Long story short, RNG on top of RNG just doesn’t feel good. I also feel like I can almost never even get close to crafting that item I want. Exacerbating the frustration is that attempting to craft a single item feels like a very time consuming process. And when you run out of shards, it’s like “o crap, now I need to farm shards before I can TRY to roll again.” I want a goal that I can clearly see and work towards without having to have my progress constantly reset.
I feel like the purpose of crafting should be to add determinism to a loot system that is already non-deterministic and may never give you the item you want.
Here’s what I propose:
Runes for shattering for extra shards (no change there)
Runes for cleansing (also no change)
A special rune let’s call it “Excellence” for removing t6 versions of a stat. It’s very rare, just like items with that tier. Let’s say this produces a “gem” of the corresponding stat
Other runes removed entirely. Support glyphs for crafting removed (or integrated into the system below)
Basically I think that itemization should work like GW2 crafting in this game, you salvage materials into raw materials for a deterministic result, but higher tiers are significantly more expensive. The numbers here are toy numbers, the devs should tweak them to match what they expect crafting a similar item should look like.
Basically you add a white item, select the attributes, and the tiers and hit “craft”, BUT:
The amount of shards scales much higher the higher the tiers:
Doing an item with all t3s let’s say would be 10 of each shard for the attributes selected.
Doing an item with all t4s would be something like 50.
Doing an item with all t5s would be something like 100 of each.
The system will allow for mixing and matching of tiers, if I select a t5 attunement, then i need 100 attunement shards, but I can still select t2 for cold resist and only pay like 3 cold resist shards for that stat.
Additionally a SINGLE stat gem extracted from an Excellence rune can be applied to a t5 affix slot to boost it to a t6 tier. (i.e. you can’t build an item of all t6 slots).
I don’t know what to do with affix stat value ranges, I really want a way to craft the “perfect” item if I put in the work and I know what I’m collecting, so I want the RNG out in this regard, but I also accept that this is often the “long pole” of a build is rerolling forever for that perfect item in a typical ARPG. Perhaps a compromise would be is you can repay the same shard cost for a given affix to reroll it. I.e. I could pay another 100 attunement shards to reroll my t5 or t6 stat range if I so desired. A deterministic alternative would be you pay n shards to increase the stat value within the affix range (and the affix value is only rolled once, at creation). But perhaps it wouldn’t be as simple as repaying the cost, see my note at the end on how we can make a functional equivalent to this rng without all the frustration in between.
basically what this does is it gives someone the ability to make a “decent” set with relatively few materials and then gradually work towards better gear that may or may not drop in the mean time. Giving value to the RNG to generate some form of determinism is what makes GW2 tolerable and I believe would be an improvement to the current model of ARPGs basically being the world’s worst slot machine.
Implicitly in this system, I want crafting instability completely removed, but perhaps crafted items can’t be shattered, so there’s a real cost to making one.
Note devs, if you’re reading this, it can absolutely be turned into a functional equivalent of the current system. It takes on average n # of shards of each type to yield the target item. All I’m asking here is that you remove the frustrating RNG in between and just tell me what n is, and save me about 1000 disappointing trips to the forge.