Feedback on runes of refinement and shaping

Feedback and Suggestions
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First of all, let me address the elephant in the room.
Namely, why is this not being posted in I Don’t See Why Forging Potential Exists?
Simply put, the purpose of this post is not to discuss the crafting system as a whole but rather a tiny portion of it.

Now, onto the main point: I really dislike divining items in LE.
Divining, for those who don’t know, refers to the act of rerolling the numerical values of the modifiers on an item without changing their tier.
The term originated from POE (where this is done using divine orbs). I am using it here for the sake of convenience since simply referring to rerolling values might be ambiguous whereas divining is not.

Now, LE offers two runes for this purpose: refinement and shaping.
My main issue with both available options is that during crafting it is very rare that I even consider using those.

At the beginning of the crafting process, using either runes often feels like you are wasting precious FP, which would be better spent on upgrading affixes. There are exceptions, of course (for instance for the implicits of catalysts), but this is the general feeling.

At the end of the crafting process, when all modifier tiers are there, I still often avoid divining the item. The runes have an FP cost, and you can very easily end up with a worse item than the one you started with, and no FP left for another try.
Anecdotally, whenever I ended up trying to divine an item, I frequently ended up regretting it.

Note that this is not a consideration stemming from optimal play. There are indeed several circumstances where divining an item might be the correct decision from an optimal play perspective.
My consideration is more with regards to how it feels using these runes.
Also, this is not to suggest any particular change to address this, just to provide feedback on my experience interacting with the system.

That is all. Thanks for reading!

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I do understand where you are coming from, but this is actually one of the things where I think LE has a very good loot system in general.

The points you brought up together with not being able to reroll values of uniques at all, makes some items way more exciting.

A “perfect roll” (within its tier) is way more exciting than it is in PoE.
In PoE its merely a budget consideration, but eventually you can do it with almost all items.

So in LE, when you find a good rolled unique or affix this is way more exciting then in PoE most of the time.
On top of that we have another tools that play into this, namely the Glyph Of Order, which lets you upgrade tier and keep their power roll.

So while I don’t say that LE’s loot (and crafting) systems are perfect, this is actually one of the cases where I think it actualyl is in a very good and relatively deliberate spot.

The decisionmaking in trying to re-roll a 75% power roll on a implicit or affix is something that weights a lot, while in PoE its for most instances a no-brainer once you have the budget.

I could see that the FP costs of both Refinment and Shaping might be a bit to high and maybe they can be lowered slightly, but I wouldn’t want to make it too easy.

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I never mentioned uniques in my post, I should mention that I agree that not being able to reroll uniques makes drops more interesting. This is only a consideration for crafted items.

I get the impression that you have the perception that I am asking for a buff, which is definitely not the case, I even put a disclaimer in the first post to make this clear.
I agree that the decision has weight.
I am not even arguing that this is not balanced.
What I am saying is that I do not enjoy interacting with the system.

I think it is mainly an issue of expectation.
The rest of the crafting system gives a strong expectation that expending FP leads to a better item, whereas when divining items this is not the case. So it is really disappointing to use the remaining FP on an item to only see it getting worse than it started.

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Personally I’m with Heavy in that I prefer rerolling values as a final step in crafting rather than PoE’s currency sink to perfect gear.

Are you using the PoE terminology or the common English usage? I’m also not entirely sure why you would use an ambiguous term to define another one.

Yes, that is the decision you need to make. Are the rolls on the item in the top half of their range or not? If they are, you’re more likely to make the item slightly worse than slightly better so it comes down to your view on gambling/risk.

It feels more to me that this is a discussion/feedback on the cost of those runes. How much FP left on an item would you concider “enough” to reroll the mods a few times? And how much FP cost would you feel ok with for the runes?

The only reason I can think of for that is because of the cost.

It likely would though, if the affix rolls were in the lower part of their ranges.

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How unpleasant =)

No idea, as mentioned I am only stating what is my perception as someone who uses the system, I do not have the perspective necessary to properly balance it.

This is a forum to provide feeback and suggestions, my intention was to only provide a perspective in my experience, giving a suggestion on how to improve the system was really not my intention.
From my understanding, this is the most useful form of feeback.

If you really want to know what I would personally do if I had to decide, is to increase the FP cost of both the runes, but make them guaranteed to increase the rolls (or at least not decrease them).

EDIT: I also would not mind if the runes were to be simply removed, this would increase tha value of properly using a gliph of order in the crafting process.

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@Llama8

Hey Giraffa. I understand your feedback and it makes sense. Using the last step of crafting (rerolling affix values) can be either rewarding or unrewarding. The reference to divining was a nice touch and perfectly apt if one reads your entire opening post.

Thanks for the feedback!

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I think I have used these runes two or three times. Theres almost no situation, where the reward is worth the risk. And in 95% of my crafting sessions I run out of FP before “finalising” an item with these runes. For me they are not there and I wouldn’t even recognize if they just vanished…

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most of the runes have TOO HIGH a FP cost to be worthwhile

rune of discovery in particular is almost useless as you would rather craft a specific affix, if it had ZERO fp cost and could roll above 1 then it may have some use

EDIT: Also to note, the runes that have randomness in them would be hard to use even with Zero FP costs, as they are rare and could make your item worse

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Rune of Discovery does not have any FP cost, but cannot be used on items with no FP left.
It has a lot of very good uses cases though, for leveling and making some risky 1 or 2 LP legendary crafts with exalted items to jsut give them 4 affixes, so they can be used for legendary crafting.

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IIRC rune of discovery also has better odds of rare affixes.
Even then, I still find myself using it extremely rarely.

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Yes that is correct, I didn’t wanted to detail this thread into discussing to much other runes though.

It definitely doesn’t have a lot of good uses cases, but when it does, it can really pay of, so the payoff, CAN be really good.

I think right now LE is missing a couple more very frequent regular crafting materials, that will be used similarly often to Glyph of Hope or Glyph Of Chaos.

And then the very situational crafts would not feel “as bad”, because they have clear situational crafts.

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That is a fair point.
I have always been of the opinion that LE needs time to grow its systems, but I always thought that would imply more situational crafting materials rather than general purpose ones.
But I think that the disconnect between situational and non-situational that you pointed out is spot-on.

I wonder what frequently used tools they could make though, the core of the crafting system is so powerful that it leaves very little room for general purpose crafts. The main elementary operations that could be done on an item (remove, add, reroll, tier-up) already exist.

Perhaps a rune that randomizes all affixes without changing their tier (so you can gamble on an exalted that rolled the wrong affixes)?

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They could easily adjust the FP costs and counter that by adjusting the rarity. Look at the rarity of the Rune of Creation,Rune of Ascendance and Glyph of Despair – they are rare as heck, which balances out their potential (although I would argue the Glyph of Despair should be guaranteed).

FP should also be adjusted:

  • Adding a new affix to an item should have a fixed cost (3, 6, 9, 12, 15), adjusted by Glyph of Hope.
  • Rune of Refinement and Rune of Shaping should have no FP cost, but be a lot more rare. As it stand now, I have 1000s of these in my storage, and rarely use them.
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