Yes like playing a new build you haven’t refined. If you can’t even combo with it reliably, why would you play on your maximum difficulty with it upgraded anyway?
It’s almost like that’s the point - so you learn what the weapon is and isn’t good at without also struggling to even kill anything on the difficulty you’re used to.
Tell me you missed the point of the reply without telling me you missed the point of the reply…
The point was, I don’t have a ton of playtime over you, yet I’m swimming in resources and have everything upgraded, and somehow you don’t. Which means somewhere along the way you must’ve spend those playtime hours in a way that brought very little actual progress.
My method was this: start playing the brand new character, using the equipment they start with. I’d stick to one specific build, and whenever I’d get a higher power weapon that fits that specific build, I would swap. I would only ever buy weapons if I hadn’t found an upgrade in a long long time and I felt I was really falling behind. I wouldn’t upgrade my weapons, ever. I’d reach lvl 30 playing at whatever highest difficulty I had unlocked by that point, and any weapons that I had left after this levelling process that were too low power, I’d sacrifice for Mastery. Over the course of this levelling process, I’d have gotten at least one melee and one ranged weapon to 20 mastery by just playing, and I’d be at around lvl 11 mastery with another one. Then I’d switch to another unlevelled class and do the same. At the end of this process, I’d have at least 8 max mastery weapons plus 8 that were halfway (this was before Arbites and Scum). Then I’d make a new build for each class that explored a playstyle that was different to what I levelled with. And I’d master another set of weapons with that. And so on until I had around 3-5 unique builds per class. Again, not buying weapons, not wasting resources upgrading weapons. Once I felt I had enough of a variety of weapons and builds, I’d work on actually maxing them, i.e. getting full weapon mastery through sacrificing on the weapons that I actually intended to use on that build, fully upgrading those weapons on that character. I’d gamble with Melkbucks (mystery acquisition, not Limited Time Acquisitions, those I reserved for Curios only). And once I had at least one of these “maxed” builds per character, I’d make sure to complete at least one Havoc per week, as that gives you a lot of resources for very little playtime until you get to like Havoc 20+ where multiple attempts may be needed.
Through this process, by the time I fully maxed out all weapons, I had enough of a resource surplus of everything EXCEPT Diamantine to make whatever builds I wanted and fully equip them. Diamantine was the only bottle neck that required several more weeks of Havoc completions to overcome. I’ve never been short on Plasteel and the only times I’d run out of coins was when I was spam buying to get a perfectly rolled weapon from Brunt. That would sometimes eat up to a million coins, if the weapon was extra stubborn.
My guess as to where your inefficiency lies is: you dial down the difficulty too much when you start levelling a new weapon, which not only drastically cuts into how much weapon mastery XP you earn, but also cuts into your resource earnings. I.e. you’ll be spending the equivalent amount of time as if you were playing a higher difficulty but earning way less of everything. Mastey XP in particular is super valuable cause it’s essentially free resources on top of everything you collected. If you then have to max out through sacrificing, that’s coins and plasteel that you’ll be missing later. I basically never play on a lower difficulty than the max while levelling and after, not unless I feel like I’m the reason we’re losing cause I’m underperforming due to unupgraded weapons. I’m also guessing you haven’t been doing Havoc assignments every week, those are a big earner for very little time investment. Even low level Havocs will give you multiple times the resources of a normal map for just one game played per week.
You are joking right now? This is a game with very few long term grind goals, where people who’ve played a few hundreds hours are sitting on millions of coins. You get approximately 20k coins for one Damnation mission, not taking into account weapon/curios drops many of which you’ll probably be just discarding, earning some extra coins too. So it’s just 15-17 missions to get a completely totaled weapon, what is about 8 hours of play.
“Prohibitively expensive”, eh? At 500 hrs in I already had all weapons I actually use in builds (which I have 5 per character, on average) on 4 my characters maxed out, and was starting to do duplicates of them for convenience (so I wouldn’t need to change blesses for same weapon used in different builds with different blesses). Same for curios.
At 1000hrs in, I completed all of those (so have duplicated sets of weapons and curios on all my characters) and I have nothing to grind for, what is kinda bad and makes game now less interesting to me. I hope they’ll finally add a new gear tier above gold.
Also - once you hit level 30 and Melk starts dropping rating 500 items, keep an eye out for weapons with good stay distributions. It’s way cheaper to buy a level 500 item from Melk with the stats you want than burn dockets at brunt’s to get a good weapon that you then have to spend even more dockets to empower up to max. The thing with Melk is to just buy good items for any weapon type you don’t already have a good version of. It’s a nice shortcut. Let’s you at least rank up mastery using a higher level item.
Also, regarding the Diamantine - which 99.99% of the time was the bottleneck for all my upgrade projects, not money or plasteel - one of the most time-efficient ways to get it is to start playing Havoc asap. Levels up to 10 are extremely easy, about Heresy level of difficulty, may be even less, they are doable by a squad of two competent players with decent builds (not even meta). And by completing just one Havoc mission even at that level you’ll get 1000-1500 Diamantine at the end of the week. So you must do one such Havoc run per week if you really need the resource.
Don’t be scared of the Party Finder thing, at those low levels it’s really as simple as sending requests to a bunch of groups, nobody really cares what you are, as it’s so easy. Just apply, wait until somebody accepts, say “Hi”, say “r” - and that’s it. Even socially awkward folks can do that. The hardest part would be to find group that runs low-level Havoc, but usually there are some during peak online hours (weekends and/or evenings). Or you could advertise your own group, as most people just want to join a ready group, chances are high there is a dozen of people just waiting for somebody to host a game.
And ofc events grant tons of those resources - but their difficulty jumps up and down, and it’s hard to see them as reliable source. Seriously, new players should start playing low lv Havoc more often.
Play havoc……. it solves all these issues.
If you play on Steam and have played Vermintide 2, suggest you get the mod that apply the red color to 500 weapons and curios of 410+ rating (mod: red weapons at home) to get a “tier” above gold.
I’ve also lost interest in the game as all 6 classes are now between +100-650 levels (via True Level)
So now just waiting for a event to have a reason to play a few maps again.