Fatshark, the weapon shop and economy is in dire need of changes

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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Right now the current implementation of the Weapon shop, Brunts armory, and the blessing acquisition system feels so poor to interact with it, that it is in dire need of change. Its so bad that it actually is a discouraging factor to play. I keep coming back for the gameplay but the out of mission systems that exist to arbitrarily increase playtime are worse than most mobile games ive seen.

Why is someone with over 400 hours in the game struggling to modify and try out weapons that I would want to? In Vermintide 2 after this amount of time I was free to get and try everything in the game. So why is it so that in Darktide after that amount of time, im currently out of all the crafting materials and wasting an ungodly amount of credits, and have yet to test or even try out even a fraction of all the weapon blessings. This just shouldnt be the case. There is so many things that contribute to this but I think these are the biggest factors.

  1. Mission length - Each mission takes 2 to 3 times as long as a Vermintide mission on average at comparable difficulties. This leads to a ratio of less loot vs time spent overall because there will be times you fail a really tough mission 40+ minutes in and get nothing for it.

  2. Mission reward - You currently only get a single item as a reward instead of the 3 you get in Vermintide 2.

  3. Plasteel income - A single mission yields around 500-600 plasteel, (Far lower for people that cant reliably clear damnation) which is actually not even enough to upgrade a weapon from purple to orange. Meanwhile in Vermintide, your 3 weapons you got would melt down into enough dust to reroll and test out multiple different perks and talents on weapons.

A side note - The actual gameplay of having to search around the map for the crafting supplies is not a good idea at all, it needs to change to a flat amount for completing a mission and you shouldnt have to play an easter egg hunt for these little pickups that take you out of the fun gameplay. This can be its own separate post though.

  1. The weapon shop’s offerings - Right now there is absolutely no reason blue weapons should exist in the shop because of the fact that they only have tier 1 and 2 blessings on them. Buying one is significantly worse than a grey or green weapon because of the low tier blessings it guarantees that you will need to re-roll that blessing, essentially wasting one of your two changes you can make of the 4 modifiers changes before the weapon lock kicks in. Why can they roll tier 4 perks but but only tier 1 and 2 blessings? They need to offer tier 3 and 4 blessings or else they shouldnt even be sold.

A good balanced change would be removing Tier 1 and 2 blessings. There really should only be 1 blessing level just like in Vermintide, and if not, at maximum just two levels of them. Having tier 1 and 2 that absolutely no one will ever use once level 30 or waste time earning is a bad design.

  1. Brunts armory - Once you are level 30 the brunts armory needs to only sell 360 to 380 weapons, it is absolutely such a poor design choice to have the armory sells RNG weapons with such a high disparity. For reference, in Vermintide 2 when you crafted a new weapon the range of it was 296 to 300 (300 being equivalent to a 380). So even getting the worst roll of a 296 was really no big issue because it was such a minor loss in power since 296 was probably equivalent to a 370+ roll in Darktide.
    Once you are level 30 the Brunts armory’s RNG range needs to be at minimum 360 to compensate for the fact that system in place is to buy tons and tons of the same weapon to get what you want, and then go through the massive hassle of selling dozens and dozens of wasted weapons that rolled poorly.

Who even thought that was a good idea? Is the intended design of the armory really to flood your inventory with dozens and dozens of grey weapons just to get one good roll, and then sell all the bad ones? It looks and feels so poorly thought-out, that im struggling to believe that no one in your QA department brought this up, and if they did, why didnt you listen to them?

The Brunts armory reason was the nail in the coffin to come make this post. I was going to try out a combat knife for Vet and I went to buy one. After finding none of them anywhere in the shop or the Melk shop, I resorted to the Brunts armory. Wanting a good one to dedicate my final scraps of Plasteel I had on upgrading it, I wanted to get one that was at least rating 370 which is not even a perfect roll. I feel like this should have been a relatively easy thing to do. No, I was dead wrong.

Fatshark please look at this. This is the current system players have to deal with, this feels unacceptable and not fit for release.

I didnt even start recording until I was already a bit into this slog of a process. In the end I ended up spending over 1.4 Million dockets, buying over 150 knifes just to get a single 370+ knife. Which is equivalent to around 70 full length damnation missions in docket rewards. Each mission of that difficulty averages 25 to 30 minutes in length. That is equivalent to potentially 30 hours of gameplay. In exchange for a single grey weapon that isnt even a perfect roll. That amount of time in Vermintide 2 I would have multiple Red weapons, which would be the same as obtaining multiple 380 rolls all with tier 4 blessings, and tier 4 perks, perfectly as I wanted them. Why is chance of that happening in Darktide statically impossible?
A system that makes you gamble to try to have a fraction of a chance at good weapons feels so gross. Im surprised there isnt just an option to buy the best stats for real money, and after interacting with the current system, sadly I think I would actually prefer that.

The gameplay is fun Fatshark, you do not need to try arbitrarily inflate playtime with these rushed systems. That is not what is keeping people coming back. Judging by the amount of feedback posts on this specific topic, I would say that these systems are actually negatively impacting player retention. I urge you to really look at some of these posts and hopefully realize what damage it might be doing to player retention to keep them how they currently are.

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BRING BACK THE 3 ITEMS REWARDED PER MISSION!!!
Please :3

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The way I’ve always seen it is you get one random weapon and enough ordo dockets to buy at least 2 weapons of your choice per successful (damnation) match. I’d take the agency over the extra rando drops personally.

