The current crafting system is a great foundation. I’m not sure if EHG will build around the current foundation or just tweak it. I personally find it to be a great starting point, but lacking in choices. The ability to customize and improve an item with built in risk system is fun to me (maybe not to others). There are four runes and two glyphs and I believe there’s endless possibilities to improve the system by adding more runes and glyphs.
Below are my suggestions:
Fractures
Currently minor, damaging, and destructive fractures are tied to instability. I believe minor and damaging/destructive fractures should not be tied to instability. Rather, all crafting failures should result in a minor fracture. Damaging fractures should only be introduced as a consequence when trying to repair a minor fracture. Destructive fractures should only be introduced when trying to repair a damaging fracture.
Instability: affects only success (reward) and failure (consequence). Instability is only added if the crafting succeeds.
Minor fracture: the consequence of a crafting failure for all crafting efforts.
Damaging fracture: the consequence of trying to repair a minor fracture.
Destructive fracture: the consequence of trying to repair a damaging fracture.
My suggestions below are predicated on removing glyphs of guardian. Remove guardian and bump up current success rates to the level of what it will be if a glyph of guardian is used. I don’t think anyone crafts without using glyphs of guardians (unless using glyphs of stability). Removing this glyph gives more flexibility to use other glyphs.
I’m not privy on current instability numbers. My suggestions below will score instability added as low, medium, high.
Glyphs
No Glyphs used
Same as if using a glyph of guardian currently. Remove glyph of guardian from the crafting system.
Glyph of Stability
Success rate: current success rate, but never 100%. Otherwise stay as is.
Glyph of Excellence
Success rate: tied to instability
Success: the affix promoted to the next tier has a guaranteed max roll (if T5 intelligence roll range is 8-10, it’s guaranteed to be a 10)
Added instability: medium
Failure: minor fracture
Glyph of Assurance
Success rate: 100%
Success: increases the tier of an affix by one
Added instability: low
Failure: not possible
Restrictions: one use per item
Glyph of Venture
Success rate: tied to instability. Lower success rate at T0. Higher success rate at T4.
Success: transfers tiers from affixes currently on the item to the targeted affix
Failure: not possible
Success rate: independent of current instability. Success rate rate is pegged at one tier transferred to the targeted affix. Higher amounts have lower success rate as it goes up (5 tiers transferring over to the targeted affix is low). Zero tiers transferring is a low chance as well.
Added instability: none
Restrictions: one use per item
Runes
Rune of Mending
Success: removes 1 - current instability.
Failure: 0 instability removed.
Success rate: If an item has 50 instability, there’s a chance of removing 0 with max of 50. The higher the amount, the lower the chance.
Added instability: none
Restrictions: one use per item
Rune (or glyph) of Jeopardy
Success: Promotes one affix to T6
Failure: lowers the affix tier by 1-3
Success rate: independent of instability. Low success rate.
Added instability: medium
Restrictions: one use per item
Rune of Restoration
Success: Repairs minor fracture to no fracture; damaging fracture to minor fracture; destructive fracture to damaging fracture
Failure: minor fracture to damaging fracture; damaging fracture to destructive fracture; destructive fracture stays at destructive fracture
Success rate: minor to no fracture - low; damaging to minor - medium; destructive to damaging - high
Added instability: reverts back to previous instability if successfully restored to no fracture.
Everything can be dismissed. If there’s one thing I would like EHG to take is moving away from trashing items. It’s too much of a consequence that satisfies only the most hardcore gamblers. If fractures are part of an equation used to calculate gear chasing longevity then find other ways to make up for it (lower success rate, lower drop rate, etc).
I am personally quite ok with crafting / fracturing system at moment as it gives purpose to hunting down affixes and making crafting a purpose / reason to play the game. I only play Mono and sell all keys as for me hunting / gear / planning build and going thru the frustration of fracturing at 90% once in a while is what an ARPG is all about. I would think the following changes would enhance the experience though:
In game vesus gambled items - if in game dropped items (incl loot in chests) had say -15 to -25 instability it would give them a 2-3 affix roll advantage over the gambler which would make playing that game more beneficial than sitting in town gambling
Rune of Removal - this should only be able to be applied to in game drops (ie not gambled items) and shouldn’t add instability. I must still be random removal but avoiding instability will greatly improve the ability to get say 1 in 10 items as really good base to work from. Currently the instability added make the use of this rune very limited
Rune of Cleansing - why cant this simply be “make the item a new white with 0 instability” ? it is hard enough to get a white item to T12 and leaving the item with instability after using this run make that further more difficult
I really do like this idea, numbers of course can be further tweaked. But generally the idea that “dropped” items are more easily craftable sounds very promising.
