weapon acquisition

[Skearn]

so one of the major things that turned me away after release was how we got weapons and especially the seemingly extreme rng/gacha nature of its stats and how crafting was done.

normally i do the research myself but between work and life i havent had much time to be able to do so, so my question is:
have they made weapons acquisition better and has there been any changes to crafting regarding traits/properties?

i apologise for the inconvenience (if any) and give my thanks in advance^^

[Brother Bigot]

No

[TaKo]

no and if you're also still trying to get blessings you're at melk or hadron's mercy and will spend thousands of plasteel to get 1 tier IV blessing, maybe

[Skeleton]

Originally posted by Skearn:

have they made weapons acquisition better

Yes. There's now an NPC that sells grey-rarity versions of any weapon that you've unlocked, so you always have access to specific archetypes that you can upgrade later. These are cheap so you can buy in bulk until you find something with high stats.

Originally posted by Skearn:

has there been any changes to crafting regarding traits/properties?

Yes. You can "extract" the blessing from a weapon (this destroys the weapon) and store it in a collection of unlocked blessings, then apply those blessings to other gear. For example, if you find a Combat Axe with Thunderous II, you can extract that blessing and apply Thunderous II to any axes you find later.

With Perks, all tiers are unlocked with Hadron from the very start so you have access to all of the highest stats.

The catch is that you can only make 2 modifications to any item. So once you find a weapon with good stats and upgrade it to maximum, you can replace both Blessings on it, both Perks, or one of each. But you can't replace all four properties.

[Skearn]

i see, so things did change for some parts.

just a few last ones tho,
did they end up increasing the crafting mats you find in the missions and is it doable to brute-force a good weapon from the grey rarity vendor?

[Lumadurin]

Originally posted by Skearn:

i see, so things did change for some parts.

just a few last ones tho,
did they end up increasing the crafting mats you find in the missions and is it doable to brute-force a good weapon from the grey rarity vendor?

Not really. A well-run Damnation (tier 5) mission will give you enough materials to take a weapon from grey to purple.
While -getting- new weapons is better than it was at launch. -Improving- weapons is pure RNG and there's no way to "gradually work towards a good weapon" (i.e., at least in Vermintide you could just dump materials into the same weapon until it got the traits you wanted).
To get a good weapon in Darktide you need to "roll" good at least 3-out-of-5 times with one of those times being the first "roll". The remaining two can be manually adjusted (but in the case of blessings you have to continuously roll other weapons to harvest them - so that's yet another layer of RNG).

• Initial stat distribution (can't change this)
  
• First perk
  
• First blessing
  
• Second Perk
  
• Second blessing

Most of the time you just settle for "good enough" (you don't need a good weapon to play the highest difficulties, just something that's "okay").

[AzZotik]

Originally posted by Skearn:

i see, so things did change for some parts.
just a few last ones tho,
did they end up increasing the crafting mats you find in the missions and is it doable to brute-force a good weapon from the grey rarity vendor?

It's bearable now, still a grind but there are games with worse grind out there.
You get 3-6 decent gray weapons and at least one of them will usually upgrade in a way that switching one perk and one blessing will make it almost perfect.

Absolute perfection in this game is unattainable and doesn't really matter, breakpoints are all over the place and even a perfect stat weapon won't help you with them once Fatshark increases enemy health like in Patch 14. You can easily play Auric Maelstrom with a random orange weapon you bought from Melk contract shop, the game is not really hard and demands skill rather than perfect weapon rolls.

As for any further changes: (from the Maelstrom dev blog)

We are aware that the changes mentioned above do not give unrestricted freedom to all aspects of an item. To do so would have a big impact on item acquisition in Darktide, and we want to explore different paths further down the line.

There is significant shortage of plasteel, so when you see you have a truck of diamantine and 0 plasteel, it's the norm.

[Fryskar]

Originally posted by Skeleton:

Originally posted by Skearn:

have they made weapons acquisition better

Yes. There's now an NPC that sells grey-rarity versions of any weapon that you've unlocked, so you always have access to specific archetypes that you can upgrade later. These are cheap so you can buy in bulk until you find something with high stats.

Now?
Call me halucinating, but i'm 100% sure you could do so at launch or even open beta.

[AzZotik]

Originally posted by Fryskar:

Now?
Call me halucinating, but i'm 100% sure you could buy greys at launch or even open beta.

No, it was added after launch, my friend quit Darktide because he was not able to get weapons he wanted before it was added. As any weapons he unlocked by leveling up were simply not rotating in the store.
I played during Closed and Pre-Order betas and he joined me at launch, so I remember.

[Fryskar]

Originally posted by AzZotik:

Originally posted by Fryskar:

Now?
Call me halucinating, but i'm 100% sure you could buy greys at launch or even open beta.

No, it was added after launch, my friend quit Darktide because he was not able to get weapons he wanted before it was added. As any weapons he unlocked by leveling up were simply not rotating in the store.
I played during Closed and Pre-Order betas and he joined me at launch, so I remember.

I played during open beta and a couple months after launch before taking a pretty long break.
So i guess shortly after then.

[Skearn]

maybe i'll have to wait just a bit longer then, its getting there though from what most are saying.

thank you all for taking the time, i appreciate it greatly^^

[rat]

Originally posted by Skeleton:

The catch is that you can only make 2 modifications to any item. So once you find a weapon with good stats and upgrade it to maximum, you can replace both Blessings on it, both Perks, or one of each. But you can't replace all four properties.

The plus side to this is that you can change these later, like if you modify a blessing and perk, then you can modify them later to your heart's content; you can add a 5% crit chance perk and the Surgical blessing, then after that you could switch it to 25% Extra damage to Carapace and Can opener, just for a (completely made up) example. I don't know if Vermintide worked like this though.

[AzZotik]

Originally posted by DonOfSandiego:

The plus side to this is that you can change these later, like if you modify a blessing and perk, then you can modify them later to your heart's content; you can add a 5% crit chance perk and the Surgical blessing, then after that you could switch it to 25% Extra damage to Carapace and Can opener, just for a (completely made up) example. I don't know if Vermintide worked like this though.

You could change everything in Vermintide, with downside of not being able to do that selectively, you just waste crafting material to reroll everything until you get what you want, which wasn't so bad because Vermintide gave WAY more crafting materials.

[rat]

Originally posted by AzZotik:

Originally posted by DonOfSandiego:

The plus side to this is that you can change these later, like if you modify a blessing and perk, then you can modify them later to your heart's content; you can add a 5% crit chance perk and the Surgical blessing, then after that you could switch it to 25% Extra damage to Carapace and Can opener, just for a (completely made up) example. I don't know if Vermintide worked like this though.

You could change everything in Vermintide, with downside of not being able to do that selectively, you just waste crafting material to reroll everything until you get what you want, which wasn't so bad because Vermintide gave WAY more crafting materials.

I personally like it this way. It's more difficult to get the "perfect" weapon right off the bat. Gives you a reason to keep playing missions. Especially the Auric missions.

I've found myself making builds around weapons rather than the other way around due to the fact that you can only modify 2 parts. You modify the weak parts and work with the strengths of the weapon, which I think is thematic with the whole "each weapon is a relic passed down through generations that you're just the current custodian of" concept. You're not bending the weapon to your will, it's the other way around.

It does necessitate the waste of a lot of resources if you want to minmax, but I've gotten fair rolls with weapons and used skills to improve my performance with them to the point that they achieve what I want them to, without having to spend 10 minutes rolling weapon stats from Brunt's Armory.

Why have the weapon do all the work anyways? Isn't that what skills are for?