I think an issue with the grind in Darktide is that gear is abstracted enough that the itemisation is disconnected from the in-mission gameplay.
Every other ARPG and looter shooters, you find the loot in gameplay with crafting being an alternative or backup. Here, you have to go through the crafting regardless because the chances of getting something straight out of the gate (from Emperor’s Gifts) usable or an upgrade is so infinitesimally small it might as well not happen. It’s always grinding the currency to have another spin at the slot machine. Combine that with the design that your currency can be permanently wasted because of the locks without contributing to any progression at all.
DT is not an ARPG or looter shooter. It’s not a free roam third person shooter like the Division or Destiny either. It doesn’t make sense to make that comparison.
If you want a label for it you can use FPS with or without putting hack n slash in there.
If you look at VT2, the power rating they used kind of made sense, since that’s what they chose to balance the difficulty. The power rating in that game increased with both levels and weapon rating and it’s purpose (seemingly) was to force you to not jump in at the deep end, but to go progress through the difficulties. Your power level, both character, weapons and accessories, always increased in power. Levels added 10 power and gear increased by a couple power per new item until it was and stayed (almost) maxed. Perk rolls did not make up for a part of weapons power level.
The VT2 system in itself is really convoluted and it’s likely that it would be both easier to balance and easier for the player to move up through the difficulties if FS kept enemies more static and focused more on enemy intensity instead.
The system in DT only gives gear a power level but most of the power levels doesn’t matter. What matters is the weapon base strenght and the modifier stat level, as that will directly impact damage, stagger, armor piercing, etc. All the other power rating lack a ourpose, other than arbitrarily show how strong your specific blessing or perk is. You can already see how steong your blessing is supposed to be by looking at it’s tier level and on curios the power level is mostly just confusing.
Since the modifiers are randomized (originally 280-380) we can assume that Damnation is tuned for weapons that fall within that range, but who knows with FS. My hope was that they would’ve abandoned this system for DT but they kept it and just made sure to remove any reason why they started using it in the first place. The RNG on top ia just superfluous.
Tl:dr; It’s a convoluted system that doesn’t serve any purpose. Putting RNG on top of it makes it serve even less of a purpose, while making it more frustrating.
The grind to get to max level and at least get rerolled weapons in VT2 was the hurdle I had to get over before I could play the game in Legend and begin to try out new builds and different playstyles properly. Unneccessary grind is one of the meta-issues with VT2 that was brought up very early after launch.
I still maintain that to some degree FS are somehow handicapping themselves by keeping players out of the very best bit of their games - the combat - by artifically inflating play time with either level grind or item grind or both. People who have played thousands of hours of VT2 haven’t done it for the grind, they’ve done it for the fun and the ability to try out all kinds of builds because the crafting allows them to try out new things.
Locks exists to somehow make people play longer and mask the lack of content behind a sh!tty system, because let’s face it - while we’re all foaming at the mouth about locks there’s an immense pile of other stuff FS aren’t doing that is sliding under the radar. If they fix the locks, all the other bits of the game that aren’t great will resurface.
Less grind = more time having fun = spend some money in shop. It’s not hard.
