing the large number of weak enemies, killing the small number of elite, deadly enemies ("specials"), tanking the damage, or boss-killing. Pointing out as a sidenote, each career choice is tied into the heroes' personal story: the starting career^note Witch Hunter Captain, Mercenary, Ranger Veteran, Waystalker, Battle Wizard represents the hero has honed their skills but remained largely the same personality-wise, the second unlocked career^note Bounty Hunter, Huntsman, Ironbreaker, Handmaiden, Pyromancer represents the hero finding a higher calling and taking positive steps forward as a result, the third unlocked career^note Zealot, Foot Knight, Slayer, Shade, Unchained represents the hero going down a darker path as their personal demons overwhelm them, and the premium careers^note Warrior Priest, Grail Knight, Outcast Engineer, Sister of the Thorn, Sienna's yet unconfirmed career represents a Canonical path the character follows after the Chaos Wastes expedition.
  • Victor
    • Witch Hunter Captain: The death of several Captains during the End Times has allowed Victor to rise in rank. Using his new position within the Order of the Silver Hammer, Victor continues his personal war against the Skaven with renewed zeal. Melee-Ranged Hybrid. A Critical Hit Class that can instantly kill any non-boss enemy with a single crit to the head, block lighter attacks for free, and empower the offensive of allies, especially against tagged enemies but suffers agaisnt larger numbers.
    • Bounty Hunter: When Victor spoke up about the Fall of Ubersreik to the Skaven, the Order silenced him, forcing him to tear off his badge and take the fight into his own hands. Technically still a Witch Hunter, Saltzpyre has tempered his zealotry with some pragmatism, and now fights a new war against the Skaven, funded independently by collecting prices on heads. Ranged. Gains automatic critical hits with ranged weapons frequently and can pull out a double-barreled shotgun for close encounters. A special and boss killer par excellence.
    • Zealot: When Victor spoke up about the Fall of Ubersreik to the Skaven, the Order silenced him, and Victor consequently lost all faith in mankind and earthly organizations, placing his faith in Sigmar alone. Melee. Gains additional damage the lower his health is and can charge into battle, granting him more attack speed. A horde-clearer melee tank.
  • Markus
    • Mercenary: Kruber finds the mercenary's life suits him fine; the blood and coin and alcohol keeps coming, but now he no longer must answer to incompetent leaders and suicidal orders. Melee. A melee focused damage dealer with a support-focused ability that knocks back enemies and gives allies extra health.
    • Huntsman: After the Fall of Ubersreik, Kruber sought solace in dedication to Taal and Rhya and became a woodsman, fighting enemies with a keen eye rather than with a strong arm. Ranged. A precision ranged class. His passive ability grants him ammo for every head shot, and his active hides him from view. The Huntsman excels versus high-priority specials and bosses.
    • Foot Knight: For his valour in the battle for Ubersreik, Kruber has been knighted by the Reikshammer and now finds himself standing on a higher and unfamiliar rung in Imperial society. Kruber doesn't complain, reasoning the new armour will better guard his life. Tank. A disruptive tank that gains greatly increased staggering and pushing abilities, allowing him to keep both entire swarms of enemies and powerful elites off balance and unable to fight back.
  • Kerillian
    • Waystalker: Frustrated by the clumsiness and ineptitude of the "lumberfoots", Kerillian has resolved to further hone her deadly skills as an archer, knife-fighter and tracker. Ranged. A Bow and Sword in Accord switch-hitter who can handle hordes, specials, and bosses at the cost of being very fragile. She sports increased ammo capacity and regenerates health up to 50% of her life bar. Her active shoots out a trio of homing arrows, that can be used to clear out a group of normal enemies, kill a few elite/special foes, or damage a boss.
    • Handmaiden: Through the subtle guidance of the Asur Everqueen, Alarielle, Kerillian happened upon a lost wayshrine to Isha and had an epiphany, deciding to serve a higher power as a Handmaiden. Tank. A defensive dodge-tank class and can also melt a horde. Her active allows her to dash straight through enemies, allowing her to phase through groups of enemies or dodge attacks safely.
    • Shade: Haunted by the horrors of Ubersreik, Kerillian's dreams grew ever darker and soon she heard the voice of Khaine. Discovering she is descended from an exiled noble of Clar Karond, it didn't take much urging within her scarred mind to take up her ancestor's mantle. Melee. An assassination class with bonuses to backstabbing. Her active makes her incorporeal for a short time or until she attacks. A shade can kill a boss or special with ease or save a troubled ally.
  • Sienna
    • Battle Wizard: The events of Ubersreik taught Sienna the value of self-control in regards to her powers... with some reluctance on her part. Ranged. Automatically vents her overcharge if she hasn't cast a spell for a short time. She can teleport short distances leaving a trail of flame.
    • Pyromancer: Lacking the precision of a true Battle Wizard, Sienna keeps the self-awareness to refrain from the more ostentatious displays of fire magic. Ranged. Overcharge increases her critical hit chance and can fire a homing missile that tracks enemies.
    • Unchained: Sienna's addiction to the magic she wields has finally overcome her sense, and she now lives for the next big burst of power. Tank. Takes reduced damage but it adds to her overcharge, which she can detonate using her ability to clear a large area.
  • Bardin
    • Veteran Ranger: Bardin has yet to find Karak Zorn, but that does not mean he is giving up, just the defence of the human realms is his current priority. Karak Zorn is going nowhere in a hurry. Ranged. A balanced class that has the ability to throw a smoke bomb to slip out when things get hairy and causes special enemies to spawn ammo drops when killed.
    • Ironbreaker: Bardin recalls his previous vocation as an Ironbreaker of Kazak Norn, and seeing the Fall of Ubersreik has persuaded him to return there and take up his old oaths (and his gromril plating) in defence of civilization. Tank. A defensive class with increased stamina, that comes with the ability to taunt all enemies near him into attacking only him while also drastically improving his blocking for a time. His passive ability lets him absorb one hit without taking damage, which refreshes after a cooldown of twenty seconds.
    • Slayer: Bardin has been carrying a Dark Secret even before the Fall of Ubersreik, and the destruction of the city has thrown his sanity over the edge. Taking up the oath of a Slayer, he now lives only to seek an honourable death, preferably one with something big also dead at his feet. Melee. A class focused on raw damage and attack speed at the expense of defensive ability, complete with a leaping attack ability. Picks a second melee weapon in place of a ranged weapon.
  • Additionally, after the revelations at Castle Drachenfels, each hero will receive one additional class that has some bearing on their backstory, either an awakening of sorts, or memories and skills dredged up by the traumatic events they were put through.
    • Markus Kruber becomes a Grail Knight: Receiving an unusual letter addressed to a "Markus de Mandalot", Kruber discovers he is, in fact, the last living descendant of the Grail Knight, Foiscarl de Mandelot, leading him to go on Bretonnian grail pilgrimage of his own, one that he succeeds at no less, gaining the blessing of the Lady and the right to call Saltzpyre "Peasant" anytime he wants. Melee-Tank hybrid. His passive lets him No-Sell Warpfire Throwers when equipped with a Bretonnian shield, whereas every other character will be staggered by them in the same situation, while his Bretonnian Longsword has the unique riposte mechanic, where holding a charged attack provides Kruber with three shields' worth of stamina for parrying, allowing him to tango with a small mob or a single melee heavy hitter. As for Melee, his career skill is a magical sword strike that deals high damage to a priority enemy, or can serve as a crowd-clearer. It should be noted that Grail Knight leans more towards the former side of things, however, as he provides neither the Damage Reduction aura nor the stamina regeneration buff provided by Foot Knight, and nearly all of his talents only serve himself, although the benefits of fulfilling his Lady's Duties apply to the entire party, and can be quite significant.
    • Bardin Goreksson becomes an Outcast Engineer: Bardin always looked up to his Cool Uncle growing up, an engineer named Draggi Daksson, but his father Gorrek was a staunch traditionalist and warded young Bardin away from the path of an apprentice engineer to become an Ironbreaker instead. Realizing he had made a mistake, Bardin went back to dabbling in tinkering with forbidden gadgetry and soon he had brought Draggi's masterwork from drawings to reality. Ranged. Boasts a customizable steam-powered gatling gun, allowing for swift crowd clearing or focusing down more dangerous enemies. The gatling gun needs to be manually recharged between volleys using his Build Pressure passive, unlike every other classes' ability bar recharging automatically. The Engineer carries more ammuntion, improves the ranged damage of nearby allies, and can also carry three bombs and switch between them, making him a capable grenadier.
    • Kerillian becomes a Sister of the Thorn: Kerillian has been undergoing a crisis of faith in Lileath for some time, and deciding to rededicate herself to Ereth Khial, the Pale Queen and the elven goddess of the dead, Kerillian ended up back in Athel Loren seeking answers. Offering up her uncertainty and regret to the forest, she reemerged as an elf reborn and dedicated to a new cause and identity. Ranged. This class came with a set of throwable javelins along with a staff that allows Kerillian to render non-monsters helpless by suspending them in mid-air. Her new ability allows her to throw up walls of thorns to either impede and debuff enemies, or cause a ton of damage and bleeding, depending on selected traits.
    • Victor Saltzpyre becomes a Warrior Priest of Sigmar: Victor's term as a Witch Hunter was only a process of elimination. His faith deeply shaken by the visible incompetence of his comrades in the Templar Witch Hunters, Victor finds his faith renewed but it now manifests directly as power flowing through his body. Nominally retaining his position as a Witch Hunter Captain, Victor disdains the bureaucracy and found his true calling: applying hammers directly to the heads of heretics and monsters while he preaches. Tank. A support tank that empowers and protects allies while staggering and powering through foes. Armed with a set of various hammer-based weapons entirely separate from Saltzpyre's original arsenal, the Warrior Priest has significantly greater staggering power, while his talents give him superior resiliency combined with the ability to make himself or an ally invulnerable for a short duration.
    • Sienna becomes a Necromancer: Following a fierce battle with her sister Sofia, Sienna's latent talent for Dark magic revealed itself to the rest of the Ubersreik Five, when a small band of spectral minions protected the unconscious and wounded Sienna. Once Sienna recovered and Saltzpyre's initial concerns were addressed, Sienna eagerly saw a chance to prove to her dear friends that her new powers can indeed be used for noble causes. As a Necromancer, Sienna's specialty is being able to summon a small squad of skeletal minions to attack nearby enemies or block off a chokepoint or doorway, with a few supplementary abilities based around restricting enemy movement and sapping their strength while also damaging enemies over time - making her a premiere crowd-control specialist.
