Crafting Frustrations

[Matchrocket]

First off, I really like the approach to crafting in Last Epoch. I think it adds a really unique layer to the game, BUT.

Drop Rates:

Glyph of Stability and of the Guardian are insanely low. I would expect them to help ALOT More for the rarity of them dropping. I get one of each per ~10 runs of a monolith.

Fracturing 100% chance @ 80% success rate:
As stated, I find I have a close to 100% chance to facture when I drop to or below 80% using a Glyph of Stability. Glyph of the Guardian doesn’t seem to work. Items don’t drop a tier, the item just breaks. Coupled with an insanely low drop rate… why use it?

Rune’s:
Rune of Shattering: Buy only? I have never seen these drop. The shopkeeper doesn’t refresh inventory until you log-out-in either, and there seems to be a time limit to that as well in that you can’t just log-in-out and re-buy. She also doesn’t refresh after time when playing either. Not that big of a deal as affix shards drop like crazy.

Rune of Removal: Always removes the first affix, top-2-bottom, not random.

Crafting a White:

Now, this is where I feel there is a major issue. Starting from a perfectly rolled white item. I have about a 75% chance to fracture BEFORE I can get 4 affixes on it. Glyph Usage helps here, but they are so freaking rare that I can’t get 4x T1 on an item due to lack of Glyphs. From this point, getting to T2 or T3 for all four is just impossible. This can’t be intentional as this seems like a core component of the crafting system.

Fractures:

I have never seen a Damaging or Destructive Fracture. Do they still exist? Is this why Glyph of Guardian doen’t seem help at all?

Summary:

It seems the best odds of crafting ANYTHING is to have an item with 4 affixes on it you want, and high level, then taking one up one or two tiers. Or 3 affixes and adding +4 + Leveling one. Pushing to T5 from a T4 will facture the item almost always, even if you have never crafted on it, which is crazy.

The stability numbers does’t really make sense as you can break an item with a low stability value VERY easily. E.G. 80% to work = damn near 100% chance to fracture.

EDIT:

Found a large number of other posts with the same feedback, mainly this very long thread.

Crafting fractures are far too common

I’m still running tests in different scenarios to try and find a problem. So far I have done a few million tests with all combinations of shards and glyphs. It’s a lot of tests. I’m getting near perfect distributions with automated testing. I’ve been running manual tests in the live version and so far after 200 crafts, I’m within 2% of theoretical. I did have several fractures at 85%+ estimated success rate. I’m not done looking at it but initial results indicate the displayed chance for success…

and

Crafting/Fracturing Mechanic

This was transcribed from Discord and some of the replies were decent ones, I’ll try to add some of them here. Metal: “if u remove the rng of crafting you have diablo 3, and that sucks. Also you consider using the gambler? I mean, mostly all the people get the gear using the gambler xD. Obviously there´s a risk on going further on crafting but thats the point . if u remove the “RNG” u´re talking about, then you just can play the campaign, get the base of an item and just craft everything you w…

Seems its mostly all known and being reviewed.

[Heavy]

@Matchrocket

Fracturing 100% chance @ 80% success rate:
As stated, I find I have a close to 100% chance to facture when I drop to or below 80% using a Glyph of Stability. Glyph of the Guardian doesn’t seem to work. Items don’t drop a tier, the item just breaks. Coupled with an insanely low drop rate… why use it?

Two things:
I think you misinterpret how the glyph of the guardians work, they basically just add 25% chance of success rate (which is “one level of fracture”)
So when you added a glyph of the guardian the chance you have displayed is actually the chance with the glyph calcuated already.

Second thing is: People really have a hard time understanding % chances i think, it’s not just you. We already had countless and endless discussion of the crafting system and it’s chances. And i can gurantee you, it works fine.

It’s just a perception thing.

Most likely alot of the items you craft unti lyou have the 80% chance of success and fractureing, you probably already crafted a few tiems in a row. Even with 99% chance, you still can fracture, it is not guaranteed. If oyu then craft another craft with 90% and another with 85 and anotehr with 80 and ALL PREVIOUS crafts succeeded, you will run into a craft that fails, even if the “chances” are pretty high.

It’s jsut a thing, when you see the actul chances of success you get a “expectation” that it’s higher than X, so it most likely will success, which is stil ltrue, but it’s not guaranteed.

You can literally read through hundred of posts.

Seeing the success rate of such crafts skews the expectations of alot of people.

