Quick Preface: I know none of this matters because the base systems are in place and are unlikely to be reworked in a large way, and FS seems to prefer randomly rolled rewards to other ones, but it’s fun for me to talk about ideas like this.
First is what most people have already said, and just unlock both blessing slots. It’s annoying and frustrating to have a weapon you like get stuck with a blessing you don’t. Where I would make the first change is that t4 blessings should be UNABLE to be attained randomly (maybe from Melk but you couldn’t extract it). The reason for this is I think getting a t4 blessing should be a bit more ceremonious, and should give a feeling of accomplishment rather than a roll for it. Additionally as of now T5 can still be cleared fairly easily with t3 blessings so I don’t think it would be a huge problem.
As for how to actually unlock t4 blessings, there are lots of different ways it can be done. I do think it should be timegated weekly so you can’t get all of them at once. Probably would be able to get 1 t4 blessing per class or maybe per character a week. It would make people want to come back, and make each blessing earned feel more rewarding as they’re spaced out rather than in bulk. I think probably the simplest one would be something like complete a certain amount of Damnation runs in a week. Most people will think that’s too easy, but I think it would be the simplest way to add it, reward the top players for being good, and push more casual players to do t5 without punishing them too hard if they don’t.
As you can tell this is already at least partially inspired by DRG’s overclock system, so something akin to a Deep Dive could be another way to earn them. A set of chained missions that have a carry over of ammo, health, items, grenades etc. Would be something special to do for it, still not super new, and would be harder than finishing individual damnation runs, and the missions could have different modifiers (e.g. 1st mission is normal, 2nd mission has hunting grounds, 3 mission has fog) that are set for the week (same every time you run them). There needs to be more modifiers and modifications to the existing ones but it’s a fun idea.
I know this makes Melk’s shop more useless than it already is, but like I mentioned before maybe he could still roll t4s but you couldn’t extract them? You could still get a weapon you want, a teaser of what you could get, but you couldn’t customize it as much as if you had unlocked the blessing. Far from a perfect solution but I’m not a huge fan of the melk shop in general. Maybe someone else has a better solution to this?
As of right now I don’t really have any other ideas for what a fun way of earning t4 blessings would be that wouldn’t take massive amounts of work on FS’s side (the chained missions idea would already probably be a decent amount of work). It would be neat to have a special mission type in a seperate que that was only on Damnation to unlock a weekly blessing, was harder than normal and had a unique and and actually fun boss (personally I don’t like bosses in tide games I prefer do an objective while being swarmed but I know a lot of people do like them), but that’s work I feel like FS is not going to realistically put in at this time. If you have any thoughts or ideas about this let me know, like I said this is less of something I feel like is going to happen and more just me having fun thinking of a way to make the game better.
TLDR: Tier 4 blessings shouldn’t come from randomly getting them from upgrading items or Melk’s shop, but from some sort of weekly timegated end game activity to make earning them feel more rewarding and give Darktide a healthier endgame experience.