Feedback on Looting Crafting Items

When it comes to their crafting system is pretty much overwhelmingly is liked by the community (which are filled with players who play all those games) though being pretty old and not much additions to it. I’m sure we will get more updates on crafting closer to 1.0 which will be interesting.

I still don’t agree that automation is what is needed to make it better.

I kinda disagree with that a bit. Yes, affix shards are items, but they are consumable & commoditised such that you don’t care about whether you’ve got armour affix shard A or armour affix shard B, you only care about how many of them you have (like gold & health potions). You do care about which shards (and by that I mean which affixes, armour, poison resist, void damage, etc) you have.

Unlike equipable items which you can modify to your liking (unless they’re sets/uniques) & IMO, that’s why I think the current differentiation between equipable items (you pick them up individually & they take up space in your inventory), consumable items (affix shards & runes which you don’t care about as much now but you will in the future when you come to use them to craft an item) and consumable non-items (gold & health potions).

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Jumping in seeing as the thread’s pretty off topic now.

I’m in the hate picking up shards crowd.

My big reason for not wanting to pick shards up when doing monos is that it usually involves backtracking.

I’ll be zipping around killing things when I’ll notice there’s a single shard about a quarter to half a screen away that wasn’t within vacuum distance. I’ve got 4 sec buffs that are ticking down, a far more interesting activity up ahead (aka killing sh*t), and I just want to finish the mono ASAP.

Even the second or so it takes to go pick it up, or the fraction of a second I need to look at it and decide if I want to pick it up takes me out of the zone (brain off, chill killing state). It’s kinda like listening to a good song and hearing a faint distracting noise every now and then.

Once or twice wouldn’t be bad, but it happens rather often in LE.

If it were a unique or item I’ve specifically highlighted using the filter, I’ll at least get a brief rush. Shards aren’t interesting enough to do that. And as Llama8 said, shards are loot, but just kinda barely.

Edit: Some other random thoughts about shards…

  • Crafting items feel more like another form of currency than actual items.
  • Not enough exciting randomness. It pains me to say this, but I might be more excited about shard drops if they were unidentified and had RNG elements (basically tiers that determine stats). I honestly wouldn’t want this in-game, but it would make shard drops more exciting.
  • If auto-loot isn’t a thing, I’d actually be willing to burn an affix/suffix slot, and depending on the slot, even an actual item slot for more convenient looting.
  • Much prefer Diablo 3’s loot rift system where you get the loot pinata at the end (kinda like arena in a sense, but without the ground drops). Helps prevent looting from interrupting fighting.
  • Would even like to see a Monster Hunter World type system where a list of loot you can snag shows up at the end and you just go through and pick the ones you want, auto-sell the rest.
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Back on topic please. I don’t see why shards are related to the loot filter, you cannot even select them with loot filter and you would allways have them show up even if you could select them with loot filter.

What is more useful, may be a loot vaccuum option

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Which is why @Sarno kindly split the conversation from the original thread…

now I am confused, is my old thread th loot filter one?

Yes, this one was yours, though it looks as though Sarno just copied the entire thread rather than moving the posts that went a tad off-topic.

What? How can you say the crafting system in this game is useless? You can craft any item better than any Unique or Set item. The only advantage of Unique and Set items is that they have certain specific adds that you can’t craft yourself, but only works for specific purposes.

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Yeah. I’m surprised about that statement, too. Just because you can beat the story without crafting, doesn’t mean that this is a good idea.

@tetsuryu I think you’re a bit hyperbolic here. You may dislike the mechanics of the crafting system. This is a personal opinion and that’s fine. But calling the crafting system useless just isn’t accurate. You are judging a system you have no experience with because you did not use, yet. Its absolutely impossible that crafted items are worse that drops. Because you can craft on any dropped item to improve it. You found am axe that is better then the one you use? Fine. Put it on. But what hinders you to not craft on that new item to even improve the stats? Nobody says, you have to stick with an item you started crafting on. If you find something better, switch and shatter the old item.

If you keep your item stats at the maximum craftable tier, you’ll rarely loot better items.

LE’s crafting is deterministic and mighty. I said this in other threads before: LE’s itemisation is designed around crafting. The randomness of gear affixes and the sheer amount of different combinations is only working because we have the current crafting system. Without it, loot would be absolutely underwhelming.

There will be a lot of improvements regarding the crafting system in the future (adding stuff making it more complex, too). Hopefully the principle of the system won’t change, because I like it very much.

No no, he used it once! And if that’s not enough to get a 4x t8 item I don’t know what is! Totally reasonable IMO!

From reading their posts, I’m getting the impression that @tetsuryu doesn’t understand that it’s not just white items that can be crafted on…

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yes you can, but in LE to craft anything good you depend on % chance as your weapon depletes its durability, it reminds me MMOs where same durability with % success chance crafting system implemented.
Take for example BDO, craft there is essential to clear high level content as you simply wont do damage to monsters that level exceed your ATK. But you won’t bother yourself with crafting there until you reach this difficulty barrier where your weapon from quest rewards or monster drops becomes ineffective. So you can actually have fun pummeling monsters and don’t bother yourself with other game mechanics until needed.

