As the title says, if we ever get chaos wastes for darktide, weapon blessings’ design will finally be exposed.
We currently have two type of blessings, the type that improves your damage, and the one that doesn’t.
And to clarify how chaos wastes will expose the horrible weapon blessings’ design, in chaos wastes you start with the basic version of your weapons, meaning no blessings or perks, you can pay points at shrines found throughout the run to either upgrade your weapon with random blessings/traits, or get a random weapon with random blessings/traits, meaning it’s never guaranteed that you will get the good blessings.
To be honest, it feels like the base power for weapons is the version with the optimal options, for example, losing on 40% power on heavy swords means you deal less damage, cleave less targets, and inflict lower stagger, and not running brutal momentum on combat axes will ruin the weapon’s ability to deal with hordes (side note: I wish axes didn’t cleave, I think the weapon fantasy is a hard hitting/armor piercing single target damage dealer), and this goes for all weapons.
In conclusion, all weapons’ damage values should be buffed (To keep the current weapon feel), and then all power/damage increasing blessings should be removed, add some fun blessings instead.
I did not particularly care for how blessings worked (Swift Slaying addict here) in CW so I hope they have a different approach in this game. Since there are tiers of blessings in DT, there is room to keep blessings but just getting a weaker version until you level up the weapon. IDK. Too much could be different for me to care too much about how balancing would work.
Since Darktide changed to lean less on RNG compared to VT2, maybe we will be able to use resources between stages to customise the weapon as we normally do.
I have been never happy with Blessing balance. At times I think that having a “power/damage” blessing slot, and a “utility” blessing slot would be one way to address the power creep issues, but it’s too late to change this in Darktide 1. Atm is most cases power / damage beats all, which pushes a lot of those blessings to the side by default.
Chaos Wastes at least had interesting traits, even if they were pretty hilariously overpowerful, like chain lightning on crit or bladestorm, with some mids like stagger shockwave on crit and the swift slaying equivalent and +damage on headshot, or duds like AoE damage on kill.
Fun Fact, Chaos Wastes actually has unique blessings (traits) that you CAN’T get in the normal game
For example there’s a trait on all shield weapons that you could get in CW that automatically blocks every attack even if you’re not blocking, or one that applies to swords/daggers that gives you 5 HP on crit attack
I’m pretty sure if a Chaos Wastes mode is added, blessings like this will added like well
Specifically not, iirc a Dev/CM has said that Mortis isn’t meant to be an equivalent to Chaos Waste.
There is indeed a problem here that wasn’t present in VT2 toward a potential Chaos Waste mode. Which is the volume of weapons that each classes have access to compared to VT2’s character, as well as each having many more blessings, and blessing in general being more impactful here than there.
Seeing as VT2’s CW worked with 2 (3) styles of Altars, 1 serving to upgrade your held weapon, and the other to switch with a better weapon (though limited to melee, or ranged).
To which I would argue toward replacing the Altars with traders and upgraders that give you multiple choices that you can pick through, or being able to buff a weapon from one way or another.
With the random weapon trader being made to work like the weapon peddler, and the upgrader like Hadron.
Obviously it’s pure speculation what gamemode we might get or if it’s even a gamemode, but just going with the idea that it’s a run-based roguelike concept like CW, I don’t think things need to be copied 1:1. There’s a multitude of ways to do RNG and upgrading for weapons, blessings, etc. Could even have bespoke balance and blessings, or completely unique systems like a trader or in-mission crafting. Certain things are solved as easily as via offering 1 more choice.
It’s a good thought but in the end it all depends on how much effort Fatshark wants to actually put into it. If it’s going to be low effort it will be rancid and suck ass and the vast majority of players won’t like it just like Mortis Trials. If it’s high effort they’ll actually figure out how to make the RNG fun. That’s really the core principle of this sort of gamemode: It needs to be different every run and have an element that’s outside of the players control that forces him to adapt while still not handing the reigns to RNG completely. They either figure it out or don’t.