Gambling is another issue that needs a lot of work. It’s there to offset the fact that levels of item drops are way too expansive. Getting base item level 10 in a high monolith run is really terrible. They need to tighten item drops to match the level of content. If I want to farm a lower level item, let me farm it at a lower level activity.
I’m not sure that’s really one of the reasons we have crafting (IMO), it’s there to allow us to overcome some of the frustrations of purely randomly spawned gear not having the affixes that we want on them.
If the item bases dropped were “on level” (no Burning Branches dropping at lvl 90), we’d still have/want crafting to allow us to personalise items that drop, adding affixes that they don’t have but we want, or increasing their tier.
Fracturing is not what being an arpg is all about. a=action, rpg=roleplaying game. It means having a character, delving through dungeons, lots of slaying action, leveling up, getting new and more powerful skills, and gaining more power through gear. Name one other arpg where crafting permanently destroys your items (Not including corrupted items in PoE, which isn’t necessary.)
But loot isn’t in that definition either. If you’re going to go all traditional about it, the RPG element would be about your character development (as in story, rather than stats & skills) not including much in the way of gear.
Name an arpg where getting better loot isn’t a part of the genre.
Now name an arpg where having your gear permanently destroyed based on a gamble while trying to upgrade.
I’ll wait.
Even in D&D players want better loot to be more powerful.
Had a new idea but didn’t want to create a new thread. What about having T6 and T7 affixes increase at a higher level than level 5? For example, adaptive spell damage while channeling currently has the following values:
Change it to something like this:
T1: 6
T2: 7
T3: 8
T4: 9
T5: 10-11
T6: 16-19
T7: 20-23
As you can see, T4 and T5 values dip slightly from the original values and T6 and T7 values go up drastically. I haven’t done extensive research, but the current numbers seem to show a linear improvement with some values having a big jump on T5. Combine that with changing instability calculations to increase at a lower rate at lower total tier an item has and accelerate instability gains at higher total tier an item has.
This does a couple of things:
It adds more value to dropped exalted items with the right affixes you need/want.
Crafting of white base items can result in a higher average total tier
T20 items are slightly easier to achieve (instability numbers would need to be adjusted as such by design), but would have lower power level compared to what we can have currently.
You would feel a more meaningful bump from using an exalted item.
My suggestion would have been “use an entirely different system”. I am against fractures even in concept. Though the devs probably will not change it all that much at this point.
There are a few affixes like Enduring (Set GB) and Sanctuary (Crit avoid) which, if the T5 range were dropped, would likely make the current 4 & 3 slot meta not viable anymore (e.g. Enduring needs some T5 7% rolls to make the 4 slot option viable). That wouldn’t be a good outcome i.mo.
But more importantly increasing instability for higher rolls is going to make even more players say “i have T16-20 and ill leave it at that … the fracture rate at higher tiers isnt worth my time farming up 20 items with good bases in hope that 1 might turn out to be T20+ viable”.
Increasing instability will not affect the 5m gold per day farmers (1% of player base) but the other 99% of us will be punished even more than we are currently being punished … apologies i am still smarting from fracturing 17 good base items last night just trying to get T12-15 starting items and ending with nothing.
I think, if they removed the damaging/destructive fractures that , at least, would allow you to continue to use the item at it’s previous “power level”.
Even if it was an immense amount of materials, or even time passing… whoa.
What if there was a way mechanically to affect fractures via time travelling? Uh like. for example, putting the fractured item in a chest in ancient times, then finding it in the ruined era. No details, literally came to me whilst typing lol.
Anyway, yeah, something to interact with fractures would be cool. I have faith EHG will do well regardless how they decide to do things. Hype!
If there was a device in end of time that did it in exchange for a very rare resource(similar to arena keys in that only drops from specific things like monolith and arena, but even rarer). Then it would make sense.
Still seems like a band-aid on a greater problem to me though.
The greater problem is fractures in general right?
Anything they do that allows us to interact with a fractured item (to improve it further) will be an infinite improvement on how things are currently. So a band-aid seems a little weak to me in terminology.
To me, the fracture mechanic is new, different, but very harsh sometimes. Then again, when I do get that amazing craft, the rush is amazing. I feel the balance between the two is what needs help. But I think any interaction with a fractured item would be an improvement, not a band aid. We will see though! I’m really curious how they go about this in the end!