• Close-Range Combatant: Bardin's Slayer career is unique in that it allows no ranged weapons but lets him carry a second melee weapon instead. He can also throw himself at enemies, and a DLC adds throwing axes that work at range with some limitations.
  • By pledging himself to the Lady of the Lake and becoming a Grail Knight, Kruber becomes an utter killing machine in close combat. He can take two melee weapon options and chop through armoured enemies and monsters with ease using a special magic sword. But his knightly vows force him to forgo firearms and other ranged weaponry (although he can still use thrown bombs). This leaves him with no answer to specials that attack from far away like Blightstormers and Ratling Gunners, and also quite vulnerable to disablers like Leeches and Hookrats.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Loot items are separated into five tiers, plus Starter Equipment. The middle tiers function independently of the Power stat, a separate mechanic.
  • "Blacksmith" starter items are dull grey, have a measly 5 power, and can't be gained or lost.
  • Common items are white and have no special features, aside from the basic traits of a given weapon type.
  • Uncommon items are green and have one random property (e.g.: a percent-based damage boost against one enemy type).
  • Rare items are blue and have two properties.
  • Exotic items are orange and have two attributes, plus a special trait (e.g.: a bow that can regenerate ammunition).
  • Veteran items are red, with two attributes, one trait, and maximized power and attribute values.
• Common Tongue: Not only do Kerillian and Bardin mostly stick to Reikspiel (or rather, English) in place of their ethnic languages, so do the Norscans and Skaven, even among themselves. Zig-zagged by the Beastmen, who only use the Dark Tongue.
• Continuity Cameo: The in-game paintings attributed to Marius Holseher are all prior works of Games Workshop veteran artist John Blanche for Warhammer Fantasy Battle.
• Continuity Nod: Character conversations make nods to some of the events of the End Times:
  • Victor mentions Sylvania being encaged by the Wall of Faith constructed by Balthasar Gelt.
  • Kruber states that Kislev has been overrun by the Forces of Chaos.
  • Kerillian mentions Bretonnia engaged in a civil war to determine which undead ruler will reign supreme. This is in reference to King Leoncoeur's illegitimate son, Mallobaude, leading most of the Bretonnian nobility turned-vampires against his father in a bid to take the throne.
  • Lohner mentions that at one time a vampire stayed at his inn without any bloodshed (or blood sucking for that matter). While he doesn't remember her name, he states that it started with a G. He's referring to Geneviève Dieudonné, the best known Friendly Neighborhood Vampire in the setting and famous for killing the dreaded Drachenfels, the book involving her being Drachenfels.
    • Also relating to Drachenfels, during the missions at the castle of the same name Bardin may remark that no records of Constant Drachenfels match historical records, a reference to the novel being written very early in the development of Warhammer as a game and thus having a lot of conflicts with the modern lore.
  • When Bardin kills a Warpfire Thrower, he'll sometimes say "That's for Karak Eight Peaks!" When the Skaven attacked Eight Peaks, they melted the city's Gromril gates with Warpfire Throwers.
• Continuity Snarl: Some enemy factions crop up in maps that they logically shouldn't be in.
  • The Rotbloods can be encountered throughout the three Ubersreik DLC maps, despite their alliance with the Skaven not being a thing yet at the time, so there wasn't a way for them to arrive there yet. And the whole thing about them not being in the first game's narrative as well. This is explained in Fortunes of War as Rotblood shamans interfering with Olesya's illusion, hence their presence.
  • The Beastmen were introduced way after the Skittergate was closed, and are based around the Reikwald area where the meteor landed. Completing Dark Omen retroactively places them in all prior maps. While one can argue that it make sense for the Beastmen to take advantage of the Skaven/Rotblood siege and can easily reach anywhere using the Beast Paths, some appearances make less sense. Particular emphasis on Ubersreik, since the Rotbloods are said to be interfering with the ritual and projecting themselves within it. Another example is Into the Nest and Skittergate, where it's unlikely Beastmen would be found inside large Skaven nests, much less Norsca itself.
• Cool Gate: Rasknitt has ordered the construction of an enormous portal called the "Skittergate", which is powered by warpstone and human sacrifice. Rasknitt intends to use the Skittergate to allow Bödvarr Ribspreader's army easy access to Helmgart. In the prologue, it appears to work, but breaks down (much to Bödvarr and Rasknitt's frustration), and it apparently wasn't the first time it failed to work properly. Despite the setbacks, the Skittergate managed to summon a large enough number of Rotbloods to mostly overwhelm Helmgart and the surrounding area.
• Completion Meter: Introduced in the Curse of Drachenfels update is a stat tracker for each individual mission that can be viewed by clicking on it, which lets the player see how many of the Ravaged Art pieces, Tomes, and Grimoires they've collected for a particular map, which difficulty was their personal best for that level, and which heroes (along with classes to be really specific) they've done it with.
• Critical Hit Class: Shade. As a Shade, Kerillian is capable of dealing frightening amounts of damage via her Back Stabs. Against anything smaller than a Chaos Warrior, a backstab from Shade is a One-Hit Kill, while bigger enemies will still take heavy damage regardless, more if she's Infiltrating. As such, Shade is one of a tiny handful of, if not the only class, that will ever make use of Crit Power, as it augments her already obscene damage output to truly maddening levels. While other classes require buffs or situational moments to rely on crit power, all the Shade needs to do is stab an enemy in the back, which can be easily accomplished due to their class skill.
  • Saltzpyre's Witch Hunter Captain career has several class features that work around critical hits. His Animosity feature increases the critical chance of himself and his allies, and he can instantly slay any man-sized enemy (in practice, anything smaller than a Chaos Warrior) with a critical headshot. As such he's one of the few heroes to get any use out of putting +Crit Chance on his weapons. He's also a rather good monster/boss killer — take a brace of pistols or the outrider pistol, shout his Animosity, draw and make the beast eat lead, and the HP bar will quickly go down from all the crits you'll be landing (to say nothing of any allies joining in).
• Cutting Off the Branches: While not outright confirmed, in-game dialogue and the heavy lore focus the classes are given seem to indicate that the DLC classes are the 'true' vocations the heroes decide to take up after the Drachenfels and Chaos Wastes DLCs. However, trailers and Lohner's Chronicle posts released chronologically after the DLC careers dropped sometimes have the characters going back to their base classes (e.g. in the Chaos Wastes trailer Kruber is a Foot Knight, and in the Warrior Priest trailer Kerillian is a Waystalker). Presumably they can just change their outfits and gear at the base, much like how characters in WFRP (and to some extent on the tabletop) can change their weapons, armor, and spell/blessing lists. This is backed up by the fact that some dialogue referencing these careers aren't actually career-locked (e.g. Kerillian and Kruber still talk about the latter's Grail Knight status in the Chaos Wastes even if he's a Foot Knight, Mercenary, or Huntsman; notably there are actually career-locked lines in the game, so it was a deliberate choice rather than a technical issue). In the Chaos Wastes, Sienna may also sometimes mock Saltzpyre by questioning if he's "going full flagellant again." Additionally, the Lohner's Chronicle entry "Markus de Mandelot" announcing the Grail Knight class notes offhand that Kruber is at the same time a "mercenary, poacher, and occasional knight", and the later "Wolves of Winter" entry has him hunting wolves, presumably with a bow. Kruber also has unique dialogue with Outcast Engineer Bardin asking him to fix one of his repeater handguns as he noticed it's been jamming frequently, even though a Grail Knight wouldn't ordinarily use guns at all.
• Curb-Stomp Cushion: Fort Brachsenbrücke marks the first time in either game we see Imperial forces still actively resisting the Skaven in an organized, direct confrontation — and winning, albeit barely. Lohner even explicitly says that for as badly as the war is going, it would be far worse if not for the Fort's defenders.
• Cursed with Awesome: Areas in the Chaos Wastes DLC can be cursed by one the Chaos Gods, creating extra threats. In most cases they do make it harder but one Slaaneshi curse actually makes the level significantly easier. The curse slowly drains health due to supernatural thirst which can only be countered by drinking potions. Certainly sounds like a problem except that the health drain is very slow and the potion doesn't just heal health lost to the curse but also to enemy attacks etc. The end result is that for that level every potion becomes a free healing potion in addition to whatever it normally does.
• Cycle of Hurting: Due to the ramped up spawn rate of special enemies on harder difficulties, it's very possible for you to be grabbed by one, freed, then immediately nabbed by another. Special points go to the Blightstormers. If they spawn in groups and position their vortexes in a tight bunch (which they very well might), you'll find yourself being juggled for a good while.
• Darkest Hour: A game mechanic. If all but one character dies, the last survivor will spout a "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner declaring their intention to go down swinging^note Interestingly, not the resident Large Ham, Saltzpyre — he just fights on in grim silence against the horde. The music changes too. It is possible for a skilled, determined or just lucky player to survive the encounter and go on to salvage the game Back from the Brink, but their odds are not great...
• Death Is Gray: Downplayed — when a character is out of Non-Lethal K.O.s and will die instantly the next time they're downed, the player's screen switches to grayscale.
• Decapitation Strike: Each Act ends with the Player Party executing a targeted strike on a leader of the Chaos invasion. One is the Warlord of the Skaven clan leading the attack; his death spreads paranoia and infighting among the clan, compromising its forces.
• Delayed Reaction: During "A Quiet Drink":
  Victor: Oh look, the tavern's on fire. [Beat] THE TAVERN'S ON FIRE!!!
• Department of Redundancy Department: This bit of grimly amusing dialogue from "A Quiet Drink":
  Sienna: You should have another drink, Markus. You're too sober...
  Markus: Ain't been properly sober in twenty years, Sienna. Helps me forget. And I'll tell you another thing...
  Sienna: What's that, dear Markus? You can tell me.
  Markus: It helps me forget.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Several career builds and pieces of kit require the player to constantly put themselves in danger in order to gain the most mileage out of them.
  • As a Zealot, Victor gains the most bonus power when his permanent (green) health is but a sliver remaining. Being a tank, it also means he will constantly be smashed by enemies, so players who can't manage his temporary HP well will find themselves dead very quickly. If they can, Zealot Victor makes short work of most non-boss creatures thrown at him, while the team behind him can support him from relative safety.
