Digirat posted:

Yes and no, but leaning toward no. In vermintide 1, two players can deal with any number of non-specials if one of them has a CC weapon like a shield and one of them has a damage weapon: if they just plant themselves in a choke point and the first player slams everything into pudding with a shield while the other one kills, they can withstand any size of horde even after the elf ran off and died, without really needing to be godlike players. In vermintide 2 they ruined the ability of most of the old mainstays to CC any number of enemies, there’s shield assholes who basically demand you handle them individually, and there’s unstaggerable assholes who have the same effect but worse. The AI is also obsessed with getting you surrounded even if you’re in a good choke point a lot of the time. Knowing how to funnel all the enemies onto the screen at once and then slamming them with CC attacks just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Madmen are already posting true solo videos on champion so it’s obviously still possible to cover for much worse/much deader players, but that’s easier said than done for us normal people. It will heavily come down to what career you are and what your power level is, and I haven’t seen most of the spectrum of that stuff yet. So it’s hard to say but in a dead average scenario I think the pubbie elf is going to handicap you a lot more than she used to