I know that these two things were ported almost as-is from Vermintide, where their design made sense.
In those games, you had all three Scriptures and both Grimoires in every map. It was a sort of “push your luck” mechanic, where the more of them you picked up, the better the rewards at the end, but the tougher the gameplay.
This doesn’t translate to Darktide, where you choose one or the other.
Scriptures is ALWAYS the better choice. Yes, there is one more to find, but they don’t lock you out of picking up and using Medipacks or Ammo Packs, they aren’t lost upon death, and they don’t put your Psykers and Sharpshooters in 1 shot range of a lot of specials. There are no extra rewards for going with Grimoires over Scriptures either.
Are there any plan to revisit the balancing between these two? Either giving better rewards to Grims for being a bigger challenge, or upping the difficulty of Scriptures to match Grims, or just giving both of these new mechanics more in line with Darktide in general. Because right now these things definitely feel like placeholder mechanics.
I agree. I really like how vermintide had implemented the book systems. I liked how you could see how the treasure reward would calculate your loot grade from the books, instead of just getting a rng item or nothing at all. I liked how grimoires were a fixed percentage cut of your hp, instead of just constantly corrupting everyone until they have no Hp left. Because on teams where my ogryn can just chill with the grim (the others are less experienced/take things slow with the team/are looking for crafting loot and don’t want to/can’t speedrun etc.), the squishy little one with the book will usually always die. I don’t know if keeping one grim at that point is useful or not, because unlike vermintide you don’t visually see your loot grade changing post game anymore. Even in cases when I try to protect the holder as much as I can from melee, at the final event when there is no med station and they might be getting overrun, they end up with barely any hp and can die to stray random chip damage/insta gib shotgunner spawns or other ranged and lose the book. And as you said, all the extra effort that goes into managing a grim is just not worth it compared to the ease of getting tomes.
I think the fact that people are asking for more rewards shows that Scriptures and Grims represents gameplay that just isn’t very fun or engaging. I question whether they should be in the game at all.
There are lots of alternatives you could implement for secondary objectives for instance defeating an optional boss, or completing an optional event. You could even re-work the Grimoire to be more mechanically interesting by making it a singular item with a known spawn location but picking it up causes increased spawn rates to try to stop players from escaping with it.
IMO the health leaching effect adds difficulty in a way that isn’t engaging or fun to interact with and mostly just ends up with lower hp classes needing to wait around more or increase the risk of a total failure neither of these options actually makes a run any more fun or dynamic.
Optional objectives should be extras to make the game more fun, not chores you expect to be paid for.
Good ideas here. Instead of Grims being books, they could be keys that open up an optional side area with either a boss or an event (somewhat like one of the mid-map events). Something that would add, say, 5 mins to a map clear. But this side area could contain good amounts of crafting materials, for one.
Playing on damnation, most groups I join will avoid picking up grimoires even after finding them. And players who do pick one up are often told to get rid of it (i.e. destroy it, because merely dropping them can’t be done, for whatever reason). Picking up a grimoire on damnation, and even sometimes heresy, is considered akin to deliberately attacking demonhosts - a selfish move made to complete your own weekly at the possible expense of your teammates and the mission.
That’s how bad the current risk/reward balance is.
They could even get rid of the split. Forget about Grimoires OR scriptures, make it both as it was before. That one be one map modifier. And as I’ve seen suggested before, having the Auspex able to detect them.
A friend of mine had a good suggestion. Make the Books part of a collection for Lore. Each certain number of grims or scriptures could unlock some cool lore and maybe some cosmetics for collecting quite a few.
But this isn’t the case is it? You get corruption up to a point but it won’t go passed that and you can spec for more hit points to mitigate this, similar to wearing CR gear in Vermintide.
I quite like the new system where you don’t always have everything, but I absolutely agree that it needs a rebalance pass as there currently is no incentives to go for the grims… or play on harder maps… or do quick plays…