I would like to see the crafting system flipped on its head.
Instead of having tons of 1 use shards, shards would be fairly rare, but you can use a shard multiple times.
Each time you use the shard, the chances of that shard breaking increases. A low quality shard might only work once or not at all, but a high quality shard might work 3-4 times before being destroyed.
This way, your equipment never breaks or suffers damage, but shards still takes grinding to find.
Having shards work this way would also tie in nicely with the auction house, allowing players to buy/sell/trade shards as needed.
The only benefits I can see from this change is that your gear doesnât break and you donât have to pick up as many shards, gear breaking can suck but that kind of adds to the fun and hype that is crafting itself. Youâll already be able to buy and sell shards on the Bazaar as you need them, unless something has been announced recently saying you wonât be able to do that. I feel like this would be a change for the sake of change and the only real benefit would be remove a key mechanic that makes crafting really rewarding and exciting to engage in.
Of course this is my opinion, but I donât feel like this change would do much aside from make crafting too easy and feel less rewarding in the long run. Unless you made shards themselves extremely rare but that would just limit engagement with one of the best parts of Last Epoch.
However, Mike did say on the dev stream today that they do have some changes coming for the crafting system so theyâre holding off on any major changes like this for now. I just hope they keep the âRisk Vs Rewardâ factor that makes crafting exciting and engaging.
My only concern with the crafting system is how easy it might be to exploit through the cash shop. And I just hope it doesnât happen here.
Iâve seen similar crafting systems in other games - where thereâs a chance to destroy the item when enchanting or imbuing, but you can buy stones/runes to protect your item in the cash shop. Suddenly - those protection items become a type of currency and those are are willing to pay real monies end up with the best gear - or the in game wealth to buy or trade for what they want. And those who donât use real money get left behind.
Even if your concern were real, which it isnât, why would it matter? A lot of people make this same argument across multiple aspects of games like this, but pay2win doesnât matter in this game. You arenât competing with anyone and how they play their game has zero impact on your game. Who cares if someone spends $100 to make their game easier for them? You wouldnât be affected by it at all.
I like the current EHG. I would like to believe in a game dev forever, but we all have seen what happened when they get too big (see Blizzard) so might as well not start opening the can of worms.
Also, but I have read that the dev may nerf drop rate if trading is too strong. (Anecdote: I am not sure if it is this game)
Just persuade a person who can still design a unique to make a unique that unfracture an item and set the instability to 0 while not reducing the crafted tiers on the items :p.
Ladders are irrelevant though. Multiplayer going to affect that even more.
The game is balanced around self found, youâll never have a relevant âeconomyâ that requires other players. Thatâs the reason they are making trade the way they are.
Iâve no idea what youâre talking about. Of course ladders are relevant. Itâs the competitive aspect so clearly having better gears by paying would make the competition unfair.
Ladders are irrelevant up to the point that they introduce rewards for it (if they ever).
Why break something that doesnât need fixing? As is, the loot you find is every bit as important as the shard you find. Making the loot all but junk after you find your item is not only bad design, it creates later problems that need fixing.
You can go to PoE forum, reddit and many other places that discuss loot and how uterly useless 99% of it is in PoE. Why do that here?
We want items to break, thatâs what makes crafting balanced. Shards have no value to your build, items do. Thatâs why crafting is focused on the items, not the shards.
We do not want a game balanced around trade.
You would be defeating the entire purpose of playing, which is to find a better item. Crafting should be useful but not a shortcut to gameplay. It is balanced right now but your ideas would make it unbalanced and remove the fun. In your system a quad T5 item has no value at all.
My concern about this point would be that it would significantly increase the number of entries in your crafting mats list, currently each shard only occurs once in the list, in the flipped scenario youâd have multiple copies of each shard (for higher quality versions and shards where youâd used part of it) which would make that unwieldy.
But in the âcurrentâ version, youâd have crafting bases selling on the market rather than shards, IMO, thereâs not much difference, it just shifts which one people trade for. Youâd âalwaysâ be trading for something to help craft.
Not necessarily, the current situation is one way to balance it. Rare/expensive mats is one of the other ways (which is how GW2 did it).
Yes, the output of crafting (the nice shiny crafted item) would always be the sought after item, what the OP suggests is that for the precursors you could flip it round & have the crafting mats be the gate/rare thing you need to spend time getting rather than have crafting risk breaking the item (forcing you to then hunt for another base to craft on as well as more mats).
