After a discussion with a friend and talking about Awakened gems in PoE and then Last Epoch crafting, we concluded that:
- Crafting in Last Epoch is way better and more fun and exciting than in PoE for both of us. (And I guess it’s a main selling point to quite a few other players too; Although getting everything to craft is a little too easy right now, but that’s why I’m making this post)
- But there’s a risk that getting the top tier items is either too disgusting hard for everyone, or too easy, with little middle ground, affecting league retention (I believe LE was also going to do X-month league cycles.)
- And awakened skill gems in PoE also do something other than LE has now in it’s affix shards. Sure, some shards are rarer to drop, but it’s not something you can actually work towards within a defined ruleset. I.E. This group or rares shards can only ever drop over Area Level X and wave 100 in Arena or in the Monolith past a certain amount of conquered timelines.
I would love to see actual distinctions made with rarity levels in game. Like if you open the crafting panel, the affix list would look something like this:
Name Type Rarity
==================================================================
Health Suffix Common
Movement Speed Suffix Uncommon
Base Spell Damage for Swords (added) Prefix Rare
New super late game chase shard Prefix Legendary /
that's a little stronger than base shard Mythic /
Artifact /
etc
And I would love to see that translate to specific drop restrictions. Perhaps there should even be more rarity tiers than just these 4. But I’d love some clarity to where what could drop. Say Common drops right from the start, Uncommon can only start dropping past area level X. Rare only after wave X in Arena or in Monolith, etc.
Plus I feel a system like this could also allow more creativity in the shards for min maxing / the “1% -playerbase”. If certain shards are very very hard to come by, you can give some leeway to attaining good crafted items with common and uncommon shards, while adding some more power and or flavor (very niche but fun build-enabling stuff) to the ultra-rare shards that only drop at the highest level of gameplay. I could think of a few examples, like minor stuff that could be lifted from passive trees or uniques, without taking too much away from this areas, but still having very fun shards to play around with.
One last thing that came up was that Awakened gems in PoE have certain effects only take place at level 5. That’s something I could actually see work well in Last Epoch as well. For higher rarity shards, you could add hybrid stats where the shard would give something of + Attack Speed, and at tier 4 / tier 5 something of a secondary line like X% chance to gain Haste on Kill. So that line effectively has two tiers in this example, being only attained after getting the shard at tier 4 and and it’s second tier at tier 5 of the shard if this makes sense.
