I believe a shop rework would benefit Darktide gameplay in the long run. I believe many players do not like sitting or logging into a game to check for items every hour to get what they want. It really does not respect the player’s time and this is something can get dull real quick causing players to quit.
Instead I think a better system would be able to let players spend Ordo Dockets on weapons or curios of their choosing . Then have the items themselves be rolled randomly when bought.
Example:
Make it so the armory lists all the melee weapons/ range weapons of that class and then they can buy that item with randomized traits and base. At least this will give the player’s agency on what they want instead of everything being RNG.
Maybe like 15k or 20k for weapons and 8k or 10k for Curios?
That doesn’t solve the problem of not being rewared for playing the game. If I play only Damantion and clear runs there I want my gear progression to be affected by it. Not to mention it still doesn’t change the fact that I would have to spam RNG to hope for RNG to give me good stats + perk I need + blessings I need becasue Refine is stupid and I don’t predict rerolling blessings will be any better.
But yours idea of course is still miles better than what we have now, but it doesn’t solve the main problems: gear quality should not be 100% tied to RNG. There need to be ways where you can off-set RNG and be able to affect stats, perks and blessings without relying on stupid lottery tickets.
The really big issue with the loot in Darktide is that the quality of the gear is too random and there is no way to upgrade the base stats of an item.
Basically what they need to do is let the XP you get past level 30 pool into either upgrading your store, so that the store rolls items with a higher base power, or upgrade your items, so you can incrementally upgrade their bar stats to a 380 rating.
Especially the Requisitorium needs to consistently give you items that have a higher power rating than what you have, because if doing a week’s worth of quests earns you maybe two new items the items that are on offer need to actually be upgrades.
Either one of those would fix the most fundamental problem which is that 99% of all items you see are crap because of low bar stats.
Until you can either consistently purchase max base power items or upgrade the bar stats on an item the loot system in this game will always feel bad. No matter how you acquire items, having that filter in there where 99 out of 100 items are bad completely regardless of what traits or blessings they rolled ruins the fun of getting loot.
The randomness in the distribution of base stats, perks and blessings as well as the randomness of even being offered the item you want is more than enough without the added randomness of the item simply being low quality.