The original crafting system in the game was - let’s all be honest - a massive dark spot on an otherwise OK game. It was grindy – there was no real reason to unlock low level blessings, and keeping track of what you could and could not craft onto gear, or what was even possible to craft, was a nightmare. It needed an overhaul. Even fatshark’s previous game Vermintide II, which had faults of its own in the crafting, was significantly better than the original release of the Darktide crafting. Unfortunately, after ruminating on the mastery crafting system, I’m confident it’s just worse:
Mastery conversion was not handled well. As stated above, there was no real need to learn low level blessings if you had already unlocked the higher level one, or were waiting to find it. Rather than converting a player’s max base weapon level watermark (up to 380) to their mastery level for high level players, this essentially means many people needed to completely restart leveling weapons from scratch to be able to craft anything.
Weapon mastery is tracked per-weapon instead of by the obvious melee/ranged split. This means it’s impractical to bother leveling everything and play around with different weapon types. Instead, you’re best rewarded by grinding out one weapon class, and using that on as many builds as you can. Getting into maelstrom missions only to have to revert back to leveling a 100-mastery mace is a terrible gameplay loop. You can’t run your leveling weapons on the missions that grant the most XP – i.e. the missions you normally run and the level of difficulty you otherwise enjoy the most.
This is compounded by the fact that anytime a new weapon is released, you have to go back to lower difficulties (or get carried on higher ones and hold your team back) just in order to grind out the levels to play end game content you’ve already played out.
This entire principle of making players re-loop through lower level content to level gear walks back what Darktide started with. It walks back Vermintide’s crafting systems. It punishes the player by rewarding them less for exploring new content and new weapons they otherwise haven’t utilized yet. Moreover, it’s important to note that this mastery system originated from Warframe – a completely different game where you can easily fill a single weapon slot with trash (i.e. unleveled) gear without hamstringing your ability to finish a mission efficiently. There are definitely some changes which could be done to streamline the system much better, and while it will never be the best crafting system in its current form, I don’t think it takes a huge leap to take it from worse than the original crafting system the game had to better:
Scale mastery experience significantly higher, proportional to a player’s watermark level, i.e. maxing out a weapon mastery should only take a game or two at a lower level if a player is/was already at 380. The philosophy here is that a player should have touched a weapon at least once before taking it into a maelstrom or havok mission. This still has a faulty reward system, but is at least much better than what we have currently
Group weapon masteries by similar weapon classes. Force swords/power swords/daggers/axes. Functionally these weapons all play very similar – the only reason to keep them separate in mastery is… well really there is none, it’s a totally unnecessary grind for the player on lower level content, and there’s no monetary reason for FS to want players repeatedly grinding out trash gear
Let players designate a training weapon class, so-to-speak. This would just earn some passive percentage of XP from missions but not be weilded on the mission itself, perhaps rewarded passively over time while the player is logged off (concept being the player is training with what they learned on recent missions offline with new weapons)
Really, anything that prevents the lower-the-difficulty-or-burden-your-team-in-maelstrom mentality forced into the game with this new mastery system would be a massive step forward, and I hope FS doesn’t have too much pride to look at their system’s faults and see how they can better reward the player for playing their game, instead of wasting each and every player’s time, on a grand scale.
No, you don’t, you can sacrifice weapons and basically turn resources into mastery. The entire premise of this argument is bad. Punitively bad RNG was not better than slight grind. Completely wrong. There isn’t more to say.
Fair enough if you want the mastery system improved, but the hyperbole isn’t needed.
Diamantine is a bit too low but the working towards what you’d like and having control over that is way better than the old system. Especially since you couldn’t adjust anything towards max rating, so a lot of times you were just coping.
But the 300 diamantine per game is pretty painful for new players.
If you are good enough to be constantly playing auric+…you almost certainly have enough dockets to just. Buy fifty of the new weapon at Brunt, upgrade to green, and plop them into Hadron’s lap for cheap and easy mastery.
And even that is a tiny, TINY issue compared to the godawful original system.
have you tried playing a game as a fresh level 1 char? the levelling process in this game is so bad anything that can be done to elevate the struggle is good.
crafting is easier and better than the old system(s) and anyone who disagrees is wrong.
you now need far less resources to level a weapon than before if you want RNG just upgrade it and youll get it you dont have to interact with the crafting system if you enjoy suffering.
took me 30k plasteel and 1mil dockets to max mastery for everything when the crafting system came out before they corrected the XP.
that would not have gotten me a single good weapon before the crafting system.
No, original crafting system was not better than what we have now.
It took me 2 575 hours to aquire all of the blessings in the game before crafting update.
(Before new weapons were introduced).
You can either play games and max out at about 30 auric damnation games, or just buy the levels entirely. I’d say thats a good trade for basically no rng.
you can literally buy your way to success with dockets by buying weapons making them green and sacrificing them it cost about 500k dockets to fully master one and get a perfect roll to use
Darktide’s new Crafting System is the best in the entire Tide series and the Itemisation Overhaul was a net positive for the game.
You’re now guaranteed to get all of the Weapons, Stats, Perks, Blessings, et cetera that you want by simply playing the game. The old Crafting System was entirely reliant on RNG and thus worse in every possible way.
If you want to instantly Master a Weapon Family, just do what @Murderer and @Ragnarok101 both said:
You earn enough Ordo Dockets in around 10 Missions of Regular Damnation to instantly Master a Weapon Family this way. I’ve already Mastered half of the Weapon Families in the game via this exact method, in fact.
Just please actually play the game instead of trying to ruin it for the rest of us, for the love of the Emperor.
Yeah have to agree with the others. The new system is a bajillion times better. It still has some rng but compared to the old system it is barely noticeable
While you will never convince me that steady master progression is worse than the RNG crap-fest that was OG crafting, I will say I also absolutely minimise my interaction with mastery progression.
As a new player, I imagine it would be fun to level your weapons alongside your character as you move up the difficulties.
As a returning player who plays exclusively Damnation+, the entire system is a waste of my time. Having to spam Brunt weapon acquisition, so I can spam Hadron upgrades for most effective Hadron sacrifice spam… is super duper tedious.
I appreciate the attempt to add a cool weapon levelling system, and also the ‘workaround’ so players who just want to max their weapons can do so. Unfortunately I feel that for most interactions with the system, it’s simply a drag. Low-level weapons are simply too restricting for the difficulty you enjoy playing for it to be fun an interesting to level them in this way imo.
