Suggestion: Gold to red dust conversion

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
1

The logic is as follows, with illusions still being locked to actual red drops, red items are effectively simply max stat version of gold items. Depending on a player’s luck (or lack there of), it can actually be impossible for a player to obtain full red items regardless of hours of game play. Myself as a case in point have 1242 hours in the game but only full red items on one character. And even then of that, 2 were upgrades from dust rather than drops.

It makes little sense how 1000+ hours in the game and some people are still stuck with gold items. Solution is obvious, have a gold to red dust conversion so as to allow people to farm red at a predetermined rate.

I would suggest a 1:25 ratio of conversion as this is effectively 9+ games per single red dust. On legend, the rate of gold drops are around 80% per chest so effectively, 9 chests are required for the requisite 25 gold dust. In effect, for every 9 games one can have 1/5 of a red item. For every 45 games one will have one red upgrade.

A game on average takes ~35 minutes, for 45 games that’s 24 cumulative hours for a single red item. This number already assumes 100% success rates with zero failures. Realistically, with games failing maybe 50% of the time this number increases to 1 upgrade per 36 hours of game play.

This translates into roughly 1 guaranteed upgrade per ~2 weeks of casual play if we assume ~16 hours played per week. Of course some people may have more play time, some people less. I’d ballpark it actually at a month per 36 hours at roughly 1 hour per day which is likely what most people play.

So in short:

  • 1:25 ratio
  • 9 successful games per red upgrade
  • 36 effective hours per red upgrade
  • 2-4 weeks per upgrade for most people
  • Give a sense of progression over time rather than purely based on luck
  • allows people to test builds and different gear choices at will rather than being locked to whatever red items they are able to obtain
6 Likes
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I don’t like this idea. Red items are NOT be all end all, that’s simply an illusion. Rather, Red items are items of convenience awarded based on luck and the highest luck comes from completing difficult challenges, deeds, or max Dice from legend play. You can just as well play for a 1k hours on champion and farm enough materials to make perfect orange weapons. But the illusion that Red > orange leads players to think that they do not have a perfect game or a perfect setup due to OCPD or completionist mindset or the mentality of instant gratification.

I’ve seen plenty of people run around with Red weapon skins but are in actuality orange weapons. It’s all just aesthetics and a poor way to judge player skill. So I’m fine with the current low chances of getting red items, because the people who complain are usually the ones with worse luck than others and for no reason because there is no gameplay advantage to having red over orange.

In my case, I made perfect orange items before I finally got any reds, that I just didn’t even care for them. So I melted them down to make red items on another character instead.

5 Likes
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With 1000+ hours on legend, you should be nearly kitted out with reds. I think I’m missing like 3 on Bardin but then again, for around 600 hours, I only opened chests on Kerillian.

I’ve been testing it lately as I don’t have a need to open vaults anymore. So I save up around 50 emp vaults and then open them all at once. In the last few weeks I’ve opened 3 batches of 50. I average around 5-8 reds per 50 emp vaults. If you’re clearing legend consistently, reds should not be an issue. The reason I opened vaults only on Kerillian was because I wanted a red glaive, which took a long time to finally drop. But, I was still able to craft a red glaive for the time being. I’ve crafted several other weapons as well as 1 each of the new DLC weapons and I still have around 40 red dust.

If you just need a red, craft it. If you want the illusion, that’s RNG or a purple one from the Bög DLC.

4 Likes
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@SmokerT69 and @Para-Medic really nail this on the head; Veteran Weapons really don’t make that massive a difference and, if you are clearing on Legend regularly, you already have enough to fill a bank.

I think the important part to note is that you are sorta meant to be clearing Legend with Non-Veteran gear as that’s how you are supposed to get the Veteran gear. I know it can drop on other difficulties, but that’s just a roll of the dice.

Until then, just reroll those Yellow-Weapon properties till you get something good. You’ve got plenty of dust if you are grinding out Champion at this point. Then, you effectively have a Veteran Weapon/Trinket.

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I think 1000+ is a substantial exaggeration. Personally I have 300 hrs most of that being champion & a decent amount legend.

