If this is all it’s useful for, than it’s unnecessary, and bloating the system. Put a level cap on Runes of Cleansing, so we know when we’re “supposed” to stop using them.
OR, devs, come out and say exactly what your vision of the crafting is, through the entire spectrum of the game, so I can either say, peace out, or awesome.
You’re right. But the BEST bases, should be fully craftable.
I save the best bases in PoE, to craft as needed, and yeah, crafting in PoE is fairly random, but guideable, and in the end, your items don’t become completely useless.
And you CAN craft perfect gear with the currencies and league features, and there’s no item breaking.
I am actually totally FOR this! It’s not the first time it’s been suggested, but it’s a great happy-medium.
Players also don’t always know what is best for the longevity of the game. Players views are often selfish, not in a negative way. They want the game to best fit their personal desires. Devs have a vision and want to see it come to fruition. People that like that vision will come, and those that don’t may leave. The players here now will not be the totality of all players to ever play the game.
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You’re semi right. Yeah it seems pretty selfish. And it kind of is. But I’m almost 40 years old. I’ve been gaming almost my entire life. I know what makes a good game, a horrible game, and a great game. And I know that every player has their own idea of it too. Last Epoch has most of the makings for a great game. I understand the need of balancing both player desires and artistic design from the devs. I can’t do their job. But to be fair, most devs can’t do the player job either. What I like are systems that are accessible to a larger variety of players, rather than just the hardcore elitists.
That’s true. Damaging and destructive fractures don’t feel good to me and I’m also no fan of it. All I say is that its purpose is to prevent the system from being op.
Crafting early and midgame gives you a huge performance boost. You can right away boost your main synergy stats for your skills. And you don’t have to worry fracturing items. This is very unlikely to happen until a certain point.
Then when it happens, you have already access to higher level bases to craft on.
Without crafting you can’t balance you stats. If you just rely on drops and don’t craft, you gimp yourself.
Although losing an item feels bad, the solution is not to skip crafting completely. The pure amount of item/affix combination and the tiers they can roll makes it impossible to properly gear for endgame. The fact that some people (claim to) do high end content with crap gear doesn’t mean this is desirable.
I have to. I feel like my rng is so bad that I can’t advance. I’ve taken a couple of characters as far as Void Rahyeh, but I can’t get further than that without crafting, and I can’t do, i get nothing but early fractures and damaging fractures. Most of my characters get to Abomination, and then I have to stop playing. A couple are permanently stuck at Lagon, due to most uniques not having appropriate protections on them.
That only points out the difference between the two games / systems. For me personally the PoE crafting is far to much rng and “chaos”. Unpredictable. LE let’s me directly focus und the exact stats I want to increase.
People talking about good bases in LE often don’t mean the same. For some a good base is a white item, high tier, with good implicit stats.
For me and many others a good base (to craft) is an item with at least 3 t3-4 stats. On anything lower than this I don’t start crafting, if I want to create an item with longevity e.g. for endgame.
The whole system implies exactly that. If you make the experience that a white item isn’t going beyond t12 you need to start at t12 to get better results.
But at least with “far too much rng and chaos” your items aren’t permanently broken!
If the end result is the same, which is more powerful, customized gear, then why would I pick the game where my crafting can break?
Even boardman21 pointed out in one of his videos that some the stats on the items weren’t for his build, but there’s no way to get rid of them, so you just deal with it. Same as PoE.
Yeah, don’t get me wrong. I’m with you on the fractures.
I’m just saying despite the fact that the system is how it is currently, it’s still incredibly useful. Despite all the drawbacks and pain that great items break all of a sudden, crafting will improve your gear.
The game is too far in development to suddenly reverse course and make drops the primary way of gearing. Crafting as an important part of gearing is here to stay unless EHG makes a massive shift in their philosophy.