  • Sienna's Pyromancer and Unchained provide far superior offensive/defensive capabilities compared to her standard Battle Wizard, but the catch is that their power scales with her Overcharge level. Therefore, in order to maximize damage output, Sienna has to constantly be in the red. This is even harder for an Unchained to manage, as her venting power has a long cooldown and Overcharge builds rather quickly just from her being hit, which is easy considering Unchained is her Tank kit.
  • Kerillian's Shade deals unparalleled critical melee damage through her backstabs, capable of killing all man-sized enemies with a single hit, and offing monsters and Lords in record time with the right build. She is also incredibly fragile and deals extremely poorly with big mobs when her career skill is off cooldown (never mind how all enemies turn on a dime if they're not distracted by other heroes), and has to rely on tanks to soak up or negate damage for her.
  • As a Waystalker, Kerillian's "Piercing Shot" talent changes her special Trueflight Volley from a wave of homing arrows, into a single unguided arrow that deals absolutely stupendous damage against anything unfortunate to get hit by it. What's more, the meter is completely refunded on a headshot. In the hands of someone with good aim and muscle memory to account for the enemies' animations, a Waystalker can use this to squash boss monsters at a horrifying rate. Chaos Warriors also sweat bullets when they see a good Waystalker loading this talent.
  • The "Natural Bond" trait for necklaces converts all health gained from healing to temporary HP that ticks down constantly, in exchange for the permanent health itself slowly regenerating every 5 seconds. Playing on Recruit and Veteran, where healing items are abundant, this trait is rather garbage, but it proves invaluable to non-tanks, who typically don't have the HP to withstand enemy strikes on Champion and Legend, where supplies are few and far between, and two thirds of a health bar could be gone in an instant from an enemy sneak attack.
  • Baiting a Ratling Gunner's, Poison Wind Globadier's, Warpfire Thrower's, Blightstormer's or Stormfiend's attacks into killing or disrupting their allies is a risky maneuver that requires precise movement and positioning. Do it incorrectly and you'll end up taking a lot of damage. Do it well, and you can get rid of several enemies without wasting ammunition or health.
• Discard and Draw: Each hero has three careers representing what happened to them after Ubersreik. Their first career, unlocked by default, has them remain much of what they were, or at least be "more" of what they were; the second has them undergo Character Development and follow a higher calling of some kind; the third and final, by contrast, has them suffer some Sanity Slippage and take a much darker turn:^note  Kruber appears to be the exception to this, as all his options can be construed as positive steps forward from the first game, just in different ways.
  • Bardin Goreksson: His first class, Ranger Veteran, continues his previous training. He can also decide to defend the world, putting the needs of others ahead of his personal quest as an Ironbreaker. He can also spiral into suicidal fury over his perceived failures and become a Death Seeker — his Slayer career, where he seeks an honorable death in battle. Or, provided one has the required DLC, he can walk in his late uncle's footsteps and following his childhood dream of becoming an Outcast Engineer by building his long-dreamt design of a custom-build crank gun.
  • Sienna Fuegonasus: Her first class, Battle Wizard, represents her deciding that the discipline and focus the College tried to teach her was not a waste after all, cleaning up her act and becoming a fully ordained magister. Pyromancer, meanwhile, sees her continue venting her powers for fun, much as she did in the first game. As the Unchained, she can succumb entirely to her Addictive Magic and become an unhinged pyromaniac, channeling self-destructive amounts of magic through her flesh. Finally, as a result of her latent Dark magic talent coming to the forefront as a result of fighting Sofia, Sienna might become a Necromancer. Saltzpyre is definitely not pleased.
  • Victor Saltzpyre: Victor can accept a promotion in the Inquisition in his first career as a Witch Hunter Captain. He can also distance himself even further from the Inquisition and continue his personal crusade while also making money as a Bounty Hunter. Finally, Victor can dive headlong into religious mania as the Zealot, recognizing only Sigmar's authority over him and recklessly throwing himself at the enemy with insane fury. Finally Saltzpyre can cast aside his Witch Hunter authority to devote himself entirely to Sigmar in a more rational manner than the Zealot by becoming a Warrior Priest of Sigmar and with it a wide variety of warhammers and battle prayers.
  • Kerillian: Kerillian's first career has her continue as a Waystalker. If her conscience tortures her with what happened at Ubersreik, she may have a religious awakening and devote herself to Isha as a Handmaiden, fighting for the memory of a once-united elf race. Alternatively, she can embrace bitterness and sadism; seeing a Dark Elf ancestor in her dreams, she emulates the cruelty of the Exiled Kin as a Shade, now counting her kills for her own pleasure. She can also leave Taal's Horn Keep after feeling abandoned by Lileath, returning after being chosen by Arial as a Sister of the Thorn and bringing to the group a second mage whom can focus on either support or offense in equal measure with magic from the Lore of Life.
  • Marcus Kruber: Marcus may continue as a Mercenary Veteran. Alternatively, he can be officially recognized by the Empire as a hero and be elevated to a knighthood as a Foot Knight. He can also return to his roots, honoring the gods Taal and Rhya as a survivalist, wilderness guardian, and Huntsman. He can discover that he is from a Bretonnian knight's blood line and become a Grail Knight, gain mystical quasi-holy powers, and start affecting the manners of his ancestors while emulating their styles of war. Saltzpyre is almost certainly not pleased.
• Downloadable Content: In several flavors. The first type are mere skins for the five heroes and their basic classes, while the second of which are chapter expansions, such as Back to Ubersreik or Winds of Magic. The third kind, which is being experimented with by FatShark, covers premium classes for the five characters, the first of which is the Grail Knight career for Markus Kruber, introduced with the Season 3 update. FatShark confirmed that more premium classes are in the works, and will potentially be delivered in later seasons.
• Draw Aggro: The special skills for Mercenary, Ironbreaker, and Witch Hunter Captain have the player characters bellow out a warcry to stagger nearby enemies^note Ironbreaker can only stagger enemies smaller than a Chaos Warrior, and cannot aggro bosses without a certain talent and taunt those affected into attacking them instead of their allies. The shouts also force pinning-type enemies (e.g. Packmaster, Gutter-Runner, etc...) to immediately drop their quarry.
• Dual Wielding:
  • Multiple heroes: Bardin as the Slayer uses two handaxes and dual flame pistols as the Ironbreaker; Kerillian has dual swords, dual daggers, and sword-and-dagger; Victor pairs his rapier with a pistol; and Bardin and Markus both use their shields offensively as well as defensively.
  • Chaos Savages can also be seen wielding two axes. Skaven Chieftain Skarrik Spinemanglr also swaps between his halberd and a pair of swords.
  • The "Back to Ubersreik" DLC features a new weapon for each character, including a sword and mace combination for Kruber, an axe and falchion combination for Saltzpyre, and dual hammers for Bardin that he can use for all three of his careers rather than just his Slayer one.
  • Saltzpyre's Warrior Priest of Sigmar class gives him every imaginable combination of warhammers you can think of. From wielding one with a shield, a holy tome, or simply another warhammer.
• Dump Stat: Some equipment properties are rather worthless and unused.
  • Respawn Speed. It's of no use on lower difficulties where you won't die often enough to take advantage of the reduced wait time, and on harder modes, you'll respawn faster than your teammates can fight their way to the respawn point to rescue you.
  • Movement Speed. It doesn't confer much benefit and can make platforming a lot harder to manage.
  • Crit Power. Highly dependent on class and weapon type. A dedicated Critical Hit Class like the Shade can use a ton of it to melt monsters and bosses. However, due to how the power boost is calculated,^note (It modifies the damage multiplier for scoring a critical hit, which is far higher for some precision-type weapons like Dual Daggers than for most others.) it's too small and too infrequent to be of use to a build that can't achieve a high critical hit chance.
• Ear Worm: In-Universe, the Dwarf song "Over the Mountain" is occasionally sung by Bardin, and seems to have stuck with the rest of the team, with Lohner mumbling it in the Chaos Wastes mission selection area on occasion, after which he grumbles that he can't get it out of his head. This video of the Ubersreik Five begrudgingly singing along featured originally-unused voice lines from the game. The lines were later added in the Geheimnistag update to play while the crew is hunting grudge-marked enemies in the Chaos Wastes, amusingly after three of the five had canonically become grimmer and more stoic via their DLC careers.
  Kerillian: Where is my hearthfire, over the mountain— you're a parasite Goreksson, burrowing in my head!
• Easy Level Trick: Post-Winds of Magic, the finale portion of Convocation of Decay has gained itself a reputation for being the single-worst defense segment of the game, even on lower difficulties.
  • However, there existed a bug in which if only one person jumps down to the circle and die there, the progress meter would still tick up, netting everyone else a free win.
  • After the above glitch was patched out in Season 3, players were quick to spot another exploit, where a half-broken pillar can be jumped onto from the leftmost side of the ring, where no melee enemy can reach them, allowing marksman classes like Waystalker or Huntsman to safely snipe at enemies from a vantage point. Even reviving respawned teammates is made easier by this, as it's right near the spawning area. The only crimps to this are that those who are not on the pillar will still have to be able to hold their own, and the reduced visibility while on the vantage point, as the environment doesn't light up like when inside the ring, though this can be gotten used to quickly, and remedied by simply clicking the brightness meter up a few notches.
• Edge Gravity: Even if you take a running jump into a bottomless pit or other falling hazard, you somehow catch the edge and hang there, helpless but able to be rescued by a teammate before you fall. A few effects can bypass this, like being Punched Across the Room by a rat ogre.
• Eldritch Location:
  • The Chaos Wastes, corrupted by the influence of the Dark Gods. There are Floating Platforms, absurdly huge structures (often with little apparent purpose), strange plants, swirling portals, several variations on an Alien Sky and so on.
  • The titular tower in Tower of Treachery has also gone a bit strange from the magic used inside. For two or three floors the dead seem unaffected by gravity, causing slain enemies to gently drift away into the air, the library looks like it was designed by M.C. Escher, with furniture clinging to the walls and ceilings and at one point a door seemingly leads into a section of the jungles of Lustria, literally the other side of the world from the tower's location. According to Olesya he latter is apparently the result of Sofia Fuegonasus leaving open a book called A Sorcerer's Journey through Lustria but given that she doesn't elaborate we don't know if it's an illusion or actual teleportation to the far off country.
