Crafting Changes We're Exploring

General
21

Those are welcome changes, but one of the most commonly discussed things in chat is how often we experience fractures with items with 90% ++ success, even 98% success. When you see those numbers and then you see a fracture happening, it is really annoying, no matter if the system works as intended. I feel that displaying those success chance % could be doing more harm than good in the long run.

I’d recommend you guys double check and triple check what’s going on there, even though I’m pretty sure I’m not the first to bring this up.

1 Like
22

Oh wow and I just recorded a Podcast Talking about what crafting changes I would like to see haha. Well hopefully that will still be relevant. I am glad you guys take feed back so well and give us a version beyond expectations looking forward to see in how this work out.

23

If you ask me, this is still a band aid on a seriously flawed system.

I know for a fact (I have been keeping a log of my crafting attempts) that a 90% chance for success is NOT a 90% chance for success. According to my data, a 90% chance for success is more like a 77% chance. I’ve had fails many more times than that 90% suggests, so there is something else going on behind the scenes other than simple instability. It is my contention that your rank at the time of crafting is also affecting the RNG roll of success as I’ve had many more successful (and more true) crafting attempts with my high level characters than say a lvl 20-something.

My solution to the crafting system would be a non-linear possibility of success and instability such as that currently used and replace it with an exponential one where as early crafting would be easier to succeed but ramp up exponentially as more tiers are added. Yes, getting 4 T5 affixes is supposed to be hard and near impossible to acquire, but failing at early crafting with 95%+ chance to succeed is just so maddening because it happens at a higher rate than it’s supposed to happen.

Just my two cents, but my data doesn’t lie and if it’s true that I’m just that unlucky, then I should probably just stop playing LE now and wait for the next ARPG since crafting and gear is vital to success in this game.

4 Likes
24

I like this idea, but it could also be adapted for the 4 --> 5 crafting process. If a critical success is not able to grant the +1 tier level, then it reduces instability by “X” instead.

1 Like
25

Serious questions: how are you collecting this information? Manually or scraping the logs automatically? How big is your data set? If it’s automatic and you have all the roll data and the data set is over 5,000 I would be very interested to see that. I have recently preformed a ton of automated and manual testing on it and I was getting insanely close to perfect distributions.

edit: even if it’s not automatic or that big, I’d still be interested in it if you’re up for sharing.

7 Likes
26

Lol, i was thinking the exact opposite, i feel my crafting tends to be lucky

The only thing i don’t really like about current crafting is rerolling the stats causes damage, i never rerolled stats on any item at all

27

I’m a bit surprised by those changes.
Personnaly as soon as the combined percentage of minor and damaging are above 33% (25% minor and 8% damanging) I’m purely stopping to craft the item. I’ve bricked too many items to consider that it’s not worth.
Therefore I never play with the odds of destructive fracture as the damaging one is already too crippling to worth the risk and I’ve never seen one appear in my craft.
So am I the only one to do that or people are just constantly trying to push the craft until the destructive fracture ?

Edit : I read too quickly the changes. It goes in the way to allow to risk more during crafting ok ok.

28

I suggested in another thread, but feel it might be relevant here as well so will repeat the gist of it:
Could you introduce a new Glyph that can only be found at a small percentage (1-3% or something so that you really have to farm for them) that allows a 100% success rate on an item craft?

Either way, these ideas are fantastic and mean you guys are listening to the community and I for one am impressed with the game developers for being so transparent and flexible. Kudos, EHG!

29

I’ll be 100% honest, I do not at all make use of the crafting system because of how it functions, I’ve bricked far too many items at the 5% failure chance to ever want to engage with the crafting system at this point, now even more pointedly with the introduction of T6-7 Affixes that can’t be crafted anyways, and as much as I very much hate to use this term because I have a strong dislike for people using it for something when they don’t agree with how a game is;

Punishing your players for engaging with a system is bad design.

Now allow me to explain, when you have a system that encourages players to break down items for the potential affixes they do want to put on the item that they want, having all that time and effort spent gathering items and materials only for it to go up in smoke makes for a punishing experience for a player, because potentially a fair amount of time has well and truly been wasted, you have no forward progress to show for it and at worst you’re going several steps back as you cannot simply reforge the item that was ruined, made exponentially worse when you lose affix levels, or affixes entirely. A feeling further reinforced with the previously mentioned Tier 6 and 7 affixes, because now, a player will simply ask why are they putting in this effort when the highest tiers can only be farmed anyways?

Now here are my personal suggestions to improve the enchanting system to make it both enjoyable and rewarding to use:

1: Do away with fractures and instability:
As I have previously stated punishing your players for using a system is not enjoyable getting rid of this mechanic will fix one of the major flaws of this system, and as you’ve stated in the original post this mechanic was originally designed for making “holy grail” items difficult to obtain, rendered moot by the introduction of tiers of affixes that cannot be crafted.

2: in lieu of using one shard to increase an affix level have each successive level require more shards:
This would allow players to simply farm until they had the gear they desired while taking time and effort put in to acquire the item with the stats they desire. For example applying a tier 1 affix to a normal item will cost 1 shard, the next tier up 3 shards, a tier 3 affix would then be 7 shards and so on, or however many EHG feels is necessary for a tier up. This allows players to progress their gear in a relatively linear fashion while not being totally at the whims of RNG and would potentially allow a smooth transition into farming end game T6-7 gear

3: Allow single shard use for gambling on a tier up, but each successive use increases the chance of a rank up in tier: pretty self explanatory, to add that element of chance into the system in a safe way without being too unduly punishing. I would also add that if Point #2 is taken into account gambled shards should increase their chance to 100% success when the number of shards gambled is equal to the tier up amount from normal use: I.E. if a tier 4 affix needs 20 shards and a player has gambled 19 already, the 20th shard should simply be a 100% success.