EDIT: Just saw you added some additiona lthread to your post as well

[Llama8]

@Matchrocket

Fracturing 100% chance @ 80% success rate:
As stated, I find I have a close to 100% chance to facture when I drop to or below 80% using a Glyph of Stability. Glyph of the Guardian doesn’t seem to work. Items don’t drop a tier, the item just breaks. Coupled with an insanely low drop rate… why use it?

You don’t have a 100% chance to fracture at the stated 80% success rate. The devs have done extensive testing & get the expected success rate.

Crafting fractures are far too common

I’m still running tests in different scenarios to try and find a problem. So far I have done a few million tests with all combinations of shards and glyphs. It’s a lot of tests. I’m getting near perfect distributions with automated testing. I’ve been running manual tests in the live version and so far after 200 crafts, I’m within 2% of theoretical. I did have several fractures at 85%+ estimated success rate. I’m not done looking at it but initial results indicate the displayed chance for success…

Having said that, personally I think the Stability glyph should reduce instability by 1-3 rather than 0-3 so there’s always a benefit to using it, it just might not be much. Glyph of the Guardian does work, it reduces the “tier” of fracture. So if you have a 50% chance of success (ie, a 25% chance for a minor fracture & a 25% chance for a damaging fracture), using the Guardian glyph bumps it down a tier, removing the “bottom” 25% chance to fracture so you then only have a 25% chance of a minor fracture.

Rune’s:
Rune of Shattering: Buy only? I have never seen these drop. The shopkeeper doesn’t refresh inventory until you log-out-in either, and there seems to be a time limit to that as well in that you can’t just log-in-out and re-buy. She also doesn’t refresh after time when playing either. Not that big of a deal as affix shards drop like crazy.

They’re random drop, they drop somewhat more later on (monoliths/arena).

Rune of Removal: Always removes the first affix, top-2-bottom, not random.

Nope, it’s a random choice as to which affix it removes, it could be anyone regardless of “where” it is.

Crafting a White:

Now, this is where I feel there is a major issue. Starting from a perfectly rolled white item. I have about a 75% chance to fracture BEFORE I can get 4 affixes on it. Glyph Usage helps here, but they are so freaking rare that I can’t get 4x T1 on an item due to lack of Glyphs. From this point, getting to T2 or T3 for all four is just impossible. This can’t be intentional as this seems like a core component of the crafting system.

That’s not been my experience. Most of the time I get a white item to 4x t1s, often 4x t2s (using Stabilities till my success chance drops to around 75% then switching to Guardians), sometimes some t3s.

Fractures:

I have never seen a Damaging or Destructive Fracture. Do they still exist? Is this why Glyph of Guardian doen’t seem help at all?

Yes, but you’ll need to be reasonably high level crafting before you see them much. At higher level items drop with higher tier affixes which increase the starting instability thereby increasing your fracture chance.

The stability numbers does’t really make sense as you can break an item with a low stability value VERY easily. E.G. 80% to work = damn near 100% chance to fracture.

No, you just remember the times it’s failed much more readily than the times you didn’t fracture.

[EHG_Mike]

@Matchrocket

Fracturing 100% chance @ 80% success rate

I’m sorry this is how it feels for you. While it is technically possible for this to be true, it becomes more and more improbable to hold true as you continue to test. If you truly believe that this is happening, I recommend getting 100 items that are ready to be crafted at 80% success rate. Do them all in a row and record (video) all attempts in a row. Once you’ve done that, check the actual success rate you experienced. If it’s still 100% failure rate or even more than 40% failure rate, I’ll check into it again.

Until then, I have quite literally run billions of tests on this. It’s really accurate. If you don’t believe me, please bring me some data with evidence.

On a wider topic, we have a lot of plans for crafting still. It’s a system with a lot of possibilities I’ve got a really big document with a lot of ideas ready to go for it. We’ve been dedicating design time to other very key systems instead recently. Most notable, the Rogue.

Crafting will continue to be expanded upon.

[Llama8]

@EHG_Mike

On a wider topic, we have a lot of plans for crafting still. It’s a system with a lot of possibilities I’ve got a really big document with a lot of ideas ready to go for it.

Mmmm, hopefully there’s a spreadsheet in there somewhere. Spreadsheets are your friend.

[EHG_Mike]

I’ve gotten really good with conditional formatting recently. My spreadsheets are really nice.

[Llama8]

Yay! The numbers will be so happy that you’re giving them colours. It makes them feel pretty and special.

[Matchrocket]

@Llama8

Nope, it’s a random choice as to which affix it removes, it could be anyone regardless of “where” it is.

