Blessing Pools, their lack of consistency and lack of overall care

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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After looking over the overall list of blessings I just gotta say that it feels like there was no rhyme or reason behind some of these and I’m surprised just how bad most of the blessings are on a lot of the non common weapons.

See looking at something like the standard las guns they get both a lot of blessings and a wide variety to nudge it towards various play styles on top of having some unique blessings like infernus which makes thematic sense.

Then we look at the infantry auto gun and it had 11 with a few things that the las gun doesn’t have and lacking a few things the las gun has. Clearly there seems to be a pattern around the auto blessings being more run and gun and I’m like “ok, I get it, accuracy and making your shots count vs running in”.

Then I check the braced auto guns…which have 6. I figure logically “ok maybe since it plays more like an smg it has a small pool of blessings because putting some of those on something fast firing would be a little busted” so I check the auto pistol thinking that maybe it’s in the same boat because similar weapon design yada yada yada.

The auto pistol gets 9 including stuff that would fit on the braced auto guns.

The deeper down the rabbit hole I went the more things started to make less sense.

It started out ok enough because I checked the flamer and despite it having a relatively small pool of blessings they all made sense, i would be relatively happy with any of the blessings and they all were fairly unique like show stopper or overpressure or fan the flames.

Then I checked the plasma gun. Some of them made a lot less sense and had a much smaller perk pool. In particular having a spammy blessing like blaze away on it made 0 sense. On top of that out of the blessings 2 were unique with the other 3 being shared by other things, the 2 unique ones are also kinda bad?

Like here is a freebie, why not have a -heat on elite kill blessing? Why not have one that changed the properties of the secondary’s shot such as +blast radius but can’t penetrate? The Bolter lacks any real unique blessings but they all at least make sense.

The staffs also mostly share a fairly small pool with the Void Strike and Pyroblast staffs getting the most stuff (I guess because the other two are good in their own) but I gotta ask, why run and gun on a staff? Why doesn’t the Braced Auto Guns who’s ENTIRE Schlick is based around moving fast and even has another blessing that improves sprint have this!?

I’m not even getting into the melee, if I get into the melee I’m going to have a full on rant about how the power sword gets an entire set of blessings built around the power function meanwhile the mauls and thunder-hammer get nothing for that and only get a bunch of various +impact blessings.

The Ogryn weapons are also just…odd. Why does the grenade gauntlet get blaze away? Why didn’t it maybe once again get something to modify the grenade aoe + damage? Why does the kickback get inspiring barrage and blaze away when it’s a single shot shotgun thing but only one of the skills from the lawbringer? why doesn’t the braced auto gun have blaze away??? So the rumbler gets adhesive grenade, cool, but why are you giving single shot weapons perks around firing continuously!?!? This makes ZERO SENSE.

It just feels like so many of these blessings are on the wrong weapons and a lot of the weapons they shoved them on SHOULD have completely unique blessings to compliment the weapon or the more mundane weapons SHOULD have access to the stuff from other weapons.

Honestly looking at the full list is just like-

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it’s so wild, and imo makes people think the system has worse chances than it does since it’s so variable. like i said making a t.axe is much much easier than making many other items and there’s no like, coherent reason why that would be?

now those blessing lists aren’t perfect, i assume you’re using the gameslantern ones and i’ve given them some little suggestions after one or the other were missing info or whatever. but the fact that some weapons have tiny ones and some have gigantic ones is constant.

generally ranged blessings seem a little lower power level than melee for whatever reason? but with a lot of exceptions.

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I think that’s the issue.

You get something like the Power Sword which seems to get nothing but winners. Same with the Flamer and it makes sense the unique weapons should get unique blessings.

Then you get stuff like the explosive weapons which by all accounts should get their own unique blessings but it’s all shared with other stuff and it just makes no sense.

Beyond just a simple balance pass I think they just need to make new blessings entirely for some of these weapons.

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It’s clearly the result of them not having enough time at all to come up with blessings nor balance them, combined with needing to have a huge amount of blessings to increase RNG.

In short, a combination of releasing a year early, and a desire to make it way harder to get a blessing you want. The fact that it’s easier on some weapons than others, that some blessings don’t make sense / cannot possibly work on some weapons etc is all just a result of this game being in barely early access state.

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for a long time for example i think it was common wisdom that the flamer had bad blessings?

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now inspiring barrage is afaik T4 only, so remove that from your estimation. every single one of these is good - i would put overpressure much higher than blaze away since it’s much easier to get it to influence burn stacks, if you fire into a boss for all but 1 ammo your entire burn stack gets the bonus. but everything else is good, there’s no duds. this in combination with the fact the flamer only needs two stats really means that almost all flamers are good - all they need do is clear cloud and burn and get any two blessings. which is kind of wild imo.

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Yep. Blessings and blessing pools make little sense, are very far from being balanced, and their descriptions have been confusing people since November.

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Agreed! Definitely looks that way. They ran out of time and just randomly sprinkled the blessings that they had available onto the weapons.

