While that would make specific shards more valuable, it would also create a lot of frustration and make filtering shards mandatory
In any case, something is definitely wrong with the current system, just on the fundamental level of how they drop. Before people even pick them up. Things like how the shards are not colored by rarity and how some of them have names that are longer than some item names, it results in them feeling interchangeable with each other, as why bother reading all that text when I could just click it once?
Res shards for instance, I will not remember WHICH resistance it was for after picking up. Even skill level shards, I would only remember that it was one of the skill level shards, not WHICH skill it was.
The sheer number of different shards seems to mirror items more than currency, yet we cannot filter them, so as almost every shard type is either completely irrelevent to the build, already in stash in massive numbers, or in the case of rare shards you want… could be more easily optained via shattering a filtered item - because of all this, almost every shard drop seems worthless. This is BEFORE talking about the pickup system.
That would be ridiculously ironic as it would require so many more steps, time and energy to then get shards - pick up gear, look at gear to see if it has shards you want, put it in the crafting ui, select the rune of shattering, shatter it, compared to, click on shard, at some point later when you next go to your inventory, click on the button to send shards to crafting stash.
This is an awful idea but I’m putting it here to maybe bring life into a very repetitive discussion.
What if shards dropped unidentified and we needed to “process” them in some way to utilize them. The shards we would get from shattering and removing would stay as they are but the unprocessed shards would be auto-pickup.
We could still have individual or groups of shards drop, but they could be made rarer to reduce clicks.
The processing function could have some kind of deterministic targeting associated with it, or even some kind of sacrifice mechanic where you sacrifice an item and shards lean towards affixes of that item/type/implicit. Idk.
Inherently I like the idea of auto-pickup on shards like gold. But I also understand EHG wants to keep crafting shards open for more item like qualities. This could be a good mesh between the two.
Maybe they could just make it so that if you clicked anywhere near the vicinity of the shard or the label it triggered the shard pickup (at both the shard and the label) and move on with our lives. Because I think most of the frustration isn’t picking up the shard, it’s the terrible mechanics of picking up the shard.
…
But then I remember that attacking with a melee attack is supposed to move you to the mob if you are out of range of the melee and, mostly, it just doesn’t. And it’s been that way as long as I’ve played this game (years). And then I think, “what engine did they choose?!.. does that engine and the way they coded the game somehow make something that should be like ARPG breathing just really hard?”. And then I think, with despair, “we’re never getting a good move to attack, are we?”.
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Adding on to your “awful idea”. Maybe it’s the open world RPGer in me speaking, but I would like to see more interaction with the forge. Not the “F” button but the actual forge in safe areas.
I also quite enjoy the slower pace so I’m not really concerned the shard pick up, on the contrary I quite like clicking on them even if I’m not going to read the names or having to move that extra few pixels to pick them up.
Hmm… am I playing the game wrong? 
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Sadly this is the best way to target farm shards however. Because of the loot filters.
You can’t recolor shards, but you can easily make a filter for the 1-2 affixes on gear that you need shards for to craft said affixes onto your gear for the current build. Sure it’s more actions required but at the same time it gives you way more of the shards you actually need in a lower amount of time than… well, just pick up everything and hope for the chance of your desired shards being among them.
On a completely different note:
Somehow I was playing with this idea of compounding shards into certain categories.
Not sure if they would like such a system or if people in general would like it.
But imagine if you didn’t have to target farm a very specific class shard for +2 to your main skill or some such but instead they would all be, say “sentinel shards”. That way you could roll desired affixes onto gear more easily or reroll(/chaos) affixes that you don’t want and don’t have shards for either.
It would maybe even make dropped shards more desirable.
For example: Currently I’d probably not stop for a void resistance shard. But I’d likely stop for a void penetration shard. Now, if those were compounded into void shards and they would have different costs depending on what you want to craft with them or how high a tier you want to craft, that would change how I look at it.
But maybe I also just didn’t get enough sleep and this is some fever dream idea that would be too hard to implement or realize in some other way.
For me, it is. It is all about the amount of content. ALL aRPGs run out of new content relatively quickly. There isn’t really any way for them to have as much content as an MMO. I just don’t like repeating stuff countless times looking for gear upgrades. That part isn’t fun for me.
I was trying to be oppositional. I don’t think the system as it is is all that bad. I play somewhat slow because I like to look at the things on the ground. I don’t like the go fast playstyle that ignores most of the game due to “time efficiency”. I’ll even go back half a screen to pick up gold.
I get tired of the slippery slope that people are always, maybe unwittingly, sliding down. Shard pickup is one of them. Goalposts always seem to move. So, my argument is to move them back in some way to make shards more valuable and not pointless.
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I believe the forge was initially only available as interaction with forges you find in the world. I’m not sure what made them change that though. Probably that the first zone doesn’t have to return to town enough to warrant crafting early on.
I remember reading somewhere that the forge became a hotkey because players were asking for crafting on the go.
For example: Currently I’d probably not stop for a void resistance shard. But I’d likely stop for a void penetration shard. Now, if those were compounded into void shards and they would have different costs depending on what you want to craft with them or how high a tier you want to craft, that would change how I look at it.
