I would like to throw in my two cents about the current augment system with the armor and weapons. There are some small improvements that can be made and also some more major ones that I can hope the developers can consider to make the experience more rewarding.
Firstly the fact that I cannot hold alt to be able to read what the affix would do in the forge menu is just plain silly. I’d also like an ability to maybe favourite shards so that they always appear up top for each particular armor piece so I don’t have to scroll though a wall of text to find the ones I want. Also, I honestly do not get why anyone would use solely cold, fire, or lightning protection when elemental protection shards are so easy to come by. I have yet to play anything with elemental based magic but I can assume the same would be for the damage.
Now for the big changes, of which I have a few suggestions. First is the fracture chance. I know that the percentages given are accurate to the actual fracturing chance and this is a big issue with my squishy human brain. Human brain finds actual percentages unfair, frustrating and not fun. Many games show a worse percentage than what is actually used so the humans playing the game can feel like they are lucky. Also humans suck at calculated risk taking so this sort of helps mitigate that. If you have already implemented this than I have the absolute worse luck in the world which brings me onto my second and most important suggestion.
Please let me spend gold to increase my success rate. Let me tell you, it is not fun to finally find a piece of armor with excellent base stats, so you go around and farm for alll the best shards and, the more important, guardian and stability glyphs. I then carefully begin forging my armor, starting with stability glyphs and then moving to guardian glyphs BUT then it fractures 2-3 shards in, wasting my glyphs, the armor, the shards, turning it into garbage.
Currently gold in game has nigh no real good use, other than to buy shatter runes. My suggestion?? Add a blacksmith that sells rare shards, glyphs, runes, and can offer to forge shards onto your armor for a 100% guaranteed success rate but for a high cost. This way, if you are impatient and poor, you can still risk the chance to fracture your armor, but if you are patient and grind a butt-load of gold, you can get some really nice armor. I.e. it rewards the player for playing the game.
Honestly I’d love to actually unlock recipes for armor, craft it from gathered materials (from little gatherable nodes in areas), and have the stuff you spent ages crafting be able to hold more affixes and have a lower chance of fracturing but for what you have so far, I’d just be happy with the chance to have all of my grinding not be wasted in a single unlucky roll of the fracturing die.