[All Heroes] Melee weapon cheat sheets
Introduction
This guide is there to help you get familiar with new melee weapons. It might cover topics that feel advanced, but it's written with the intent to be understandable for brand-new players, too.
To get the most out of a weapon, you need to know which attacks and attack combos are appropriate for which situation: What do I do against groups? What do I do against armored enemies? For this, the guide contains one cheat sheet for every weapon, outlining which attacks it has, what they're good at, and how they chain into each other.
It also includes info on how good the weapon's defense is, and tells you if it has any other special up- or downsides that you should be aware of. Because knowing your weapon's potentials and limits will help you make better decisions in-game, such as: Can I contribute if we aggro this patrol right now? Do I have a chance of reaching and reviving my downed teammate in the middle of that horde, or do we need to cut our losses? Should I be fighting this monster, or should I let a teammate do it, because I am better suited to creating space? Answering these questions always depends on your build, and for a large part on the strengths and weaknesses of your chosen melee weapon.
In the beginning of the guide, you will find explanations on how you read the weapon cheat sheets, and what all the attack property icons mean. As an example, you will also find the Torch's moveset here.
After that, you will find the remaining 53 melee weapons, ordered by hero.
Lastly, you will find links to related resources that I found useful.
Explanations
Tapping left click gives you a light attack. Holding and releasing left click gives you a heavy attack (the game calls it "charged" attack). Note that holding a heavy attack for longer doesn't change its properties, it simply happens later.
Pressing right click cancels what you're doing to block, so you can even use it to abort a heavy attack, for example.
Pressing left click while blocking spends stamina to do a push, which doesn't lower your guard - you remain safe while pushing. If you keep holding left click, after the push you will follow up with the push attack. This does cancel your guard, so you may get hit! Also, remember that you are not restricted to the push attack after doing a push: If you tap left click to push, then let go of both buttons and press left click again, you will do a light or heavy attack.
For visual clarity, arrows going back to the first light and heavy attacks are not drawn. Instead, you will see an outgoing arrow that ends in a circle. This does not mean that your combo ends, it's as fast as going to any other attack. So the weapon in this example could perform the following loop: [Heavy 1 > Light 2 > Heavy 1 > ...] forever, without stopping or slowing down.
Some weapons can perform a special attack, accessible by a different keybind (the game calls it Weapon Special). You will find its box below the push attack, indicated by a purple arrow.
Icon Glossary
Attack boxes will be accompanied by all kinds of icons, summarizing what this attack is good at. Use this information to plan your combos: If you want to fight hordes, try to find cleaving attacks that link into each other. And to fight armored elites, look for armor-piercing attacks linking into each other.
On the left side of the attack name, you will generally find icons telling you how well the attack cleaves. On the right side, you will find icons telling you what type of damage it deals. And if a heavy attack has special mechanics related to charging it, you will find icons below its name.
If only a single weapon uses a unique icon, it will be skipped here, and only explained in that weapon's details text.
And on the topic of blocking, here is what's special about shield weapons: Obviously, they generally have improved blocking stats as you will see in their infographics, and are the only type of weapon that may have shield bashes in their moveset. Furthermore, unlike all other weapons, they also allow you to block ratling gun bullets and the rat ogre's overhead attacks. And their push strength is also improved, being able to stagger a lot of elite enemies that otherwise wouldn't care. And lastly, the delay until your stamina recovers after pushing is halved when using a shield weapon.
Markus Kruber
Bardin Goreksson
Kerillian
Note: Even though it makes no sense, Heavy 1 hits like two cleaving swords, while Heavy 2 hits like two armor-piercing daggers, and not a mix of both.
Note: Unlike the other shield weapons, this one does not improve your stamina recovery delay after pushing.
Victor Saltzpyre
Note: Even though it makes no sense, both your weapons suddenly have the same properties when heavy attacking.
Victor Saltzpyre (2)
Warrior priest comes with so many weapons, they didn't even fit in the original section!
Sienna Fuegonasus
Further Resources
This is a random dump of other guides and stuff on melee weapon mechanics that I found useful, and you might as well:
To do more detailed testing, you don't want to rely on dummies, as they sometimes don't behave like real enemies. For this, you will need to hop on the modded realm (no worries, your progress is constantly copied from official to modded, so no need to spend time unlocking anything over there). Use the Creature Spawner mod to spawn mobs in the Keep and test anything. To see exactly how much damage and stagger you're doing, Test Assistant helps.
If you would like to see recommended melee weapon combos for different purposes, check out Optimal Melee Weapon Combo by Royale w/ Cheese.
As your movement speed is constantly modified while attacking, some weapons have attack loops that can be used to run faster. Novality's A Comprehensive Spreadsheet about Movement Tech lists a lot of these combos, and tests their movement speed depending on your attack speed.
Note: I've indicated movement tech being available for any weapon that can reach 10% bonus movement speed with base attack speed, according to this resource.
And there's A List of Everything You Wish Fatshark Told You by OrangeChris, which covers a lot of advanced stuff, not limited to weapon mechanics.
Versions, TODOs, Feedback
You may also find errors, or maybe you've played a weapon more than me and disagree with my info text for it. Right now, I'm open to hearing all complaints. If the weapons change, or we get new ones, I'll update/add them the next time I actively play vermintide, so it might take a while. Developing the cheat sheet design and building them for all weapons has happened whenever I was bored in the keep, so it took 3 years lol
- fixed Sienna's "shield bashes"
- added the Halberd's special Push Atk > Light Atk pathing
- added the Bretonnian SnS special Push > Light 3 pathing
- use differing arrowheads for tapped/held inputs, to improve colorblind readability
- added whitespace to all small diagrams to prevent steam's misplaced display box
- update reduced push costs for many weapons
- update to current elven axe moveset
- fix class availability for kerillian's spear and shield
- update description texts for some weapons
- skull-splitter & tome: add the missing infinity symbol to heavy attacks
- fix info about bleeds (they usually don't stack)
- fixed block cost modifiers of torch and rapier
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