Meta shifts and rebalancing in Darktide is BRUTAL

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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So here is the deal, i am not against meta shifts or re-balancing per say, it can help keep a game from going stale if done right.

But with the current restrictive and RNG heavy system its a massive pain every time something you are using gets hit to hard with the nerf hammer, or in other cases, something might get buffed to a state where you actually want to test it out again but the game design is fighting against experimentation with tooth and nail.

As a recent example, lets look at Crucian Roulette, this was a great blessing for the burst fire HH guns, and i blew a bunch of materials and time to get the tier 4 version of this blessing ontop of having to acquire guns that had good enough base stats to warrant an upgrade, and after all that i had to roll the dice to see if Hadron would not screw me over during the upgrade process (which she kind of did). I also spent time and materials on experimenting with different blessing combinations.
A couple of weeks later it gets “fixed” and ends up being a relatively sub mediocre blessing, so that whole process ended up being a waste of time, and left me with a few guns i cant really do anything with due to the blessing/perk locks.
Now lets say the locks were not in place, at least i would still have a gun with good base stats that i could rebuild into something else, but as it is now, its back into the RNG hamster wheel which is not something i relish.

Even just experimenting with different weapons, trying to get a weapon that is under performing to work on damnation, or just testing out different blessing combinations, is so restricted by the games different design decisions that i feel its not worth it with the limited time i have with the game.

TLDR:
If you want to keep shifting the meta and re-balancing things to keep things fresh, remove the locks so players can deal with the changes without having to deal with more excessive grind as well.

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This thread includes this exact issue.
Help keeping it at the top and maybe we will see changes happen.

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Meanwhile, me playing Chainaxe and braced autogun in damnation doing perfetly fine…

Darktide isn’t an exceptionally hard game, playing META isn’t essential for success as long as the gear you bring to the missions makes sense and you know what to do with it, your old gear should still work

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It is not about meta, it is about playing the way you want to play it. And, in this case, putting a lot of the OP’s time into the quicksand that FS calls item system to win the coveted prize just to have it turned into junk by FS’s rebalancing.

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Meta shifts are just a part of it, i dont particularly follow the meta all that much as i play with whatever has a good mix between being fun and being efficient. Sometimes that ends up being a meta weapon, sometimes it does not, its all a bit dependent on how the game as a whole is balanced at the moment.

I bring up meta shifts to incorporate the people who are more focused on it into my argument, since they might get put on the RNG thread-mil more than people who are not to focused on the perceived meta due to how the meta tends to be the strongest weapons, and are therefore the weapons that tends to get nerfed or “reworked” first.

The point is that if they are going to shift things around like this, they need to give the players a more efficient way of rebuilding old weapons and building new weapons, so they can deal with these changes, and have the option to test out new things and experiment with different builds without having to spend a tedious amount of time grinding for materials/currency and dealing with the RNG.

Removing the locks on perks and blessings would be the preferable method for me personally, and really seems like it would be a lot quicker and easier than introducing another system thats suppose to alleviate the RNG like Brunts was suppose to do, and we all know how that ended up.

But i guess they gotta have their player retention tactics, even if it feels semi hostile towards the player base.

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Completely agree. It can take ages to build up a proper weapon with the right perks and blessings. Not to mention a lot of currency. To have the meta then shift and break your weapon means you now need to build an entirely new one, with different perks and blessings, and you need to spend all that currency again. Without red weapons that can be changed freely we are at the mercy of RNG.

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You are too gentle. Or is this a pair of euphemisms?

feels - is
semi - extremely

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Some builds only function with certain combinations. The fix to warp nexus and addition of wildfire recently makes blazing spirit + warp nexus Trauma an actually functional build but it does require both blessings at a high tier to really start working at all.

I got kinda lucky and happened to have a high warp nexus Trauma with good stats at the ready then Melk gifted me blazing spirit but I’m under no illusions about how long the process of getting that staff could have taken. I don’t think meta shifts is the major issue here but it does exacerbate the issues that are already present with build experimentation generally.