Up to tier 12 or so is relatively easy to gear up on. You can even do a perfect tier 8-10 using a base item with no stats on it. That’ll take you to at least past abomination if you’re remotely decent and you have the right stats. Items breaking at that level is hardly an impact. You can get over it and start over by finding another base item. The problem starts when you have to get to tier 13+. That’s when you can’t realistically work with just a base item with no stats on it or the instability becomes a hindrance trying to go higher. That’s when you’re farming for the right base item with at least one or two affixes you want at a higher tier level. Once you get to a comfortable level then you move on to finding exalted items as a base. The higher you go the harder it gets not just by virtue of fractures but by finding the right base items and affixes. Fractures are just a royal f u.
Lizard provides the best example. 800 hours to get perfect items and that’s using the gambler. Gambler is a whole different story that should probably get addressed. Imagine no gambler and relying purely on farming. Or a nerfed gambler. I don’t think we realistically expect people to spend 800 efficient hours to fully gear a character. That’s just insanity to me. And even if that is the expectation there are ways to keep that same time commitment without shafting people with fractures.
I don’t think fractures are even needed for preventing people from getting too OP too fast, look at PoE where a lot of end game crafts take days to farm the currency to make, yet outside of very specific and very risky crafting methods(Vaal orbs) you do not risk item bricking. The main factor in PoE is time, but in LE it is luck.
If the Devs want to balance the system they should do so in a way that doesn’t make crafting unfun. I noticed that even the defenders of it are saying that it just “isn’t bad”. Which makes me think that they are not having fun either.
The Devs can keep improving the balance but they should not forget the fun along the way.
I don’t understand where all these rose tinted lens of POE crafting is coming from. But POE crafting is EXTREMELY luck based. And you basically need mirrors of currency to even consider crafting.
You mention Vaal orbs. What about Alts? Chaos? Fossils? Essences?
Can you throw any of those crafting item and improve on your existing one? No. The item completely breaks in the sense that if you had a semi decent item before, you cannot use any of these crafting approach to improve your existing item because they all completely reroll the item.
People also talk about “exalt slam” in POE. Why? Because an exalt slam is basically the equivalent of a minor fracture in this game. Once you slam an item you’re basically hoping the roll goes your way or the item had “slightly” bricked with a useless mod and you’re probably not going to continue crafting on it.
Harvest crafting changed that somewhat but harvest is a once off and we don’t even know in what form it’s coming back.
great ideas, considering remaking runes (glyph of stability and guardian are working fine), but the other two are more or less useless, should be a possibility for them to make an item more stable, not less stable.
I hear ya, but the other two glyphs are useful. I use removal glyps for those items that have 4 affixes, 3 useful and one not. If Im lucky, boom. Might be able to get a useful craft on it, even if its low tier. I feel it shouldnt add as much instability as it does, but…
The other is useful, but really, not worth using due to the instability cost. It’s one I would use as a last touch to an item. But… no way I’d chance fracturing it, so yeah, this one is moderately useless in my mind (just not 100% useless lol).
Yeah, IMO, the rune of removal should not add instability. It already has a good chance for failure & if it fails you would then likely throw the item away as it would have 2 useful affixes, 1 not & it’s unlikely that you’d be able to replace the affix it removed at a similar or higher tier without it fracturing.
Precisely!
Hey Raw Suicide, thanks for your message - I’m a fan of your insights on this forum. This is a delayed response because I’ve been trying some crafting. In short, I’m still not a fan of LE crafting, but I can try to elaborate on your suggestions:
It sounds that you are very biased towards crafting being unfun and tedious because of your experience with PoE.
Possibly. We all have biases. I doubt this is a strong one, however.
> It’s less tedious as you think (in my opinion) and the results do matter. Without it you gimp your potential and will miss a lot of content that you can’t beat.
Certainly the results matter, but I still find it really tedious. In fact, after retrying crafting, it struck me that I logged on to an ARPG, and spent a couple of hours on … an idle clicker? A gambling simulator?
> Theres near to no RNG regarding the result.
RNG is present: to find base items, the affixes on each item, remove affixes, find affixes, instability added per craft, not fracture (up to twenty times per item), and the range of each roll.
