Excessive randomness in itemization - This is a genuine flaw in this game

[Aetrion]

After we found out today that you can only change one of the perks on an item my heart sank a little, because a realization hit me: I will never have my perfect item set in Darktide.

This game has what I would refer to as excessively random loot. The likelihood of every obtaining a specific thing that you are looking for is so infinitesimally small that it borders on winning the lottery.

The culprit here is the effect of multiple layers of randomness multiplying on top of each other.

First, you have the number of items in the loot pool. Generally having more weapons in the game is good, but if you want a specific one having more items that can roll is a negative for you. Classses as they are have access to somewhere around 25-35 weapons, though this will likely go up in the future.

Then you have the base value of the item. A 380 base power weapon is already extremely rare. I have encountered two of them in my entire time playing this game. I have never once encountered a 100 base power curio. I would say the chance of obtaining a weapon like this is 1% tops.

On top of that you have the stat distribution of the weapon. Luckily stats are capped, so the higher the base rating of the weapon the more likely it becomes that no essential stat is too low. Most high rolled weapons will have an OK stat distribution at the least, so I’m not going to factor that in.

Then you have your perks, I don’t have a concrete list of all the perks that a weapon can have. There is this one character builder someone made, but it has stuff like reload speed or ranged crit in the melee weapons for example, which I don’t think belongs there. There are somewhere around 15-20 perks a weapon can actually roll. Since perks can come in 4 power levels that effectively gives you four times as many possible rolls assuming that all power levels are equally likely. So, on the most conservative estimate you have to get one of two perks perfect out of a list of 60. In reality the odds are likely much worse.

So, this is as far as our knowledge of the system goes right now, let’s calculate out the odds that you get a max rolled weapon you want with at least one perk you want:

Let’s say 25 weapons, 1% chance for a max roll, and two out of 60 chances to get the right perk.

That already makes your chance of getting the perfect weapon a 1 out of 75,000.

The real odds are likely worse, but if you can show something to be absurd when giving it every benefit of the doubt then it is most certainly absurd.

So now just think about how many weapons you actually run across in a play session. About 10 of them from the regular store every hour, another 3-4 per day on the commendation store, which doesn’t actually help you get better gear at all, because the items there are no more likely to have the right rolls. Maybe another bonus item every three matches or so as an emperor’s gift.

I would say in a 4 hour play session you will come across around 50 items in total. Statistically it will be several years, and literally thousands of hours before you see a single perfect weapon.

But wait! It’s worse!

We don’t know if the Blessings only get to replace one of them too. If that is the case you can up the chance of getting the right things on an item by about another factor of 10.

And then of course let’s not forget that stats are capped at 80% right now, so that means there is some kind of system in play that we don’t even know about yet that allows even more powerful weapons.

That’s right, if you do manage to acquire a perfect weapon under the current system it will likely become obsolete in the future.

Feeling like grinding for better items in Darktide is pointless yet? Good. Because it is.

The crafting system is BAD. It doesn’t save us from the futility of trying to build a character in spite of an excessively random item system, it just slightly improves the odds, from “utter bedlam” to “complete insanity”.

This is this game’s Achilles heel right now. Every single other problem with this game is a bug or a mistake or delay that will be fixed in time. But the crafting is a full blown bad design that creates the most destructive thing to a game’s longevity: A sense of futility in the players.

I still enjoy playing the game, but if the progression system exists to keep me logging in regularly and for a long period of time it accomplishes the exact opposite. I have no interest in engaging with a system where success is so unlikely that it is simply not made to engage smart and informed players, but only to trick and trap the unaware. Shame.

[CommanderJ]

The absurdity of the RNG is indeed baffling. Especially since you were actually kind in your estimates. You brushed over the power stuff, but 380 doesn’t max the stats, so there’s a pretty big non-zero chance that a 380 you find has the dump stat in the wrong location.

Power budgets overall are a pretty bad idea, and compounds and becomes even worse when you then attach other RNG elements, like properties and blessings on top of it, not to mention a huge pool of items, so that even getting the type of item you want has a low chance, let alone getting a good roll of that type.

