TL;DR: keep the Armoury Exchange as is, remove all grey items from it, and open up a seperate vendor that lists all available weapons as grey versions. Call it “Warband Armoury” and make it available to all players once they reach rank 30 with each class.
I know there are a ton of suggestions and ideas on how to change the Armoury Exchange (e.g. increase inventory volume, change the timers, etc) but this is mine and I’m posting this in the Gameplay Category because I actually believe it fits.
Just so we all are on the same page: the Armoury Exchange sucks! Being solely dependant on RNG to acquire weapons and gear is a frustrating and soul-crushing system. Idk if it’s intentionally designed that way in order to “entice” players to spend money in the cash shop across the exchange and I’m not going to believe that until proven otherwise.
What I do believe is that the Armoury Exchange is there to fit in with the setting of the game: we play untrustworthy rejects that need to prove their loyalty and trustworthiness - this is the entire “story” for your Player Character when you rank up - and I view the process of ranking up to Max Level (30) as the setup for what I expect to be an actual narrative that will develop in the background (through snippets of dialogue and ideally through new missions) as the game receives continued updates; this is how live-service games work, right? And Darktide is supposed to be a live service game?! Ok.
So from this perspective, if I was a game designer at FS, the Armoury Exchange would make sense to me - “here’s what we have available for you, scumbag! Take it or leave it, we don’t care about you or what you want” - and I don’t actually think it would be viewed as badly as it is if there was also an alternative way to acquire specific gear (no, Melk’s Requisitorium alone isn’t enough).
I have leveled up 5 characters so far, and while I did not enjoy the entirety of the ranking progress, I did appreciate being forced to use all manner of weapons on my way to 30 for each class. So, IMO, the Armoury Exchange is fine the way it is and I don’t think it’s necessary to change too much about it.
What definitely needs to happen, though, is for a system to be implemented that allows players to get exactly the weapon they want without too much hassle, and honestly, I am shocked that we don’t get that once we reach max rank.
Once I reach rank 30 and my character gets officially inducted into the Warband with a bang (literally) there should be no more “Reject, varlet, scumbag, we no trust you” -nonsense. What should happen is that we get access to the Warband’s own armoury, where, in my mind, we’d get access to all available weapons without any question. I imagine this could work similarly to the Armoury Exchange and have all items on rotation as profane (grey) versions, just so that when you say to yourself “huh, I’d like to test out a specific weapon right now” you can do just that.
I say keep the Armoury Exchange as it is (maybe only take out grey items out of rotation) and make it the place to go to find greens and blues, with Melk being a possible source for purples and golds, but add another (simple) vendor to the game where you can get every single weapon as a grey.
This suggestion is far from perfect, I know - if I had my way every weapon would be individually balanced and have fixed stats - but I just wanted to post my opinion and my reasoning here injto the void.
Thank you for your time.