Weapon stats do not offer you a real choice, you always keep stats such as damage and first target at 80% (which should just be made into 100% at this point, it’s been almost 3 years), and pick either (for example) mobility or defenses as your dump stat.
There is no real point to weapon stats other than to make you feel like you are making a choice, when in reality you are not making one.
I have two ideas to remedy this issue, the first one is to simply remove weapon stats, all stats scale from 0 to 80% based on weapon power level.
The second idea, is that every two stats are now linked, meaning the more you have in one, the less you have in the other, examples for linked stats:
First target & Cleave( Cleave targets and Cleave damage combined): you can either max out first target damage for better elites damage, or improve your cleave for better horde handling.
Damage & penetration: You can either deal more damage to all enemies except armored ones, or focus on dealing more damage to armored enemies.
Mobility & Defenses: Both offer more survivability, you either dodge better or block better.
Mobility & Stability (ranged weapons): Move better, or shoot more accurately.
Ammo & Damage (ranged weapons): Have more ammo, or deal more damage with the reduced amount of ammo you have.
This could offer more build variety, if the stats are balanced in a way that makes taking one over the other offer a meaningful and noticeable boost to your performance when the stat is relevant.
I agree, I just added the second one in case people wanted to tinker with stats in a meaningful way, but removal sounds better to me, it’s hard to implement the second idea without getting the same result as now, which is having a clear and set in stone singular correct stat distribution per weapon.
I think they had plans to add red weapons from Vermintide, red weapons were the final upgrade level, and they had max rolls on perks, but instead of max roll perks maybe they wanted red weapons to have an extra 20% in every stat.
Somewhat similar idea i had for some time already:
Raise max stat cap to 100%, but leave amount of points the same. Dumping any stat to 60% rarely changes anything. But 40%? That’s a realy disadvantage, in exchange for which you receive solid buffs from 100% stat you’ve maxxed.
Yep. Choosing a boost or two is generally better - more interesting, leads to better build varieties - than choosing one “dump.”
I’d be tempted to suggest that FS use an expert system to adjust the numbers each patch until, because which is better is a genuinely tough decision, the use-numbers are roughly equal. Could do the same thing with Perks and Blessings. And Talents.
But knowing FS they’d probably accidentally create a genocidal AI and - it being FS - it’d be a year or more before they get around to patching it out.
is it that hard to make weapon stat sliders?
you pull those you want to max out to 80 and the dump stat to 60, done.
it seems they left the system just as it was in the days of the brick factory to save work on this, so the initial stats are the only part that’s still RNG.
I do like your second idea, I think it could be fun to customise weapons more (attachments, even..?). It’s really nice to pick perks & blessings freely, why not stat bars too. Having to literally gamble for them, I find quite degrading.
For a start having full control would be an improvement. After that, offering meaningful choices within weapon marks would be icing on the cake. The current stat bar spread doesn’t inspire all that much imo, but with some work it could be possible.
Yeah… I find it bizzare that this is still a thing, even after the itemization rework.
What’s more bizzare is that the game was supposed to have weapon customization, it was like 90% done and then removed from the game last moment so we could instead enjoy casino, some abstract “power bars” and bloated arsenal with “weapon marks” to create an illusion of choice
I mentioned it awhile ago, but I assume 80% is the current cap to allow for reds.
Now, instead of having the same problem just a “red” weapon with 100% in every stat and 80% in one dump stat (I also don’t think we need to be even more powerful than we already are).
I would like to see:
You can upgrade weapons to “red” allowing them to go beyond 80. However, every point from 80 to 90 costs 2 points. And from 90 to 100 costs 3 points.
This would make it so that hyper specializing into certain stats might not feel as worth it and may encourage the usual dump stats.
And maybe even some stats (like mobility and defense) never cost more than 1 point all the way up to 100.
And key here is being able to modify the stats like with a slider not mass buying from brunts to get what you want.
And of course paired with this a massive balance pass on us, talents, weapons, and enemies to make a 20% increase from 80 to 100 make sense. As well as that curio re work they mentioned.
Base weapon stats is just a left over of Fatshark idea of character progression. Quite RNG and grind based. Atm it’s a fairly pointless hoop to jump through so you can get a weapon with the dump stat you need. If anything they should just remove it.
What I would like them to consider when it comes to weapon build variety, is viability of blessings on weapons. There is a quite a few weapons which make little sense unless you use really specific blessings. A weapon should stand on its own. Blessings should just allow you to trigger synergies with other blessings and talents and change playstyle a bit. Something like a trash tier blessing should not exist.
I still don’t consider the marks as separate weapons in any meaningful capacity. They’re stat-tweaks using the leftover remnants of the OG weapon customization system. Nothing else.
I think we’ve entered Sunk Cost territory, tho. Weapon stats and the loot grind system as it is/was should have been ditched during the beta. I don’t think stat bars have been touched, ever, and I don’t think FS will.
Depends what you mean by touched. I distinctly remember the numberless bars and posts about discerning the pixel differences when comparing weapons back at beta. It was a major head-scratcher and continues my dumbfoundedness over devs that love hiding as much as possible from players (hello fellow swede devs AH).
We would need a guarantee (that, rightly, no one would believe) that the new stat-less weapons were actually identical under the hood. And how do you decide (read: recommend to FS and hope for) what the dump stat will be? Some people choose different (rare but it does happen). Do we want complete normalization like the all-76 rolls? Do we want all 80 (that math-doers say will be a worse balance problem)?
You’ll have to forgive me if I’m not excited to see FS work on such a system at this point in the game’s life in favor of leaving well enough alone for that aspect.
Having the same weapon as another person and it being objectively worse because of stats is bad. This is why the forums asked for red weapons,(ie maxed out weapons) but FS decided to troll us and give us literal red weapons. Which is kind of hilarious.
I find that, in practice, most attempts games make to create build diversity fall flat and people figure out quickly what builds work and/or are fun and stick to those. Even if you aren’t going meta, I’d bet that most people stick to just a few main build types.
I rather miss the days of games where things were just carefully, intentionally designed instead of having 34254253632 supposed options that really just come down to finding broken combos.