However, it does not seem that this has been suggested recently.
The new dungeon system offers the perfect framework to adding resource sinks to the game.
With the new patch, we have gotten a gold sink in the form of the lightless arbor.
I feel that adding a shard skink as a dungeon could be very beneficial to the game.
Currently, shard pickups feel almost completely pointless to me.
Whenever I find an affix shard reward in an echo it feels like a waste of time.
Rare modifiers are so rare in shard form that they might as well not exist, and are much better found by shattering.
If you are not specifically shattering for a specific affix, it is not uncommon to end up having hundreds of resistance shards, and less than 5 of any individual class specific shards.
Now that I have thousands shards that I don’t expect to be ever using, I sometimes question if it is even worth the effort to pickup shards from the ground.
A shard sink would fix the issue of shards being useless.
Personally, I am not sure what should be given as a reward for the shards.
I would take basically anything, even if it ends up being very little.
As a matter of fact, I think that the conversion rates of whatever reward is given for the sink SHOULD be very bad.
Shard farming is not an engaging activity and should probably not be encouraged.
Would love something to do with the 100k+ shards I have collected, but then again, this may be a “problem” specifically with long time die hards like myself who collected every shard without looking no matter what…
Jokes aside, I would like something to do with shards too… even if its simple things like
swapping 10 shards for one new random one
swapping 100 shards for one new random one from a higher rarity pool
swapping 1000 shards for Rune of Creation or Ascendance
would be nice if you could stack shards… e.g. 50 shards of one type gives you a T5 shard of the same kind to add to gear… but the game forge system isnt really designed for this…
This could be one of those “after launch” kinds of additions to the game when there are more people who actually have excess shards to get rid of…
I think it would be interesting & a good fit for the dungeon setup to be able to sacrifice a large number of shards of one type to influence droprates of the corresponding affix. Maybe you could even use shards as the dungeon “key”? The mobs could get different modifiers and spells appropriate for the affix, it could be quite cool. And you could accumulate the bonus over multiple runs (lose them on death) to get a kind of persistent “evolving” dungeon concept to play around with
In this kind of dungeon there’s a strong incentive to explore the map and kill all the mobs, which seems to be missing from the current dungeons despite some efforts in that direction.
On the other hand I really don’t like the idea of any shard exchange system which gets you poring over hundreds of different resources to find marginal gains. It’s much better for the shard system to remain ignored and forgotten than to make you roleplay as a commodities trader.