• Elite Mooks: Chaos Warriors wear heavy plate armor and wield better weapons than the marauders. Even worse is that they are devoted to Nurgle, thus being gifted with increased durability but at a cost of speed.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Kruber and Saltzpyre may have once been an ordinary Empire soldier and a badass old monster hunter sharing the company of a dwarf, an elf and a wizard, but the expedition into the Chaos Wastes left them with their own magical powers and superhuman abilities. Kruber discovered a distant Bretonnian ancestor and after a quest for the Lady's favour, became a mighty Grail Knight - granted biological immortality and incredible physical strength, he can now command the magical powers of the Lady of the Lake and throw down with monsters directly. Returning from the wastes a changed man, Saltzpyre now commands the powers of Sigmar as a Warrior Priest, able to perform divine miracles to strengthen his physical might and shield himself and others from harm, blessing his comrades and striking the fear of Sigmar in his foes.
• Epic Flail: Victor's new melee weapon type are flails. They ignore shields entirely and stagger hordes aside. Sienna can get a flaming variant of her own via DLC.
• Escort Mission: Several missions have objectives that force you to deliver a certain object to its destination, such as a battering ram or a cart full of blackpowder. Hunger in the Dark in particular is one huge escort mission in its entirety, where you need to fill up, push, lose, find, and deliver the powder cart to the end.
• Evil Versus Evil: By the time of the Chaos Wastes expeditions, the Skaven are actively waging war against their former Norscan allies, with Skaven and Norscan corpses being fairly common finds in areas occupied by the other and one map (Count Mordrek's Fortress) even being the set of a siege complete with Skaven artillery and trench networks. They still fight on the same side whenever the Ubersreik Five walk in, though.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: Bardin can now wield flame spewing drakeguns. They don't require ammunition but have an Overheat gauge that drops him if it overloads.
• Foregone Conclusion: Possibly. If you are familiar at all with the canonical lore of The End Times, you know ultimately the planet will be destroyed and all the protagonists' work will be for nothing (bar taking a bunch of enemies with them who otherwise would have potentially survived in the mouth of the Great Horned Rat). Additionally, everyone bar the new gods, the beast races (Skaven and Lizardmen), and a handful of humans, elves, and dwarves saved by their gods or other magical means^note For example, White Dwarf (2015) #75 and the 2019 Slaanesh Battletome both mention this. Said survivors founded great civilizations that repulsed Chaos in the Age of Myth and are the ancestors of most residents of the Cities of Sigmar. will perish in the world's destruction. However, hints that the game takes place in the same Alternate Universe as Total War: Warhammer mean the characters might have a chance. If it's in the End Times universe, their best bet would be trying to end up among the chosen few who survive.
• Foreshadowing
  • In the Chaos Wastes expansion, Saltzpyre comments that the gods are busy squabbling rather than focusing on the true threat of Chaos, lamenting that Sigmar is not here to show them the error of their ways. In Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, he does exactly that, becoming the leader of the new pantheon of gods (e.g. Teclis, Tyrion, Grungni, Grimnir, Nagash). The unified pantheon achieves unprecedented success, building huge, rich, peaceful civilizations in the Mortal Realms that are capable of keeping Chaos out. The elven deities even manage to defeat and imprison Slaanesh, one of the big four Chaos gods. Things start to go bad in the Age of Chaos soon after the gods go back to squabbling, resulting in Chaos being able to make gains through both corruption and invasion, spawning centuries of bitter war. This is followed by the titular Age of Sigmar where the God-King and his allies are currently leading reclamation of the territory lost to Chaos.
    • On the same note, there's a multi-branched conversation where Saltzpyre asks his comrades why they worship the gods that they do. No matter what they say, he'll comment that they'd do better to worship Sigmar. Some of his dialogue in the base game is along the same lines, such as when he says it's a shame that Kerillian, as skilled a fighter as she is, isn't one of Sigmar's faithful. In Age of Sigmar, Sigmar is worshipped by all the peoples of the Free Cities (largely descended from survivors of this world) instead of being an Empire Ethnic God, his worshippers including aelves/elves and duardin/dwarfs of the Cities (though they worship other members of the pantheon too).
• Flunky Boss: All of them. Despite them being something of a big deal and their tendency to talk smack at our heroes, all of them would rather drown the players in cannon fodder than actually taking on them themselves. Bödvarr is an especially egregious example of this, as he proudly boasts his superiority over the Ubersreik Five (or Four, doesn't matter), and threatens to kill them all by himself, and yet will also call in waves of fodder to help him should he be sufficiently hurt. The characters will immediately call him out on this.
• Fun with Subtitles: Several members of the party have two different random yawns as "dialogue" in the "A Quiet Drink" event. The first is subtitled as "YAWN". The second is subtitled as "A DIFFERENT YAWN". Other bits of odd speech include "MUMBLE" and "SINGS INCOHERENTLY".
• Game Mod: Could be found on the Steam Workshop for PC versions. These come in two types: "Sanctioned" and "Unsanctioned". Sanctioned mods can be downloaded and freely used while playing normal games, while Unsanctioned mods require playing on a Modded realm to take effect, which doesn't track player progression to avoid cheesing using cheats.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • The Beastmen introduced with the Winds of Magic DLC are apparently fine with playing second fiddle to the Skaven and Rotbloods, despite them being literally Chaotic Evil in lore and would sooner fight (and eat) the Skaven than work with them. Chaos Warriors, sure, while they don't like it the Beasts will work with fellow Chaos worshippers if they seem to have the favour of the gods (and the Norsicans are uncivilised enough that the Beastmen can stand to be around them). However the only way Beastmen would be likely to work with the decidedly civilised (if dysfunctional) Skaven is if there was a particularly smart and influential Beastman leading the herd, which so far there has been no signs of.
  • At the end of most missions the party extracts via the Bridge of Shadows while an endless horde of enemies assaults them. Mostly all well and good but the problem arises with Slayer Bardin; under the Slayer oath Bardin should really stay and fight until either he is dead or every single enemy is.
  • The heroes are at no risk of mutation from exposure to warpstone, Chaos sorcery, or the Chaos Wastes themselves, any of which could set a Warhammer character on a short path to becoming a Chaos Spawn. Hand-waved at the end of "The Skittergate" when they say they did a "quick tentacle check".
• Gang Up on the Human: If you're playing in a private game with only bots then you're the only death that matters. The game knows this and will specifically target you if it can. Although this is still true if you're playing as the Elf or the Dwarf.
• The Ghost: Catrinne of Aldenstein is a painter taking residence at Taal's Horn Keep. There are numerous hints to her presence: she sometimes calls to Lohner from a distance, is occasionally name-dropped by Lohner and the Five, is the artist of some of the paintings you can put on the walls, and her room is located beyond a secret tunnel behind where Lohner stands. But she has yet to make an in-game appearance.
• Glass Cannon: Several characters have access to career paths that offer extremely high burst damage capabilities, but in exchange for low HP, poor survivability, or both. These are Huntsman (Kruber), Shade (Kerillian), Bounty Hunter (Saltzpyre), and Pyromancer (Sienna), all of which could do a real number on bosses and elite enemies, but have the staying power of a limp noodle when mobbed by large crowds, even on the easier difficulties. Tellingly, these are usually the worst classes to have as AI teammates, because they can't think like players could to compensate for their fragility.
  • Kerillian herself embodies this trope fully across all three of her careers, not just Shade, it's just that Waystalker makes up for this with passive healing via Amaranth, while Hand Maiden has the added benefit of improved dodging. All three go down very quickly once the enemy actually lands a blow on them, however. This trait is continued in her DLC class Sister of the Thorn, which focuses mostly on keeping the party in top shape. She's only as tanky as they are healthy, and does upwards of twice as much damage on wounded targets. This means that by default, her survivability and DPS begins to crumble as the party falters.
  • Do you want to be able to pack a steam-powered gatling gun along with your rifle/flamethrower/clockwork pistol/anti-troll grenade launcher, and leave the mucking around with bows and umgak flintlocks to your teammates? Look no further than Bardin's premium Outcast Engineer career, which is this trope writ large. Teach your foes the meaning of Dawi technological superiority by using massive firepower to mow down ratmen and cultists like it's World War I and melt monsters' HP bars in seconds flat, or pick the Gromril-Plated Shot talent and render Stormvermin and Chaos Warrior armour a joke. However, Outcast Engineer Bardin's defensive capabilities are positively woeful (though can be somewhat mitigated by the Barkskin trait, the Ablative Armour talent in his skill tree, using a weapon with a shield, etc.) and what's worse, you don't really have a panic button to be able to quickly clear space or escape when you are surrounded, which is a major problem as your movement speed drops considerably while the gun is firing. It's very hard to beat an Outcast Engineer's potential damage output, but without skilful positioning and support from his teammates, he will go down very fast.
• Got Me Doing It: During "A Quiet Drink" a drunken Saltzpyre shouts this after you drop the cask of Bugman's:
  Victor: CAREFUL, LUMBERFOOT! ...Oh, Blessed Hammer, she has me doing it now.
• Grim Up North: Norsca from where the Rotbloods hail is this, a frozen Chaos-infested wasteland filled with savage tribes and monsters where only the strong survive. During the Skittergate mission, the group briefly visits Norsca through the aforementioned gate in order to disable its reactors on that side.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: The patrols, to be exact. As with the first Vermintide, groups of Stormvermin and now Chaos Warriors may be encountered patrolling random areas of the map, and will attack the heroes if provoked, or a player enters their aggro range. They will also flat-out ignore you otherwise, so all four heroes standing in the middle of the road eyeballing them from a distance, engaged in a loud brawl with a horde of their fellows, or even shooting in their direction is no cause for alarm, as long as the Ubersreik Five don't get close or actually hit anyone in their group.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • While finding the three hidden runes in the missions of the "Return to Ubersreik" DLC is surprisingly completely optional (considering finding them is ostensibly the entire reason Oleysa sends the heroes back into the illusion of Ubersreik in the first place), as a result they're ridiculously hard to find. The first requires you to find five devilishly well-hidden switches hidden throughout the level to open the gate to the rune, while avoiding a number of decoy switches which will disqualify you. The second requires you to fiddle with a number of environmental objects (again with a number of red herrings that can instantly seal the hidden chamber shut if pressed) to uncover a stone gargoyle head which you then have to carry through more than half the level until you find the headless gargoyle to put it back on to open the door. The third, and possibly the worst, demands that you find a hidden torch, bring it to a small room off the beaten track with a fireplace in it, drop the torch into the fireplace (by changing weapons rather than by interacting with it) to cause three miniature statues to appear, then pass through a well-hidden platforming challenge to find a row of statues where you have to interact with the same three from the small room to open the door (which three it is randomises each time so no shortcuts).
