A huge part of my Vermintide 2 experience was learning the routes through levels to find and collect all of the tomes and grimoires which provided a consistent, repeatable but fun secondary objective that enabled the higher difficulty scenarios by reducing your health and restricting the resources your party may have. With the warchest system, we’d be rewarded with better odds for higher tier gear and a faster progression through the item levels.
In Darktide, the role of scriptures and grimoires seems to have been entirely reworked in such a way that they take a substandard backseat and only take relevance in weekly challenges, finding anywhere from 8 to 12 of either over the course of the week. Collecting scriptures and grimoires rewards you with a small bonus of EXP And dockets, though grimoires have been enhanced to steadily corrupt your team’s health the longer it takes to complete a mission.
I feel like this change in the system has robbed Darktide of the same exploration incentive that Vermintide had and it often leaves levels feeling lacking in complexity and now reward, as the warchest system is gone in favor of the rotating vendor. The way its been set up, I can join Grimoire or Scripture missions and see that absolutely nobody has any actual vetted interest in finding them, and it’s often left up to the player that needs to ask others to sacrifice their inventory space for minimal gain and some time investment.
Of the potential fixes I’d propose beyond just reimplementing them in the same vein as the first games which I’m mostly in favor of, collecting these in missions should reward you with a Gift from the Emperor with the quality of the weapon scaling to the mission difficulty and completion amount. On Malice and below, collecting 1-3 scriptures could instead reward you with a grey>green>blue weapon or trinket, while grimoires could have no chance of rolling a grey weapon. In 4+, these could be expanded to only roll green>blue>purple, following the same grimoire rule, to reward the map scrawl associated with such intense difficulty.
Thoughts, prayers, opinions?