My testing on this is 100% reproducible. Before posting I took 10 items and rolled off affixes, removed them top to bottom as shown on the item each time. Its proven handy to remove un-wanted affixes when they are the first one.

@Llama8

You don’t have a 100% chance to fracture at the stated 80% success rate. The devs have done extensive testing & get the expected success rate.

I strongly disagree here. I have never been able to craft with a success rate lower than 80%, granted I have not played 100’s of hours yet, but I have dozens on dozens of fracture items that had 80% chance of success, fracture. From the other threads, I am not alone. I get RNG… but something seems off.

@Llama8

No, you just remember the times it’s failed much more readily than the times you didn’t fracture.

The rate of instability increase vs success rate doesn’t seem balanced. Prior to posting, I took a chest piece from the gambler, with three affixes on it. I added strength, and it fractured at T2. 90% chance of success. Took a second chest, four affixes on it, and got ONE increase of an affix before fracture. Both attempts success rate above 90.

This plays out over, and over and over… My RNG Luck can simply not be that bad.

[Matchrocket]

I understand the long run probably, but up-front this gets really really frustrating really fast.

As I mentioned, I really like the idea of crafting right now, it just seems like the odds are really not balanced unless like you said your doing 100’s of items at a time… which… there is no time for that.

Will file a bug report on the remove “random” affix. Its not random at all. Very much removes the #1 affix, then next etc until all gone. Burned through all 10 of my runes on that.

[EHG_Mike]

Even 5 in a row, we’re talking something like 0.03% chance.

[Heavy]

I still strongly believe, that having the actual success rate visible skews people exceptations heavily.

I really like seeing the success chance, but it really plays with peoples minds

[Llama8]

I grabbed some random boots from my inventory & added an additional prefix (replacing any removed affixes to continue testing). Then used a rune of removal, the first two times it removed the top left affix, then the bottom left, then the bottom right.

Next I crafted up some random gloves:

The first one removed was the bottom right(void resist), then it removed the bottom left (vitaility), then it fractured while trying to add a replacement affix.

IMO, the rune of removal is rolling each tier of each affix to pick one to remove so it’s more likely to remove higher tier affixes.

[Matchrocket]

I didn’t pay any attention to that at all actually, when I have more runes, I’ll check again.

[Matchrocket]

Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket! I’m batting a 1000 right now.

[Matchrocket]

@Heavy

It’s just a perception thing.

Most likely alot of the items you craft unti lyou have the 80% chance of success and fractureing, you probably already crafted a few tiems in a row. Even with 99% chance, you still can fracture, it is not guaranteed. If oyu then craft another craft with 90% and another with 85 and anotehr with 80 and ALL PREVIOUS crafts succeeded, you will run into a craft that fails, even if the “chances” are pretty high.

I don’t disagree here, and your right, seeing the % chance being high after two or three crafts that are okay then having a fail creates a WTF moment. My personal experience so far is you have a MUCH higher chance of failure (the 47% quoted in another post is about right) with a “success chance” being statically high, which layers on the WTF moments.

As I mentioned, focusing on One or Two affixes only GREATLY increases the odds of having a good item. Not being able to craft from scratch a high end item (There should be a cost here! I don’t disagree) is a little disappointing. 4x T2 is rare to get, and is nice for leveling, but not so much for pushing.

[Shrukn]

The Rune of Removal doesnt remove only the top left affix, it only removes the rolls you want lately

If I have a Sword with T5 Melee crit and T1 poison chance and I use a rune of removal - say 10 times - it will remove T5 melee crit 8 times on average since Rogue release - ive tried with 3 affixes for fun and again it will remove both the ones I want leaving the bad affix

Also ive had many fractures using rune of removal lately at 95% where the item straight up bricks immediately

[ArtCrusader]

Because the human brain is not made to understand chances. It’s a strange concept. Even in Path of Exile, a game that has been heavily studied by its community, people still believe in fairytales like having different odds of 6-linking an item between town and hideout. Because it’s easier to believe in some causality than to accept that sometimes you just get the unlikely outcome.

@OP: A sample size of 10 has no significance in statistics

[Mythrandir]

@Llama8

No, you just remember the times it’s failed much more readily than the times you didn’t fracture.

According to research, this seems to be human nature. Studies have found that it takes at least three positive experiences to compensate for one negative experience.

This means that even if a rng system is perfectly balanced, it will always feel “unfair” to the user by a ratio of about 3:1.

Some researchers, such as John Gottman and Robert Levenson, have even put this “dissatisfaction ratio” higher, upwards of 5:1.