  • Unless you came directly from Vermintide 1, there would be no indication that Saltzpyre's rapier has an off-hand pistol that you could shoot, despite him holding both the gun and sword in third-person. There's also no in-game hint that this is even possible; the button used to fire it isn't even bound unless you dive into the settings yourself and make adjustments. One is more likely to find the relevant binding by accident while adjusting their button inputs.
  • Similarly, Waystalker Kerillian's passive grants her an additional zoom level on her bows, which the game briefly tells to be bound to this same alternate fire key and nowhere else... the same key that isn't bound by default.
  • Strength potions increase makes all damage done by someone benefiting from it be armor-piercing as well as doing more damage. You may not expect the potion that sounds like it makes your muscles stronger for its duration to also cause your guns to (somehow) shoot harder and your bombs to explode with more force, but that's how it is.
• Harder Than Hard: Not only does Cataclysm difficulty give enemies more health, damage, mass, and stagger resistance and higher aggression, it throws them at you in greater numbers and more punishing combinations. Hordes are padded out with plenty of elite and special units and are more likely to coincide with monster attacks.
• Hell Is That Noise: As before, each time a special enemy appears, it will emit a faint signature sound that alerts players to its presence. Gets really unnerving when the scene is eerily quiet and then you start hearing whispers coming out of nowhere. Monsters also make a telltale sound immediately before their battle theme starts, just to let you know they're coming, though occasionally this noise will glitch out and not play, leaving players utterly terrified and surprised when a Chaos Spawn or Bile Troll comes out of nowhere and bashes everyone to paste.
• Hitbox Dissonance:
  • Usually not the case even with melee combat — lag or bugs aside, to hit an enemy in the head with your melee weapons, putting their head in the center of your screen isn't necessarily the guaranteed way to headshot them depending on how the weapon swings (for example, the heavy attack that is performed in the third sequence of Saltzpyre's Rapier attacks might be considered as not headshotting an enemy if aimed too low at an enemy's head, because the stab of it goes from below to upward).
  • The Beastmen are absolutely ridiculous with this. A basic Gor already hits for obscene amounts of damage even on Champion and lower, making complete mockery of damage reduction effects, but their actual attack range is deceptively long, far longer than the striking distance of any melee weapon in fact. Their hits also seem to connect before the animation finishes, making it a complete toss up on when to block and when not, which is made worse by how they could hit through even that on occasion.
  • The projectile coming from a Fireball staff is deceptively massive, especially when fully-charged. Casually flinging fireballs past your teammates may occasionally result in friendly fire complaints and team damage.
• Hold the Line: The hidden mission in "Return to Ubersreik" you unlock if you find all three hidden runes, "Fortunes of War", is one of these. You get placed in the open square from the "Horn of Magnus" Map with some extra furniture and a lot of supplies scattered around, then face down massive hordes of enemies while Olesya tries to uncover the treasure hidden in the statue at the center. Said hordes include elites spawning in pairs or even trios (leading to horrible situations where you can be crossfired by multiple Ratling Gunners or have multiple party members grabbed by Packmasters at the same time), Stormvermin and Chaos Warriors coming at you in packs, and at least three boss monsters! Good luck!
• Honorable Warrior's Death: As a Slayer, Bardin goes into Bödvarr's Boss Battle excited that the Chaos Lord might give him a worthy death, and leaves underwhelmed afterwards.
• Immortality: Going by Warhammer lore Markus and Kerillian are both immortal in their final careers, as both Grail Knights and Sisters of the Thorn get this as a side benefit. Of course, given that it is the end of the world they likely won't get much out of this.
• Interface Spoiler: Opening Okri's Challenges and scrolling down to the Back to Ubersreik section will instantly give away the existence of Fortunes of War.
• Intoxication Mechanic: In the anniversary event "A Quiet Drink", ale grants a stacking boost to attack speed and power, Critical Hit chance, and cooldown regeneration, but the bonuses turn to penalties if you go too long without drinking, and you fall over if you drink too much at once. There's also the minor issue of the heroes doing a drunken pub crawl through a monster-infested city...
• Item Amplifier: Exotic Charms enhance the Magic Potions the wearer drinks, such as by prolonging their effect or sharing the effect with a nearby ally.
• Kill Enemies to Open:
  • Several levels include an enclosed area that starts to flood with enemies when you enter past the Point of No Return; once you've killed them all, an exit spontaneously opens.
  • Chaos Wastes expeditions include Chests of Trials that spawn waves of enemies if activated and grant a divine boon when they've all been defeated. Similarly, the final stage of every expedition is an arena level that only grants access to the MacGuffin when you've killed every enemy. Both are framed as tests of worth from the Gods.
• King Mook: Three of the five Lord enemies are simply beefed-up versions of certain special units: Halescourge is an enhanced Blightstormer/Lifeleecher, Spinemanglr is a boss Stormvermin, and Bödvarr is a tougher Chaos Warrior with some new moves. Rasknitt's mount Deathrattler is additionally a modified Stormfiend, wielding dual Ratling guns in place of Warpfire Throwers and capable of a Foe-Tossing Charge, though it remains more or less the same. Rasknitt and Nurgloth's moves, on the other hand, are unique.
• Lag Cancel: "Block canceling" — various dashing career skills can cause players to end up pulling their best Leeroy Jenkins imitation to perform for its entire length, like through a horde while they're already with the rest of their team. To perform them more safely and still reap the skill's benefits, players can instead press their block button at any point during the dash which causes them to immediately block and stop charging forward while still gaining, say, the Zealot's attack speed bonus.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The opening rather blatantly spoils the original game's very last DLC. Specifically, its Downer Ending where Grey Seer Rasknitt is not only revealed to be still alive, but ambushes, curbstomps and captures the heroes.
• Lethal Joke Weapon: Torches. Despite appearances, they deal obscene amounts of damage with each swing due to them setting enemies on fire. Each torch offers 3 points worth of block stamina, and like standard weapons are indestructible, no matter if hit by a puny slave rat, or the gigantic fists of a Rat Ogre. They also deal very handily with hordes due to the wide frontal sweeps, and even armored foes fall to the afterburn very quickly on Legend. The only catch is that torches are inherently rare due to their nature as puzzle-solving tools, and with the exception of one, cannot be brought out of their immediate areas to use elsewhere.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: Played for Drama. After the completion of Castle Drachenfels, not a single one of the heroes wants to discuss what happened there. Lohner gets slapped down whenever he asks about it, and whenever one hero tries to talk about it with another, they get some variant of "best not to talk about it", something that the one who brought it up quickly agrees with.
• Level Limiter: Modded Realm is a gameplay mode that grants access to Game Mods but doesn't award experience points, loot, or progress towards Challenges.
• Limit Break: All five heroes and their many alternative career choices have access to an ultimate ability of some sort. Ultimates are very powerful abilities that can quickly turn the tide of battle when used, but are balanced out by their cooldowns (or in the case of Bardin's Outcast Engineer, a manual recharge) that can only be reliably sidestepped by consuming a Potion of Concentration, which is rare, and some careers tend to naturally have higher potion priority than others due to how more strategically-important their Ultimates are by comparison (e.g. offensive careers with burst damage Ultimates like Waystalker and Bounty Hunter tend to make better use of Concentration potions than tanks like Foot Knight and Warrior Priest).
• Mage Tower: "A Treacherous Adventure" has the heroes attack a mage in their tower. It's an Eldritch Location full of traps, strange gravity, shifting architecture, illusory (or not?) chunks of other landscapes, and remnants of magical experimentation. It was Olesya's, but was subsequently stolen by a Necromancer.
• Magic Misfire: Invoked by the heroes in "Convocation of Decay" when they interrupt a Summoning Ritual. They jump into the summoning circle and Hold the Line against waves of enemies, causing the ritual to destabilize and kill the spellcasters one by one.
• Magic Potion:
  • Potions of Speed, Strength, and Concentration are described as magical creations, unlike mundane Healing Draughts, and occupy a different inventory slot.
  • The Chaos Wastes have potions with even more overtly supernatural effects like Invisibility, described as gifts from the Gods.
    Potion of Endless Bombs: For the next 10 seconds, grim Hashut grants you unlimited bombs (don't ask how).
• Maximum HP Reduction: As in the first game, finding Grimoires and carrying them to the end of the level grants bonus loot but reduces the entire party's maximum HP by 30% per Grimoire while carried. The Anti-Debuff "Curse Resistance" from some Trinkets or the Warrior Priest passive ability mitigate this, even to the point of inversion if the resistance is stacked past 100%.
• Meat Moss: Present wherever Nurgle-related magics gather, such as the ritual site in Convocation of Decay, the manor claimed by the titular sorcerer in the mission Halescourge, or the caves around the Monolith of Ghûlmagak in Festering Ground. As expected from the Rotfather, these are usually growing as putrid ropes of meat from pools and pits where bodies were ripped apart and left to decay.
• Mechanically Unusual Class:
  • As the Slayer, Bardin cannot use ranged weapons, and is the only character class that allows you to carry two different melee weapons instead. Also, his Skill, which performs a leaping attack, recharges extremely fast compared to the other Skills which partially makes up for his inability to kill at a distance. Averted slightly when Winds of Magic gave him throwing hatchets that he can return to his hand, a mechanic that would be later given to Kerillian's javelins.
  • Grail Knight Kruber and Warrior Priest Saltzpyre, in contrast, are the classes without ranged weapons and in fact lose the ability to use a lot of their non "Knightly" or "Priestly" weapons befitting their classes. In exchange they're both given unique mechanics. Kruber recieves missions from The Lady that confer party-wide buffs for the whole level when completed and Saltzpyre being given a 'Righteous Fury' meter that fills as enemies die around him and when filled drastically increases his combat performance for as long as he's fighting something.
• Merging the Branches
  • It's implied in the Lohner's Chronicle post "Changer of Ways" that all of the characters' careers are "canon" by way of the Chaos God Tzeentch shifting their realities every week. Or it could just be Oleysa using her magic to mess with them.
