Red Tier Weapons & Crafting Unlocked

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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Reposting a comment I made on NewNoise10’s topic about removing crafting locks on weapons. I think it’s worth starting my own topic as I cover some similar points, and make some other suggestions on how to improve the game.

Create a special resource that can be found in Malice or higher missions, make it rare (maybe 20% chance for it to spawn in a hiding place somewhere in the mission), maybe call it STC-File. There’s a lot of ways to make the resource compatible with lore. For extra fun you could have it take up an inventory slot like one of the books. When you finish the mission with the resource in your inventory, you can redeem it at the shrine of the omnissiah to upgrade an ascendant weapon into a red tier weapon. ++Red tier weapons used to be the emptiomy of gear in the older tide type games of Fatshark++ This gives a stat of your choice a 20% bonus up to a cap of 100%, and unlocks all perks and blessings, allowing you to alter them at will so long as you have the crafting materials to do so. You can redeem multiple STC-Files on the same red tier weapon to keep improving stats on it up to a cap of 100% each. That way you can have a “perfect” weapon. This gives both the player base, and the devs what they want in one fell swoop. We get the crafting system we want, they get to add a low effort game mechanic that increases our play time, and there is new content to strive for. Win-win.

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Adding a new ressource seems like unnecessary effort to me.

Diamantine is effectively useless right now (there is no mechanic where diamantine is the bottleneck: it always comes down to plasteel).
They could let us spend diamantine on deterministic crafting options.

I have been suggesting this for many months now. Let’s hope that FS listen at some point.
They should just remove diamantine costs from consecration entirely and add new ways to spend it.
Lock removal.
learning blessings of choice.
Upgrading weapon modifiers.

This way, the ressource imbalance issues (dockets/plasteel/diamantine) are solved as well, and our previously farmed ressources do not become obsolete.

Also, the entire experience of the loot- and crafting system would shift

  • “This aspect of the item is bad, so the item is ruined.”
    turns to “These aspects of the item are already good, so it is cheaper to make perfect.”

  • “I spent all of my ressources but got nothing in return. My time got wasted.”
    turns to “I may have gotten nothing from spending those ressources on rng systems, but i can still spend my diamantine to get exactly what i want, so i got something for the time i put in.”

  • “I have not seen any progression in weeks.”
    turns to “Every mission i play, gets me a bit closer to upgrading my gear to perfection.”

Edit:
In case anyone is wondering how this would solve ressource imbalances, instead of just shifting them over to a lack of diamantine instead, here is why it would work:

Since spending diamantine is the only way to upgrade modifiers past the 380 baseline, this is the primary sink for diamantine.
Removing locks and learning blessings, would be something that you would realistically use, but do not 100% need if you get lucky with the other currencies.

Base Items: You can spend extra dockets to get a better base item (and save diamantine later on) or you can save dockets and spend more diamantine to fix the modifiers later.

Locks: You can either buy and upgrade a ton of weapons (for dockets and plasteel) hoping to get something that only needs 1 lock removed (or maybe even none), or you can save dockets and plasteel but spend more diamantine to fix the entire item later.

Blessings: You can upgrade a bunch of items, hoping for your desired blessing to pop up, then rip the blessing out of the item. Or you can spend diamantine to just buy the exact blessing that you want.

You would be able to spend dockets and plasteel on rng systems, trying to get as close as possible, then use your diamantine to polish the item and to upgrade it beyond 380 modifier lvl.
If you are fed up with rng, you can alternatively just spend some of your diamantine to circumvent the rng (which comes at the cost of reducing the amount of diamantine that you have available for modifier upgrades past 380).

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Fantastic idea. Using diamantine to custom craft up a weapon would make it immediately valuable. As it stands, as you mentioned, diamantine is worthless compared to plasteel.

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QFT

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Interesting ideas. I agree that adding a new resource is unnecessary.

Adding higher base stat items to the game is a tricky topic.
The current 380max. system is balanced around the current D5 (Damnation) difficulty level (and some may argue that even now the game is too easy at the highest levels). So a ton of rebalancing will be necessary. Adding D6 would make sense but again that doesn’t solve the problem at lower levels (you can’t just not give higher stat weapons to Heresy players). Anyway I heard FS did a good job of balancing this in VT2 so they should manage.

The game is designed to have items with higher base ratings than 380 (don’t think that we will ever see perfect 500s that would be even boring, but 470-480 are probably coming in the close future). Also there were red rarity items in the previous tide game which I believe will come to DT. They could upgrade all perks and blessing to the highest tier (currently they are purple tier4s, but maybe with the red item update tier5s will be added) and potentially remove the locks. If they don’t remove the locks than there must be a different type of upgrade that removes them - and diamantines would be perfect for that.
We started the game as rejects and we were told that for now all we can get is second hand gear that is not top quality. But since then we levelled up, became varlets and even many of us are regulars in Auric missions and part of important Special Assignments. We are getting to the point where we deserve more.
So I’m hoping that FS is working on this and in the next update we will get a big overhaul of the crafting system along with overhauls of Brunt’s shop and Melk’s shop (and even Emperor’s gifts and mission rewards for some modifiers etc.).

I wouldn’t mind grinding contracts and tough challenges for top notch gear instead of grinding for gold and resources just to loose it all in the Brunt’s and Hadron’s casino. So if I knew I have 50% chance (for the Emperor’s gift) to get a 480 base stat weapon with guaranteed top tier blessings and perks in every Auric Maelstrom mission after collecting both grimoires (they are no grims in Auric Maelstrom currently but they could be) than I would happily accept the challenge.

@Flawless ’ idea is also appealing - grinding for gold and resources which I know I can invest the way I want is great.

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They could simply allow us to upgrade all modifiers to 80 (400 overall) for now.
That would not require any rebalancing at all.
Pretty much all weapons have one stat that is not all that important, so having all 5 stats at 80, instead of just the 4 more important ones, does not make a big difference in regard to balance and gameplay
Although it makes a huge psychological difference.

They probably also should do what a mod already does:
Display a bar as full, when it is at 80 points, and show the “max stats” for the 80 point value, when hovering over the stat bar, instead of showing an irrelevant max stat for the theiretical 100 point value.

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