Crafting is the main thing that will probably get me to quit again

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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Darktide is doing better than it has ever since launch. There are excellent changes every patch, big and small! Talent trees aren’t perfect, but they’re a huge improvement over the ol’ 3x6 brick. Pooling together character currency was a welcome fix to a silly problem. Scab stalkers get highlighted by vet ult! Weapons are more balanced overall (or at least, weaker weapons have gotten significantly stronger)! Auric Maelstrom! Huzzah! Hurray! Wahoo! For the Emperor!

This is a great upwards trend, and the only way to ruin it would be to stop it prematurely when you don’t have to. Therefore, I am going to ruin the good mood by starting yet another thread on why the crafting system as it is is probably the biggest annoyance remaining for me that detracts from the longevity of me playing this game. (This will discuss more than the crafting locks, so it’s not quite the same as the other thread currently going about it, but old yeller the thread if you must)

Where do I even start? Crafting locks are of course annoying when the right perk and/or blessing could easily increase the power of your weapon by a good 30% or more, but we arbitrarily have to find more high-stat weapons in case the first one doesn’t roll as good as we would like because Fatshark decided to remove infinite rerolls on weapons like there was in Vermintide. Not just annoying and completely artificial-feeling limitation, but a direct downgrade.

Diamantine and plasteel are fraggin silly. Plasteel sees huge consumption rates compared to diamantine, and since you can’t convert one into another that means that diamantine is nearly useless in comparison because you will never have more diamantine than plasteel. I’m aware they increased high difficulty plasteel drops a bit ago, but it hasn’t fixed anything. Again, a direct downgrade from Vermintide 2 where you could convert dust.

Randomized weapon stats are still silly. This is the least of my complaints and would be relatively moot if the other concerns were addressed, but randomly distributed totals of weapon stats (that STILL can’t reach past 80% a year into the game, for some reason) are 100% yet another downgrade from Fatshark’s last game where the only randomized unchangeable stat was power level. It’s missed potential as well- a stat distribution we could allocate freely into different bars for money or something could be really neat!

There is no way the dev team doesn’t know about the crafting complaints that have been here from day 1 of the system, so all I can do is make this heartfelt plea. Darktide is so, so close to being a game so good that I would gladly play it for the foreseeable future and recommend my friends join me in doing so. While there are other things that annoy me, the most standout one that finds a way to annoy me basically every mission is undoubtedly the crafting. The only possible reason I could see for the dev team dragging their feet on changing it is that this particular system is some kind of mandatory shareholder check box, or they fear that the crafting system is somehow the only thing keeping a significant amount of players in the game. I can at least speak for myself when I say that this is the opposite case for me.

Please, please, please loosen up the crafting system. Darktide has great gameplay, great new talent trees, a decent variety of weapons, and way more complex perks and blessings than Vermintide 2 ever had. Let us switch out blessings and perks, convert diamantine to plasteel, and even distribute base weapon stats as we please for simple plasteel or money! The freedom of build-making that an improved crafting system would allow would be amazing.

Again, all I can do is speak for myself, so I am really well and truly begging in an uncomfortably intense way: don’t let the good changes stop here.

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i mostly agree with this, i really like the stat modifier system myself i think its fun and cool and i like that the power level isnt the only relevant number but you actually have to get guns with the stats you want, it does allow players to be like “i dont mind lower impact if it means higher ammo cause i like to magdump a lot”, not optimal but fun and fine. i agree with everything else though the 2 reroll cap is bad cause you can get a near perfect weapon but if it needs both perks rerolled you dont get to apply the blessings you would want, that’s frustrating. and yeah the ratio of plasteel to diamantine is ridiculous, i have like 9000 diamantine that is never able to be used for anything because i keep getting far more diamantine than plasteel and am eternally bottlenecked by plasteel deficiency.

let us convert between them, at a loss of course, but with 9000 diamantine and like 200 plasteel right now i sure could afford to lose a lot in the conversion.

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I don’t mind having a limited amount of base stat that has to be allocated between different stats so some have to be higher than others. Like having 380 weapon stat points that you have to allocate between the six stats would be fine by me. I would prefer it to be player choice for some in-game moneys rather than random, though.