  • For a less trippy version, most of the careers are possible to coexist with one another (all culminating in their premium careers), just at different points of a character's development, due to reflecting a change in equipment and job rather than a fundamental change to the character per se (the exceptions being the Slayer, Shade, and Unchained). Dialogue and flavor text imply that this is exactly what happened. For example, in the Chaos Wastes, Sienna may joke that Saltzpyre "is going full flagellant again", implying even if he's currently being played as, say, a Bounty Hunter, he was a Zealot at some time in the past. The in-universe website post announcing Kruber's Grail Knight class refers to him as a "mercenary, poacher, and occasional knight", implying he went through all three career paths in the roughly two years he's been fighting the Skaven. The trailers also seem to go with this, if they're not supposed to be an example of Negative Continuity instead; Kerillian is a Waystalker in the Winds of Magic trailer, still a Waystalker in the trailer for Bardin's Outcast Engineer class, a Handmaiden in the Chaos Wastes trailer, and of course a Sister of the Thorn in the trailer for that class. Kruber is a Foot Knight in the Winds of Magic trailer, a Mercenary in the trailer for his Grail Knight class, a Grail Knight in the Outcast Engineer trailer, and back to Foot Knight by the Chaos Wastes trailer (yet unique dialogue in the Chaos Wastes always refers to Kruber as blessed by the Lady regardless of what class he's actually playing, implying it carries over). Keep dialogue between Kruber and Bardin also reveals that he's been both an Ironbreaker and a Ranger in the past, seemingly to give an excuse as to how he can be both in-game.
• Mighty Glacier: Chaos Warriors of Nurgle are, effectively, demon-worshipping zombie Vikings clad in thick iron armour forged in the fires of Hell itself. They cannot move any speed faster than a brisk walking pace and their attack rate is pathetic, but they can shrug off a ton of punishment; in fact you won't be doing any damage to them unless your weapon has the Armour Piercing property (like a musket) or you use heavy attacks against the head. They have a nasty overhead swing attack that can down your hero in a single hit on Legend and Cataclysm, but the wind-up allows you to easily dodge it... provided you see it coming or aren't trapped. Granted they are tough but not invincible, and there are a couple of ways to kill them in one go: Shade Kerillian's trademark "Infiltrate" ultimate is exquisitely effective at killing them, Grail Knight Kruber's "Blessed Blade" will cut through them like warm butter, Bounty Hunter Saltzpyre's "Locked and Loaded" with "Double-Shotted" talent will do it at range provided the shot finds their head, and Bardin's Trollhammer Torpedo will instantly kill them provided it's a direct hit (it's a dwarfen-made portable cannon meant for one-shotting trolls). And the "Parting of the Waves" update is due to add Nurglite Chaos Warriors with shields — pray to Sigmar for mercy. Not the case however for Bodvarr Ribspreader, the "special boss" Chaos Warrior who sprints around the arena like a lunatic when you fight him. In the tabletop books and novels Chaos Warriors are generally described as being as fast and agile as an athletic human half their size, but they're also almost never as strong and tough as depicted here; presumably the Rotbloods, being Nurglites, are doubling down on power and durability over speed.
  • As a Warrior Priest, Saltzpyre is incredibly tanky. He has high HP, an innate 20% Damage Reduction, a magical barrier that allows him to No-Sell any incoming damage for five seconds, and the ability to heal permanent HP and revive downed teammates from a distance using "The Comet's Gift". He uses two melee weapons allowing him to easily switch between offence (Holy Great Hammer or Dual Hammers) and defence (Flail and Shield or Hammer and Shield), letting him excel in tight spaces and create space where his teammates can be safe and protected. But apart from a movement tech with Hammer and Tome, he has almost no mobility options, and with no ranged option this can leave him quite vulnerable to disablers like Packmasters and Assassins. His newfound Sigmarite powers have left Saltzpyre very strong but highly specialized towards one way of fighting.
• Mini-Boss: "Monster" class enemies like Stormfiends and Trolls have lots of health and hit hard, but have simple attack patterns and are generic respawning enemies. This is in contrast to "Lords", proper bosses who have better stats, more complex movesets, names, and dialogue, and only appear at the end of arc missions. While there are usually one or two monsters per mission in the base campaigns, Chaos Wastes can have you kill half a dozen or more in a single map because of the presence of event chests and map modifiers. Like Lords, monsters are invariably accompanied by the usual Zerg Rush of basic infantry, which can often be more of a threat than they are, especially if they're acting as a meat shield to grab your attention while a slippery Clanrat back-stabs you.
• Mythology Gag:
  • When discussing the origin of Chaos, Markus claims he heard it was frogs (big ones). This is immediately dismissed. However, the actual origin of Chaos is the actions of the Old Ones, and in the original lore they were the same entities as the Slann, leaders of the Lizardfolk and, yes, big frogs.
  • The portrait "Valten's Triumph" depicts the climax of the Storm of Chaos storyline, where Chaos's attempt at global conquest was defeated relatively easily. These events were retconned years ago, and the basic premise eventually reworked into the far bleaker End Times story (which the Vermintide games tie into).
    Valten? Who in Morr's name is Valten? Looks a bit like Sigmar, but it ain't. Still, the painting was recovered in the Chaos Wastes, so who knows where or when it's originally from.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In every single hero's backstory. Every single one of them, when taunted by the Nameless Voice, proves to have completely messed up.
  • Markus: Markus is a shell-shocked veteran who is losing all sense of morality after sending so many men to their deaths and has actually considered selling out the others to the Chaos forces in order to save himself.
  • Bardin: Bardin's mistakes on a mission cost him his son and many other dwarfs, and he was nearly gutted by the Skaven. He was punished accordingly by his people; "Hold-Seeker" sounds so much nicer than "exile."
  • Victor: Victor's faith in Sigmar is actually flagging significantly, hidden by his rhetoric and bluster. He doubts Sigmar is real, and doubts even if he exists that he can do anything about the coming storms. Moreover, Victor knows he tortured and burned an innocent woman to death due to over-zealousness on his part, and the guilt is eating him alive.
  • Kerillian: Kerillian heard a prophecy that Ubersreik would play a role in Athel Loren's fall. Arrogant in the extreme, Kerillian thought that she would be the one to singlehandedly stop this prophecy from coming to pass. Interpreting it as the people of Ubersreik eventually attacking her home, she led an ambush against a military convoy to the city, weakening it greatly. Hence, the fall of Ubersreik, then an invigorated Skaven presence, then the corruption of Athel Loren. Her ego caused a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, the downfall of Ubersreik indeed had a role in Athel Loren's fall, and it's all her fault.
  • Sienna: Sienna has just lost herself to the flames multiple times and killed her colleagues in wild pyromania for the thrill of it. She also killed a templar hunting a "witch"... only to learn the templar was exactly right and the witch really was a dangerous Chaos-worshipping monster. Also she burned down the town the templar was in during the process of killing him.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • Legend mode is supposed to represent the true might of the Chaos hordes, where the enemy swarms in dozens at a time, players take massively increased damage, special units come in large numbers, and monsters may spawn more than once during a single mission.
  • Cataclysm mode returns with the Winds of Magic DLC that promises to make even Legend seems like a complete pushover. As FatShark developers put it, "Cataclysm is something we wanted to add for those who like pain, this is not part of the progression and this is not something we think most should play".
• Nobody Poops: Averted since 1. If the player explores every corner of the Keep, they could find primitive "toilets" on one of the battlements that are essentially just a wooden hole dangling over the edge of the cliff.
• Noodle Incident:
  • During "A Quiet Drink" Bardin mentions an incident at a tavern called The Orc and Feather where a couple of "friendly" girls attempted to cut Markus' throat and sacrifice him to some dark god. Markus thinks it might have been worth it.
  • Lohner may tell the heroes to drink their ale in moderation, as he doesn't want a repeat of "last time".
• Non-Lethal K.O.: When a hero runs out of Hit Points, they're knocked down and start to bleed out, but can be revived by another hero. If they're downed too many times without receiving any actual healing, the next K.O. kills them instantly.
• No-Sell:
  • Ironbreaker Bardin wears Gromril Armor that lets him completely ignore damage from one hit every 20 seconds. He's still, however, subjected to CC effects and knockback from certain attacks.
  • Warrior Priest Saltzypre's class ability allows him to make him or someone else completely immune to damage for five seconds. In addition, he is immune to curses and anyone carrying a grimoire will not reduce his max health.
• Nostalgia Level:
  • The Back to Ubersreik DLC functions as this, playing as an (only slightly) remixed version of three of the levels from the original game. The rationalization for this is that Olesya is trying to locate some dwarven runes located in Ubersreik that point to the location of a hidden treasure, and is casting Grey Magic over the party to make them relive their experiences, Quantum Leap-style, while she scans what they experience looking for them. If the players manage to find all three runes, they unlock a forth level which resembles Ubersreik's endless mode where they have to survive for long enough.
  • Slightly remixed versions of the three maps from the first game's Drachenfels DLC were added into the game as a free expansion.
• Oddly Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo: Averted. The sequel even dropped the bit about the End Times in its title, settling for the much shorter Warhammer: Vermintide 2 instead. According to the developers, the way they named the first game kind of makes additional DLCs and content expansions sound very weird due to Colon Cancer, which featured such Overly Long Names like Warhammer: The End Times: Vermintide: Schluesselschloss, and more.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: During the tutorial you find Kerillian casually leaning on a post near a number of dead Skaven, including a rat ogre, in an extremely confined space. In a different way, Saltzpyre manages to escape without the Skaven ever noticing.
• Off with His Head!: A very common cosmetic result of killing blows as you hack your way through the Skaven and Rotblood hordes, particularly if you aim for the head, although the heads are as likely to shatter as go flying. Kruber even has an alternate type of two-handed sword called an Executioner's Sword which gains bonus damage on headshots.
• Oh, Crap!: It doesn't reduce their aggression any, but some Enemy Chatter upon noticing the Ubersreik Five gets a bit panicked:
  Stormvermin: No, no! They're not supposed to be here!
• Oh, My Gods!: Back from the first game, except this time, in addition to Sigmar, Taal, Shallya, Lileath, Valaya and the Winds of Magic, a Grail Knight Kruber will invoke the Lady of the Lake.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Every character has a few pithy phrases for moments when they are the last hero still standing against the Vermintide. That is, except for the normally very hammy Saltzpyre, who has no audible reaction to the poor odds facing him and fights on in grim silence.