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It will be real fun when they eventually introduce new blessings and you gotta do another RNG cycle just to test them out on a weapon with decent base stats and whatever else you want on it to test it close to its zenith.

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I think that for a lot of players, including myself, you simply do not bother.

The only reason I got a Illisi Force Sword for my Psyker was because I absolutely hated the old Force Sword and Brunt gave me a good one very quickly with the correct blessing when consecrating.

This topic was what I used to hate in Diablo 3 before they reworked set items drop rate; where if you did not have the set, the build simply didn’t work.

If you wanted to play that Earthquake Barbarian (or whatever it was called, was a long time ago I played D3) you needed the set first then you could go for the build. That meant that your gear defined what build you were playing instead of you choosing what sounds fun to play.

I mean… Take this as an example; on my Veteran I have a 373 Force Sword with T2 and T3 blessing (no Power Cycler, but I do not care about that blessing) and a 369 Autogun on my Veteran with T2 and T3 Blessing.

Both these items have the correct perks and good modifiers.

Could I try to use the RNG shop to get the same weapons but as 380 rating and with higher version blessings? Yes, I absolutely could, but why would I bother?

The weird thing with modern game design is that it has created this idea, started either by the developers or the players, that games with RPG-ish features should not have a endpoint and just keep going forever.

To get it going forever games rely on gear grind as its end activity and at least for me, that really has to be the most uninteresting and uncreative way to extend playtime.

I played Quake 3, Blood multiplayer, Street Fighter, King of Fighters and Unreal Tournament to death back in the day and there was absolutley 0 playtime extend grinding at all in those game except for grinding out your own player skill.

It’s ok that games “end”.

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Yeah I got my first Bloodthirsty like 2 weeks before the nerf and it was so much fun I shelved my Ogryn for the entire duration buying and upgrading Chainswords for the gang.

Then it got nerfed into a pointless blessing.

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They’ve gotten much better at this from their previous projects.

In Vermintide 2, we had patches that killed entire playstyles and created entirely new ones.
So far, every weapon that got a readjustment here is still very effective. Appreciating that. I think Fatshark is a lot more respectful towards their own work now than they were in the past.

Cries in Kruber Halbeard and several infinite ammo / overcharge builds

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Its kind of mind blowing how long fatshark has been refusing to address this issue while their player base slowly hemorrhage.

We keep hearing how they are trying to address or at least respond to the things that the players bring up the most, but for some reason they always ignore this particular topic.

I kind of just want an answer at this point, if they say “No the locks are staying” then fine, i am just gonna drop the game because the RNG/grind is to excessive for my personal preferences.

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This is actually a good point, at least they haven’t completely dumpstered anything like repeater pistol yet.

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Yeah, currently it makes no sense to do all the grinding if they will keep rebalancing weapons “on the go” in a such harsh way.

It’s extremely unstable for the game that is out of Early Access.

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the game barely have 20% usable weaponry, and they making it worse

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I just assume that they’re going to keep the locks and generally terrible crafting and item system until they say anything so I already dropped the game.

They knew people hated the locks since they announced them, I think back in december? Now we’re in April and instead of making the crafting/item acquisition less terrible they just made it worse and worse.

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Not to be overly hyperbolic, but thats kinda like being in a burning house and dying from smoke inhalation while thinking to yourself “Hey, at least im not gonna burn to death”. Its still a bad situation.

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They tinkered with it a bit. Brunt actually letts you play any weapon and the addition of the blessing means that you don’t have to hunt for each and every blessing in the inventory if you want to rebless something, although (I’m being bona fide here) neglecting to see how long it would take to collect blessings, especially random. They also crippled additional crafting aspects like perks. So I would say that their improvements, which are at first more noticeable than the deteriorations, are here just to hide the lack of any real intention to deal with the Ineffable Design.

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Brunt’s trades acquiring specific weapon types with spending resources to blind box the stats and stats spread. RNG was barely reduced, just shifted elsewhere.