Torchlight and D2 had the mechanics to transmute/combine lower tier shards/gems/potions into higher tier ones. Something to consider perhaps?
That’s not really “target farming” though, that’s just not showing you the crap that you don’t want. I’m not even sure whether I would call the drop rate blessings “target farming”, since the best you can do is have a slightly higher chance for a whole swathe of a particular type of thing (helmets/relic shard affixes, etc) drop, but there’s no way to increase the +x Smite affix drop chance specifically (other than the relic drop rates).
Not at all. 
Are you a developer? I’m guessing yes. Either that, or you are in a profession where every word matters. Developers and crazy people are hyper focused on magic words. He simply included the wrong magic word in his sentence.
What GreyManJones was actually saying was, 'the best way to get the less common/rare shards you want is to set your loot filters to change the color of items that have those shards (and then harvest those items for the shards)". And he’s correct.
But he used the wrong magic word. And suddenly you couldn’t see anything except “target farming”. And you broke off into a tangent about how “target farming” isn’t what he was talking about. And then, and this was masterful, you launched into another tangent about how the new faction’s increased drop rate won’t be awesome enough, in fact, can’t be awesome enough to overcome the torrent of useless loot coming toward the user (ok, I made that last part up).
Why did I type all this? Well, it’s a little slow at work today and it amused me.
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I think that’s literally why people are advocating for auto-pickup of shards in the same way that gold is. You can still see gold as an “item” on the ground, but if you move near it then it gets put into its own storage area. That’s exactly what I would want for shards, just being able to click and move near them, rather than having to be so precise about clicking on the textbox nameplate. That’s the part that I find annoying.
Personally, I enjoy seeing shards drop on the ground. I enjoy vacuuming them up. I enjoy opening my inventory and seeing it full of loot, even if its simple crafting materials. I enjoy clicking the button and having the satisfying “swoosh” of them all flying into my magic infinite extra storage space. Those are all fun little dopamine hits. I don’t mind that they take up inventory space, because inventory space isn’t as crazy precious as it is in other games. With item filters you’re picking up actual gear items fairly rarely, so it feels meaningful, and that’s great. Even when my inventory gets stuffed full of shards/runes/glyphs, it’s an easy thing to solve with the transfer button, and then I can do a little inventory tetris, or just hit “sort” and be on my way.
Crafting materials in their current state are not at all meaningful drops. As others have said, it’s always the best option to just click and collect every one you see, same as gold. The frustration comes from having it be a jarring interruption to gameplay. I agree that there is a risk of making the game “too fast” like PoE, and I’m glad the developers are taking steps to keep the pace of gameplay measured, but I simply cannot agree that picking up shards is a good part of that solution.
Having them auto-pickup in the same way as gold would actually encourage me to make MORE moment-to-moment decisions, and read the names of shards that were slightly out of my way, like I do currently with small piles of gold. “Is it worth it to loop back over there? Is it a shard I really want, or is it a common one I have hundreds of? Is it far enough to use a movement skill and place it on cooldown? Is it completely opposite from the direction I’m going, or just slightly off course?” All of those questions/decisions can still be in the game, even with auto-pickup, it just removes the tediousness/fine motor control of needing to click on the item name textboxes, especially while moving.
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I mean, he is technically correct, which is the best kind of correct. And Llama prob knew want I meant, but that’s fine, too.
About the target farming for certain class affixes that Llama mentioned:
I guess, you could kinda try and get more of them by playing the specific echoes that give helmets/chest armor/relics. That would at least speed it up a little.
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no.
I am an accountant, so yes.
Also, there’s nothing inherently wrong or bad in attempting to use words to accurately convey what you mean. It can be difficult if you are not a native speaker which is why I give non-native speakers a lot more room than native speakers, them I hold to a higher standard (& I accept that I don’t always meet it myself). One of the things my Dad taught me was that if you can’t say what you mean, you can’t mean what you say. While i do use mockery quite a bit, if someone is willing to work through things to get to a clearer understamding I’m fine with that…
I wouldn’t argue there was (in other words, I agree). Words do have meaning and people who can use the perfect word at the right time are undervalued.
But I would also argue that focusing exclusively on trees and never looking at the forest is missing quite a bit.
But I would also argue that focusing exclusively on trees and never looking at the forest is missing quite a bit.
I feel like there’s an analogy to the discussion topic to be made here…
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I know a Forester personaly and while he is responsible for a big part of a forest he needs to focus on every tree and every animal. “Big picture” isn’t always the best modus operandi and not always usefull in every analogy.
If we use it on shards it’s not important to look at single shards or a big mass of shards because you pick them up when they are in your way or you don’t because you don’t need anymore shards after farming for 500h .
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Oh hey this suggestion again! Interesting that a suggestion that has so many votes is always just discounted by the devs cause their vision and they know better than their player base. Honestly not sure why they vacuum up when you click one that is dropped near other shards. Like shouldn’t we have to click each one? Is that not the point of them not auto collecting like gold? Would love to hear the logic behind that.
Anyway would love an option to check to auto pickup shards also another one to auto send to crafting. Cause while cool at first transferring gets old.
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