As baseline for this suggestion, I will assume that possible gold duplication bugs and unintended gold farming strategies are beyond the scope of this and unrelated. (I don’t believe POE has never suffered chaos or divs duplication bugs – it was just fixed faster and had better PR suppression applied)
Suggestion to introduce Woven Echoes that use gold as a resource to fuel powerful and unique crafting mechanics scoped toward end-game items. Possible considerations: (1) the mechanics should be balanced at baseline to only be able to produce useful results starting from 10s of '000,000s invested at minimum; (2) consider trade restricting crafted items to prevent these items from flooding back the trade market; (3) the mechanic should be able to produce items not possible or difficult to obtain elsewhere, but only near-guarantee desirable results with '000,000,000s invested.
Possible models:
- Crafting bench fully consumes FP and all modifiers on an item and # gold to provide a sequence of pick 1 of X random crafting choices, including choices that are not otherwise possible (e.g., upgrade T5 to exalted affix).
- Crafting bench consumes # gold to drop random number of runes, glyphs, and/or access keys to special crafting benches, including new runes and glyphs only obtainable as such.
- High-cost gambling (e.g., '000,000s of gold per attempt, vs regular) with possible special outcomes not possible in regular crafting or normal and soul gambling.