Crafting Changes We're Exploring

Sorry but you’re wrong.
Two things being important does not follow that one of them is not important at all.

Correct until the second comma! As I said, it’s the foundation on which this whole structure lies on - if this is removed, the whole thing collapses. The floors of the house are important but first the foundation has to be “ticked”.

You wanted to separate it and I said it’s not possible from which the argument gave it’s birth.


Too easy for who!? The developers? The advertising agency? Who’s perspective and perception is being made bets on?

None of this is really relevant to our discussion as it’s a philosophical claim, not a psychological one.
You’re conflating the player’s perception and perspective to the player’s philosophy. I was very adamant on the fact that I’m taking a psychological approach here.

You may give me a final response but I think we’ve ravaged this thread enough already.
Again…
:woozy_face:

These changes will defo be good for the dopamine levels. Finding the right balance between positive and negative is hard. I really like the idea of the critical success and making the fractures less punishing will be a win for sure. I do like the risk/reward of crafting so I wouldnt want to see the fracture chance/effect nerfed anymore.

I agree. Perhaps w/ the loot filter some of us might be more willing to risk items and shards because we’ll have more of them (and searching for them won’t be so tedious).

The current crafting system seems very easy to implement. It doesn’t require a whole catalogue of materials or recipes. The RNG can be manipulated seemingly on the fly. That seems great for a small dev team. I think in its current state its very limited and gives the illusion of depth. What better way to keep us hunting for items then to have an in game mechanic that can literally destroy the items we’ve already acquired.

I personally won’t be satisfied until all damaging fractures are completely removed.

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I’m hoping these changes are made with both, A) the player economy and B) however long the economy will exist until it resets, in mind. I already find the current crafting system vastly more enjoyable than other ARPGs I’ve played, where they are just literal slot machine casinos. Here we actually have agency on our decisions and there is a nice amount of risk/reward. Obviously right now my concern is how easy it’ll be to kit out a character in desirable T5s and call it geared, even worse still when trading enters the equation.

I understand exalteds have become great chase items, and of course we have no inside track on what is planned for legendaries. Just hoping the general health of the gearing process and what it could look like once the other systems start to open up as we continue along is under consideration.

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All changes seem to be for the better. I also like how you foreshadow the new crafting affix “minion attack speed”, very subtle lmao. At least I think It’s new because I have never come across it yet.

I feel like you’re still not addressing the fact that crafting is TOO RNG, and some of us with bad game RNG still get FAR too many fractures between 80 and 98%. If you don’t address this, it will literally be the only reason I don’t play this game. As it is now, I have to use mostly unique items, which we all know offers zero survivability in the end, for most builds.

My post about it in the bug forums: Crafting fractures are far too common

All the other crafting changes you’re suggesting are nice fluff, maybe unnecessary (to me), but this, is game breaking imo, and I won’t be playing a game just to waste my time. There’s enough shit, stress, and frustration going on out in the real world, I will not play a game that’s supposed to take me out of that, just to deal with the same thing.

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I love the idea of getting to interact with an item for longer. Right now when the item fractures, it’s done. If the first level of fracturing instead lowered an affix or cost a large penalty of stability raising the chance of a damaging fracture I think it would feel like more risk and reward could be put into an item.

I would really enjoying seeing a glyph that lowered instability in any form. One cool way I thought of would be lowering or locking an affix but then cutting the instability in half. This would force people to get a large amount of instability before attempting to use the glyph but would feel really good when it was pulled off.

I also think it would be really cool if glyphs and rune could interact with each other. I’m excited to see what you guys come up with!

main reason i stopped playing games that use an enchanting system like this.

  • Tera
  • Aion
  • Perfect World
  • Jade Dynasty
  • Most of the Nexon MMO’s
  • Black Desert Online
  • Forsaken World
  • Majority of mobile games that use said system (while i havent played a mobile game in a while for obvious reasons)

This crafting system imo is inferior to Grim Dawn and Current Path of Exile whose uniques are also superior in adding Defenses

See there’s still a problem with this.

Any failure, even under your system, usually just means f*ck that item and go start again on another one. You can’t afford increased instability for no affix level increase, you’re just knowingly gimping the item, and continuing to craft on it is pointless. Level 2 in your system would be more of level 1 - increased instability and -1 affix level is instant item vendor, you can’t rescue that item and still get anything worth putting in the slot, vs saving shards and trying again.

The metric of success in crafting needs to be time spent, not luck. The idea of more shards needed per affix level is the right one, just find the right curve. Start with X^3 shards (1, 8, 27, 64, 125) and all of a sudden if people want the best items they have to play the game, not gamble for bases and throw a couple of the several hundred shards they have at it, then rinse and repeat till one doesn’t fracture.

Add trading and boom, you have classes that want X shards trading Y shards that other classes want. We just added player interaction into crafting, which right now is non-existent.

Players crafting too fast? Tweak the curve, X^3 + X^2 + 4X (6, 20, 48, 96, 170).

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which just leads back to my point of, as an associate of mine put it last night, not punishing your players for playing your game. Because at the end of the day punishing the player for something outside of their control is extreme negative reinforcement, and it’s not like Player spent X amount of money buying Y amount of items and didn’t get what he wanted, this is the Player making an effort at playing the game to improve their performance and getting shafted under both the old and proposed systems, again a system potentially rendered not worth using because the highest tier of affix cant be obtained through crafting.