Champion level emp chests drop reds too, and when I open 50 I get maybe 3-4 typically. I have orange items, and want more red ones, but i’m happy with what I have… probably 20 or so items across all characters, and most weapons I don’t even use. There’s nothing wrong with an orange, occasionally they will drop with max rolls (or close to it) too.

I would rather see one red dust added to first completion of the weekly challenge than an up-convert option.

2 Likes
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Red dust is a complete non-issue for anyone who plays legend a lot. Champion and commendation chests have drop rates in the .5-1% range, legend general and emperor vaults have a drop rate of 10-20% by comparison. You will get far more red accessories than you will weapons, and sometimes the RNG is a jerk and gives you 4 repeater crossbows in a row. So the extras just go right into the scrap pile.

If you play 100 games of legend and complete all daily quests you should have enough chests to get all but 1-2 weapons on any given character. I have repeated this pattern 3 times in a row and it’s held true, so far I’m only missing handgun on kruber, axeshield on bardin, and falchion for saltz. I’m currently working on Kerilian and after ~50 missions or so I’m only missing 3 reds.

In theory this was the purpose of the bogenhaven DLC. You will eventually get a purple illusion of every item type. So in theory you can gather red dust over time, craft any red you want and make it glow. Unfortunately that doesn’t help someone like me who prefers the blue and wants to collect glow variants that don’t come in purple. I have to get the exact item I want as a drop and the chance of getting any particular weapon is very small.

If you want some way of making the progression linear you have to remove the RNG from the equation. When I see red items in a chest I no longer get excited because they have a greater than 50% chance of being an accessory, of which I have useless dozens already. If it’s a weapon you still have a less than 10% chance of getting the particular one you want, and an even smaller chance of a specific weapon skin if there are multiple on that type.

You could for instance influence the RNG in such a way that the drop table favours items you don’t have yet. So if you have every red item except for the rapier then every further red item that drops would be increasingly likely to be a rapier until you actually get one, at which point the drop chance for all items becomes even again.

Or another way of doing this would be to add some kind of renewable quest with very long and difficult requirements. But once you complete the quest you get a voucher for one red item that you get to pick specifically. This ensures that you will eventually get exactly what you want after X effort.

I’ve seen similar suggestions many times and I hope they implement something (anything!) like this because the current system is far too RNG.

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I find the anecdotes “I’ve got everything so it’s not needed for anyone elese” to be problematic.

But let’s play anecdotes, in this case, my game play experience will be used.

  1. I have 1300 hours in the game of which at least half of that is legend.
  2. I do not have red on all characters. In fact, I have maybe 30 red drops total of which the vast majority were charms/rings. Nearly all my weapons were converted from dust rather than dropped.
  3. “Perfect gold weapons” do not exist. It is mathematically impossible to roll two max traits of what you want at once. This is why reds are essential.
  4. “If you need a red craft it” - this is precisely why gold-> red conversion is required. Red drops are nonexistent for some players and as such it is impossible to gather the requisite dust.
  5. “red is no problem for anyone playing legend” - hello, I play legend exclusively and I have a significant problem with red.

Now, moving on from the anecdote discussion:

Statistically speaking, with a 16% drop rate, if we assume that 99%+ is “guaranteed” then per the math, a guaranteed drop for red occurs at the rate of 1:30 emperor chests at legend difficulty.

Assuming 35 minutes per game with a 50% fail rate, we arrive at 35 hours of continuous game play for a single red drop and 175 hours for enough red dust for one red item.

Under my proposed gold-> red system, one will obtain one guaranteed red every 36 hours for gold alone and every 175 hours for red dust from red. Effectively, every 175 hours, one will be able to craft and upgrade 5 red items. Note that 175 hours of game play is anywhere from 1-6 months depending on how much one plays. Of course if one is playing 175 hours per month…

4 Likes
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While I don’t necessarily disagree with your math and I certainly do agree that “because we already have them” is not good enough reason to deny the thought, I believe the issue lies elsewhere.

Effectively, what you are producing is a few additional Veteran Weapons which is great, but why are they necessary?