On the other hand look at GD, a thing that makes it worth crafting - you just need to find components needed and you will be able to craft what you want without depending on luck in crafting process. Also you can craft items with passive and active effects, not just items with slightly better stats.

In LE right now i can waste 1-5 minutes to craft something with T4 stats, its true that it will be better than dropped item especially if i start crafting on this same dropped item.
But let me ask you is there any need to waste my time and attention on it if i can easily use picked up item as it is and clear more content with it? While you craft something worthy of your time spent in crafting menus, i will be going further into the game, have fun pummeling monsters, level up my passives and skills, becoming stronger overall, not just from 1 item.
Maybe when devs introduce to us some high level content crafting will become a thing, but right now it is useless appendix which can be cut out from the game without any harm.

And this brings us back to the topic of a need to manually pick up affixes and then open up your inventory just to press “store crafting items” button.
Let me refresh your memory,
after i suggested to automate picking up and storing affixes people started to make excuses for not doing so:

So if you actually pay attention you will understand 2 things:

  • automation on picking up and storing into forge for affixes is a thing that lets player focus on the main ARPG gameplay, not wasting time on backtracking or pointless clicking in menus. Especially since most players won’t be using those affixes until later into the game.
  • crafting in LE may be useful in the future with introduction of high level content, but right now it isn’t.

This problem is one of the reasons why loot filter is so useful, getting a t4-t5 of the affix you want makes it much easier to craft the other affixes. Though a loot vaccuum option on loot filter may help a bit.

I just want to point out a few things here, because there’s some diffraction of the conversation going on which makes it hard to stick to a point. You’ve made multiple statements that are related but not the same. One was about having an auto pick up feature for shards. This is a suggestion that has been made before and some people really like it while some people don’t. It is definitely a solid discussion whether implementing such a system is a good idea.

You have also called crafting “useless” and stated that there is no content in the game right now where crafting matters. This is wholly incorrect. I’m happy to discuss the merits of QoL on the shard system with you, but if you’re going to talk about the value of crafting in the game as it stands, I think getting more experience with the system and the content, as well as asking some questions about how others use crafting would do you well. Crafting right now is how we make our builds at endgame, with uniques only being used, as Llama stated, in niche situations. Getting to a point of understanding how the players are actually handling crafting in the game will help you make your case on topics like QoL in the crafting system without getting derailed.

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since this thread about looting crafting items naturally my main point is about automation, but to make my point more obvious to people like

i have to explain why and i can’t do so without explaining my whole view on crafting system in LE.

isn’t it the same thing that i told before? and if you also understand that this crafting thing gradually becomes useful to the endgame, then you should also understand why i don’t want to do pointless actions like backtracking or pressing buttons in menus right from the start of the game.

No, it’s not the same thing that you “told before”. If crafting is the primary way of gearing at endgame, calling it useless is not correct. You have a more nuanced point here about just how valuable crafting is during the campaign, but you’ve mixed that in with a more broad statement. If you want to walk back how valuable crafting is in general, we can discuss it from the position of how it works in the campaign.

This also doesn’t relate to the QoL part of your concerns. Crafting could be great in campaign, or terrible, great in endgame, or terrible, and it wouldn’t make much of a difference on whether or not shards should be auto pickup. For that reason, I would rather we separate the two. It’s easy enough to talk about how it “feels bad” to have to backtrack and pick up shards without worrying about whether or not crafting itself is in a good place right now.

While crafting definitely is the easierst and intended way of getting upgrades in endgame, the crafting system most definitely is not useless before that.

Even on a Solo Character you can make really good upgrades during the story or fix gaps in your defensives etc.

I am still not sure if you simply don’t like the crafting system or you just don’t have enough experience with it.

I would highly suggest trying crafting out and explore all it’s possiblities.
You can so easily make mediocre items into great items, or simply craft a white base, that you just found in a new level bracket to make yourself the next gear upgrade.

I like how in campaign, you can craft if thats something that interests you or not craft if you just want to use your focus on learning your character. Seems like a pretty good middle ground. Then late game when you have your build (skills/passives) more figured out, then you can turn your focus to crafting to optimize your gear for your build. I quite like the system

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Everyone has their opinion and it’s their right. Everyone’s opinion has merit, yours, mine, and everyone else’s. It is your opinion that the crafting system is useless, and as such you should state it as your opinion, not as fact.
As you can see, at least most of the community disagrees with you. This doesn’t mean your opinion doesn’t matter, just that it’s unlikely that it will go away. Most of us seem to like it the way it works for the most part.
If you have input on how to make it better, I’m sure we would all like to hear that.

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Absolutely. With crafted gear you can easily decrease the time to kill by 50%, if not more. You can also boost your survivability by a lot. That few seconds it takes to slap an affix onto you gear pay back many times.

May I ask at what point of the story you are currently? I personally have not the slightest intention to try to beat the story with only looted gear without crafting. Even if this is possible, I just can’t imagine to waste my time trying.

When I level a new character on live, i usually use crafting and my shared stash as much as possible to get the smoothest walkthrough. It’s already a huge difference when I test things on the CT build with solo self found but with crafting. I think I would have quit playing the game long ago without crafting.

You can just ignore the multiple advices from experienced players. You’re absolutely free to do so. You can also go on and argue, but all your arguments regarding the usefulness of crafting don’t make any sense for me.

Sorry.