I like that someone mentioned that ARPGs land somewhere on spectrum of high-low RNG and it is developers’ choice. I don’t like that it’s assumed it has to be one point. As in many other cases i prefer to give people choice. Create 2 “crafting” mechanics: one for high RNG (like right now) and one for low RNG (maybe something slowly progressing with play).
Look at Grim Dawn (which is only other relevant ARPG i played, so i can’t refer to others for examples). When you want specific legendary for your build, you can choose to either play the game and hope it drops or you can use crafting (most legendary items have blueprints) by spending non-trivial resources to craft your item.
Barely writing this post i already have some ideas:
add more runes/glyphs and split them into chaotic and orderly, high and low RNG. glyph of hope and glyph of chaos would already be a proof of concept of this in way
allow some form of crafting tied with mechanic like “weaver’s will”, so progress your affixes with XP. e.g. so craft item from scratch, choose t1 affixes and then rise affixes with play/XP
Those low-RNG mechanics would require some higher cost to balance them against high-RNG. And then player can choose whether they want to spend 1$ for 1% chance for 100$ or 90$ for 90% chance for 100$.
I’m sure others can offer many other ideas for low-RNG crafting and how to balance it against current system.
Also I am not sure if you suggested Unique crafting with your example of GD or not.
But I personally would not like that.
LE already offers so much tools to get more deterministic loot within all of the random drops.
(blessings, farming specific timelines for specific types of uniqie/set items, rune of asendence).
Also with your high eng and low rng crafting what I don’t like are having too many redundant ways of achieving the same thing.
I rather have one specific way of obtaining or target farming/altering your chances. And then there might be different approaches how to target farm or use this methods.
Giving people more choices is not necessarily a good thing.
It can bloat or convolude a game a lot.
I WOULD REALLY LOVE TO SEE A CRAFTING SYSTEM THAT when we add an item and select an affix shard the rest outcome would be random, that way we will get rid that silly forging potential and we will have MAJOR change in the crafting system that the outcome would be so much more interesting to give us the joy to actually hunt something for craft. I’m just dreaming.
Not quite sure what you mean by “rest of the outcome”, surely you add the affix to the item & that’s it? The forging potential bit is the balancing side of things, in the same way that in PoE the rng & cost is the balance (maybe you’ll get something with some useable affixes, maybe you won’t, but if you don’t you just throw more currency at it).
I believe he meant a system where you just select an affix and the rest of the affixes are randomly rolled. Something kind of like PoE essences, I believe. So a lot more RNG than we have now.
As I said before, there are always people that will want either less or more RNG and this is the proof of that