My first Veteran Hagbane I got right as I hit 30 on Kerillian. I still wield my Gold Longbow instead because I prefer it’s play-style despite the Hagbanes extraordinary DPS. With all Veteran trinkets, I’ve never really felt like a Gold weapon is a massive downgrade… and when I get my Veteran Longbow, I’ll be a little excited, but it’s really not going to change anything.

Getting to 99.9% (max level, 300 gear of your preference, becoming better at the game) is the hard part. Veteran gear isn’t necessary to clear Legend, so accelerating that last bit seems excessive IMO.

Unfortunate, as Ranald seems to have stiffed you. While I know you find it irritating to not have the Veteran Weapons you want, isn’t that the point of end-game grinding? To get that very specific kit you love with all of the buffs on it?

I know that’s what I do for every video game.

9

Perhaps you would like screen shots of how many perfect Orange items I have?

But nevertheless, I understand RNG frustrations, but I do not feel it so problematic that you absolutely need a change to increase chances of acquiring. It’s merely a cosmetic piece of convenience in the end.

The ultimate blame is left on the horrible RNG crafting system. I would have done it much differently and better. I would have made it so that first, you rng the perimeters you want. Than you pay a set cost per increment increase that accumulates.

So, I RNG a sword with Crit % and Att speed, and that costs me 50~ green/blue dust. Now to increase crit % alone by .1% I must pay 5 green/blue dust, and subsequent increases should cost more dust.

Mathematically, that would cost more than RNG costs, but it should be an option for people to gamble or pay more for an assured stat that they’d want to work towards.

4 Likes
10

This is bad idea, better is just small increase each time you didnt rolled red (like I heard something similar in VT 1 was) .

And reds are endgame stuff you dont want to get it too fast (and outside of curse resist and crit chance rest of stats is not that game changing if you dont go for breaking some points)

And really avg time for game is around 20min or less

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That’s just plain wrong mate. I rolled a full crit and curse resistance trinket. And I even managed to roll a 18% curse resistance and 5% crit orange for back when zealot didn’t get stacks from temp. So that he would always have 3 stacks.

Not to mention the perfect glaive, BoP, crossbow and so on that I’ve rolled. If it’s impossible, I must be RNG jesus.

What? The 15% drop rate is for each of the 3 slots in the vault. You average around 1-3 reds per per 10 emperor vaults.

Now we get to the meat of it. This is a “git gud” situation. 35 mins average to finish a full book run? My god mate… average QP games are 15-25 mins max. And a 50% fail rate? Who are you playing with?

1 Like
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Again, I find the anecdotal “I’ll show you mine”, “I’m better than you”, “git good”, etc to be irrelevant to the discussion. I noted specifically that anecdotes are not math and as such are not representative of the overall picture. Per probabilities, there are winners and losers. If we have 5% that win we have 95% that don’t win, if you are that 5% of course you don’t see an issue nor are you ever able to identify the issue as you’re on the winning end.

The other 95% though?

This is why one should stick to math.

So, more math, I find the thing about max stat gold to be hilariously amusing.

  1. Max stat gold weapons:

For a weapon there are 12 possible traits.

1a) attack speed, critical strike having 20/30 possible combinations
1b) critical power having 10 possible combinations
1c) power vs having 50 possible combinations
1d) stamina having 25 possible combinations
1e) block cost having 20 possible combinations

There are 12 traits and 155 possible combinations available.

The probability to obtain 2 traits you want is roughly 8%. This is roughly 55 rolls for 99%

The probability to obtain both traits (say attack speed and critical) and max stats on both traits is 0.005%, let’s leave it at that.

“I did it so it’s possible”. Congratulations, you won the VT2 lottery. Nothing is “impossible” unless it’s got a zero percent chance of happening. However, functionally impossible is key here.

  1. 16% drop rate

There are mountains of data that point to 16% per box and not per chance of item within the box. I’d love to see some data to support the claim that loot is rolled per item tile and not on the box overall.

