Red Weapons seem like they could fix to a lot of problems right about now

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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I know in my bones there’s plans for red weapons. There has to be. Why else cap out stats at 80%?

So, assuming that a red quality weapon all start at zero, but can eventually reach 100% in every stat (Which is sheer speculation and nothing more) here’s a list of problems that could fix.

1.) Make Melk Useful in Endgame. If the random boxes had a chance of getting a Red Weapon, Melk Money could be spent there instead of piling up. Also, add a button to automatically convert the non-reds to mats to reduce menu fatigue. Being able to “Bulk Buy” crates might also help us old-timers dump our Melk Money.

2.) Incentive to play higher difficulties. If higher difficulties increased chance to get a red weapon from an Emperor’s Gift.

3.) Incentive to collect Grims/Scriptures, if doing so increases the chance to get a red weapon.

4.) Material Sink. If Red Weapons start with stats at 0, it would take a lot of materials to empower them to 80% across all stats. The sink could then be made sinkier if you had to spend mats to empower each stat individually after 80%.

5.) Improving Havoc rewards. If your weekly havoc box had significantly higher chance of a Red Weapon instead of mats, with the chance based on havoc rank. This would encourage people to return to the mode at least once a week.

6.) More rewards. Not only would this raise the value of Melk money and mats, but also open new avenues for rewards. For example, the chance to gain a “Redifier” that lets you choose what weapon to Redify, could be a good reward when a player first completes a challenging mode.

Or a “Red Boost” consumable that increases the chance your next Emperors Gift is a Red, could be a good reward to give out more frequently (For events, regular completes, special assignments, etc). Such consumables could also turn your name and/or title Red during the mission, having a small cosmetic incentive to use them even if they don’t give a red. They could also boost the chance of your teammates also getting a red, which gives the cosmetic more oomph in my opinion (It might make strangers like you more).

Problems it’d cause.

1.) Increased RNG. Since Fatshark fixed the crafting system, I say they can have a little bit of RNG back as a treat, but I understand folks hesitancy on the matter. The old item progression system has left its scars.

2.) Power Imbalance. Power Creep is real and should be feared. And it’s hard to take power away once given.

3.) Delaying the inevitable. Once a player has all red weapons fully empowered, they’ll begin to accrue useless materials and be deincentivised again. This will happen faster the fewer operators a player plays, as they need less reds. Don’t underestimate a person’s luck and determination.

4.) Open the gateway to “Red Hell”. This is only an issue if you don’t account for duplicates. You could have a pipeline to convert dupes into Redifiers, but I think a better solution is to just not allow a user to obtain duplicate red items. This has the added benefit of making each Red more likely to be a Red you want overtime, as there’s fewer and fewer reds to get.

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Red weapons WOULD have fixed a lot of problems in the old system (pre-Unlocked and Loaded), whether capped at 80% or 100% is inconsequential as long as their properties and blessings could be freely (but perhaps expensively) exchanged any number of times as you please. It would have given us a way out of the old crafting system via working towards it by playing the game. It could have given Melk an actual purpose by making him the red vendor, whether via his existing marks an replacing his current store or a new system, whatever. The pain of the old crafting would have been great incentive to pursue these weapons too.

As you say, capping at 100% would cause power creep issues so capping all at 80% would be perfectly acceptable in my eyes.

But now they are completely unnecessary. We can already exchange properties and blessings any number of times. In fact, for dirt cheap. We can already get weapons with all but one stat maxed at 80%, also for dirt cheap. If we already get a near-perfect weapon for peanuts -so cheaply that it has ruined the economy of the game and rendered all currencies worthless- then why should they upend the balance of the game just to introduce “super-perfect” weapons? Especially when balance is already a mess, and the lowest-tech melee weapons (knife and duelling sword) are head-and-shoulders meta over everything else? There’s just too little incentive.

I grant that the game’s economy is currently a mess, as I said (and some aspects, such as Melk, have always been pretty bad), but I can’t see a good way out of it. You’d either have to revert some of the crafting overhaul from last year, reduce rewards, or jack up prices. None of these are great. To complicate the issue by adding even more over-powered weapons to the mix would be a step in a worse direction, I think.

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They managed to keep RNG Curios. That’s more than enough. No more RNG for the Sharks at all, please.

Yeah, there needs to be some SERIOUS balancing changes prior to Red Weapons ever becoming a thing.

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We can only hope.

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Not exactly speculation. Inside the game code, weapons’ and curios’ stats can theoretically reach 100% and return usable values. In fact, you can see the top of any given stat’s band in the inspect window. It’s just that all stats are capped at 80% (plus rounding errors, lol) when the item is generated. Likely to show that in the grim darkness of the far future, nothing works as intended anymore. Everything is at least a bit broken.

To further fuel conspiracy theories, red weapons were shown in at least one pre-launch dev stream where they show-cased the gameplay. They had red backgrounds on their inventory cards and all their stats were 100% (only shown by a full bar, there were no visible numbers back then). These were likely just dev aids for testing purposes but they were clearly batting the idea around. Maybe they were intended at one point, hard to tell when the creative direction for this game seems to have taken so many twists and turns.

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Yeah, fatshark’s dug themselves a pretty deep hole. I don’t expect them climbing out of it unscathed, some folks are going to riot.

But I will never accept a permanent 80% cap as the valid solution here. I’d sooner permit them making the current 80%, 100% and reduce everyone’s power by 20% across the board or completely remove the 25% damage perks entirely and rebalance the difference.

Also, we can’t really use poor weapon balance as an excuse not to fix problems when weapon balance is fluid and ever-changing. DS and knife may be OP today, but that’s not set in stone. I mean, it’s not like we have to trade Red Weapons for Balanced Weapons here, we can have both.

Arguably, the longer they wait to add Red Weapons the harder it’ll be to balance.

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I think the only problem now is weapons capping out at 80% which just triggers my tism
If 80% is the max it might as well be 100%

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