It’s the most hateful way of designing loot progression I’ve ever seen. Even Division 2 that did the same power budget + RNG traits mistake, actually rewarded you with loot post mission - and ended up needing to completely rework crafting so people could overcome the absurd RNG.

[Merdoc]

Omegabump. The layered systems of excessive RNG in this game have me flabbergasted.

First you have to level up to 30 So the item stats are not artificially capped and you even get a chance at a decent roll.

It’s RNG to find the weapon you want in the store.
Then there’s RNG for the overall weapon rating.
Then there’s RNG for the distribution of the weapons stats
Then it’s RNG if whether they have the right perks.
Then there’s RNG for the right blessings.

Last but not least it’s RNG for the Perk rerolls (coming soon!) as well.

What else?
Oh yeah, RNG for the mission select, the secondary objective, the difficulty and modifiers.
RNG for the weekly missions (It didn’t even let me use the ridiculously expensive re-roll system yesterday.)
Also, RNG for the emperor’s gifts.

Feels bad, man.

[Aetrion]

All of that random stuff isn’t even really the problem IMO, it’s the fact that there is no system you can feed the random things into to make them not random that bothers me. When I still thought you could reroll all perks I was OK with the system, because getting items with powerful base stats was rare, but not yet unreasonably so. With the addition of another layer of randomness though we’ve gone from it likely taking a few months of playing to get a great base item for every slot to a few years.

[RaNdOmKiLs666]

Yeah, they need to get rid a lot of the RNG bullcrap. My want to play the game is fading due to not getting the items I want. 3 weeks there has not been a single power sword that is higher then my current powersword. This is crap, just let us craft what we want and not just that but when a character is level 30 all their crafted gears base power should default to 380, that way I can simply craft a 380 base power bolter or slab shield or whatever it is I want to craft.

The re-rolling perks needs to be changed as well, i should be able to swap out all perks for different specific ones whenever I like. Not oh, you can only change a single perk and the other ones are staying how they are. That’s crap,

It’s like having a call of duty game (or any shooter with perks really) where you can pick a single perk and all the other ones are random, same with the weapon attachments, what if they were all RNG. That’d be crap. But for some reason the darktide devs think this kind of stuff is ok. This isn’t a borderlands game where the game revolves around random loot, so why is darktide setup like it is borderlands? Doesn’t make sense.

The darktide devs also said they want to move away from RNG, but this game has even more RNG then what Vermintide 2 ever had.

Anyway, I’d like to see the RNG elements reduced and more player choice implemented so that we can make builds that we want and not just random crap on our weapons and curios.

[Aetrion]

It seems to me like they got cold feet on just letting people create whatever, because that does have a tendency to very quickly get “solved” and crystalize out as a meta. It also kind of short circuits the whole reward loop for the game if getting new items serves no purpose because a single high end item can be turned into anything you want.

The problem is that they didn’t solve this issue in a good way. What they should have gone with essentially is make items into the primary resource for creating better items. From what we have heard about the way blessings work they actually have what looks like a good system for this planned for one of the aspects of a weapon. Stripping blessings off weapons, combining them like gems in an ARPG and then forging them back onto other items sounds like it will give you plenty of reason to keep collecting weapons.

The problem is that they didn’t go that route for anything else.

For example, the base stats of a weapon could be swappable by breaking down a weapon for its “Configuration” which can then be copied onto another weapon of the same type to replace its stat block with that of the previous weapon. That way if we get an expansion where the item level and stat cap goes up in the future you don’t have to start from scratch, you can actually dynamically improve your weapons as you find appropriate donor weapons.

Likewise with the perks it would have been a much better system to be able to destroy a weapon to copy its perk to another weapon of equal or lower power rating.

They could have very easily created a system where the randomness of items is not an issue, but instead means that almost everything you pick up has a chance of being a component for experimenting with your build and creating interesting item sets.

Randomness is not inherently negative. For example the apparent randomness of monster spawns in this game is one of the biggest things that makes it interesting. What makes randomness in games feel negative is when the player has no agency. The circumstances you have to deal with can be random, but the result should be in your hands.