Not really a discussion but, some of my own personal ideas that would fit well into the changes already made, and ideas for the future. The general ideas are in sentence form, with more specific bullet points to highlight changes.
Removing locking would be a huge impactful change for the people who want to continue to play and try to unlock the games potential. You would still have to spend resources to minmax a weapon, and you will still need to farm sources of high blessings like Melk and RNG, which still means general player engagement over time.
-Rerolling the first perk of a weapon works as currently implemented, while rerolling the second perk of a weapon never becomes free. This maintains the resource dump/time sink mechanic while allowing people to tweak their weapons how they want.
-Speaking of rerolling, why not make it so that once a reroll is free, it can be changed to whatever the player wants? The current reroll mechanic post - resource is merely an unfun time sink, people are figuring out ways to automate it with scripts. This shouldn’t be necessary.
-Blessings do not need this type of mechanic, as getting high level blessings is already heavily RNG based. It can be a long term goal to get blessings you want at higher percentages for breakpoints and the feeling of completion. However, I highly recommend changing most weapon specific/unique blessings to be changed to tier 3 rather than tier 4, and possibly increasing their respective % drop/roll rates, as most of these are why people use these weapons to begin with. (Power Cycler, Deflector come to mind)
Setting a standard by removing rng and finally introducing red weapons or otherwise allowing “max” rolling would also be a good move for the elitist/damnation community (no hate, just an observation).
-Face it, people want to think their gear is best in slot/meta/maxed, however you want to say it. I’m sure this is already planned in the future, or for DLC, but doing it now would drastically improve the game’s standing without much loss. Make it expensive to increase your weapon stats with crafting or give us the option to craft/shape new weapons to our own liking, whatever it may be. I’d happily pay 100k gold, 5000 plasteel and 1-2000 diamantine just for a ~400 roll weapon, even without rolling perks (which could already be amended by the first suggestion). That would be a grind, but a worthy one with an actual reward, rather than RNG.
-You’ve shown you want to improve the crafting system, and allowing players to upgrade their weapons or otherwise spend hard earned resources. Respect the players time, but still give them a goal and engagement to keep them playing the game.
Sharing resources and weapons (barring class exclusives ofc) across all characters would be another step in the right direction. Theres no reason to force someone through a hundred hours of grind again just to change what some percentage bonuses or their ability are.
-I have no notes here, these are just good changes.
Add or change all those things consider the baseline mechanics finished, then started adding content like weapons, maps, and classes, this game would be on the right track.
Also, keep up the good work on balance passes to weapons. Some stuff that was really weak at launch has slowly been getting better, and some op stuff is slowly getting weaker. Its not perfect, but at least it is moving in the right direction.