Announcing Unlocked and Loaded - Update (September 26, 2024)

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Announcements
164

It looks like there will be a lot of grind added upon release. Depending on how many weapon families you’ve grown to enjoy, you have much more grinding to do than those who just use a handful of families.

I’n my experience, those that come to enjoy most of a games arsenal are often also those that “feel bad” when they use a mastered family when they could be progressing another instead.

You’re either feeling stuck only enjoying less of the arsenal than you’d like or you’re stuck grinding out the things you do want to try out. It’s a long road of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”

That’s the exact experience I’ve had which made me never boot up Warframe ever again. I am certain that plenty of people will be able to point to a game that made them feel that way too.

I genuinely admire those that do not have those feelings and can just grab whatever and do whatever :slight_smile:

Seems to be that way to me too.

Being able to max out every gun to 380 and therefore the abiltly to see no stat lower than 60 / being around 70ish on average sounds great… until you realize that some weapons are “made or broken” by not getting certain stats to 80. We don’t have choice over that.

There is no argument anyone can come up with that makes this not a waste of time.

In my case specifically, that’s not fully accurate. I like a sense of progression and unlocks and loot. I just have had enough of my time and resources wasted on literally nothing.

Not being able to freely allocate my stat point budget is nothing but a waste of time. Not a choice, not an aspect of cuzstomization, it’s a time waster.

Point cap can be a good thing if there’s meaningful choices to be made.

As it looks right now, there’s not much choice there.

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165

Man, I hope so! Should be fun to max out different weapons, and also to play around with some of the new blessings we were promised.

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166

New weapons come out, and they’ll either feel good to play with or won’t because they don’t match our playstyle. But we’ll be able to upgrade to orange and, at level 30, get T3/T4 perks and blessings, like now. Those weapons will be perfectly usable on auric maelstroms, but they won’t be perfect weapons.

Based on the WIP images we’ve seen, we’ll very likely be able to change the perks to any T1 immediately. And we’ll be able to place our first 2 mastery points to pick 2 T1 blessings (and it looks like ALL blessings are getting a T1 now) after the first 2 ranks. We just don’t know if that will take 1, 5 or 10 games.

167

I totally forgot about that, yeah I absolutely hated having to weapon grind in that game. To be fair though, you couldn’t even use those weapons until you finished the grind to make them, so that won’t be quite as bad here.

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168

And that’s the bit that sucks. (If it’s indeed the case)

Even when the new weapons dropped and I really wanted to try them, the fact that I needed to waste most of my resources to NOT get what I wanted just made me close the game again.

If new weapons come out which do not share a family with one that you’ve already mastered, you have to grind first and then get to use what you actually wanted to use.

This idea of grind first then have the kind of fun you were looking for is getting really old.

Exactly. You get it.

There is none of that in VT2, and DT is not better for having it. There were other RNG aspects to VT2 but none even remotely close to how egregious as DTs renditions are / were.

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It is not the case:

This also loops back around to “wasted” progression (playing now, before the update, or later with a maxed out weapon family ) because you’ll still always earn materials for the shops/consecrating.

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170

And to think… they could’ve just added an option to pay diamantine to remove locks temporarily on a weapon.

Wouldn’t be a perfect system (that was VT’s Athanor system by the way), would still have tons of RNG and grind for resources, but at least there wouldn’t be gated progress.

I appreciate that this new system lets you deterministically unlock blessings, but I fear it’s not going to be flexible enough or advance quickly enough to feel like an unreservedly positive change.

Everything in Darktide comes with an asterisk, which is why it continues to struggle for broader acclaim and fails to find a growing player base.

171

Blah! Now, instead of throwing away a million mats yanking the one armed bandit, like I did to get all the blessings for the bolt pistol et al, I’ll get a progression track to work through.

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172

In the case of new weapon families; if I want to circumvent the gated progression / customization, I have to, and everyone say it with me, get lucky!

If we could stockpile mastery globally to then immediately use on new gear, this phenomenon goes away completely.

