You mean people that don’t agree with you or have a different opinion?
As I said on the crafting teaser thread, this crafting isn’t going to be the panacea that everybody expects it to be. It has some benefits but it’s impossible to completely get rid of the feelsbad moments.
My initial reactions after an evening playing the new patch and tinkering around with some crafting aren’t altogether positive.
I love the patch, I will say that off the get go. So, I’m only addressing my first reactions to the crafting changes alone.
I hope that it is a “work in progress”. Right now, I actually preferred the old “high risk” system. This new system seems even more RNG than the old one, and I hate RNG with a passion (seen what it does to a game when devs become obsessed with it).
The reason for my initial dislike is the balancing of the system. As others here have said, I think it needs some work. Either the Forging Potential is too low, or the ranges for the amount used need decreasing.
To take 2 tests that I did last night:
Test 1: Take a T1 “virgin” item and try to get to 4 x T4’s. This was something I did a lot in the last patch to get starter mono gear for builds. I’d push it all the way to fracture quite often but I wouldn’t start grinding monos in earnest until I had at least T16 items. Without precise data (I didn’t keep any) my feeling was that I’d make a T16 about 1 in 3 attempts. I had the process quite well nailed down.
Now, with this new system, my initial tests had a much worse success rate, and it seemed way more RNG based than the previous system. Some crafts using the 25% rune cost nothing at all, some almost took out 1/2 of the Forging Potential in one swipe. 2 or 3 “failed” upgrades and the item was done. I found to get a T16 was taking me 1 in about 7 attempts. This is almost twice as bad as I remember the old system. This was almost entirely due to the “cost” almost being at least half way in the “range”, so I think that the ranges need tweaking somewhat.
Test 2: Taking a good drop with T12+ and upgrading it attempting T20. Here is where it seems to level out somewhat. Success rates seemed roughly about the same, but obviously with only 1 night to play around my testing pool was quite small as I had to grind some items to test. Again though, the ranges felt a little too high for the potential.
I think though that if you want to craft the mystical 5 affix item with 1 locked off that the ranges / potential need a lot of work. I don’t know if the devs deliberately made it this way as a soft gate for making these types of items or not.
All in all, with my trust in the devs I am keeping an open mind. In the past they’ve always stepped in and adjusted new things they have introduced if they aren’t working out how they initially wanted them to. I think this new system might come in for some “adjusting”. So I’m more than happy to see how things pan out over the next few weeks. Once they have more data & feedback I am sure they will review as usual.
The thing I hope they do mostly is to ignore “kneejerk” reactions to these changes. The “other main competitor” always put far too much stock into kneejerk reactions, and hence the mess they are in now. I think we all need to play with things as they are for a week or 2 and report our feedback after a considered amount of testing, rather than simply a day or 2.
One small thing I would like to see is the chance to “lock” a T5. I didn’t get enough chances to see if this would happen or not, but the hint notes seem to indicate that a T4 will either lock or upgrade, making T4 the highest possible “locked” affix. The option to craft/lock a T5 is greyed out, so I am guessing that with a lock the new T20 variant would be 3xT5’s, T4, & a new random affix? I haven’t tested this yet, so you might be able to pick your affix. However, I’d really like the chance to lock a T5, even if the chances were almost zero 
Yes, Like Llama said I don’t think you have to worry as much about WK’s here. This isn’t PoE, which seems to need stating on an almost hourly basis. I really wish people migrating here would read the forums a bit before assuming that all arpg’s are the same…
There are a lot of supporters of the devs and their project here, myself included. However, unlike the “other place” we’re not fanatical supporters posting like zealots in the vain hope of getting shares/xmas cards/chocolate or whatever drives those nut jobs over there.
Unlike there, we don’t just mindlessly support everything that is done. Instead, I would like to think that when new things come into the game we are usually among the first to point out to the devs our dislikes of those amendments along with constructive criticism as to why we don’t like them.
The key thing to note is “constructive criticism”. It’s all well & good to like/dislike something in the game, but unless you provide your reasoning in a logical and polite fashion then you’re doing nothing more than trolling. When I say “you’re” I don’t mean you in particular babylord I mean the general population. I use “you” as a term to encompass posters in general who do that.
This place is great, and will continue to be great as long as we have constructive & polite debates between agree’ers & disagree’ers. It’s when it becomes meaningless & insubstantive arguments between flamers & white knights that it all devolves into chaos. I sincerely hope we are some time away from that starting to happen.
It’s not just feelsbad moments.
To get through the story you need stats, offensive and defensive. Most of the items that drop during the story are bad, but they may have some stats you need, albeit at very low rank. Before you could craft those items to get them to “somewhat good level” before they fractured.
Now, I get items with 12 to 22 crafting potential, with t1 or t2 stats, and as soon as I touch them, I’m out of crafting potential, without even having 4 affixes, even low tier. And I am using glyphs of hope.
