Another one regarding crafting

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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Right, don’t think this needs much elaboration at this point, but throwing my voice in anyway.

I enjoy things like buildcrafting and testing in games in general, and as my new hoard of veteran shovels will attest to (I enjoy seeing things like seeing hammerblow proc on bleed ticks, and then realizing i can stagger multiple crushers with heavy bodyshots at full stacks. And that bleed ticks on anything keeps your stacks going. You know, testing things), it’s really hard to yet again try to ignore how incredibly off-putting the current system is now that we’ve got a bunch of interesting weapons to play with in one go.

The fact that i’ve watched 1.5m go just to test ONE weapon (ok, and craft a couple of meh-to-ok laspistols) is somewhat insane.
I’ve been playing since beta, i know the pain i’m setting myself up for, but since the very solid changes from patch 13 and out, several friends who bailed early have come back, and i find myself trying to explain the current crafting situation to them.

And frankly, i can’t, or rather, i certainly can’t justify it and it’s nearly player-hating mechanics.
As an example, I just burned 1.2m on shovels, and i got 4 rolls over 370.
3 of them had damage values under 70 because of course they did, and the one nearly perfect 379 i got, anyone want to take a shot at what happened there?
I’m not going to say because frankly i think everyone who’s done any focused crafting (ok, slot machine rolling) in this game knows exactly what happened.

And this isn’t even about that incident in itself, it’s hardly the first time i’ve had that happen and like most of the people in the crafting memorial thread i’ve beat my head against this system since it’s implementation, but until recently it seemed like a “they’ll get to it when the larger fires have been put out” situation.
And do you think a new or even new’ish player is going to go “oh sure, i’ll just save up 1.5m instead of using it on cosmetics or the load of weapons i don’t already have for multiple classes so i can shoot for that one perfect roll for a weapon that’ll probably get nerfed within a week of finally getting my roll”.
One returning friend had this happen right after patch 13, he spent almost two weeks getting a recon D with a really solid roll, his self-stated goal on returning to the game.
And then it got nerfed.
Hey, just roll a new weapon right? Chase that meta again? No.
Normal people just quit when they realize they just spent 2 weeks to get over that power hump and get to play with one of those new fancy OP builds only to have the rug pulled.
(to keep things on track here, which is the newbie experience, not that weapons don’t need nerfing or buffing from time to time. They 100% do, but people with hundreds of hours of playtime and newbies have different ideas about that when resources and experiences vary wildly)

I mean, I’ve had power cycler for a long time now, but people are still cheering when they get theirs.
I get that, i don’t blame them, because it lets people go full power fantasy blender mode.
I’m utterly bored of it despite recognizing how near-brokenly (ok, quite broken) good a mk6 is these days, but again, that’s the hook isn’t it?
You get to be the blender for a bit, then you maybe move on to other weapons to see if you can do as well with those, like moving to a mk5 Caxe back in the dark ages.

Well, since patch 13 a lot of good things have happened, and (for me at least) it seems fatshark is getting some momentum when it comes to getting the game in a state where a recommend is easy enough.

So why keep a system that’s so obviously a horrid time-gate that most people will look at the time commitment required to get anywhere if they want to test different classes and loadouts (something that’s now a reality with the new skill trees) and just go “nope” once they realize the time commitment.
And looking past the people who play damnation+ regularly, if you’re a new 30 getting an average 15k per mission on completion on say malice, how many missions do they have to grind to get one weapon worth keeping going forward and work up the difficulty ladder?

I’m sure the crafting thread has enough suggestions and i apologize if it’s been said before, but outside of the obvious “remove locks, reduce plasteel costs, and give us a diamantine exchange”, if you really want to make a quick QoL fix, change the base quality spread in both armory vendors (or even Melk if your intent is for those weapons to be used rather than being a blessing dispenser) to 340/350-380, and drop the cost of crafting blanks to 1-3k.
I’d argue focusing the store quality spread and reducing blank costs would require minimal effort to implement, and just give it a try.
Run it over the coming holiday and see if it affects your player retention.

Anyway, this isn’t a “the game sucks, you all suck” post, just another who likes the game going “… WHY??” when looking at what should be an engaging part of the game due to it’s nature, but instead feels more like borderline masochism, so to the memorial i go i guess.

Cheers all.

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@brosgw
Oh dark Lord of the crafted threads, I summon thee to observe this meagre vessel.

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With a post like this? Hell yeah you do 467! Welcome to the warband.

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I’d say we have even more reason to complain now. Despite saying that we are free to monitor the shop at our own risk of account security, they went ahead and tore the function that allowed us to authenticate accounts.

That should be a line in the sand on locks, really. Why is the design mantra of items so deliberately player hostile? Rain spent like 2 weeks fixing this mod only for them to rip the function he was using to make it possible out of the game completely with traitor’s curse part 2. Now its most likely never going to be updated to incorporate new weapons so I’m once again annoyed AF by the item system (not that I was ever pleased with it).

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You are out of luck then and obviously you know it. Fatshark crafting / itemisation system designers are in denial about RNG and its impact on the game longevity, and enjoyment.

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I still maintain that the issue is not the core RNG itself alone, but also the lack of grace RNG options.
Most games have hidden systems in place to rig the dice in the player’s favor after ever so many failed attempts. Not Darktide, though.
If Tzeentch says you get the same level 2 Blessing and 2 Tier 3 perks 10 times in a row, then that’s how your cookie crumbles.

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To answer you and @JanZamoysky above in the same post, I agree that the core rng is “fine” in the sense of creating some level of spread so every weapon isn’t identical.
That said, i think the rng range is way too wide as i said, and it would make a lot more sense to restrict the spread to something like 350-380 once you hit l30, both for crafting blanks and vendor browsing.

Sad part is, if they removed the locks and just dropped the price of printing blanks right now with no other adjustments, I’d probably be ok with it.
Granted the price drop would have to be significant, but at least if those two things happened i could live with the plasteel cost and currency grind, even if the system still couldn’t be called “good”.

It would be a hell of a band-aid while they cobble together something more useful if nothing else.

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I have no problem with a certain level of RNG in the game, this is what games are about to a CERTAIN degree. I’m fine with “learning” new blessings by crafting new weapons.

However, the Brunt shop has clearly rigged odds of obtaining decent base score items. I’ve thrown obscene amount of money at the shop, so did a lot of other people. I would love to see those few lines of backend code governing that aspect the design team justification for it. I’m really trying to stay civil here.

The perk and blessing lock system just has to go, it’s a malicious waste of players time.

I should not be forced to use mods so I can automate this whole casino loop and to clean up the hundreds of weapons I have to discard to get few I want to keep, only for the lock system to ruin even those precious few.

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Yea, i agree about the blessings as well, no issue with that being a collecting mini-game.
Granted, that’s a lot easier to say after a year and having most of the blessing as this point.

Also, maybe it’s just me, but i’ve kept a good number of solid base roll/horrid perks and blessing rolls just in case we get our wish and locks disappear.
That’s starting to become quite a lot of weapons and inventory scroll distance across 4 characters at this point.

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Yeah. same here, also inventary management without mods is again a pain.

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