Obviously this system would require most glyphs to be re-evaluated as to what they would do in this system, but I personally think that progressing your items into early endgame tier 5 affixes along the way would feel far more enjoyable than simply leaving everything to RNG and potentially ruining items.

I sincerely hope the content of my post is taken into consideration as I do want Last Epoch to succeed and this is one of the few points of the game I consider to be the weakest in what is an otherwise good ARPG shaping up into a great one.

2 Likes
30

This would make loot that drops that isn’t tier 6/7 affix or unique/set completely pointless. Players would just use white items to make whatever they want. Why even have affix shards at that point? Once a trade mechanism is added to the game, it would not be hard to get near infinite shards to make whatever build you wanted with zero chance of failure. It would completely destroy the entire loot system of the game.

4 Likes
31

I find it hard to believe that all loot drops below unique/set/T6-7 would be rendered “useless” you need shards to get the ball rolling, not only that there’s also the fact you can end up dropping a superior item to what you’re working on, or find another item with the resists that suit the area that the player is in better and use that while working on the previous item still, in any case the player would then decide to keep the items or break them down or pass them on to a new character.

Also yes the intention is very much for someone to take the base item they desire in their build and work off from that. Not to mention a good many of the really good shards are very rare and would take a decent amount of time to farm for the amounts required for a T5 affix of them.

a progression system that allows for the player to always move forward in improving an item is superior to one that relies wholly on RNG in terms of respecting the players time and effort invested.

as for trading it remains to be seen what kind of other gold sinks the game may have in the future but I would be fairly certain rather than buying shards, people would rather buy 4x T5 items off of people.

You claim that my idea would “destroy the entire loot system of the game” yet offer no reasoned counter argument as to why or how, if anything the ideas would make all loot valuable if even only to break down because you’re always going to want affix shards to improve your item.

3 Likes
32

Hi Mike! I’d love to share it with you, but I’m doing this manually with good ole paper and pen and a mathematical brain. I have logs for each of my characters, the item attempted, what the instability was at the time of attempt, what the character level was, what tier(s) were achieved, when did it fail and what kind of fail it was. So, yeah, I’d love to share, but don’t have the time and it’s really only about 250 entries at this point, but still would be a lot to input into a spreadsheet or text file.

Nice to know that your own stats are showing near perfect distributions. Maybe I AM unlucky. IDK So, were your distributions based on character level and the level of the item attempted? Just digging to see if my assumption was correct. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

BTW, if you would pass on how to collect the data automatically, I’d be glad to help you out and see the comparison to yours.

33

@Peredur’s thinking is very close to mine.

Personally, I find the inability to craft the biggest loss. Also, echo the thought that the material implication of damaging and destructive fractures is minor - from a usability standpoint, most of the time a damaging fracture (even with the new proposed penalties), would render the item unusable already; shard returns is also something not usually considered given that shard rarity is usually not a concern.

My preferred crafting penalties at this point is as follow:

Level 1 - Craft (Fail): no affix level increase; increased instability
Level 2 - Craft ( Fail): -1 to affix level; increased instability
Level 3 - Craft (Fracture): -1 to affix level; can no longer craft on item

I like the consideration of introducing the idea of critical success. But would also prefer @Llama8’s suggestion for it to be a reduction in instability rather than a random +1 chance.

5 Likes
34

I modified the game files to collect the data directly so I can’t share that method with you. Every roll is logged to the log files though so I thought you might possibly have created some python script to step through the log and find all the data automatically.

Character level has no impact on crafting success rates.

4 Likes
35

I’m a reasonably new player. Around 30 hours played. Lagon defeated on my level 56 necromancer and just started leveling a druid. So far, I really like the crafting system! A lot more interesting than some Arpg’s I won’t mention and not as confusing and convoluted as others. These changes sound great too. Keep up the great work guys, I’m really enjoying your game and look forward to playing much more!

1 Like
36

I’ve try to say that many times but seems like alot of players doesn’t understand the need of a collective system along with RNG.

Always “feel” like you are progressing toward your goal is vital for a healthy game.

Though this is a step into the right direction, the current system still sometime make you feel backward and unrewarding. This feeling will make a lot of people quitting the game than you think. It’s not about logical or statistic. It’s about feeling. And feeling is what actually make people keep playing any game.

If there is a data about this, I’d love to know how many T20 items people actually make in all of their game time. How many set of max lvl item w/ T20 affixes on it, on the “the system is perfect” side.

And I’ve also say it many times, there have to be a reasonable period between the game reward a player with an upgrade/ progress. Especially EHG want to make season.

1 Like
37

This is definitely a good start, as the drawbacks with crafting really have no counterbalance. I also like the idea of a chance at getting an extra level to an affix on the item. However, if there’s a chance at adding more instability than you would otherwise, it is no longer a truly desirable result in my opinion.

38

OK, thanks for the input! Now that I know the rolls are logged into the log file, think I might just take your suggestion and do that!

Also, thanks for the clarity on character level versus crafting success. The reason I said what I did was that any new character I create seems to fail at T3 tries almost always whereas my high level characters can craft through T3 w/o blinking. Again, RNG hates me! LOL

39

Yea, I start to see patterns in it too when I’m just crafting. Then when I have it to a few million crafts, everything is perfect in the long run.

2 Likes
40

Sounds interesting!