Random core item stats have no place in this game

In reaction to post After the crafting Update, Good Enough?
I believe the core of the problem here isn’t neccessarily the locks (as frustrating as completely bricking an item by upgrading it is…)


In my eyes, by far the absolutely worst part of the whole game is the RANDOMIZED BASE STATS of each item.


Rolling for 2 good perks/blessings out of 4 is bad enough for a number of reasons:

  • RNG lottery in a game where natural item acquisition is extremely slow compared to actual looter games, which devolves the endgame gearing process into buying hundreds of white items hoping for a few that will roll 2/4 desired stats… with no option to mass salvage, of course.
  • Very limiting factor in trying out new builds, you still need many “usable” copies of each item depending on which stats are locked. This will only get worse and actually work directly against the new skill trees.
  • It makes any future blessing/perk balance update potentially much more frustrating, because now you have a different stat priority for your build and ooops, you locked the wrong one previously. Get rekt.

Now amplify all this by 200 since in order to even begin thinking of all the things you want to roll on your favorite weapon, you first need a usable base → which brings us back to buying hundreds and thousands of white weapons from Brunt’s.

Especially stats like damage, armor pen, speed, mobility HAVE TO be defined by the weapon type/variant itself. It makes absolutely no sense for it to be random in a game like this (where e.g. breakpoints are game changing).


It’s not intuitive, it’s not fun, it doesn’t feel rewarding… it makes me wanna quit just one week after my 8-month break, again. In fact pretty much everyone I had on my Steam friendlist from VT2 is done with DT now for the same exact reason.

It doesn’t matter how much horizontal progression and build variety you add with your skill trees because THIS is what makes build experimenting or even building anything in the first place incredibly anti-fun.

And no, giving us power 380 items will not fix this, at all, because we still have to fight bad stat distribution between the 5 core stats.

15 Likes

The paragraphs below is a direct quote of you, Fatshark. This is what you used as part of pre-release marketing for Darktide in order to sell more copies to people who were already frustrated with crafting in VT2.
Why does everything you actually do go directly against everything you say and promise?
Either you have a rogue developer somewhere or are willing to blatantly lie to sell more copies.
I’m not sure which is worse.


Crafting in Darktide
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.

6 Likes

Totally agree.

Just take mobility for instance, mobility should be defined by the weapon type not RNG.

8 Likes

I completely agree.

3 Likes

If we could mitigate all RNG that is involved (by having the ability to upgrade our items to perfection), i would not mind random stats.
Randomness in the stats of base items would simply determine how many ressources you have to farm in order to max them out.

But since we do not have that, RNG kinda sucks balls.

6 Likes

Yep, it’s a dumb system that throws everything they (didn’t) learn from not one but two vermintide games into the trash.

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i think they have a place however it should be based on your level,

Level 1 - 9 = shops have Gray and Green items, base item Lv 100-200,
Level 10 - 19 = shops have Green and Blue items, base item Lv 200-300, Lv 1-2 Blessings.
Level 20 - 29 = shops have Blue and Purple items, base item Lv 300-380, Lv 2-3 Blessings.
Level 30 = shops have only Purple items, base item Lv 360-380, only Lv 3 Blessings.

this way when at max level you would have good options for weapons in the Armory.
with all items being Purple and having Lv 3 blessings you would know most the weapon stats.
this would give you much better view of what a weapon is and what it can become.

Blessings seem to be tied to the level.

I noticed that I’m still missing some LV1 Blessings. Those NEVER come up on a Level 30 Character.

You can still get T 1-2 blessings to complete your collection. Just buy blue items from the armory and extract the blessings from them.

Just IMO: Those have never T1 Blessings as far as I noticed. Lowest is T2. Seldom. T3 is common for me and I have 6 Level 30 Character.

EDIT: We should just be able to buy Blessings.

