Craft Fake % succes

[Albinosaurus]

lol, alright. Many of those suggestions are present in the trade threads, so if you have only been closely following this one (or simply not those ones), it might be easier to miss. Let me pull one of the more detailed ideas for you.

@Albinosaurus

As for it being shallow, well, going to have to repeat myself a bit, but…

Summary

1. Crafting doesn’t feel good. In my case, it’s not even so much about the actual item power, but how binary it is. You get a good base with an exalted mod on it, you want to be able to fill up the rest of the mod slots with at least t3s, but it’s so easy for the item to brick before then and the item just feels incomplete if it does. You will constantly be mentally nagged by that, even if it’s still an upgrade for you. I’ve outlined in other threads the other issues I have with it, but most of the affixes aren’t terribly interesting either.
2. The idol changes. I understand why they felt they needed to change them, but I don’t like the trade of giving up idols with interesting stats for larger quantities of boring stats. It’s a step in the wrong direction.
3. Respec. It’s terrible and undermines the game’s biggest selling point: Build variety. Don’t want to beat that dead horse too much here, either, but it has a lot to do with how little I actually play this right now.
4. Movement skills feel bad. They are slow, clunky, and usually have too many/high costs.
5. Monster density is too light.
6. Loot boils down to items you can equip and affixes (which go on those same items). It needs a lot more variety.
7. Echo progress being on a per character basis on top of an overly long campaign also discourages that most important of features outlined in point 3.

Most of the shallowness is to do with itemization, though. The potential for build expression is promising, but EHG need to get out of their own way on that.

@Albinosaurus

I think of other games when I think of interesting loot. A few examples (out of the sea of them):

Summary

1. Warframe

• Mods require investment to make powerful and there is reason to have multiple copies that aren’t all maxed out.
• You buy most of your equippable (and tradeable) stuff in pieces, which are generally target farmed, and you assemble them into something new and (potentially) exciting.
• There are crafting materials that require time/effort to farm which are used to make some of these things (Plains of Eidolon and Fortuna come to mind here)
• Certain keys to access limited content can be traded and has some value

2. Path of Exile

• The crafting materials are the currency. I don’t really think gold will make the cut for LE. However, the crafting materials in PoE have multiple uses.
• There are content key fragments (almost collectibles in a sense) that require farming to collect and hold worth to other players because that content is limited.
• The socket system is a whole other dimension of loot beyond just the affixes. LE doesn’t need to copy this precisely, but coming up with another dimension for item optimization would be worth looking into.

3. Torchlight 1 & 2

• Spell scrolls that teach any character (and their companion) new skills, regardless of class.
• Diablo 2 style gems to socket into gear (honestly, hard to go wrong with this system).
• Fishing provides consumables for your companion (but for LE, these could just be buffs) as well as temporary buff pots. Would be cool to have a scroll that you cast at the start of a map/echo that last for the duration of it or until you die (whichever is first).

4. Grim Dawn

• Consumables that enchant your items with new stats, skills, auras, etc. This is easily one of the coolest features in any ARPG on the market.
• Consumables that provide buffs or deal damage/status effects to nearby enemies.
• MIs are another awesome feature you just don’t see enough of in the genre.

There are really countless things they could draw inspiration from. It doesn’t have to all be the gear you directly equip on your character, but that needs help too. I realize a lot of this requires a lot more development time, and I’m fine with that. I just think these kinds of things should come before trade because it doesn’t make sense to think about all the ways we can make trade shitty when we have so very little that is even worth bothering with.

It’s worth noting that useful consumables can do a lot to drive an economy. This should not be overlooked.

Since they are lists, I dropped them behind spoiler tags to minimize the “spam” of a huge wall of text for those that don’t want to read through them.