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i dunno if it’s completely random? it’s totally arbitrary but i dunno about random. to me it feels like a bunch of them might have been too good in development and then got hit insanely hard by a nerf, by removing a blessing from the pool or by completely reworking what it does. or moving the decimal over.

i think there are clues that this had to happen in some of them? like, the braced autoguns have two blessings that are basically the same, or at least their frigging tooltip makes them out to be the same, fire frenzy and deathspitter- kill something close range bonus power for a short period. but the icon for deathspitter looks like this

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why is there a medical cross in the icon? did it at some point heal you somehow, or maybe there used to be a more sophisticated toughness/health system on enemy mobs and it did bonus damage to HP, maybe? who knows, it’s just (imo) clearly not whatever it used to be. a lot of blessings feel like that, like something interesting or good that got completely reworked into something super marginal and dull.

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Most of the blessings are just fillers, there’s only 1-2 that a weapon actually needs hence the grind +rng in play

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Was being a big sarcastic with the random part but arbitrary… definitely. A lot of the blessings appear to be half baked. Good catch on the Deathspitter icon, hadn’t noticed that one.

Would be great if they sorted out the blessings thus giving us a lot more playstyle options to try out.

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Slightly tangential to your main issue but it’s wild to me that All or Nothing and Slaughterer both exist in the same game. Some things I can kinda justify that they’re using the blessings as an extra balancing measure for the weapon. Makes sense in a lot of cases. Heavy Sword has its own unique head taker that is probably the most wildly overpowered blessing in the game taken in a vacuum, but on Heavy Sword it mostly functions to bring that weapon up to competitive status without removing its biggest weaknesses. Pretty bizarre way to balance weapons but at least it’s been placed intelligently. Similarly slaughterer on Chain Axe. Really elevates an otherwise mid weapon and gives it this nice feeling of building and maintaining momentum.

Then you realise they also slapped slaughterer on power sword and any potential sense you could make of the system evaporates.

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I actually rolled both T3 Wrath and T3 Slaughter and I was kinda flabbergasted at how broken it was compared to even the power sword specific skills and my big thing is like…I don‘t get why it’s even there.

I figured if they were going to have blessings unique to certain weapons they would you know, lean into that.

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definitely not true on all weapons. look at flamer! all bangers, there isn’t a single one on the tree i couldn’t see myself running/have run happily. a lot of situational options but situations that routinely happen in use of the weapon that covers weaknesses in how the weapon is used - quickflame would imo be a pretty poor blessing on a lot of weapons and it’s a monster here.

there’s your RNG issue which comes back to outcomes and odds, not the fact it’s random. imo there’s a big part of the reason that weapons like the flamer are so prevalent - there are power issues but the biggest power issue is that it’s incredibly easy to roll a god tier flamer, you need two good stats and basically any two blessings. those odds are incredibly stacked towards the player (once you’ve cleared the 1/18 shot of a flamer rolling at all), while some weapons are hugely stacked towards terrible outcomes.

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to contrast, lets compare with the combat shotgun, a weapon pretty broadly considered underpowered. it competes with the flamer (ie, for zealot it’s an either or) and in theory would be a similar ish short ranged burst weapon. but then you need to roll the dice:

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okay right off the bat - you need damage and stopping power for sure. ammo is important since the weapon is starved for it so you can’t have that a dump stat, stability is important because you’ll be ADS with it so often. so out of five stats you need two to be great and two to be at least not terrible. then you need to clear this trash cavalcade:

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good luck! even with crafting (my evaluation puts no respite as the only real chase rare here but i haven’t done much shotgun testing) the odds of your locked slot being anything but hot garbage is atrocious. this imo is the worst - the pools that are stacked are one thing, the pools stacked with trash also fine for largely the same reason, but pools with one or two good, seven trash are going to outcome garbage almost all of the time.

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I generally agree none of flamers are straight stinkers but showstopper seems extremely unimpactful in practice.

Also worth noting no respite can stack multiple times. It’s laughably better than the other blessings shotgun can get.

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i thought this for a long long time until someone clued me in to the alleged fact that the showstopper damage bonus seems to scale depending on the base unit’s HP. this means in higher difficulties and intensity damnation when it procs firing into a crowd it very routinely clears it, or so i am told.

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Decimator was re-worded because of testing I did. It sounds good on paper too, but it’s really kinda bad especially in comparison to something like headtaker, which both exist for whatever reason. I would be fine with decimator being removed and replaced with headtaker, in general.

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I mean decimator can get double the power bonus of head taker even if it is a little unrealistic to maintain, so they seem distinct enough to me.

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Like I said, good on paper, but you’ll likely never reach that point. The buff duration scales on attack speed, so even simply pushing or dodging resets your stacks because the animations take longer than the buff duration lasts if you use a weapon with high enough attack speed or your attack speed is buffed high enough (buff duration is lower with higher attack speed - tactical axe had approx half the duration than a combat axe, which itself was slightly less than a second). Also, the stacks don’t start until the third hit, as opposed to the first, so it’s extremely unlikely that decimator will actually overtake as its design suggests (in actual gameplay as opposed to just wailing on stuff in the psyk).

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What about Taxe II heavy chain? Is that fast enough to keep it active?

Sounds like if anything it just needs its reset conditions loosened somewhat.