I understand that there is design intent that was behind the choice to lock parts of items, but the fact the devs are choosing to rebalance blessings can effectively brick weapons people have heavily invested in.
Players would be able to deal with this easily if blessings weren’t locked.
Put plainly, there are too many levels of RNG already in place. The new level of RNG in blessing rebalances feels like a bridge too…
EDIT: This post got more attention than I was expecting, but I didn’t offer a solution in it. The best one I have hard so far is from @Flawless and he deserves credit.
Gotta say yeah, it’s a super pain finding a nice base weapon and then upgrading it watching hadron brick it by putting useless or undertiered perks/blessing that you can’t fix. Like if I’m upgrading a weapon that’s rating 370+ base it should not roll 2 star perks (15% damage). Really doesn’t respect my time investment to grind out the resources to upgrade it, because once it’s bricked I can’t even give it to hadron to grind up for some materials back if I don’t need any blessings off it, just a pittance of dockets.
Tide games have one of the worst itemisation / progression systems I have ever seen, and I played some grindy MMOs in my time. The present crafting system is an excercise in frustration and I don’t blame players for giving up on the game because ofd this.
The usual scenerio plays like this: you get a good base score item with a decent perk and/or blessing, then you spend your TIME / resource upgrading it only to get a broken trash item as a “reward”. I look at you all weapons with terrible blessings combos, terrible blessings in general and +1 stam + sprint perk combos.
The game should feel “GOOD” when you obtain new loot. Instead feels like a bad trip to Las Vegas with your drunk uncle Charlie.
Thing is though, that you don’t gain any more levels or meet stronger enemies in DT. My last Diablo game was no 2 and, just like most mmos, you change out your weapons very often to keep your dps up (and possibly hit chance). DT has a static difficulty at 30, so even for those who appreciate Diablo-esque loot systems, DT is an entirely different beast. The games also handle character builds differently with weapons being way more build-critical (less flexibility).
I’m talking about the “feeling” not copy/pasting game systems. Players should feel rewarded or have an ability to steadly work towards an upgrade. Not having their progress, resources and time wasted on the casino gameplay:
Agreed. Locking blessings also makes blessing balancing into a nightmare scenario for both devs and players, because players can have weapons they work hard on bricked, and devs want to avoid that scenario and so might not balance blessings that badly need tuning for the health of the game (see: brutal momentum, power cycler, etc.)
There is a room to make this system more interesting - another material that can remove locks but you recieve it only for doing extra hard missions or events. Or maybe new specific secondary objective - find techpriest corpses during missions, scan them and bring info back to mommy Hadron with gathered info she can remove lock now.
If you had understood the Ineffable Design, you would have never written this. But, alas, it’s too late now. No unlocking until David Bowie and Freddie Mercury rise from their graves.
There are so many ways out of this, a lot simpler than adding anything. But since none of us want to accept the Ineffable Design, FS has to shove it down our throats until we get to the very edge of its ineffability. It is us, not FS, not the Ineffable Design, who have to be fixed or replaced.
I would even be fine with something like 5,000 diamonds to swap locks (not remove them) from one blessing perk and then reblessing or re-rolling adds them back appropriately.
Then you still have RNG on weapon type, modifier score, mod distribution, and finding the right tier of blessings. And hunting for crafting resources and ordo to afford it all. That’s more reasonable.
And then they can release red weapons at some point and have some interesting way to get those.
I think the most irritating thing about it is how they probably expect you to grind up a completely new weapon every tine they brick the balance on your blessings so even if you had a “perfect” (let’s be real that would be Uber rare anyways) weapon last patch it might be bricked the next.
It’s not even a case of “the was clearly broken” but stuff like crucian roulette for the revolver. It’s kind of nuts.
The itemisation and crafting makes me feel like I’m playing a Korean MMO. Nothing apart from actual Korean MMOs should make me feel like I’m playing a Korean MMO because of the atrocious upgrade and grind systems most of them have.
It’s probably one of the vilest ways I can describe a game.
Rebalancing and even meta changes is straight up brutal in this game due to the RNG and material and currency sinks. Oh? the weapon you spent a ton of resources on to even get within the ballpark of what you wanted got its blessings rebalanced? Welp, guess you gotta farm up a new one.
And whenever new blessings comes out, well, you might just have to farm up a new weapon if the blessing you want to replace on a weapon is the blessing thats locked.