• Outside-Context Problem: The Beastmen fill this role. Their presence has absolutely no bearing on the series' plot at large other than serving as a new enemy population introduced in Dark Omen, only seemingly teaming up with the Pactsworn against you because of mechanical reasons. They are then promptly forgotten about as the narrative takes the Ubersreik five elsewhere, with no further mention of them by the time of the Castle Drachenfels revisit and Chaos Wastes expeditions (though they do appear in the latter as generic mooks).
• Pain & Gain: Whenever a character is hit, they get a one-off boost to their career ability cooldown proportionate to the damage they suffered.
• Pilgrimage: The Chaos Wastes game mode sends the heroes on a perilous four-part pilgrimage into the titular Eldritch Location to prove their worth and ultimately find the Citadel of Eternity, a Place of Power where they can speak to the Gods directly. The experience elevates Victor Saltzpyre to a Warrior Priest of Sigmar, though Lohner privately questions whether it was truly Sigmar who answered him.
• Piñata Enemy: The Sack Rat, an enemy that spawns rarely and has a tendency to immediately run from players, exists solely to drop items and loot dice for players.
• Player Headquarters: Taal's Horn Keep, a semi-ruined fortress in the mountains near Helmgart. Features include a level-selection map and Bridge of Shadows; quarters for the Ubersreik Five; diegetic versions of the Item Crafting, inventory, and other menus; a snarky innkeeper; and lots of picture frames.
• Point of No Return: Every level is broken up into stages that you can't backtrack from, most commonly in the form of ledges that you can drop down but not jump back up.
• Portal Network: The party enter and leave each level through the Bridge of Shadows, portals projected by Olesya's grey magic between various magical pylons. Those pylons themselves appear to be repurposed elven waystones; the level Athel Yenlui sends the party to an elven temple to fix a magical disturbance in the Bridge.
• Random Loot Exchanger: Crafting can break down unwanted items for parts, create a new item of the player's choice with random properties, and modify items. Modifications include randomizing the item's bonuses, randomizing a high-tier item's special trait independent of its bonuses, and adding a new random bonus or trait by upgrading its tier.
• Rank Up: Alternate classes aside, each character's starter class has improved since the first game: Victor has been promoted from a common Witch Hunter to a Witch Hunter Captain, Bardin has gone from a Dwarf Ranger to a Veteran Ranger, Kerillian has advanced from Waywatcher to Waystalker and Sienna has upgraded from Bright Wizard to Battle Wizard. The only exception is Markus, who's changed careers entirely from Empire Soldier to Mercenary.
• Rare Candy: Bright Dust, an incredibly rare resource that's used to upgrade your Exotic gear to Veteran level for 5 dusts a pop. They can only be obtained by smelting unused Veteran gear at a rate of 1:1, meaning you won't be able to reliably farm for them like you could with lesser dusts.
• Rebel Relaxation: The pose that everyone adopts while in the Lean pose.
• Resource Reimbursement:
  • Ranged weapons with the trait Scrounger regain one ammunition when they land a headshot.
  • The Bounty Hunter's capstone talent Double-Shotted causes his Locked and Loaded attack to refund 60% of its cooldown if it scores a headshot.
  • The Huntsman's passive ability regains one ammunition whenever he lands a ranged headshot.
  • The Waystalker's capstone talent Piercing Shot causes her career skill to loose one powerful arrow that fully refunds its cooldown if it lands a headshot.
  • The Ranger Veteran's capstone talent Ranger's Parting Gift lets him throw one grenade while his career skill is active without consuming the item.
• Ridiculously Potent Explosive: In the Chaos Wastes, a Shrine of Strife may have the Miracle of Morgrim available for purchase. This grants the purchaser Morgrim's Bomb, a fancy-looking explosive not much bigger than a normal bomb. But when thrown, after a couple of seconds of delay, the bomb goes off in an earth-shaking explosion and a pillar of fire large enough to be seen from miles away. It's also strong enough to severely injure Monsters, assuming it doesn't just kill them outright.
• Running Gag: As premium cosmetics were developed for the game, the premium headwear for Zealot Saltzpyre for some reason consisted of an entire, whole animal being worn on his head.
• Sanity Slippage: Each character has a career that represents this, which represent the life the character led if their experiences in Ubersreik drove them over the edge rather than steeled their resolve. Compare Discard and Draw, above. The one exception being Kruber, who remains the same happy-go-lucky career soldier he always was.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • Some grimoires seem deliberately placed to screw with perfectionist players, requiring very difficult or very dangerous jumping puzzles to obtain. Players will often refuse to leave without them anyway, resulting in a lot of wasted time or a mission failure due to 'Hurry Up Horde' attacks, specials picking people off while they try to get the grimoire, or just losing so much health in the process that the rest of the level becomes nigh-impossible.
  • The grimoires in the Skittergate stage are placed very early on, before going through the titular gate. This forces any party who grabs them to go through the longest level in the game, which also has far more enemies and multiple guaranteed bosses, without their full health bars.
  • The Sack Rat reprises its role as Schmuck Bait, as its main threat is causing greedy players to recklessly chase the rat into danger and splitting the party. A loading screen hint cheekily suggests that you "ignore the plight of the rest of your team and greedily charge for it", while not mentioning how bad of an idea that actually is. There's no guarantee that they'll even drop what you need or want, and on rare occasions Sack Rats may not even drop anything after dying.
    • The Tzeenchian Twins modifier in normal missions and the Twin Blight curse in the Chaos Wastes upgrade the Sack Rat's Schmuck Bait status exponentially. If a Sack Rat is killed and they end up splitting, they'll divide into a pair of monsters. That the party then have to deal with at the same time. Careless players will almost certainly get a Total Party Kill for their troubles.
• Scolded for Not Buying: If you exit Lohner's Emporium of Wonders without buying anything, Lohner will toss a catty remark your way. This even happens if you just visited him to pick up your daily reward.
• Series Continuity Error: As an Ironbreaker, Bardin has access to Drakefire pistols and Drakeguns. In lore and the series proper, he would have to be an Irondrake and wearing much more complex armors to use the latter, mostly because standard gromril plates are not insulated enough to withstand the Drakegun's intense heat. Seemingly handwaved by his ability to also use these weapons as an Outcast Engineer that has even less protection. Popular theory is that Bardin is using more low-yield ingredients in the guns so he doesn't kill himself and everyone in the party, in addition to not likely having the proper alchemical ingredients to make proper Drakefire outside of a dwarven hold.
• Ship Tease:
  • A fair few dialogues between Kerillian and Kruber hints that Kerillian may hold some level of affection for the guy, especially her wondering why he willingly follows Saltzpyre.
  • Sienna has lines of dialog in the first game where she hints Victor's interest in her is romantic. If he's present, a sputtering, exasperated reply is all he can manage. Fans read into the shackles over Victor's bed in Vermintide 2 for sure.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Kruber's blunderbusses have absolutely dreadful performance against anything that isn't unarmoured enemies at very close range. Given that he has a lot of exceptional melee weapon options for clearing out hordes and his other ranged weapons (the versatile repeater handgun, the very good handgun, and the fantastic though Huntsman-exclusive longbow) are all great for sniping specials and armoured foes, this is why you hardly ever see a Kruber player using a blunderbuss.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the tomes in the map Empire in Flames is located in a bricked-up alcove in a wine cellar with a skeleton in it.
  • The game has a mode for Twitch streamers where periodically, the chat can vote between two options of what happens in the game next; such as spawning an enemy or conferring a buff. The option for spawning a Stormfiend is named "Fire and Fury".
  • Another option in Twitch mode is for the chat to summon an army of Stormvermin. This option is called "Blackfurs on Parade".
  • The picture for A Gun to a Swordfight◊ challenge is clearly supposed to look like Indiana Jones' famous scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark of shooting a swordsman that flourished his weapon at him.
  • The description for Bardin's Drungazaz Great Axe skin claims that it belonged to "Unkri the Terrible, who carved out a significant holding in the Badlands, before his fortress fell over and sank into the swamp".
  • One of Kruber's lines from "A Quiet Drink" is "Kruber needs ale- badly!", while at one point, Saltspyre declares "I have a cunning plan!"
  • Occasional banter between Saltzpyre and Kruber added with the Winds of Magic DLC has the former offering the latter to Take Up My Sword, should he fall in combat, so that others may see that they respected and valued each other's company. This is a reference to a scene in the 1993 series Sharpe, where captain Murray (also played by Tim Bentinck) offers the protagonist Richard Sharpe his sword, so that others will know he liked him while he was still alive.
    Saltzpyre: Should I die, Kruber, I'd like you to have my sword of office.
    Kruber: So the others'll think I'm a witch hunter?
    Saltzpyre: No. So they think that I liked you.
    Kruber: Gotta be honest, not sure what to say about that, sir.
  • Getting 3,000 cumulative kills with Outcast Engineer Bardin's Crank gun unlocks the "We Have the Technology" challenge.
  • After the finale event of the Karak Azgaraz mission, "Khazukan Kazakit-ha", players can quickly make their way down the hill by leaping into a haycart. There is even an achievement for doing so.
• Shown Their Work: The Empire having Nurglite Chaos Warriors to deal with alongside Skaven is actually correct, considering that during the early End Times the Empire was in a devastating war against the Glottkin, a trio of Chaos Lord siblings who follow Nurgle.
• Simple Rescue Mechanic: "Against the Grain" has you rescue caged civilians before they can be shipped off as slaves. Your work is done when you've opened every cage door, even if the captives are standing in the middle of a horde when the player characters escape through the Bridge of Shadows.
• Slice-and-Dice Swordsmanship: Kruber and Saltzpyre only uses their greatswords for hacking, even though its historical equivalent was primarily a stabbing weapon. Kerillian does thrust with her greatswords' heavy attack, but she's the only one. Kerillian also slashes a lot with her spears, but this is justified as said spears have huge, bladed heads that are more like mislabeled glaives. As for Kruber's spears, given the amount of stagger and modifiers on them, it's all but stated he's just bludgeoning rats with it. And as in the first game, most of Saltzpyre's rapier attacks are slashes, ditto Kerillian's daggers.
