Now that crafting is “fully” released and we can start to actually tinker with and try out different blessings, the deficiencies in how it’s all put together, balanced, and implemented are all the more apparent.
The whole blessing system is plagued by a combination of the following issues:
Blessing descriptions are misleading, inaccurate, or don’t fully explain how they work (or use terms that aren’t defined in-game still)
Blessings that are clearly bugged, either not proc’ing when they should or not having the intended effect. Did anyone playtest this?
Blessings that are clearly outclassed by other blessings that achieve a similar end effect.
Blessings that are actively harmful and/or clearly incompatible with the way a given weapon functions. Did anyone playtest this?
That’s for the blessings themselves. Then when it comes to actually managing blessings relative to crafting, there are even more deficiencies:
The only way to view a weapon’s available blessings in your library is to go all the way through the crafting menu to the point of re-blessing an item.
There is no way to see whether you have a given blessing already extracted (let alone a higher tier one of the same blessing) when viewing weapons in your inventory, at the armory, or at Melks shop. This makes it a total pain to manage inventory, decide what to buy, what to scrap, what to save to extract. Ugh. Did anyone playtest this?
Blue items in the armory are limited to Tier 1 & 2 blessings, making them much less attractive to buy. Given the high cost of upgrading to orange and getting a second blessing, if you’re fishing for blessings you are much better off buying higher rated gray or green items and upgrading them to blue. At least Melk’s shop is a little better for farming blessings now.
You can’t combine lower tier blessings to make a higher tier one, like was previously planned. Why the heck not? At least that would’ve give lower tier weapons a reason to exist and be purchased.
So seriously - Did anyone playtest this? Do Fatshark employees actually play and care about the experience of their game?
Anyway, blessings need a major revision pass to get the blessings themselves cleaned up and working and balanced, and the blessing management improved.
Welcome to the prolonged early beta in Tide games. The game completion is expected in early 2024. Obviously if we assume Fatshark didn’t cut away too much meat and fat from the bones on Darktide, which is debatable. This could sadly result in a loss of the playerbase to the point the game dies as Fatshark won’t have the finance numbers to justify working on the title to the shareholders.
I write this as a massive fan of Tide Warhammer (40k) games and not a raging troll these forums often feature.
I get all that… I’ve been here since VT1 days so I know Fatsharks MO at this point. It’s still just kinda mind boggling to me how sloppy it all is. Like they have one person designing the idea for a blessing, someone else programs it based on what they think the designer intended, then someone else tries to interpret the code and write the UI description. No one bothers to playtest it or review the description to see if it’s even correct. And certainly no one is reviewing the design and bigger balance picture. It’s amazing the game works at all.
To throw Fatshark a small bone, I do think the Blessing system has the potential to be a huge improvement over Vermintide 2’s traits, which were so imbalanced everyone just ran swift slaying 98% of the time. At least in DT there are a handful of interesting options for each weapon - but there are still a bunch of trash options that should be made better and more attractive.
I only assume this is their method in the chaos of game development. Don’t get me wrong, I do not envy these guys job, and they do not work for a massive, well known workforce exploiters in that industry.
What I wish for is that they would finally drop the excessive amount of RNG in their games, present in every game system these days. The recent changes to SOME blessings is a step in the right direction, so I remain hopeful.
Made basically an entire post about how for example some of the blessing polls make no sense:
The blessing system really is kind of a mess when it comes to readability.
Unless you go to an external website there is no way to know some blessings even exist. There is no explanation for what constitutes various terms (Close, Far, Continous fire) unless you go digging. Even for say surgical there is no reason to hide how long it takes before the bonus kicks in and even testing it im not sure if it even works vs Cavalcade.
Some blessing should be shared between some weapons such as the combat and tactical axe blessings or the staff weapons being able to share stuff like run and gun. Overall if they are going to have mark / model locked blessings they need to actually make those blessings unique instead of just copying them from other weapons. They could also clean up the pool on some weapons to make it less of a teeth pulling experience.
Even comparing combat to tactical i don’t really see the why for the tactical axe just having less blessings overall and with some of these being literal direct copies of each other. Sure you maybe don’t want to dilute the pool too much if your tactical axes aren’t doing big heavy chops but why hide slaughter spree on just the combat?
Then you get the opposite problem with stuff like the Thunder hammer.
Do we really need 3 separate blessings for impact on a weapon that already is essentially a guaranteed knockdown on heavy hits? Why not, i don’t know, something to do with the POWER part of your POWER weapon?
The power sword gets at least 3 and they are all good.
And i know this isn’t a full list because i have one that has Wrath but that goes back to the other problem, external wikis can be wrong or have out of date information so maybe if you are going to build you item system around having a library of blessings that enhance each weapon maybe put that in game so people don’t chase a blessing that doesn’t exist or they atleast understand their odds / options.
honestly i basically just found a way i could ask people what stuff did i never found a great resource for it otherwise. that and observation, the tooltips are very poor. ie:
why are these blessings worded that way? what is the difference between them. i think maybe the top one i can get a close range kill and kill something farther away, maybe? what is close range, do either stack. why are these the only two damage influencers in the pool and why is the stronger one longer lasting?
it gets slaughterer which is imo one of the most transformative blessings in the game in my observation, particularly on this weapon. it’s already incredibly good that makes it utterly insane.
I played one session in the last week (haven’t played in a while at this point going on more than a month), just to check out the changes… while I appreciate the addition of being able to basically pick the weapon I want, I don’t appreciate the even MORE aggressive RNG for weapon rolls, first grey I bought popped out at about 330, got another one at 340, then everything from thereon out nosedived into high 200s…
I took a stroll over to Hadron to check out that blessing rework… and yeah its awful. Each tier of blessing represents a whole weapon thrown into the bin. No additional resources gained, just one blessing tier specific to that weapon class. All I’m seeing is more tedious crap that doesn’t improve my experience nor enjoyment of the game.
Imagine having to explain to Tencent that your business strategy includes releasing unfinished and overhyped products, tanking on release, losing almost all customers and then slowly crawling back from near death to a position of sordid mediocrity.
“What? We did it twice already! It works! Sometimes…”
Ironically i think the one part of the blessing system they cut would have helped this a bit.
Essentially combine blessings would have let you say earn a tier 2 an then get 3 weapons of the same type, slap that blessing on them, and bless up to a tier 3. Sure the grind would have been still long but again, steady progress vs large jumps with minimal control.
