The crafting system’s reroll restrictions make it effectively pointless to Consecrate beyond Anointed (Blue), Refine, or Rebless an item unless it has Perfect Base Stats, a Perfect First Perk, and a Perfect First Blessing.
You cannot increase the Base Stats of a weapon. I have 228 hours in this game and have not once encountered an item with a perfect 400 Power (my personal highest is a 375 Base Axe that has a moveset I don’t enjoy). There is no reason to build a piece of gear up using difficult-to-find resources unless that item is nearly perfect as you will be outpaced by other players with more luck that yourself. It’s a PvE game so I’m not overly concerned with competitiveness, but I am concerned with being able to pull my own weight in higher difficulty tiers with obsolete gear.
Finding a 400 Power weapon is now a Low Percentage Gamble. With the inability to reroll BOTH perks or blessings, you essentially have to get lucky and find the exact Perk and Blessing you want (at the maximum strength) when you Consecrate the item up to Green and then to Blue rarity. If you do not get the Perfect Green Perk, the item might as well be bumped to Blue and then Scrapped for the Blessing as you’re now in the position of having to spend precious Diamantine on upgrading to Purple and to Orange to try again for another perk/blessing. You can only reroll one, so if your first isn’t exactly what you want, you either need to be incredibly lucky at the expense of Rare Resources or try again (You must find ANOTHER 400 Power item first).
Ideally you would find a new item at Blue, Purple, or Orange rarity already with the exact benefits that you want, but this is the exception and not the rule. Praise the Omnissiah if you are so fortunate. For many players this system is keyed in to effectively destroy either your Resource Pool or your Inventory The fact that it’s a Resource-Intensive Reroll system to begin with is already a heavy tax on the player. It should not also Tax items out of your inventory for the crime of being unlucky.
My suggestion: Players work hard for their gear. This crafting system is actually harmful to the longevity of that gear and should be reworked.
Allow for all Perks and Blessings to be Refined or Reblessed. This is a completely unnecessary restriction currently, and only serves to make the crafting system harder on the player. We’re already randomly rolling for Perks at-cost, and the limitation makes Consecration a massive liability.
We need a Base Stat improvement option. The “Get Lucky” loot problem is currently the most persistent issue, and while I understand it’s a core aspect of the gameplay loop… I’ve played for over 200 hours and haven’t come close to a 400 Power item. This isn’t World of Warcraft, and you aren’t Blizzard (at least I hope you aren’t). Why on earth is the grind to high-tier gear so crippling?
Either we get a Base Stat improvement option for crafting, or a Red-Tier of rarity needs to be implemented. This is my least favorite choice, as all the problems then boil down to “Get Reds” which would only exacerbate the Luck-based loot issues, but having a Red-Tier would at least open up options for special crafting treatments such as being able to perfectly craft the item. Keep in mind that having a Red-Tier of rarity with guaranteed perfect stats, but the inability to perfect both of its perks and blessings would all but ensure a mass abandonment of Darktide by the community out of frustration.
You aren’t alone. Some like the grind, but they seem to be in the minority. I think the simplest solution would be to pay crafting resources to swap what perk/blessing the lock goes to. There will always be a lock but it can be moved around.
The lock is the biggest problem… It goes beyond a grind when you can Ruin an otherwise perfectly usable item by locking in a Blessing only to then roll up a 2nd one with a massive downside like Limbsplitter.
That seems counter to everything else I’ve read so far, and that would arbitrarily necessitate a reduction of at least 1 Weapon Stat by 20 points or spread that difference out across multiple Stats. However that’s not really my concern, it simply opens up another concern with the current system, that now in the search for “the ideal weapon” every weapon is going to have a different ideal stat spread at Base 380. ie: Combat Axes might be more effective with 60 Damage and 80 Mobility, as their single target damage already hits many breakpoints for 1 and 2 shotting enemies with only 60 Base Damage.
This would mean ANOTHER chance for Luck to play a part in your gear efficiency. This matters less overall than many of the above concerns, but you could miss some particularly critical breakpoints that change the Time to Kill against some enemies.
Feels like an entirely arbitrary reduction from the already arbitrary “530” Max down to a 510
Yeah taken on their own the changes would have been good, but in typical Fat Shark fashion they had to drive a tank right down the middle of the bad system. Armory exchange was already pretty bad RNG, now the blue weapons that appear there are effectively worthless besides gambling luck (you need to get a good blessing on final upgrade so you can replace the trash one from the armory). Emperor Gifts are now hot garbage, even playing books T5 you rarely see oranges and they have blessings and ratings worse than what you see in the armory almost every time. I just got a T1 purple thunderous bully club from a Damnation scrip run, with 333 base rating lol.
So yeah if I were to take the decent Emperor Gifts from last week, combine it with last week’s store that didn’t hard cap blessing power on weapons, or this curio nerf that seemed to have occurred which nobody is mentioning, and just apply the blessings earning/re applying and materials increases to that I would have fixed the game. But that would have been too simple, so they didn’t. They gave you more materials only because you need to dump them at a rate far greater than we ever did before.
Why not pay ressources to remove the lock entirely?
Make it 2k plast and 2k diamantine or something (per unlocked perk/blessing).
Just not something annoying that has you constantly pay again and again, when ever you want to try out something else.
In addition to that, we should be able to upgrade all modifiers.
This would remove a MASSIVE amount of annoying rng, and allow us to decide if we want to try again on the slot machine, or if we want to heavily invest in an item that has imperfect perks/blessings/modifiers, until the item becomes everything we want (without any more RNG being involved).
Or maybe let us upgrade modifiers until everything is at 80%, then we unlock an extra quality upgrade that unlocks both perks and blessings and allows to further upgrade modifiers to 100%.
When all modifiers are upgraded to 100, the item quality turns red.
If the prices for these things are properly balanced, the system would incentivize players to buy a bunch of items and quality upgrade them to blue, hoping that they turn out good.
For those who already have a nearly perfect item, and who would no longer engage with the system since the chance of getting something better becomes incredibly slim, they would now engage with the system again, since they could perfect the item they have.
Also, people who do not like to play the slot machine, would be allowed to skip pretty much all of the RNG for a price.
I mean, I agree with you. I am just trying to find more of a middle ground with the developers “design intent” and the people who love to grind for the sake of grinding. I would be ok with swapping locks but removing them altogether would obviously be best (for me).
This forum is my go to place to see that I’m not the only one who is sad about Darktide. I hope this elaboration helped you a bit - but it’s sad to see so much effort put into just another variation of actual improvement that is going nowhere. FS decided to make cosmetic changes to the putrid swamp of the item system and there is no way in hell any amount of pleading or begging for reason will change their mind.
So barring what is apparently extreme luck on SOME perks I’ve rolled, I’ve never once seen a 60 Power Blessing and only a very very rare 25 Power Perk.
So the RNG is even more awful than I originally believed and this entire system is hopeless to manage, seeing as you can practically ruin a weapon by upgrading it and rolling a “Limbsplitter” blessing.
Incredible… alright I’ll just see if this game is patched together with duct tape and fairy dust in 12 months. Rose-colored glasses are off, this isn’t Vermintide 3, this is some appalling Skinner Box of attention hoarding. I’m uninstalling now.
FatShark, fix this. You have a perfectly fun game marred by countless under-the-hood design decisions that serve no purpose other than to R@&# your customers’ attention spans.
I don’t regret the time I have spent, but I regret giving you the benefit of the doubt back in Oct/Sept when you promised you would be making things right.