  1. QP game round time

Most VT youtube replays are around 25+ minutes with I would presume - competent streamers. As such, the assumption of +10 minutes from +25 for an average party rather than a highly skilled one is rather reasonable. Some maps are also larger and some are shorter, we want averages not the lowest possible.

Again, I’d like to ask people to leave their “I did this” anecdotes out of the discussion. Anecdotal experiences do not reflect math and math is the constant we shall be using to represent the average experience that most players will experience.

As a side note, here’s a fun anecdote, I once got 3/3 reds in an emperor legend chest. That was roughly 500 hours ago, has it happened since? Nope.

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I had a few more e.g sword for Sienna with +5% crit chance and 20% crit power, but I melted them down when few reds drops for me.

I do not have =/= does not exist

1 Like
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“Let’s stick to math instead of anecdotal evidence”. Meanwhile all your math is wrong and you admit you don’t have any data on chest drops. Well played…

The drop rate is around 1 red per every 10 chests as I’ve told you now many times. I’m of course talking about Legend Emperor Vaults. Which you can pretty much get on every single run now that they have added loot dice to bosses. And you are guaranteed one on maps like skittergate where you get around 7 dice.

Again, at the end of the day. This is a “git gud” situation. If you have a 50% fail rate on legend, and it takes you 35 mins to do a run, you’re doing something horribly wrong. Feel free to add me on steam and I can take you through legend games. Walkertrips, myself and another player helped a guy for nearly 3 hours the other night, explaining combos to him, tactics, builds and game play. If you asked for help instead of taking this direction, it might help you more.

1 Like
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Math (more precisely, probability) also dictates that even if a situation is unlikely, it will eventually happen given enough chances. There is only 1-in-52 chance of drawing a particular card from a deck, yet one of those happens every tie we do choose a card. Similarly, if my memory is correct and the Property probabilities work as they do in VT1, there are 20 distinct values for each Property, which means that (disregarding the actual Properties, and if again my calculations are right) getting perfect rolls has a probability of 1/400. That’s not amazingly unlikely, and even adding getting the exact Properties you want (on Melee weapon) drops this to 1/22400. I don’t find that even near “virtually impossible”, and this gets tweaked back a bit as often enough, there are couple of possible Properties, a few Properties (Stamina and Movement Speed) have far less variance in their value range, and for breakpoints you very rarely need all full values anyway (iirc, there are maybe one or two breakpoints that need that and the interaction bonus from the different Properties). That means that while the chance is annoyingly low, in practice it will only take time and material to get there, and many people (if not most) will end up having at least one or two Perfect Exotics.

I agree that there should be some bad luck protection in, as being in the lousy end of Bell curve sucks and can result in enough frustration to (at least temporarily) quitting the game. For a long time, I was there for reds too, and with nearly 1k hours in the game, I’ve nowhere near a full set of reds, crafted or found. It has recently started catching up, though. And that’s another point: The longer you play, the lower the chance you stay there in the low end gets, and the less people it affects. It doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be anything to mitigate that, but it doesn’t need to be a strong effect.

There’s also another thing that people seem to have ignored. Long-time players have a lot of Gold Dust accumulated; for me, it’s ~950 pieces. With your suggestion, I’d be able to craft 38 Bright Dust immediately, translating to 7 Reds. So I’d say that’d make them too easy to receive. Even those who have less time in time in, as long as they’re in a point where they’re actually collecting Veteran items, likely have at least some dust saved up. This also would reduce the value of Exotic items, as what point would there be to reroll any of them, even before you got your first Veteran ones?

I think you have good intentions, and the point you raise is a valid one, but the approach is wrong. I think that the value of Exotic items is already too small (as Veteran items are only glorified Exotics, sometimes with glowy bits); this would reduce it even more. I also wish we had an actual resource sink in the long term - this isn’t it. Enhancements to the crafting system would be one thing to strive for, but that’d also run the high possibility of reducing the value gap between Veteran and Exotic items. Bad luck protection in the rolling (particularly of loot quality) would reduce the frustration of getting bad rolls, and would eventually net at least some Veteran items (of course, as long as you get the chests where they actually can drop). Bot oversaturating everyone’s everyone’s inventory with Veteran items and devaluing rerolling anything else isn’t good.