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ah fair yeah i agree with that, modifiers is the only thing you cant reroll so it does get hella tedious spending all your gold on randomized greys hoping to get a 370+ modifier gun and then getting so desperate you go blow all your requisitoriumbux on randomized weapons hoping for either the same or enough sold weapons to afford more random greys. it took me like a week of constant farming to get a grey lasgun with 370 mod budget - and even then it’s not even a guarantee you wont be unlucky and get the wrong rolls with that budget.

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Yeah this really is the least fun part of Darktide right now. I am not joking when I say that without this crafting system being so awful, Darktide would easily be like an 8/10 for me. It’s the last major thing holding back the game IMO so all I can do is hope the Obese Fish deems us worthy of a fix sooner rather than later

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Yeah, you are not crafting a weapon, you are putting currency into a gachapon machine and seeing what pops out.

There are so many layers of RNG that you lose the feel of having any agency over how your weapon turns out. All the RNG mitigation also relies on RNG, so they don’t actually do much to alleviate the feeling, as well as certain parts of the itemisation (initial item rating, stat spread, consecration) having no RNG mitigation at all (bounding ranges do not count as RNG mitigation to me).

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It really is basically a gacha. Roll to get a high stat weapon, roll for at least two good blessings and perks, hope that the weapon or your build doesn’t get changed so drastically that the weapon suddenly becomes less useful, and the whole time we’re grinding for plasteel. A quickplay Damnation mission gets you like, 1000 tops. I don’t even think that even gets a weapon to purple.

In fact, this whole system reminds me quite a lot of the artifact system in Genshin Impact, and that is really not a flattering comparison.

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Also, welcome 429

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It is good and bad to see the memorial still slowly, morbidly, expanding in size :frowning:

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I completely understand your frustration and your decision to step away from the game, if that’s what you choose to do. As for me, I’ve decided to take a break for now and focus on other games.

The crafting system hinders progression and limits access to a significant portion of the game’s weapons since they need adequate stats to tackle higher difficulties and experiment with a variety of viable builds. This task demands far more time than the average player is willing to invest if they just want to slay hordes and play with the fun weapons. My friends and I devoted thousands of hours to VT2, and back when we started, we grew frustrated with the lengthy process of reaching max level for all characters and obtaining good gear and took breaks. Darktide, however, requires even more time to achieve the same and having to do all that again after getting 100% max tier gear in Vermintide 2 makes doing it again in Darktide even more tedious. In our small Discord community of 36 people, most play Vermintide 2 sporadically, but only four, including myself even own Darktide. We can’t recommend it to others because they would likely burn out due to the extended time it takes to unlock additional content. The true joy of these games lies in access to fun features like diverse weapons and builds suited to the chosen difficulty while fighting hordes, not in the grind so you can click buttons in a menu to roll a good weapon stat like some slot machine.

Your decision to take a break until these issues are addressed is entirely reasonable, and it’s crucial for developers to consider feedback from players like you in shaping the future of Darktide.

Other issues have also contributed to our decision to move away from the game, aside from the crafting system. When compared to its predecessor, Vermintide 2, Darktide suffers from numerous balance problems, with many weapon subtypes, blessings, perks, and talents being either nearly useless or overpowered. Additionally, the need for mods to access basic UI features such as a scoreboard, penance details, hub hotkeys, and favorited items is surprising, considering these features are standard in VT2. Furthermore, the game experiences jarring pauses and animation delays during combat. The combat mechanics also feel cumbersome, with oddly long delays before enemies execute overhead attacks in melee while following your dodges unless you time it till the last second of watching a mauler/crusher hold his weapon above his head for an eternity before dodging, dogs pausing mid-air before being pushed off or grabbing you, specials instantly spawning in doorways and attacking, trappers using their nets even without a clear line of sight, flamethrowers shooting flames onto bridges and cliffs by aiming under them, and snipers firing shots without any warning sounds or visual cues. Additionally, the weapons have repetitive and often ineffective attack patterns against various foes, rendering some attack combos pointless.

