I 100% agree that crafting in Darktide sucks.
There are ways to cope with this, Brunt is not one of them. Brunt is a beginner’s trap disguised as a convenience. His sole purpose is to convert your hard-won Ordo Dockets into heaps of gray garbage.
That’s not to say that you can’t occasionally get lucky with a serviceable weapon, but more often than not, you’ll spend 5-50x more than just waiting for something on the Armoury Exchange or possibly Melk’s store (not often, but it can happen).
I wrote a guide a while back explaining the most effective way I’ve found to collect level 380 weapons, but here’s the TL;DR version:
-
Get all of your characters to level 30. if you’re a mad man like me, go ahead and make 5th character and level them up too for more weekly Melk bucks!
-
Get the Armoury Exchange browser extension. I recommend the Firefox version now as it features better exception handling, and won’t outright break when Fatshark introduces new items. Setup filters and check the rotation as often as you can. If you see something good, log in and buy it.
-
Complete the weeklies on as many characters as you can. Spend your Melk bucks on to buy weapons with T4 blessings you don’t already have, then extract them for later use. When you’ve amassed a few choice weapons, you can upgrade them with confidence, knowing that you’ll have a guaranteed 530-550 rating when they’re fully upgraded and re-rolled.
The downside to this method is waiting for the right weapons to show up in the store. The upside is that if you’re patient, you’ll save yourself a ton of resources while slowly amassing dozens of nice weapons.
Also, #BreakTheLocks