3 Likes
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Honestly, any change to the abysmal conversion rate is a welcome one

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Nope, there are 8 possible properties for melee and ranged weapons (though the properties differ between melee and ranged)

Every single property combination between 2 properties is possible but you cannot doulbe. So what you talking about the different amount of possible rolls is just wrong. There are 8 possible properties and you cannot roll double, so the total amount of possiblilites is 56, not 155.

With 56 possible combinations, the chance of getting exactly the combination you want is not 8%, but 3,57% (1/8 * 1/7 * 2)
The amount of rerolls you need to get a 99,9% chance of getting the rolls you want is ~190 [(1-0,0357)^x=0,001 |x~190]
Calculating with 99,9% is ridiculus though, you already have >90% chance beyond 63 rolls.

This is not even a calculation. This is just an estimation and it is totally off. Attack speed and critical chance both have a range from 3% to 5% with 0,5% steps. That means for both properties there are 5 possible rolls each, making a total of 25 rolls.
So lets put it into math. The chance of getting a maxroll, once you rolled the perfect combination is 4%, that follows:
0,0357*0,04=0,001428
The chance of getting the perfect roll in a single roll is 0,1428%. Lets put that back into the formula for the 90% chance:
(1-0,001428)^x=0,1
x~1611
Simple, you need 1611 rerolls for a 90% on a perfect orange weapon. And before you reply saying that this is insane, it is not. For a video game this is a pretty high chance of getting the roll you want. Furthermore, do you really need a perfect roll? having 4,5% crit chance instead of 5% does that change much? having maybe 14,5% instead of 15% results in 1 or 2 crits less per run. Thats neglitible. Especially if we look at power vs properties. Most people rely on these to hit specific breakpoints to kill specific enemies in a certain amount of hits. If an enemy has 15 hp, it doesnt matter if i do 15 or 15,5 damage a hit for it to die. Reaching the breakpoints is far more desirable than actually having perfect rolls. In most cases you do not need them.

Honestly, I do not know, who you follow, but needing 25mins avg a run is very long. I rarely follow any vt2 youtubers that does regular legend stuff. Get the mission timer mod and if you need more than 20mins, you should push yourself to finish runs faster, slack around less and quit wasting time. Even skittergate, which is one of the longest maps shouldnt take more than 20mins max. I normally aim for 16-18mins runtime there.

Congratulations. I never got in 1200 hours of vt2 a 3/3 red chest.

2 Likes
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Mathematically improbable, realistically more probable than you’d think, but no where near impossible. Dividing by 0 is mathematically impossible.

I want to issue a thought experiment. If a dev introduces the availability of an item that is not an improvement over another item and sets the chances to be extremely low, players complain about the low percentage. Would you still complain if NOTHING was introduced? Devs could remove red items entirely and it wouldn’t effect gameplay. It certainly didn’t change the game in V1.

If I suddenly introduced Purple items to the game and set the acquisition rate even lower than Red, with the only difference being cosmetic, would people still whine about it?

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Yes, they would. I at least think people put too much worth on the reds, even considering the QoL they bring to rolling for breakpoints or other high-end builds. But some people will chase anything shiny if it’s rare, and complain if it’s too rare.

4 Likes
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Oh for sure people complain about not owning a shiny. It just reinforces that their complaints are invalid. I SHOULD have said, would you complain or care if I introduced a purple item that is purely cosmetic (and looks way badass) but along with perfect properties and traits, it also has a negative. Would you want it then?

Example: Purple Sword. Glows neon blue (like a …saber, made of …light…) Your pick of perfect properties and traits but also imposes a random negative trait like… Full damage Melee Friendly Fire, Chance to Critically miss (weapon drops, hit yourself, gets stuck when striking environmental objects or enemies), requires a fuel source to function, only works when less than 25% HP, generates HEAT from melee, instant death when downed.

Hey that’s a great idea, put Deed properties into purple weapons, but they are 5% better than red items.

What do you think?