In VT2, completing a tier 4 mission typically rewarded players with 2-3 orange items, and there was even a 20% chance of receiving a red max-stat item, a feature that does not yet exist in Darktide. My enjoyment in VT2 was mainly experienced long long after obtaining gear with near-maximum stats, allowing me to focus on playing the game rather than farming for loot. The worst part of Vermintide 2 was the grind to get enough weapons to where I had a number of fun builds to experiment with and in Darktide they’ve heavily invested in making that long RNG grind for gear the goal of the game.

It’s encouraging to witness some progress in the skill tree revamp and the introduction of additional career builds, particularly when considering that some were initially skeptical about their infrequent release. However, it’s not just the frequency of updates that’s crucial, but also their quality. Although the development team is actively addressing issues, it still appears that the design favors engagement through grinding. There are plenty of other games that are better suited to the mechanics of leveling and loot grinding, which are not the core strengths of a cooperative horde game where players queue for random missions. It’s evident that substantial work is needed in various aspects to create a more enjoyable and rewarding experience for players like you and your friends. In my opinion, the time required to level all four characters to level 30 and build a complete arsenal of max-tier items for each character should align with the amount of time it takes for players need to become proficient at the highest difficulty level.

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Same.

  1. Played ~1000 missions, rage quitted because of item acquisitions/crafting.
  2. Returned right before patch 13 to finish some penance that patch will break for sure and it did!).
  3. Enjoyed all i could from class rework and new mission dynamics.
  4. Past 1500 missions - burned out and on verge of rage quitting after cascades of really good weapon rolls bricked by ABSLUTE *******ING BULL*****IT crafting system.
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God yes, that is the worst. You play all night for a few nights, save up some resources hoping you’ll get to try a new weapon on Damnation or Auric 5s so you can try out a new build, and then it turns into crap, and I just end up playing with the same 4-5 builds that I have good gear for. I’ve put in over 120 and about 60 of those hours was just leveling all 4 characters without finding anything decent. Another 60 hours, and I’ve been stuck playing mostly 2 builds with the few good weapons I’ve crafted.

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Worst thing - they will not change a thing!
Crafting system will remain the ugly broken thing that turn players from the game: either because of Fatshark sheer stubbornness, or their plans to keep it bad to monetize it.

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They have been changing it, just nothing that actually addresses the core of the issue.

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Do I need to make a thread to take part? Because I can and I will. :smiley:
But probably not today so there’s some respite for the wicked.

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Oh man, don’t get me started on the scoreboard, or the serverside hit registration, or the special design, or the terrible mission/difficulty rewards, or the shiddy microtransactions. These are all included in things that annoy me but I could potentially ignore if the crafting system was like 100x less terrible.

(The scoreboard in particular irks me to no end that they’re leaving such a basic game feature out to… I dunno, appease people who don’t like green circle chasers? Why are the rest of us having to wrestle with NexusMods because of people who were probably going to play badly regardless? They even said they would have it in and seemed to have “forgotten” in classic ChubbyGuppy fashion. It is probably even sillier than the crafting system even though it’s a smaller problem.)

But I digress. The crafting is truly an awful fit for this game it makes V2 crafting look good by comparison, and given the constant grumbling about it I am well and truly baffled why they refuse to even address it verbally. I’m just here to try the game with friends to see the new skill trees and missions and probably get sick of it in a couple weeks. It’s not like they’re getting any more money out of any of us at this rate.

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I seriously don’t understand how they didn’t just do the math of how much plasteel vs diamantine gets spent during crafting compared to how much plasteel vs diamantine is given in Damnation. The “fix” didn’t even get close to making it better. It kind of feels like they’re scared to make any changes that make the crafting system less restrictive than it is now, for whatever reason they have.

I can maybe give them a very generous benefit of doubt and assume that they’re being held at gunpoint by the Swedish government to not change the current crafting system, but while I would pity them that is probably not enough to keep people playing for long

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It’s because there isn’t really any testing of the game as a normal player plays it, all their test accounts have hundreds of thousands of every resource and it’s an admitted thing where they don’t check the numbers on things until someone brings it up.

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The initiation ceremony was completed. Welcome #430.

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They have said they are planning on making further changes just can’t share anything yet. So what that means, in the end, is anyone’s guess. They may not even know themselves.

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