> By not using it you gimp yourself. I’d even would go that far and say that LE isn’t meant to be played without crafting.
> The fracturing mechanic is just a mechanism to cap the potential of crafting otherwise it would be op.
All this is true, but it makes me think of the parable of the fisherman and the industrialist.
The fisherman lives in a hut on the beach, enjoys fishing, then playing with his kids in the afternoon. The industrialist comes and suggests he fishes with two boats, then three, then builds a cannery. “It’ll be a lot of work” suggests the businessman, “but you’ll be the most powerful man in the village. You’ll have hundreds of employees to manage and a fine house on the hill.”
The fisherman replies:
“No thanks”,
then goes fishing.
By analogy, the power is not the key point here, what matters is the means by which we can acquire it.
For me, experimenting, killing things or planning well are satisfying ways to progress a character. Conversely, grinding, tedium, RNG, arbitrary hoops to jump through are just not my thing.
This crafting system i like , but it needs improvements :
– No need defining fractures like damaged and destructive .
– NEW Fraction point is on items supposed to be destroyed normally with current crafting system. If normally would be fracture , get a fracture point and only one. Next time will fracture . It still be possible to craft, but gets 10 % more instability using any glyph .
– No loosing tiers on fraction point .
– NEW Add Rune of Transferring – this rune use is in a different way. Place item in forge you want extract affix to transfer only one affix at time . Then should pop up window to select affix you want to transfer then open secondary forge slot to item you want transfer . Affix slot should be empty in that item (you wish put affix) to transfer. Adds instability by 20 %. Can be applied only twice for a single item. Do not accept duplicates. This process keep tiers number exact .
This will cause less frustration. It will be not to restrictive and fair system.
I will tell you where, even with the luck factor you do not actually brick the gear itself and it is usually best to just use scouring and retry again, the main factor in success for crafting isn’t luck but having a large number of currency lying around, which requires time, there is a reason people refer to it as “spamming”, because while each individual craft has a low chance of success, a ton of crafts makes it almost guaranteed that you get what you are looking for somewhere along the way.
In addition due to all the different crafting methods you can push the odds more in your favour. There are even ways around certain luck elements, like the crafting bench and the 6 link prophecy(which you can trade a player for). If you know what you are doing a vast amount of the luck gets removed.
Even more importantly, you do not need to rely on finding an item drop with very specific affixes before you even BEGIN crafting in PoE, in fact you can start on a common item and still end up with something good at the end. While in LE one fail and you need to find another ITEM to continue instead of just wasting crafting currency.
Oh yes, your absolutely right. The huge amount of rng with finding adequate items is the reason we need that kind of predictive crafting system. What I meant was the crafting process itself regarding the outcome is not rng. You know what you get when you put %increased armor on your shield. I just saw a lot of references to PoE where the outcome is random. Yes, there’s no bricking. But there also a huge possibility that you can put your item into the stash for a long time because your crafting session leaves you with an item that has stats you did not want. You can try later but have no guarantee that you’ll get what you want. This was what I was referring to.
In PoE I have the feeling, it doesn’t even matter what stats you have on your items. There will always be enough to let you have decent stat. On my first playthrough ever I was resistance capped at around lvl 40-50 I think. And this did not change until the very end even with the resistance penalties in the later story.
In LE you do chase every single stat that is important for your build and playstyle. Theres not much room for fluffy stats on your gear. The crafting grands the opportunity to absolutely fine tune your build.
That Fisher story made my day 
. I hope you enjoy fishing then 
I just bricked another stashload of promising items on crafting, and I can now say I have gone from ambivalent to actively hating it. The more I engage with this system, the more it just seems needlessly malevolent.
Whatever your current opinion, to envision a truly enjoyable crafting system, I recommend starting with Ceno’s lucid and incredibly eloquent comments in this thread. He/She/They even come up with a version of the Hippocratic oath that could be applied to game developers: