Crafting still needs a complete rework

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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I’m having so much fun with the new talent trees even if some balance is still needed, however, why am I punished for playing auric missions, more characters and playing new weapon builds? Constantly at 0 plasteel and thousands of diamantine, missions don’t give proper rewards.

And all that to gamble it on a slot machine, meanwhile the talent tree has unlimited respecs and rewards you for leveling and experimenting! It’s like 2 completely different games together and they don’t match. THIS GAME has the best first person combat ever that easily carries it, plus a really high skill ceiling, and a lot of room for experimenting with builds, that has always been the endgame, not a boring mindless RNG grind.

They can either copy their previous game and add conversion between currencies, red weapons, and unlimited tweaking. Or they can make the system they promised with customization like in that mod, and scrap the million weapon marks, and also completely change material costs or give more. And give me really good gear for completing a maelstrom please!
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It doesn’t matter how many players this update brought, the fun with the new UNLIMITED RESPEC talents will rapidly fade away once they reach the current very unfun and not rewarding performance “endgame”. Fix the game to match the new fun and exciting stuff, not the other way around.

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You have seen 2 new cut scenes, right? Those a FS statement about what they will ever give us for crafting. A lot of players was fighting this crafting fight since crafting appeared… to very little effect. Well at least it’s easier to get good curios.

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Its just THE MOST frequent and agreed upon feedback since the release
But in almost 12 months fatshark didnt even touch it (no the last change was a sidegrade not upgrade)

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That’s why we need to keep insisting, band aid fixes don’t work. We need a fun and engaging rework just like the most recent one for the classes.

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You know what definition of insanity is, right? That’s exactly that situation - FS gives a very little shark about players displeasure with crafting system… Tapping glass of it’s fishtank did not yield any major results so far (save for curios, and slightly more flexibility with locks). At this point it feels like wasted effort.

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If it were me I’d probably raise the minimum *shop item level to 350 and the minimum perk tier to 3 at level 30. Then I’d continue to do passes on any weapon that only has a few blessing options and add more while also buffing the under-performing and irrelevant blessings. Then I’d see where crafting stood after more weapons were rolled that enticed people to try out something that isn’t exactly what they were looking for but still looked intriguing.

I’d guess everyone gets tired of their 100th disappointing shop check or weapon upgrade with tier 1/2 perks, but I think making the shops and existing upgrades less disappointing is better than making it easier to never have to look at the shops or upgrade ever again because you got what you wanted.

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Yeah, the system they have now is terrible. I just don’t understand how anyone can defend it. I play games like Diablo and Borderlands despite the loot system. There are few things I find less fun than comparing gear. Mission after mission I get more and more gear that just piles up. I’ll be damned if I’ll spend time actually comparing gear here. I spend some time crafting weapons with some blessings that I want, but that’s it. At least Diablo is reasonably quick with sorting out the trash.

Vermintide 2 at least let me get the gear that I wanted eventually, but that loot system was really bad too, except for… Winds of Magic.

Give me one gun of each type. This is my gun. It is mine and it belongs to me. Let me grind for upgrades. The thing with grinding is that I don’t mind if the grind is fun (some even argue that it’s not a grind if it’s fun and I can buy that). Flesh out what you had in Winds of Magic and let me some of these upgrades be really hard to get, but once I have them they can be slotted in and out, some across weapon types, some only within the same weapon. Give me something to work towards. I’m really easy this way. Give me a number (500 deeds for instance). I’ll grind that if the grind is fun. Same goes for the gear here.

  • Give me one weapon of each type and let me work towards upgrades (scopes, skins, stocks, barrels, muzzles, extended magazines, …). Let this take time. I’m perfectly fine with maxing out a weapon taking time.
  • Make my weapons personal. Give them their own talent trees and let me put points in them (just an idea)
  • Turn off the loot fountain. I hate seeing dozens of weapons of the same type in my inventory. It’s not even remotely fun. I heard some cheers when the Empreror’s blessing came after each mission. I really don’t like it, but it has to be there with the broken system we have now.

The system we have now must be reworked from the ground up. I don’t even care if this puts me back to zero when it comes to my gear as long as the path forward is clear.

end of rant

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In dungeon crawler style games and looter shooters, they’re built around the gear grind. There are ways that the players can put their fingers on the scales and roll the dice many times to help bolster their odds. Their inventory systems also have grown to have comprehensive organizational filters to help streamline managing the big piles of loot that we get.

Fatshark just stacked layers of RNG with atrocious odds on top of the game without giving players a way to stack the deck or organize their piles of mostly worthless loot. You need mods to even flag items as favorites.

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It does. but certain Fatshark game designers seem to disagree. Theory crafting, trying out new builds should be one of the layers behind the game longevity. Atm it’s a pain without a massive time investment and even then you get demorilised by RNG.

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10

I agree with everything you say, but even with these filters in place I do not find this type of gameplay even remotely fun, but the pain can be mitigated with good UI. Diablo does this passably, Borderlands is absolutely terrible, and Darktide I’ve just given up on.

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Oh boy a new crafting related thread.
Let me post this real quick:

@FatsharkCatfish
@FatsharkSeptSis
Would you be so kind and deliver this to the right person?
Thank you in advance.

Dear FS.

Since release, the crafting system has been the most consistently criticized aspect of the game.
The current system is RNG heavy, repetitive and restrictive, which is the opposite of what was originally advertised, and the opposite of what the players want.
The player base clearly does not like it, as it is.
The system seems be great at driving players away, but does not succeed at retaining them at all.
Please make a few alterations to the current crafting system, in order to make it rewarding and fun to interact with.

Please make the following 4 changes to the game, in order to allow players to have gear progression and to experiment with their weapon builds:

  • Let us pay diamantine to upgrade our item modifiers.
    This allows players to fix any item with bad modifiers, push a stat just above a breakpoint, and enables player progression. If a +1 upgrade to a modifier would cost ~100 diamantine, players would be able to get a small, guaranteed upgrade after every single mission they complete. Alternatively, upgrades could come in steps of +5 and cost 500 diamantine to make the reward a bit less frequent, but more impactful.
  • Let us pay diamantine to “learn” blessings of choice.
    Currently, the only way to get a blessing, is via rng. Getting a blessing via rng is fine, but please add this function, so that we can also have the option to circumvent that rng by spending diamantine to get the exact blessings that we are looking for. Having that option would turn the “Oh well. I did not have that blessing yet, but it is not the one that i wanted.” to “Yay. A free blessing that i do not need to pay diamantine for, when ever i decide to try it out.”.
  • Let us pay diamantine to remove locks from our items.
    Just let us customize 1 slot per item for free. Customization for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th slot of the item, can be unlocked for increasing costs of diamantine (2nd slot unlock is cheap, 4th slot unlock is expensive).
  • Remove the diamantine cost from consecration.
    Consecration applies random perks and blessings to an item. The currency spent on this rng system, should be separated from the deterministic system suggested above.

If the deterministic systems above are implemented and only cost diamantine, while consecration only costs plasteel, then interacting with the randomness of brunt’s armory (dockets) and consecration (plasteel) will no longer fell all that bad.
If consecration produces a good item, great. If consecration produces something not so good, any shortcomings can be fixed by spending diamantine. Alternatively, the player can spend more plasteel and consecrate more items, hoping to get something better, that will cost less diamantine to fix.

The above mentioned crafting functions would also allow players to make changes to their items later on, as well as making the use of a large variety different weapons much more accessible. Both of which are important with balance changes being a thing, and with the many weapon options that we have in the game.
Getting a different weapon into a decent state to experiment with (and use it for variety), would cost mostly plasteel for a decent consecrated item, which can then be slightly polished for a relatively low cost of diamantine.
At the same time, the player can still keep investing almost all of their diamantine in an other item, to slowly get it to 100% modifiers and full T4 perks and blessings.

Players would enjoy to engage with the crafting system, because any bad rng could be mitigated.
Players would have a motivation to keep playing, because their time is no longer being wasted, and they can farm diamantine to craft exactly what they want, with any completed mission allowing to pay for a small upgrade.

These changes would be a win for everyone, because they would solve all of the community’s problems with the current crafting system, while allowing the devs to keep all existing items intact, as they are. Player enjoyment and retention (as well as ratings) would go up.
Doing this, would be a very easy win for the game and FS as a whole.

Thank you for your attention and have a good day.

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12

Why rework something that has been solved previously?

Just implement the weave crafting from VT2.

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Well, yes, but that was quite spartan. I agree that this is a good starting point but it can be taken so much further. It’s not a matter of “just implementing it”. It’s an excellent starting point though.

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Sounds good. For this to work for me we would also need to stop getting weapons as loot. Let us have one weapon of each type and update that. I don’t mind the high-end stuff being really expensive. That just gives me something to work towards.

I may be in a minority here. People really seem to like Diablo…

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We can still get random weapons as loot.

Maybe you get lucky and get a good item to polish, or you just get one with a blessing that you did not have yet.
Maybe you get a pretty good version of a weapon that you have never tried, so you now have an incentive to test it out.

If what you get is bad, you just dismantle it.

Either way, nothing is lost.

I am all for this, but maybe you would like to have 2 of the same weapon, to save them as parts of different loadouts.

But yeah… Having more than something like 3 copies of the same weapon seems a bit overkill.

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I just don’t find this fun. Digging through my inventory with 15 guns of the same type is not fun. So no. Other type of mission rewards that allow me to upgrade existing weaponry rather than having to go through the boring middle route of getting weapon, checking if it’s good or bad, walking over to have it either sold or disenchanted to get something you want out of it. It’s just boring steps with no payout. Either give me money or blessings directly if that’s what you intend to do. Don’t do the detour through a weapon. It’s just not fun (to me).

Absolutely, but one does not exclude the other. Just have preset load outs that you can switch between. I would really like this for builds as well so that I can switch between tanky Ogryn to artillery Ogryn without having to respec the entire tree. I enjoy both modes of play.

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I legit do not understand the rationale behind this game’s crafting system and RNG for everything equipment related, or the upgrade locks. It feels like something someone in a corner office decided was a great idea after attending a shady industry conference and now insists on dying on that hill over it.

From a business/profit perspective, how does it help? Other games have frustrating or very long progression measures, but monetize ways around the frustration (e.g. purchase the ability to remove perk/blessing locks/reduce levelling time/etc). I can get that business model, even if I hate it, but Fatshark isn’t doing that. All they’re doing is generating lots of personal-level hate for mechanics plainly designed to frustrate but also not given any outlet, and all in a manner that’s going to constantly poke them in the eye no matter what else they get right or add.

I get that RNG/Gambling mechanics are also used for psychological reasons to keep people engaged, but in this instance all they do is generate frustration and stifle interest in exploring and trying new things.

Fatshark could have just built out weapon upgrade paths for people to earn (instead of random % ratings/Perks/blessings on everything, offer researchable paths for each of those things), particularly with all that extra XP that goes to waste once one hits 30. That would have provided clear, concise, achievable goals for gaming sessions with tangible payoffs and incentivize players to log in and play as much as possible.

Having RNG availability for equipment with RNG stats and RNG upgrades and RNG features and limited ways over controlling that, coupled with tons of garbage RNG results, and nearly no way to have any impact on that, is really poor fundamental game design and business modelling.

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Listen bro, I’m doing my best here, feel free to join me at #BreaktheLocks again… I’m a bit more aggro about it this time around.

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This. Exactly this.

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I fear some of the devs may be afraid of the Weaves DLC’s negative reception to do this. I want to assure them, the bad reception came from issues with beastmen’s initial poor balance and the overhaul to the pacing of the game that was unnecessary and later rectified.

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