Suggestion: remove grimoires and scriptures from Aurics.
There’s always a few who actively leave crates behind for reading material, or grab grimoires when nobody wants them lowering available HP.
At this point it’s just trolling and griefing pickups and ~nobody has done books for contracts for a long time now, sine they added tasks like “pick up 3 plasteel” etc.
Nothing like silently losing a med crate on HiSTG because someone needed a magazine to read on the Valk (or to use as TP).
P.S. Or as others have suggested, just remove them from the game altogether.
In Vermintide 2, getting all the books in the map was a guaranteed “Emperors Vault” which gave you three items; with a pretty decent chance (10-20%? I cannot remember) to get a red item with maximum stats.
That is why the “full books runs” were a thing.
The reward for gathering books in Darktide just isn’t worth taking the risk. If getting the books would give you 360+ weapon with Tier IV blessings, then I would take them, right know they only make sense if you go for an additional challenge.
I agree with the OP that they are useless on Auric, but the issue IMO is the meagre reward for battling an additional obstacle during the run.
Unfortunately you’re asking for sensible reward mechanics, which is something FatShark just won’t do.
The only rewards they’re interested in is the reward in their bank account for overpriced cosmetics. Having actual meaningful rewards (and reward mechanics) in their game would never even cross their mind.
Remove books period, they are pointless, they just reward money and we can get money easily by just playing the game. If they gave bonus plasteel and diamantine, then they might be worth picking up but yeah, they are useless at basically every level of play. On that note Monsters in VT2 gave loot die, but here they are worthless.
Ammo and medipacks are too valuable to leave behind. The few extra dockets are not worth the hassle (and in case of grimoires the challange as well).
If you got plasteel or diamantine (or some sort of multiplier) at the end, it would be much more interesting. Maybe even a better gift from the emperor (or an uncollected blessing?).
They should just swap it to the stim-slot tbh. Yes, leaving a health-stim behind feels wrong, but leaving a team-wide-heal behind feels WORSE.