(Poll) In regards to grinding in the itemization rework

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
81

In my opinion, grind isn’t what Darktide is about.

I responded in another post yesterday with an answer that, I confessed, made me appear to be gate-keeping and sounding like a bloody karker, in which I compared Tide games to the niche game Dark and Darker in the sense that only a special type of person finds Tide games enjoyable for over 1000 hours.

My personal passion for Darktide stems not from playing the gambling system, switching perks and blessings, or obsessing over stats; rather, my continual development of in-game skill, game knowledge, reflexes and learning new things by playing with players that are better than me is what makes the game so addictive.

My playtime if anyone is interested:

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82

Absolutely nothing to be sorry for. You’re very much on point. The issue is also getting others to understand what we want from a game like this, and, more importantly, what these games are all about. It also doesn’t help that not even the developers understand the core appeal of their own game.

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83

I’m fine with a bit of grind (hell i played Warframe for years) but would rather it be closer to like…5-6 hours maybe per character, less if you already have a lot of resources built up.

Basically the kind of play time where you don’t really think about it but just play, get your unlocks, and then try a new things.

I believe if i need to bust out a calculator or do math to figure out the least terrible way to level then you have already messed it up and need to go back to the drawing board.

We have a bunch of complicated caviets for no reason.

“You need to find a good base to improve it, no you can’t just point buy your way on an ok weapon”

“Oh you can only improve it so much, improving to many stats is not allowed”

“If you improve you base too much you are locked out of the better blessings and perks”

“For some reason this needs to require a bunch of resources to not even get max stats and we are still going to limit you to 80%”

For comparison Warframe, despite being a game that has a lot of stuff to do, is fairly simple.

Get weapon, use weapon, install mods, improve weapon, finish leveling weapon, get XP towards your overall account, level that up, make the next leve up easier. Forma is also easy to understand, if you get a build you like you put in a modifier that lowers the cost of a specific mod type. That way you can fit higher cost or more mods onto a build.

The most complicated it gets is Rivens and Incarnations which in itself is not rocket science, it’s just another way to improve existing weapons beyond ways that you normally can.

Making people grind just to put a bunch of arbitrary caps in because you maybe didn’t balance certian blessing interactions or perk interactions is madness.

“Oh well if they let people improve their weapons more the game will be too easy”

Hey, hear me out, do what you did previously and make a harder difficulty. Bump some numbers up and adjust some abilities. Boom, done.

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84

I am a bit surprised by what was said regarding the migration, because it sounds like some progress in regard to blessing unlocks will actually be reset.

Here is what i think they should migrate our stuff

  • we keep our existing weapons as they are (with their stats, perks and blessings), so that we can keep using the items we already have
  • we keep all blessings that we unlocked already
  • put our weapon family xp level at what ever seems fit, based on the amount of blessings we have unlocked (mostly looking at T3 and T4 blessings), so we might have to level the weapon a bit before we can make further modifications, but at least we can keep using the weapons that we already have, as they are
  • let us use diamantine to boost weapon xp, so that we do not need to use a weapon in combat, before we can modify it properly

Seems like something they should be able to do.

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85

I played VT1 and VT2. Of the pair, I liked 1 better for what it was because while everything was grind, in the end I had more freedom.

Now, usually people will say crafting was easier in VT2, which is absolutely true, but for most of my time in VT2, what you were able to craft was much more limited then in VT1.

In VT1, I had 6 sets of orange brace of pistols with several different ‘blessings.’ Because you got three. My favorite was bloodlust, which healed, rupture, which gave overpen, and ammo hoarder, which gave more ammo.

Then in VT2, I got top end pistols much faster… but they were much worse. The ‘blessing’ list was so limited. You got two traints and a ‘blessing’ and the traits and blessings were meh.

A typical setup might be + crit change, + crit power, and
Barrage - Consecutive attacks against the same targets boosts attack power by 5.0% for 5.0 seconds.
There were only five-ish options, and they were fairly boring.

