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The gear progression in Darktide sucks. It’s heavily based on RNG. The whole thing works like a giant convoluted casino. Which means if you aren’t careful you can dump a lot of crafting materials and resources into the slot machine and get nothing in return (aka a bunch of useless “bricked” items).

This guide is to help people survive the endless grinding casino of Darktide’s item progression and come out with some decent gear. But more importantly, to not drive yourself insane in the process.


Progression towards what is “good” instead of what is “perfect” is the most important thing to not going crazy.

With how many levels of RNG are layered into Darktide’s item progression system, it’s impossible in practical terms to get a “perfect” item. And by “perfect” I mean something with a 375+ base rating with 80% stats (or close to) in all important stats, two tier 4 desired perks and two tier 4 desired blessings. You can’t force a perfect weapon because of the layered RNG and the god-forsaken perk and blessing locks (which I wish Fatshark would remove of course).

So instead, learn to recognize what a “good” item is and settle for something a little less than perfect. Good items might have a base rating from 350 and higher (or even lower in some cases), so long as the “key stats” for the item are acceptable to good (usually 70-80%). Learn what an item’s “dump stat” is (often things like mobility or warp resistance) and when a lower base rating will still work well enough. Good items DO have the two blessings you want, but maybe not both at tier 4. Good items will have one desired perk, but maybe not two.

All of this is to say that you can still use “good” items to test out builds and capabilities for the most part. And moreover, the difficulty in Darktide really doesn’t demand or require perfect items anyway. Damnation can be played with even mediocre or even borderline “bad” weapons.

So, how do you get “good items” without going crazy? Read on.

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Below are some overall recommendations that will make things move a little faster and also help prevent burning out from ginding one character the whole time:

• Get the browser extension[chrome.google.com] so you can check the shop remotely without logging into the game and suffering through all the loading screens on all of your characters.
  
• Consider getting Geforce NOW[www.nvidia.com] on your mobile device. You can log into the game when on the go to buy stuff that pops up.
  
• Level up all characters to 30. Since extracted blessings in your pool are shared between all characters (that can share a given weapon) having more characters gives you more chances to find a blessing you want over a given period of time.
  
• Consider leveling up a second character in your favorite class (or Ogryn since their weapons are exclusive) to give yourself even more chances to roll items.
  
• If you can manage it, play at Damnation difficulty to maximize the amount of plasteel you get per run.
  
• Avoid Grimoire missions since it greatly increases the chance of a wipe (in my experience anyway).

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Weapons are the heart and soul of Darktide's twisted, awful progression system. The processes and recommendations below should make things as painless as possible. But there is still quite a bit of pain involved. Send your love to Slaanesh.

• Scan the basic shop for items of all types with high base ratings and good stat distributions. Grey & Green items are best to purchase, blue items are okay (but not ideal, see below). The key here is that you’re keeping your eye out for good stuff overall. Don’t overly fixate on just one item type.
  
• Blue items from the shop aren’t ideal because the Blessings are limited to Tier 1 or 2 and you have to fully upgrade the item to Orange before you know whether you’ll have at least one good blessing or not, which potentially wastes a lot of crafting materials.
  
• However, keep an eye out for blue items with blessings that can work well-enough at Tier 1 or 2. For example, Tier 2 deflector is perfectly useful.
  
• Don’t bother spending money at Brunt’s shop trying to fish for good base items. You’ll waste all your ordo dockets and leave yourself short when good things pop up in the basic shop. It's better to just check the hourly shop refresh (use browser extension) and spend your ordo dockets getting something more useful.
  
• Overall, just buy high base stat gray/green items that show up, even if it is for an item type you’re not currently pursuing. You never know when you’ll want to try something out or when a balance patch will make something worth using in the future.
  
• If you see high base rating (365+) green or gray items but with BAD stat distributions, it may still be worth buying those items because they can be upgraded to blue and potentially orange as a pathway for “farming blessings” to add to your blessing library.

• The overall goal is to build up ~4,000 credits in each of your characters to have a decent pool of Melk money available for when something pops up in the shop.
  
• Re-roll weekly challenges to ones that are easy and reliable to achieve so you can get the weekly bonus. An ideal combination is X crafting materials (plasteel and diamanine both), killing X dregs/scabs with melee/ranged, killing X monsters. On damnation you can usually achieve the above in 3-4 runs. Other challenges are much less consistent to achieve (finding books takes longer, no team deaths is really hard on damnation unless you have a top notch team, etc.)
  
• When scanning Melk’s shop, you’re looking for either (a) weapons with a high base rating and at least one desired perk and blessing OR (b) a weapon with a high tier or otherwise rare desired blessing that you plan to extract (regardless of the stats)
  
• When credits dip below 4,000 on a character, prioritize playing that character until you get their weekly assignments done and their credits back up. If you really want to min-max, prioritize weekly challenges for whatever character has the lowest pool. Getting up to 7500+ credits lets you potentially buy two high level items in a week should they drop.

If you are doing the above on acquiring items, overtime you’ll begin to accumulate a fairly large volume of items of all the types you’d potentially like to craft into a good state. At this point, you probably have a “target” item in mind that you want to build towards.

Let's use a Force Sword with Deflector and Slaughter blessings as an example.

• If you got a “good” base stat Force Sword from Melk or as a mission reward that has one of the two blessings you want (e.g. Deflector or Slaughterer) and at least one acceptable/good perk, congrats, you’ll all set. Upgrade that item to Orange (if it isn’t already) and re-bless the item to add in the other blessing you want. You can then change the less desired perk to whatever you want.
  
• To maximize your chances of the above, you ideally want both of the desired blessings to be in your blessing library/pool already, so that the base item you’re going for only needs to have one of the desired blessings on it.
  
• So if you don’t have both of the desired blessings in your library, you’ll need to farm for those, either by watching Melk’s shop as described earlier, or upgrading items to higher levels. Green items can be upgraded to blue and can get a decent blessing. It appears that higher tier and rarity blessings are more likely to show up when upgrading to orange, but can still be found when going to blue. Prioritize upgrading items of a given type to blue first, and then as you have plasteel available upgrade others to orange.
  
• Following from the above point, you want to upgrade as many high base rating items as you can to orange to have the best chances of getting the top tier blessings. The “bad stat distribution” weapons you’ll plan to scrap for the blessing if you get it. If you have some “good stat distribution” weapons, then you’re also hoping that you’ll luck into one of the two blessings you want anyway (which puts that weapon back to top bullet point above).
  
• For reference, upgrading a gray item or orange takes about 1,500 total plasteel, which you can typically get in 3-4 damnation runs.
  
• When it comes to perks, get the Re-Roll Until Rarity mod[www.nexusmods.com] to make your life easier. It takes about 300 plasteel to get the perk re-roll cost down to zero.
  
• When it comes to managing your blessing pool, get the Blessings of the Omnissiah mod[www.nexusmods.com]. The benefit of this mod is that it gives an indication of when you already have a blessing of a higher tier level already in your blessing pool.

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Curio progression is a little different, but I’ve found with the below I have a lot of curios on hand and a lot more waiting in the to be upgraded:

• First, buy all blue curios from the basic shop if (#1) the blessing is good (high +% health, +2 or +3 stamina, high +% toughness, etc.) and (#2) the perk is a desired perk at Tier 3 or 4.
  
• Only buy a green curio if the blessing is exceptional and you have plasteel to spare to upgrade to blue.
  
• If the blue curio perk is good, upgrade to purple. If the resulting 2nd perk is BAD (e.g. +ordo, +experience, +curio chance) stop upgrading and hold onto it for later. If the 2nd perk is good, you’re clear to upgrade to orange.
  
• It’s only worth upgrading a purple curio with one bad blessing to orange if you have tons of blasteel to spare. Otherwise, it’s better to spend the plasteel upgrading blues to purple.
  
• Only buy Curios from Melk if the blessing and at least two of the perks are good.

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There are no shortcuts or magic tricks to make the item progression not ♥♥♥♥ in Darktide.

There is a lot of RNG involved and even with doing everything right you can still randomly be prevented from getting something you’re working towards. This guide and the above recommendations are all about using your time and resources efficiently while keeping your options open and minimizing the negative feeling and risk of bricking items or not having enough resources to buy something when it does randomly show up in the shop.

Focus on getting "good" items and don't try to chase "perfect" ones. Don't focus on one weapon type exclusively when browsing the shops, stay nimble and buy anything "good" that comes your way so you have the building blocks for what you may need in the future.

Good luck Varlets.