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Yeah that would be nice if there were no stats, but the weapons you are buying are literally no different than ones that might drop, its still an RNG roll in the shop just like a mission reward

reply system bugged out on me apparently

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The post-level rewards aren’t really comparable to the ordo shop(s) since the shop is grey-blue only, but even still I prefer the option to save my bucks upfront instead of reclaiming them by breaking down more junk I didn’t ask for.

Now if only I could buy plasteel with dockets…

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Yeah, none of the weapon acquisition methods are particularly interesting, satisfying or fun, part of which is because of the many layered RNG design of the weapons, the RNG of Brunt’s requisitions leading to it being a massive resource sink (which isn’t a bad thing to have, but getting the balance right between getting what you want and sinking enough resources into it is a fine line that RNG is not suited to tune) and the hard timers in the Armoury and Melk shops.

There’s also little agency in affecting what appears in those shops, no longer term contract to work on to get a weapon of a certain rarity/rating and a prioritised stat or two, it’s all RNG and even when they ostensibly remove some of the RNG they’re just shifting it away (Brunt lets you choose the item type but obsfucates the rating and stat spread).

And then to top it on that, the inventory management UI and UX struggles with bulk items, and how to barter/sell/salvage them and the sorting options need more helpful options as well as remembering what you had it set to would be nice too.

There’s just so many layers as to why itemisation is unsatisfying, and acquisition is a big one.

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at lvl 30, you should be able pick and choose parameters at the armory, and then one gets generated for you based on what you’ve chosen. like maybe put in amounts of resources to increase your chances of getting stats that you want right from the start. blessings and perks should be fully open to modify and change, though. locking 2 is bogus lol

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Why not 3 instead of just 1? Most of the weapon drops are awful, so giving us 3 times more chance of getting a good weapon isn’t bad in any way, shape or form. If we don’t get any good weapons from the 3 dropped, we could just sell them all.

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3 weapons are also more beneficial to new players for the purpose of collecting blessings, but I doubt we’ll ever see that.

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The 3 weapons is the least of my issues here honestly, the real issues are plasteel income needs to be doubled at minimum and they need to have the Brunts armory sell weapons with an RNG range of 360 to 380, that would solve a ton of issues with the economy

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Agreed. It is very odd that so many Vermintide 2 QoL changes were just disregarded and dropped during the making of Darktide.

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More Plasteel gang (I’m stockpiling it in the event that Fatshark grants us the fabled Red-Tier weapons)

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agree i post something similar after playing this game after a week we need ASAP refactor this eco resource/system !
imo best will be nice to have trade system for the resources u will not run 10k diaman with 0 plast

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Wow that video is atrocious.

I’m pretty sure what happens with this is Catfish looks at all the posts this week about the crafting system, sighs, writes it down, and throws the paper into a dark pit in Sweden.

“They still don’t like the crafting.”

The hole spits out a 304 Mk V Poop Knife.

Then she shrugs and leaves.

Either the code is so convoluted it literally takes them a year to change it, they’re being held hostage somehow by nefarious groups who really like the crafting system, or… someone/s influential on the dev team is deeply, delusionally misinformed about the reasons people are still playing this game.

I am really hoping to be proven wrong for the Part 2 of the anniversary update, because the talent tree update was a sign of life that I was happy to see. I’m fresh out of copium if that one doesn’t pan out, though.

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Honestly, this whole situation feels like they’re just waiting for the most vocal critics of the crafting system to leave so they can drop the ability to buy red weapons for Aquilas.
Either that, or that ability was planned and they don’t dare to release it because of the flak they got so far, and are keeping the crafting the way it is just in case they need a quick cash injection by adding that ability.
It’s not designed like a gacha/mobile game by accident, they have stated multiple times that the original crafting was their design intent. I sincerely doubt they have changed that intent.

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There is absolutely zero evidence to support this, and that 1000% includes the RNG-gated item progression/economy systems that were clearly designed with the intent of giving players short/long-term goals beyond gameplay.

The systems aren’t perfect, but they are being continually improved.

I’d be upset if FS sold anything related to power or the ability to purchase power outside of well-packed/valued DLC. I think it’d be pretty out of character for them, and judging by all the paid cosmetics I’ve seen I think they’re doing just fine without resorting to that.

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3 random weapons means staff psykers getting 3 brand new guns. Or with the current system, 1 brand new gun and the ordos/plasteel sufficient to buy 2 grey staffs and upgrade them to blue to fish for blessings.

I’ll do the math on that again and post an update/edit, but I’m pretty sure that’s correct with a single typical damnation run.

I still need tube tho…

EDIT: did the math and checked my scoreboard history. To upgrade a 372 grey to green is 147 tube and then 196 to blue. So to fish twice for T3+ blessings would cost around 690. Looking at my last few runs, that’s a number I seem to hit often enough, and I think the upper bound is around 800?

At any rate, I like that setup better than forced-fishing for blessings on weapons I’d likely never use.

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I think you are getting stuck on the 3 weapons thing thinking we were saying that it would replace the current rewards. For proper game economy balance it should be giving you 3 weapons, AND around 1000 plasteel in a mission, as well as the current docket amount. If you read my initial paragraph again, you can see that after 400 hours in the game, im literally out of the crafting supplies, with not even aggressively upgrading or anything. I probably make a new weapon once every few days, its completely unacceptable that the rewards are this poor and limit you this much for spending so much time in the game.

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I never thought I’d see the day where I would ever want to implement Verminide 2’s item system; It was weird that there was barely any reason to use anything but swift slaying, that you couldn’t just pick what modifiers you wanted on a red weapon, that you had to roll that sucker a bunch before you got the ones you wanted, but here we are.

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okay @brosgw , add me in i guess, hopefully fatshark see this

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