And that was as good as it would get. Because they didn’t want a lot of creativity in the weapons like in vt1. Almost put me off the game.

I’m getting worried that designer is back in control and we are going to lose all our blessings, never get them back, and we’ll get to the top of the tree fast with our boost and there will be nothing there much worth having.

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86

Fatshark has always historically picked one of the lower difficulties to balance around. For Vermintide 2 they always balanced around Legend despite the fact that it ends up putting Cata out of whack with their balance. Fortunately modders picked up the slack there. I never understood why Fatshark doesn’t balance from the hardest then just do tweaks to modify the numbers for lower difficulties; it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do that.

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87

Their devs can’t handle the highest difficulties.

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88

Where is the following option:

“I have already done the work. I’m NOT interested in Fatshark introducing gear inflation to ruin the gear I have bought and spent time & resources on?”

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89

One thing to also keep in mind about the comparison between VT 1 and 2 is that when we were rolling for improvements on our gear in 1, we picked either what we’re rolling or the numbers associated with it, and the more important part to me is that we could keep our rolls if the new one was worse. There were no steps back, and everything could be rolled.

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90

There was also the bounty board too. God it’s crazy how downgraded the sequel was to the first game in terms of itemization.

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91

God, I forgot about the bounty board! Don’t even remember how exactly it worked, I just know that there was some difficult (for me at least) challenges to eventually get either red weapons or nifty hats.

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92

I still have an active bounty for Kruber’s red mace and shield. I’ll get around to it, eventually.

93

It’s crazy to me how in each consecutive game Fatshark manages to erode player agency from their games. Vermintide 2 had you rolling on lootboxes for loot. Darktide completely dropped the pretense and just want head straight into a complete gacha system with no regards to player agency. If the 'tide games didn’t have such excellent, tight, gameplay, with in-depth mechanics that facilitate a high skill ceiling; then I highly doubt there would have been such a dedicated following for the games, because Fatshark is constantly fumbling on auxiliary systems outside of the main gameplay.

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94

TBF just getting the weapons in VT 1 was absolutely horrid, especially the DLC ones. Can’t tell you how many times I ran the shortest Drakenhof map on the easiest setting just to get a glaive, but it was far beyond what was acceptable and soured my opinion of Fatshark’s obsession with RNG.

But once you got the weapon, it was vastly superior to VT 2’s and DT’s gearing. No locks, no bricking, no resetting progression on a weapon, and it was easier to keep an armory around for in case you wanted to try a different build.

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95

Ahaha. Reminds me of this classic video of this poor guy rolling dice just to get a white:

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96

Same, but the Dwarf level for the Falchion. Even though it wasn’t a falchion, it was a messer. Then I killed about a bajillion rats with my new messer. Eventually got it in red.

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97

Of course people are gonna prefer to get everything maxed out immediately but we need to be realistic.
No game gives you that.
This new system is infinitely better than the current one. I’m guaranteed to get results for my efforts and it’s all I ask.
Yes you still have one layer of RNG in the stats of the weapon, but we still need to see how the odds will be to get a 370+ rating, even if the odds are the same as now, I think i would still be satisfied.

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98

I’ve already done the work over 1200 hours, if I have to level a single item that I’ve used over this time, I’d feel betrayed. I specifically stay away from games that reset my progress regularly, even if they interest me otherwise.

I don’t want to have to use an item in order to progress with it as that would mean that I’d either need to play on difficulties I don’t like or with gear that’s too weak.
If I have the currency, let me max it out and put on it precisely what I want.

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99

Plenty of games does give you that though?
Left for Dead 2, GTFO, Sea of Thieves, Magicka, Barony… Just to mention a few off the top of my head co-op games that are still releveant today.

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100

Man, Left 4 Dead, the gold standard for these games, the progenitor that all these games attempt to be, is still being played to this day and is still pulling in tens of thousands of players on a daily basis while featuring no grind.

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