Currently, for a weapon to be worth keeping you need to have a good stat roll and decent distribution, since we know we can never change the values on the bars. That sucks, but it is what it is. The assumption was that the crafting system would let us change every other aspect of the weapon, and tailor it to our needs.
With the change coming next week, you can add having one good perk on it to the list of requirements. This restricts the pool of high potential weapons even further, meaning we also are even more reliant on hourly shop RNG for that one perfect roll. If you roll a weapon with perfect bars but too bad perks - too bad, it’ll never be what you want. It’ll probably miss breakpoints, or have some other annoying quality that could have been patched up (Enjoy your +15% sprint efficiency though)
It also means that we are discouraged from testing different perk combinations. I can foresee this creating a very defined meta of a limited pool of perks, most likely damage vs elites or specials depending on the weapon, and no reason to ever go out of that.
It also means if a perk is hit by a nerf or a buff, we can’t change our weapon to adjust for it. One of those slots will always be locked in.
This is not a crafting system. It’s an engagement system to force us to log in every day, or ideally every hour, to check the shop.
I want to get a good weapon, and then play the game over a long period of time to constantly improve it, and then move on to doing the same with all my weapons. I want to test different perk combos in the Psykerium and then bring those out into high difficulty missions. Unless I get multiple different godrolls of every weapon, that won’t happen. There is no path to progression other than camping the store and hoping you get lucky. And if you do get lucky, you just reach the starting point of a much better system.
This stifles player choice and there is no good reason to restrict perks.
100% Agreed, even if you get a weapon with the base stats you want, (which will take a long time since it’s fully rng and time gated) you still need to get the one perk you want with right percentages, which doesn’t really make the rng grind much better.
It’s even worse for curios which have three sub perks.
If this is how the system is going to be it’s purposely designed to bloat out playtime and keep players checking the armory hourly. The armory system is not fun, it’s nothing but an annoyance with the wait times and rng.
EDIT: On the context of how unfun the waiting system for the armory is, here are some things that could be done to improve it.
We already have to grind for the dockets to buy the weapons, why not give us an option to re-roll the store contents? Preferably without any cost to do so, and as many times as you want. But it could also be balanced to be a couple of times with the refresh duration being much lower, let’s say 10-30 minutes.
For weapon refining, the one perk limitation has to go, so far huge part of the community that has seen the community update agree that it’s an awful system. Please balance it in some other way, all perks should be allowed to be re-rolled, there already is a very good assumption that it will have a resource cost.
We have learned a lot from our previous choices and gameplay surrounding crafting offered within the Vermintide series. For Darktide we wanted to take those lessons to expand and improve in such a way that crafting would become a central pillar of player progression, while giving more impact and agency to you, the player in your preferred playstyle.
The nature of randomization and repetitive actions sometimes seen within crafting is something that we are steering to avoid in the crafting system within Darktide. Meaningful choices will be made with strategy and goals behind them, as you set your eyes upon that perfect combination of melee and ranged weapons for your class.
lmaooooooo I’ll give Fatshark some credit: Their BS Corporate gaslighting has gotten significantly better. I almost believed them this time!
Instead they made player progression pretty much fully about an rng store that refreshes only once every hour. But credit for fatshark, crafting is not where the rng is, it’s the store!
By re-rolling a trait, it locks the others. So you still have to hope that the weapon you get will have all but 1 trait that you want. If we upgrade a weapon from Gray, the traits are RNG. So, better hope that you get the traits you want still because you can only reroll 1. They also said in the crafting blog that traits are going to be more and more expensive the more you reroll.
what really bothers me is that although it did take a long time to get the VT2 crafting to where it is now, it’s good and it works well. It very easily could just be copy/pasted over, and it would fit their promises for the Darktide crafting well. What they’re doing now definitely isn’t “the core of the progression” system, it’s more RNG trash and we’re being told that it’s good and we’ll like it.