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173

Right… but you’re at the complete mercy of RNG in these situations. You get what you get from upgrade, emperors gifts, etc. It’s less of a shortcut than today because you can’t change anything on it until your mastery level catches up. Sure, weapons are unlocked, but that’s irrelevant you I don’t have anything to put on it.

If I upgrade

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174

Honestly, let me convert diamantine into mastery. I almost do not care for how poor the conversion rate, at least that’d make either currency useful.

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Certainly agree some sort of overall mastery you build up playing with whatever and can be spent even on weapons you haven’t played with would be a welcome lubricator of sorts for the system. Could let players bank up their global mastery between weapon releases then have that surplus to spend and get most of the way through a new weapons unlocks, netting a good starting point weapon to finish the mastery grind with if desired.

Edit: oh lmao wasn’t reading other recent comments here didn’t realise I was saying the same idea as something linked immediately above me whoops.

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176

Yea…just like now, except if you like a weapon and play with it you then earn guaranteed rewards, including the agency to change the blessings at will.

We were never going to get NO progression system. The new one covers both people who don’t care much (just roll an orange, swing a new weapon) and people who want full control over a weapon. Previously, people who wanted full control were locked and RNG-blocked.

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Apparently it wasn’t clear with how you phrased that comment but go on

178

Well, for me, it’s about freedom of choice, or reduction thereof.

The locks took away freedom of choice unless I was prepared to grind [potentially infinite combinations]. One of the reasons I’ve not tried different weapons - which is surely what FS want (?) - is because I don’t have good variants of them. Either base rolls were bad, or I simply don’t have the blessings I want.

e.g. Still not used the bolt pistol because I’ve about 4 fairly decently rolled ones, but few t4 blessings. I can’t be bothered to do Brunt+Hadron random rolls, so it’s just on pause.

And then …

It looks to me as though after the patch, I still won’t be incentivised to try new combinations. New weapons will be behind a pointless grind - I mean, why do I need to use a rubbish weapon for 20 hours before it becomes good enough to enjoy?

Worse - it is unclear if I’m going to also have to re-grind some hours to get what I currently have back to its old standard?

Let’s say I have the perfect knife right now. I’m really happy with it. Power 546 with the “right” blessings and perks. In the new system… can I use that right away? We’ve been told we won’t lose any weapons etc. , but can I use it straight away at full power, or do I need to “master” it first?

Let’s say I’ve a second knife that was bricked. I want to change things on that. Can I do that straight away, or do I need to put 20 hours in on a knife before I can?

Then the “positive” spin on this new patch: upgrading existing weapons that were locked.

Let’s say I’ve a good 360 base chain sword. Not one I’ve played with much so far, but I’ve a fair few blessings unlocked. I believe from the original post that I can now make that up to 380, but it’s going to be a random 380 set of stats that presumably have minimums set at my current bar stats, with a few of them higher.

So… I’m going to have to use that weapon a bit to level the mastery to max. But I might have t4 blessings on it already; are they still accessible? Will they be greyed out til I get to max mastery? And we were told that blessings unlocked now are independent on the ones we can access in the future ~ so I might have two unlocked, but in the future all will be … depending on mastery. Which is a cyclical problem: basically I’ve got to have max mastery to have choice.

It’s all a bit hand wavy right now. I detest the idea of having to play low levels with a weapon to be able to play high levels with it.

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179

Just to be clear, those people are still RNG blocked. Stats are still a complete dice roll.

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180

They’re RNG blocked if they don’t want to play with the weapon, yea.

But the people who do want to play with the weapon have a deterministic progression track.

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181

Unless this is a problem with how they worded it again, correct me if I’m wrong, potential max stat values still are random.

If I want 80% in damage or whatever, I still need to be lucky

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182

I am beyond confident this will prove trivial because the minimum stat is 60. The RNG required to get an adequate spread on 4/5 stats will be no kind of pain at all.

Edit: but then I don’t subscribe to the idea that a sub-80% stat makes a weapon worthless.

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183

But it is still random

…and might I add still less deterministic than VT2 after you played enough to get all the red dust you ever needed.

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