Honourable mention RIP for the ORIGINAL crafting system. Where blessings could be combined and whatever else it had:
“Darktide’s crafting system isn’t quite ready because Fatshark ‘ripped it out and started over’ mid-development”
“We had another crafting system that we realized just wasn’t good enough.”
“Victor Magnuson, Fatshark’s head of design, detailed why the crafting system wasn’t ready for launch: it needed a redo.”
We had another crafting system that we realized just wasn’t good enough," he said. "So we ripped it out and started over, and created a completely new crafting system which will be much much better. When we took that decision, it was not a happy day in the office. But we felt that we had to do it.
If we release a system and it’s in there and people are using it, it’s really, really hard to rip that system out and replace it with another system," Magnuson said. "People have already invested in the previous system. And from a backend perspective it’s going to be a nightmare. From the player experience, it’s going to be really bad. So if we released the game with a borked crafting system and decided we needed to redo it, that’s major surgery, and we don’t want to do that. It was a really tough call, but I think in the end players will agree it was the right call. Of course, they’re never going to know how bad the original crafting system was, but it wasn’t as good as this one
" Combine Blessings
At the Shrine you may choose to combine three Votive Offerings into a single upgraded Votive Offering. Currently, most Votive Offerings have a maximum Tier of IV, but there are some exceptions to this. We’re testing a few different options with the requirements and the results of combining these Votive Offerings."
"We also hope this blog gives you a glimpse of the broader crafting system(s) and the depth of customising your weaponry and loadout for the perfect playstyle you wish to engage with. At the heart of this is the Blessing extraction and Re-Blessing functionality, where you can collect and swap out Blessings in order to customise the different combination of weapons you wish to experiment with.
We have learned a lot from our previous choices and gameplay surrounding crafting offered within the Vermintide series. For Darktide we wanted to take those lessons to expand and improve in such a way that crafting would become a central pillar of player progression, while giving more impact and agency to you, the player in your preferred playstyle.
The nature of randomization and repetitive actions sometimes seen within crafting is something that we are steering to avoid in the crafting system within Darktide. Meaningful choices will be made with strategy and goals behind them, as you set your eyes upon that perfect combination of melee and ranged weapons for your class."
emphasis mine.