TL;DR: Athanor should upgrade power level, while weapon upgrades should increase mastery AND properties/traits available. Maybe increase essence needed for upgrading Athanor. It will help players to join other lobbies, helping matchmaking system this way.
Idea behind it is to encourage players to try different stuff and overcome hard weaves by selecting something that work best in this specific scenario. It kinda feels bad when you are forced to use one specific loadout for first 20+ weaves (not sure when i’ll finish upgrading that).
Right now it’s impossible to complete 11+ weaves if you pick just any unupgraded weapon and career, because you would do no damage at all. But if Athanor rank would be giving power, you could pick any loadout and still have pretty good chance to complete any of weave, just without some properties from weapons.
Essence invested to weapons would still has a lot of value, in order to get sweet swift slaying trait, or power vs chaos, whatever. Player would spend essence on favorite weapons to have more specific builds, but it could pick other weapons if decides to do so. It would define unupraded weapons not as “completely useless”, but just as “weak”, like white weapon with 600 power compared to red with maximized properties and trait.
That way, I won’t really mind the new requirement of unlocking weapons and even upgrading all of the weapons. The main goal is to not have hands tied to one specific loadout, which is a big problem with current weave economy system.
Also it would really help with matchmaking. If your goal is to “play this specific weave with just any players”, you could easily swap to less effective loadout and join other lobbies, even if your “main” character is already taken. In current system, you simply can’t pick low level loadout, you would be just dead weight, unless it’s recruit weave.
I may see potential problem, when you have fully upgraded athanor and you play lower difficulties, but that can be simply fixed by capping maximum player’s power, like it is in normal game. Oneshotting everything is boring anyway.
P.S. Loving the patch so far, weave’s gameplay is fantastic.