This is what I was getting at with my first post in this topic as well, let T6-7 affix items be the ones we have to really get lucky for, let crafted items be the the progression into the start of the end game. and as he has said, you’re introducing player interaction into the system with trading for shards or pre-crafted items.

I don’t think people are considering the positive effects of feeling like you’re making progress towards a goal, even if it’s a minuscule amount of progress like “Oh I got 20 of the shards I need, cool, now I’m that much closer to my goal.”

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If people want punishments out, then something has to give. You can’t realistically expect having the ability to customize stats alongside guaranteed crafting. Everyone maxes out way too fast.

I added my suggestion in the suggestion subsection, but my idea is to introduce runes to repair. Right now fractures are permanent. Have all failures be minor fractures. Repair rune has a chance to repair the fracture back to its original instability before the fracture. Failure brings it down to damaging fracture. Damaging fracture can be repaired to minor. Failure means destructive. Destructive can be repaired to damaging. Doing this allows people to eventually craft ideal equipments without trashing anything. You still need to farm for mats (affix shards, repair runes) so the timesink is there. It gets progressively harder and harder to improve tiers without trashing anything.

Unstable (craftable) <-> minor fracture <-> damaging fracture <-> destructive fracture

Present.

I think this is my first post on these forums (so, hello!) but I already gave a little bit of feedback on this very subject on the reddit thread for this blog post. You can read the whole thread here, but I’ll quote specifically from my comment that which I think is worth repeating:

The fracturing system felt kinda lame even on the scale of T1-5, but with the introduction of T6-7 and uncraftable tiers it really begs the question of why fractures still exist to begin with. Players will ruin hundreds or thousands of items in minor fractures long before damaging fractures will matter, and I’ve literally never seen a destructive fracture occur. Now that even a perfect 4x T5 item is no longer “optimal”, what’s the point of prohibiting crafting on fractured pieces of gear?

Fractures make people stop interacting with crafting. On a small scale, what I mean by this is that once you get a fracture, people physically cannot continue to iterate upon the item in question, and so they need to move on. On a larger scale, however, my big turnoff from the game as a whole is the fracturing system, and getting fracture after fracture and bricked item after bricked item grew frustrating enough that on more than one occasion I simply turned the game off and moved on to something else.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that’s a “good result” of a game system.

I understand that if items were readily available players could easily amass the gearing of their dreams (cough D3 cough) and would thusly lose engagement with the loot-hunt as a whole. However, because crafting does not enable “dream” items to begin with, any further limitations to the system seem - at best - arbitrary or - at worst - like a sneering slap of the wrists to players’ time investment.

Crafting is already a lengthy process rife with RNG in attempting to acquire the affix shards one wants/a base item one wants that features open affix slots. I’d be OK with a Success/Fail gamble to necessitate even further affix shard farming. But the fact that an item can suddenly be made entirely useless on a 5% chance is a real kick in the groin to players that attempted to dedicate dozens of hours - or more - to fine-tuning their gear setup.

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No they don’t, since 4x T5 isn’t “maxing out”.

Even a 2x T7 and 2x T5 isn’t “max.”

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For crafting it is. You’re going from a surefire T20 item and waiting on the RNG gods for a T21+ item. You can only really craft a T26 item. Anything above that is up to the RNG gods. And that’s assuming you get all the affixes right on the right item. That’s too big of a jump from guaranteed crafting to RNG.

In other words, anything above T21 isn’t part of this conversation. Whether crafting is guaranteed or stays as is, T6+ items are just pure luck from farming. So in the context of discussing crafting, 4x T5 items is maxing out.

…yes?

I don’t get your point.

T6 and T7 items were specifically designed to give you a loot hunt beyond crafting. That implies that at some point, you are meant to finish crafting and have a long-term goal still remaining.

Presently, however, you probably wind up ragequitting the game long before you begin that loot hunt.

The point is we’re talking about crafting. You emphasized beyond crafting. Yes, it is beyond crafting. And we’re talking about the crafting system, no?

I addressed this in the second point of my suggestion, with each affix level requiring more shards than the previous. Also again T5 is no longer the be all end all of affixes, that now falls to T7. Ideally a player would make progress towards being able to farm endgame level content at its initial level, with the rarest legendaries and uniques along with T7 items being the pinnacle.

Again the main issue here is forcing players back 3 steps when they’re trying to move one step forward. Lastly to answer about people being able to “max out” quickly, it’s been stated multiple times that there will be a wipe prior to 1.0 any major progress made will be gone once that happens and people have to start over again.

What does wiping have to do with anything? Maxing out easily can happen after launch.

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the fact that everyone loses all their gold, shards, inventory and items.

also again the ideal system is not a one for one shard to affix level increase, the idea is to have a goal to work towards to prepare for late/endgame. Also quit looking at the crafting system in a vacuum, the system does not exist by itself, it is very much tied into the progression of the game, and an RNG progression system does not end up being enjoyable when you mean zero forward progress or worse you’re forced back

This is a discussion for the crafting system in general. The statement applies now or post launch. I try not to flame on these types of discussions, but are you really not getting the point?

And when did I advocate for “zero progress forward or forced back”? I even suggested the ability to repair and take away fractures from trashing items.