EDIT 2: I was totally wrong… must be that I haven’t seen a one of the missing T1 Blessings in the shop like forever. So my brain did trick me into believing things…

But why? What does this add to the game?
Getting a random item or two per hour isn’t rewarding, this isn’t a looter game… but FS seems keen on using looter levels of bad RNG anyway.
You focus on shops, but the shops are bad by design, you are not supposed to get an endgame weapon there… Brunt only rolling up to T2 blessings is their way of bringing down your chances of a “perfect” item here to absolute minimum possible within current gear system. Ofc you can still buy white/green and actually have a higher chance of rolling T3/4 perks and blessings but that’s probably just an oversight on FS’s part.

The most rewarding thing (apart from meme builds) in Tide games has always been overcoming the odds, finishing a hard map. Not checking a stupid NPC shop and getting a half usable weapon once every few days…

Knowing that you are having a hard time only because you have to hit 7/10 enemies one more time because you’re missing a breakpoint with your weapon because RNG decided so and the only thing you can do about it is go bang your head against the wall for couple more hours and buy 250 more white copies of said weapon… makes this all so much less fun.

If I wanted a bad looter game I could just go play Diablo.

I think like you… stats are totally dumb, especially damages.

They should not have introduced them… but now, I don’t think that they will be removed. But, if they would remove them, I would not complain… even the contrary.

There’s also a lot of hidden goofs on the bars that you probably aren’t even aware of. Like this relationship between damage and charge rate on the plasma gun which is definitely some kind of math error with the plasma itself. For whatever reason 60% charge will do more damage than 80% charge, but this relationship is flat somewhere at 70% bar. It can make a T4 maniacs perk with 80/80 damage stat roll 752 damage for a body shot and no ult, but if your charge roll is higher your damage will max somewhere around 735.

pretty crazy considering that random bug lets you 2 shot a tox/dreg flamer, or waste another shot.

To prove my point further, after 415 hours I’ve just gotten a first ever 17% toughness curio.
I genuinely thought 16% was the max roll until now.
Nice RNG Fatshark, I really feel rewarded for my time now :))

So did it come with 3 bad perks?

The crafting system and it’s problems has annoyed almost all of my friends who were looking forward to this game as well. They actually stopped playing Darktide faster then they stopped playing vermintide 2, and they actually like 40k more than fantasy.

The crafting system and how it functions is the soul root of the issue of why they aren’t getting many players. It’s to the point where people would argue that Vermintide 2 is less tedious because at least you can get items where you can reroll everything and not be locked out of specific stats because you rerolled too many things.

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Pretty much. I’d go so far as to argue vermintide would not have had a pro scene if red items didn’t exist. Vermintide has an RNG loot system but it has a discrete END to the grind in the form of red items, put in enough effort and eventually you will receive a weapon with perfect stats that you can configure as you like. You can also disassemble red items of the wrong type and craft a new one of a different type if RNG isn’t giving you what you need.

Darktide doesn’t have any of that and desperately needs a red item equivalent. Since darktide’s loot system is 100% open ended RNG you could get the perfect item tomorrow, or you could play the game for 100 years and not get what you want. It would be extremely unlikely, but the fact that it is even possible for the game to do that to you should be considered a crime.

2 Likes

Experience, Curio drop chance and Pox Hounds… so yes, naturally.
EXCITING.

Same here. Everyone I regularly played VT2 with has been done with Darktide for some time now and the reason is always the same - “I’d like to actually play the game and try out different builds… but I can’t unless I grind for months and then upgrade 651741651 white items and still probably don’t get the gear I need for my desired builds.”

And we all REALLY wanted to like the game, but even with a heavily biased community of people who love WH40K and will put up with a lot of bad… FS still somehow manages to make this so frustrating even the biggest Warhammer nerds quit.

1 Like

All my friends have left this game because of this system lol, literally all they have to do is give me a darktide athanor and I can finally stop engaging with this abhorrent crafting system and hopefully work on making the gore more enhanced and varied @FatsharkCatfish pass this along ty, need a super customisable system and more gore

2 Likes