• Situational Sword:
  • Curse Resistance. Its chief use is to mitigate the HP penalty when you or your party are going for Grimoires, but is completely worthless otherwise. Unless you're devoted to picking them up every run, this takes up a property slot that could have universal applications. Due to a Good Bad Bug, it's surprisingly a really good pick for the Warrior Priest - because he gets 100% Curse Resistance innately plus whatever your trinket offers, it results in his maximum HP increasing when a grimoire is picked up.
  • Basically every Damage bonus vs. traits that aren't Infantry, Chaos, or Skaven.
    • Damage bonus vs. Monster. Highly useful for designated monster killers, useless to everyone else, as it takes up the slot of another property that could have been much more practical in other situations.
    • Damage bonus vs. Armored. Only really useful if you're looking to maximize your damage against armored enemies, which isn't very practical due to most of them having unarmored weakspots that could already be exploited to deal high damage.
    • Damage bonus vs. Berserker. Good if Rotblood Frothers and Plague Monks are giving you a hard time, not so much otherwise.
  • The Potion of Poison Aegis in the Chaos Wastes. A great defence against Globadier gas clouds and perfect for the "Infested Foes" curse where certain enemies explode into gas clouds on death. Completely useless otherwise.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil:
  • Seemingly reflecting the Five's power boosts (both in-universe and out of universe), the enemy units are tougher this time around. In the first game, the basic troops were Clanrats (in lore you'd need a couple Clanrats to equal a decent human soldier), the only elites were Stormvermin (about on par with a good human soldier), and the only monsters were Rat Ogres (which are dangerous, but not considerably more so than a Kodiak bear or something, with no magic or weapons besides their fists). The main danger came from the weapons specialists (Ratling Gunners, Poison-Wind Globadiers, Gutter Runners, and Warpfire Throwers). There was also only one unique boss, a Skaven chieftain. 2 brings back the first game's enemy roster but adds the Norscans to the fray and makes them about as common as the Skaven; their basic troops are Marauders (individually on par with human soldiers), their elites are Chaos Warriors (seven-foot tall superhumans), they liberally deploy sorcerers, and their monsters include Chaos Spawn and Bile Trolls, the former being able to regenerate, the latter being able to use weapons, and both being much tougher than Rat Ogres. To keep up, the Skaven deploy proportionally more weapons specialists and get a new monster, the Stormfiend, which is a Rat Ogre upgraded with armor and weapons (either a flamethrower or a machine gun). Finally, both factions deploy potent boss-level characters, including Chaos Sorcerer Lords and Chaos Champions — a distinct upgrade over anything the Ubersreik Five fought in the first game.
  • The Chaos Wastes expansion goes further on the algorithm by complementing the Rotbloods and Skaven with swarms of Beastmen and having the Chaos Gods buff the enemy roster directly, balanced out by the fact that Order's gods are doing the same thing with the heroes.
  • On a per-level basis, this is averted. Each mission has about the same number and quality of enemies, and the DLC missions are not particularly more different than the base ones in either gameplay or lore.
• Sterility Plague: Olesya reveals that Clan Fester's breeders (female skaven who are best described as large and bloated baby makers) are suffering from a sterility disease known as the "Brood Blight", and their attack on Ubersreik was due to Rasknitt promising them a cure if they captured the city for him.
• Summon to Hand: When playing as Ranger Veteran or Slayer, Bardin can equip magical throwing axes that he can recall back to him by holding the reload key. This works even if the axes were thrown out of map, attached to an enemy or object that are destroyed, or landed in otherwise irretrievable locations.
• Support Party Member:
  • Downplayed. Witch Hunter Captains, Mercenaries, and Ranger Veterans are fully capable of attacking, but their kits are designed to support the team through buffs, temporary HP, frequent ammo drops, or chances of free healing. Playing on harder difficulties without at least one of them puts everyone at a potential disadvantage, but forming a team with exclusively them isn't a very good idea in most cases, either, due to their lower HP compared to dedicated tanks, and weaker burst damage potential compared to the likes of Shades or Pyromancers.
  • Further complicated by DLC classes like Sister of the Thorn and Warrior Priest of Sigmar. While they're kitted out for support and tanking for the most part, it's possible to spec them into dedicated DPS roles through talents and the nature of some of their unique skills. It's up to the player if they want to make them play to their strengths or go for a more hybrid playstyle.
• Swamps Are Evil: The main camp of the Rotblood Tribe is built in a fetid swamp that they've liberally seasoned with rotting corpses. They deliberately live in filth to bring themselves closer to Nurgle. There's also the Fetid Gorge in the Chaos Wastes, a swamp village dedicated to Nurgle's most infamous Great Unclean One.
• Taking You with Me: Globadiers on low health, as usual. If playing as Unchained Sienna and you're beaten until overloaded by the enemy, the most you could do is intentionally steer right back into them so that the resulting explosion takes them out as well, though for your sake let's hope you don't do this too often.
• A Taste of Power: Played with; the prologue of the game lets the player try out what it's like playing as Foot Knight Kruber, before being reverted to being a Mercenary come gameplay proper. Foot Knight doesn't become available again until Kruber reaches level 12. The player is also given an Empire Longbow to use during this segment, despite it being available only to Kruber's Huntsman specialization, which is locked until he levels up to 7. However, the community does not as a rule think that the Foot Knight class is better than the Mercenary Veteran, and the bow is not that good without the Huntsman's many tweaks to ranged attacks.
• Temporary Online Content: Comes in the form of the unique portrait frames given out as part of the seasonal events, especially those that can be earned by beating A Quiet Drink every time it becomes available during the game's anniversaries.
• Terminal Transformation: Chaos Warriors who accumulate too many Mutations degenerate into mindless, berserk Chaos Spawn with no trace of their former selves. This fate befalls Gatekeeper Naglfahr partway through his boss fight.
• Unfriendly Fire:
  • Discussed in some Keep dialogue between Kerillian and Kruber, in which the latter says that Saltzpyre isn't so bad before mentioning that he'd had a few officers he might have "helped on their way".
  • On Champion and Legendary difficulties, friendly fire is turned on. During gameplay, hitting your allies triggers dialog. Some hint that the victim thinks this is the case.
    Sienna: Not now, Victor!
    Saltzpyre: I expected as much, elf!
• Universal Ammunition: Ammunition works for every ranged weapon that doesn't use Overheat, from longbows to pistols and even the Trollhammer Torpedo. Hand-Waved by dialogue suggesting that the ammo crates and pickups contain a little bit of everything:
  Victor: Shot, quarrels, arrows — a fine supply!
• Unlockable Difficulty Levels: The Winds of Magic DLC adds Cataclysm difficulty, which needs to be unlocked by defeating all the bosses on Legend difficulty.
• Verbal Tic: Far more so than in the prior installment, each of the heroes has a word that they utter much more frequently than any other. Try counting the seconds between Victor saying "Sigmar", Kerillian saying "Lumberfoot" or '"Mayflies", Kruber saying "Mates" or "Goodfellows", Bardin saying "Dawri", or Sienna saying "Darlings". Some DLC classes change the verbal tics characters have. Grail Knight Kruber will begin referring to Victor as "peasant" (instead of "Sir") and Sister of the Thorn Kerillian will refer to everyone as "meat" or "bloodlings" instead.
• Videogame Flamethrowers Suck: Yes and no, depending on which side is using the flamethrower. For the Skaven, their Warpfire Throwers can be devastating regardless of which difficulty one is playing on, while Ironbreaker Bardin's Drakegun is, in charitable terms, utter garbage.
• Villain Team-Up: The Skaven have allied with the Nurgle-worshipping Rotblood tribe. Given the Skaven's (and in particular Clan Fester's) penchant for ruin, decay, and plague, it makes sense that the Rotbloods would be the tribe that tolerates the Skaven. The Winds of Magic DLC also adds Beastmen into the mix, though there's no proper in-story explanation as to why they're cooperating with the Skaven and Norscans.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: The five heroes constantly argue with and verbally snipe at each other, but it's clear they've grown at least moderately fond of each other as well after surviving the first game together. Although this fondness is definitely a bit strained in the case of Kerillian.
• Weapons Breaking Weapons: Shield Bearing Mooks usually need to be attacked until they drop their guard, but some powerful weapons, like the two-handed hammer and the glaive, can destroy their shields completely. It's a minor benefit; the mook typically only outlives their shield by a second or two.
• Welcome to Corneria: The game overall averts this, with many different conversations between all members of the Ubersreik Five, and Lohner in the base game has plenty of dialogue as well. Prior to the 4.3 patch, completing the Castle Drachenfels DLC made this trope rear its head in force, as Lohner would never stop asking the heroes about their experience in Drachenfels, and each hero has only one conversation with him about it (all five are variations of "don't ask me about it again"). They also only have one conversation asking each other about Drachenfels, adding onto the repetition.
• What If?: Each of the heroes' three careers represents an alternative route of Character Development that each character could have gone through after the events of Ubersreik. Generally the careers follow three basic themes; the character retains their career from the first game but gets a promotion, attains a new one due to the events of the first game making them want to change their ways, or goes insane from the horrors they saw in Ubersreik and falls to madness of some sort.^note The one exception being Kruber, who finds positive development in all cases; he either returns to his roots as a Taal-worshipping woodsman, or gets promoted into a formidable knight due to his valourous service. That said, some of Lohner's notes on the Huntsman career imply that Kruber has fallen in with some nasty bandit types. The DLC classes are framed as the proper career changes that the characters choose to undertake after the events of Castle Drachenfels, furthering the credence of the three base classes being "What If?" scenarios.
• Wizard Workshop: The Mage Tower in "Tower of Treachery" contains an alchemy lab where you can improvise magic potions, an observatory for astrological work, and a storage area for animal specimens, along with a huge Magical Library and even stranger features.
• Wolfpack Boss: Wolfpack Miniboss. Patrols border on this on Legend, where they consist of either sixteen Stormvermin or six Chaos Warriors backed by four Maulers and six Bulwarks — often with regular fodder-type enemies swarming you at the same time you encounter the patrol. A skilled team or even a single high-damage class (e.g. Sister of the Thorn) can still melt them in short order, but if your team is uncoordinated and/or not sporting any classes of the latter description (or any bombs), you're in for a tough fight.
• Zerg Rush: The backbone of every Horde is a large group of bottom-tier enemies that try to mob the heroes.

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