As was mentioned, they will never be balanced and were never intended to be. Nor do they even need to be. They are designed to support 2 different itemization styles, that’s all.
Unless you have a very good solid reason to go CoF (such as you play offline or you are SSF, you have no cash, or you simply detest trading) then MG is the better choice.
Trading is a natural part of an ARPG, but these devs saw fit to throw a bone to those who cannot or will not trade.
Fair enough. Give me back my double exp tomes then.
I was literally picking up every single jade amulet that was dropping and trying to craft on it. It’s not like I had my filter set to only ever show a perfect item that had every affix I wanted on it already. I was picking up every one that dropped regardless of affixes. I had over 100 crafting attempts on them and none were upgrades. My mistake was probably trying to craft the affix I wanted onto it, instead of just chaosing the existing affixes and hoping I get one of ones that was useful for me.
The suboptimal item bases- I don’t see the point in this. The IAS from jade amulet is 10% dps and 1000 effective HP for my build. Even if I got two t5 damage affixes, that would only just make up for the dps loss, but there’s not a set of t5 affixes to put on amulets that make up for a loss of 1000 HP.