I have a love-hate relationship with Warhammer: Vermintide 2. It’s like a volatile relationship that makes you and your partner miserable, but at the end of the day, you just wanna sit on the couch cuddling and smoke some pot before the next fight breaks loose. Vermintide 2 is probably one of the best Warhammer fantasy game out there, but at the same time, some of its poorly thought-out development updates and the overall buggy nature often brings out the worst in me.
Thankfully, the game has steadied its footing since the polarizing release of its first big expansion- Winds of Magic. The since-then released free maps, decently prized new careers (Simp Kni…I mean Grail Knight for the win!), and the free roguelite update Chaos Wastes really breathed new life into the game. While I don’t agree with the decision of locking some of the coolest new weapons behind a paywall, making the new career cosmetic bundles cost much higher than the actual careers themselves and the overpriced nature of the shiny neww skins, it’s always a game I can count on to relive some of that built-up stress.
Elf players don’t have the most popular opinion in the community, thanks to their tendency to rush ahead and get themselves killed and the party wiped, and also for their itchy trigger fingers that rain down friendly fire on their teammates. That being said, Kerillian, in my opinion, has some of the most viable weapons and careers available in the game. After the awesome Grail Knight and Dwarven Engineer, Fatshark has released the much-awaited new career for elf Kerillian the other day- Sister of the Thorn.
After playing around two dozen maps with the new career, I’m fairly convinced that the Sister of the Thorn is the most bonker character class available in Vermintide 2 at the moment. Even though SotT is marketed as a ‘Support’ class, she’s anything but. Kerillian is now an unstoppable killing machine thanks to the super OP new weapons and her newfound talent tree. In other words, in the hands of the right player, she makes even Cataclysm a cakewalk!
SotT comes equipped with two new ranged weapons- the Briar Javelin and the Deepwood Staff. While the Briar Javelin functions similar to Bardin’s returning Throwing Axes, it’s much more powerful, capable of deleting Chaos Warriors in mere seconds. It also can be used as a melee weapon, featuring attack patterns similar to a spear. The Deepwood Staff, on the other hand, is an outright broken tool (in a good way). While its primary fire is slow-moving multi-projectiles, its secondary fire lets you lift up and incapacitate any enemy type (other than bosses) for 10 seconds, giving your party more than enough time to chip away at their health. The secondary fire for the Deepwood staff is only limited by the generous overcharge meter. If you combine it with the Heat Sink trait, you got a nearly-unlimited stun staff that makes even a full Chaos Warrior patrol look like a mere joke.
It doesn’t stop there, oh no. If you enhance her Thorn Wall ability with the Bloodrazon Thicket talent and Radiant Inheritance (Radiance is a free use of her career skill that is granted to the player every 1 minute) that grants you the combat potency of speed+strength potions, SotT becomes an unstoppable one-woman army capable of melting even the mighty Minotaur.
Vermintide 2’s new career is so overpoweringly broken that players have taken it to the forums, asking Fatshark to nerf her. There are also complaints of people not getting free Kerillian slots because everyone and their Nurgle-hating grandma is playing as SotT right now. If you ask me, Vermintide 2 is not a PvP game that lives and dies on balancing. If players are having fun with SotT, let them have it. After all, a career is only as effective as its player.
Sister of the Thorn might not be the Spellsinger or Wardancer like players asked for but she sure is a blast to play. As for me, I’ll be going back to maining Grail Knight and waiting another four months for Fatshark to release the ‘Thomas the steam tank’ career for Victor Saltzpyre.