Why are we just being fed garbage, and yet are told that “they’ve learned from previous systems” while making things worse and worse? What they’re showing us is simply not what they’re saying it is.
The thing about the VT system is it was only good if you got a Red weapon and had the materials to roll the stats until you got what you want. To someone with hundreds of hours, that was fine, but it sucked for onboarding. The whole system was built on lootbox drops.
So how is this so much worse?
We essentially need a red weapon (though with imperfect stats) that already has one of the properties we want, because we can’t reroll both. And loot boxes have just been replaced with a store, so we can’t save up drops or farm them. It’s all on a timer.
I’d say the system Darktide is going for has a lot of potential. But the biggest issue is the store rng and wait times, improve that a lot and get rid of 1 perk re-roll restriction.
I can live with depending on the store for rolls, but we should be able to change everything else about it. Moving blessings from other weapons and combining them so they’re more powerful is all fine, but we should be able to reroll both perks. That is a crazy restriction with no purpose.
You know what you’re right - for some reason I thought that you could just pick what perks you wanted. I had it mixed up in my head that the change to make it so it would cycle logically instead of it being pure RNG meant that it was just selectable - so I’m wrong.
But I feel that’s still better. Although sure I have to click a bunch to get what I want, the options roll through a cycle rather than it being pure RNG - So I know I’ll be able to get what I want eventually. Here it’s pure RNG to hope that all except 1 trait are the ones that you want. If not, you’re SOL. At least in VT2 I can click a bunch to get exactly what I want. It would be even more ideal to just like, have a dropdown menu or something and pick what I want.
This is restrictive for no other reason but force you to spend time trying to get what you wanted.
The perfect crafting system, funnily enough, was the one they made for Weaves. Play missions to unlock points, spend points to improve the weapon and choose the specific bonuses you wanted. Just a shame it was attached to weaves and not the main game.
That’s a great point, I forgot about that. Yeah the way weapons were handled in weaves was awesome.
Man I’m just getting so bummed. Weapons in weaves, the mode in chaos wastes. So many great pieces of development here and there that just…for some reason didn’t show up here.
Let’s just appreciate how absolutely nuts the RNG factor is on a Curio with this system:
Any given curio is only a 1 in 4 chance to have the base stat you want.
Then it has to roll 2 out of 3 perks correctly, and there are about 20 perks (22 according to a list I’ve seen, but I haven’t personally seen some of the stats on there ever, so I’m just going with a round number here) The perks also come in 4 power levels, so that means it’s really more 80 perks if you want max stats. The chance to get the right perks is 3/80 and then 2/80, since you need two out of three right.
So, just on the stats alone we’re at 1 out of 4*(80/3)*(80/2).
That’s only a 1 in ~4256 chance to get a curio with the correct stats you need just to be able to build the item.
But here is the thing, that’s before we’ve factored the rarity of the curio’s base power level into it. I’ve never even seen a curio with 100 base power in my entire time playing the game now. Not one. So we’re talking about a 1 in ~4256 chance to get the right stats on an item that doesn’t show up even once in a month of playing.
I really hope they pivot on that. Because when put this way, it is actually insane - especially when they say they want to give us agency and reduce the RNG nature of crafting.
They’re not doing that at all with this decision.
The game makes you open boxes to reach 300 item power in VT2 though, which necessarily means routine cleaning of your inventory and piles of dust before you even hit 300 power. I never once had a resource avaliability problem with the massive amounts of dust I had after they allowed you to break dust down into lower grades. I could literally only fault it for being boring reroll x whatever number of times RNG with no player agency.
Here that weapon I stalked hours of no actual gameplay just loading the game and checking the store might get bricked just by turning it green. If your one blessing at blue is bad start over. If the store actually gave you the material to start on this pitiable grind repeatedly it would be less painful.
I’d say they’ll pivot in a year in classic fatshark terms, but now there’s not even mods for them to copy to figure out what they should’ve been doing this whole time.