Vermintide 2 is challenging, and until you get some levels under your belt, and some better equipment, failure is common. What’s apparent is that despite the game appearing simple, mechanically there’s a lot players can do to significantly improve their chances of completing missions, or maximizing their loot gain.

You Can Block And Revive At The Same Time

Reviving when surrounded by enemies can be challenging, and you may be regularly interrupted. Using Block, and then reviving, allows you to mitigate some incoming damage and often get a clean revive. While you can still be disrupted, if you’ve multiple block charges available, you and your team shouldn’t struggle to get your downed ally back on their feet.

Knock Enemies Back When Blocking

Using your block, and then M1 allows you to push a group of enemies back. This causes them to stagger, allowing you to gain a free swing with your melee weapon of choice. Typically this will allow you to clear multiple enemies at once without suffering any damage.

Always Grab Tomes and Grimoires To Maximize Gains

Tomes and Grimoires make any mission more difficult because they directly limit your items, or maximum health. Collecting all 5 significantly improves your end of mission rewards, allowing you to gain far greater loot and experience. While there’s no mistaking that the risk versus reward factor of Tomes and Grimoires proves challenging in random groups, it’s undoubtedly better for your progress.

Rebind Your Dodge Key

By default the dodge keybind isn’t great, yet it’s an incredibly important part of your kit when it comes to avoiding high doses of damage. If you rebind it to something a little more convenient, it’s not only easier to make use of your additional movement, but you’ll find that you use it much more often.

Understand Healing Draught and Medical Supplies

There’s two methods of healing yourself in Vermintide 2: Healing Draught and Medical Supplies. While some Heroes can passively heal over time, most will rely heavily on the sustain that these two items provide. Both heal for a large amount (50% for Healing Draught, 75% for Medical Supplies), but both take up different item slots. Healing Draught is considered a potion, while Medical Supplies an item, taking up a Tome or Grimoire slot. The key difference between both is the fact Healing Draughts cannot be passed to an ally, while Medical Supplies can be used on yourself, or a teammate.

Saving your ammo so you don't have to get near challenging enemies is a wise move.

Conserve Your Ammo

As tempting as it is to constantly fire off your ammo at the enemy, having a full ammo count is mandatory against Specials, Monsters and Bosses. Going toe to toe with these in melee range is incredibly risky, so dealing high damage from afar - right from the start - puts you and your team at a much better advantage.

Repeatedly Use Ammo Crates

Often you’ll be fighting a horde of enemies or Specials where you’re almost immediately next to an Ammo crate. If you are, repeatedly unload all your ammo and replenish it the moment you're out. This’ll allow you to constantly bombard the enemy with ranged attacks, without ever having to get near them. It’s surprisingly common to find yourself in such a situation, so use the Ammo Crates to your advantage by fighting near them.

Save Your Commendation Chests

Every time you level up, you receive a Commendation Chest. If you can, try to save them for when you have around 200 Hero Power. With Commendation Chests providing loot scaling up to 300 Hero Power, once you reach the 200 threshold, opening a large amount of them significantly reduces your grind-time when it comes to end game farming.

Don’t Waste Your Hero Ability

Although your ability charges fairly quickly, wasting them on a lowly group of enemies often isn’t worth it unless you’re under serious pressure. Instead, saving it for a Monster or Boss ensures you can instantly lop off a large chunk of health against them. I’m not suggesting to save your ability all the way through a mission, but experience with the game typically allows you to judge when a challenging encounter is around the corner.

Save The Right Bombs

Similarly to ammo and your heroic ability, saving the right bomb for the right circumstance is important. The triangular bombs cause burning across a large area, allowing you to clear a massive wave of enemies. In contrast, the circular bombs cause direct explosive damage and are excellent against Specials, Monsters and Bosses. It’s also worth noting that if you drink a strength potion before throwing a grenade, it will deal significantly more damage.

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