If they are completely adamant on keeping the crafting options as is as described in the blog Dev Blog: Deep Dive into the Shrine, I think having the option to pay Hadron to strip down an item back to grey for weapons and green for curios might alleviate a little bit of the frustration being directed at the itemisation.
A significant chunk of the frustration comes from the difficulty in getting a good crafting base (IE. 380 weapon with good stat distribution) where it is entirely possible to roll multiple bad blessings or perk thus, in a lot of player’s minds, ruins the item. Then comes the second part of the frustration where they have to win the lottery again to get a decent crafting base.
With the ability strip an item back to its base form gives that bit of agency back to the players crafting, they don’t have to keep pulling the frankly frustratingly low payout slot machine for another crafting base when an item gets ruined.
Ideally a lot of people just want the crafting system to not lock perks and blessings, but if you do intend to continue down this path it might be worth considering why people are unhappy with how it’s currently described.
Of course, if the design intent is to force people to engage with the item acquisition at all costs at all times, you’re probably going to lose more people than you want to retain.
There are so many contradictory design details that it makes my head hurt just to try to unravel them.
For instance, I completely fail to understand Melk. I don’t think his quests were too difficult - but they sucked because of the character siloing and that will suck even more once even one new class arrives. His rewards are… just another armoury. Sorry, really boring. I was doing his missions for fun. And you know which game had a similar, time limited contracts with absolutely great rewards, many of which could be transferred here? Vermintide 1. If Melk currency gave you “unlock blessing/perk” and modifiers like “+3% critical on a mission” boons (one or two max per game), that would be an incentive.
Yeah, it still feels like a jumble of systems that multiple people worked on but didn’t really speak to each other about. Like all the layers of RNG; each person had an idea for RNG that was palatable, but when you combined them together you get:
Which worryingly they have done little to nothing about even with the newly announced plans.
*add a re-roll all stats button that effectively keeps the current level but randomized all the stats added, that way I don’t need to waste a bunch of time re-leveling from a gray
*do the same with blessings, it can cost a lot but just make it do what the VT2 system did as an option and remove all current locks.
*add an option to break weapons down for crafting mats since credits are currently too plentiful and pointless
As it stands running missions over and over just to get a few crafting mats sucks and even with the re-bless system there will still be a lot of junk weapons that have no use, especially if it’s a guaranteed gift on ever mission.
Either that or make it so credits have a use in the crafting process somewhere so it’s not such a lopsided resource drain.
I just want to be able to trade in these Emp gifts we’ll apparently be getting every mission for plasteel and diamante. That’d fix the majority of my remaining issues with the gear system paired with the stuff they’ve already said is coming.