That’s not just feelbad, that’s straight up unplayable: at that point in the story the wengaris are ruining my character and I can’t craft anything to save my life.
I’m not despairing, I think the system just needs some tuning. But I don’t see myself suffering through the story with bad items, or farming wengaris until I get base items with affixes I need.
You might be surprised by how far you can get with low level gear depending on the build & player skill.
Yeah, I like the principle, I just think the numbers need a bit more tweaking.
Turning a T1 into T16, using Stability down to ~75%, then Guardian the rest of the way was about 1/10 chance. So not quite so common as you feel, but still not exactly rare.
Never had any with the previous crafting system. Crafted a lot of t18-t20 items, failed many more. This time i straight up don’t enjoy it ? It seems way way more random than what we had before.
But trying to upgrade something knowing you could slam an affix 20 times or just once feel reaaally shitty. Before you had a sense of greed, and “you deserved” to be punished. With this version, it just seems completely random and nonsensical. It costed you 1 forging potential the first time but this time it will cost you 20. And there isn’t any kind of feedback telling you you just consumed 20 forging potential so everytime I need 2 seconds to realise that my item is gone.
Really weird crafting update. It really needs some tweaking, maybe depending on the rarity of the affixe or something. First time i’m quite disapointed in EHG but I’ll test some more in end game as a sign of good faith.
Most people had feelsbad moments when they fractured an item with a high sucess chance.
Chill. Talking about people defending stuff blindly.
You seem to substantiate your arguement so no need for your “knee jerk” response.
Now, people have the unpleasant feeling that even if they succeed 100%, their item will still be trash with low stats.
I am now glad that I did not use the prepared items, I will wait for the developers to correct the numbers.
You’re assuming that they’re blindly defending stuff rather than having a sincerely held opinion which is different to your own (hence my comment), then throwing out a pejorative.
Did a little more testing on low end items… i.e. t1/t2 crafts… 1 to 20 for a T1 craft is far too high…
I havent done enough to make any assumptions statistically but whenever I started with a 3 affix item with 20-30 FP, and tried to add another affix, it tended to roll on the higher end of the range 10-20 fp and effectively cripples the chances of the item reaching greatness…
by contrast, if I start with something that already has 4 affixes (even if they are relatively low) then the potential to forge something good is much better…
Again, havent done the math but it definitely seems like the new system penalises starting items that have less affixes on them… I know they said they wanted to ensure that Rares were better than Whites / Blues for making gear but if you have an Exalted with only 2 affixes, adding the next two affixes at T1 effectively finishes the item because it uses up so much FP just to add the first tier…
@Llama8 can you chip in here about this issue… As a side effect of the above, Exalted items with only 2 affixes are/seem to be penalised as if they are Magic items… Is this how its supposed to be?
EDIT: Unless of course the Devs intend that for exalted items you should Apply a Rune of Discovery or two before beginning your forging…
When I was asking about the ranges in the initial announcement, one of the devs said it would probably be between 1-10 for the lower tiers so I was pretty surprised when the T1 craft was 1-20 (which is way too high in my opinion).
I also don’t quite get why it’s necessary to (seemingly) double nerf white/magic items. White and magic items already have low forging potential but it seems that as you said, the forging cost is made high so as to penalize white/magic items.
I feel like staggering the forging potential by tiers (e.g. 1-4, 1-8, 1-12 etc) would be more useful than just having it be a blanket 1-20 even if behind the scenes there’s certain weightings or whatever going on
Here’s the reality with the new crafting system: it’s more powerful. It has way more flexibility than the old system and good gear is even easier to craft on. But it also shifts that power in several ways, so old strategies often don’t work very well, and require the player to adjust to the newer strategies in order to get the most out of it. Here are some examples:
Crafting a new affix on an item - This is much more expensive than the old system. It makes sense because the power you gain from choosing whatever affix you want is very high and the old system didn’t account for that. So now you have a choice: You can either slam your preferred affix into the slot and hope you get lucky (which happens a lot in the new system) or you can use a rune of discovery and get a free tier 1 on all of your empty slots with a higher chance to roll a rare affix. Rune of discovery is really powerful while leveling. If you’re trying to slam 2-3 affixes into a leveling item you’re gonna have a bad time. Use a discovery and then chaos any bad affixes that you just can’t live with.
Speaking of chaos, let’s talk about altering affixes. Before, all we could do is use a rune of removal. Doing so meant that you could remove the good affixes you wanted to keep instead of the one you’re targeting. You can still do that, but it’s even more expensive to do so now. Why is it more expensive? Because removal gained an increase in power. It now gives you all the shards back from what it removed (which is amazing targeting certain shards you need for crafting), so there has to be a downside for that. If you’re used to using removal to try and craft up a good item with a bad affix, I strongly suggest switching to chaos. You aren’t guaranteed the affix you want, but you are guaranteed to target the right affix to alter, and it’s going to cost less forging potential than removal.
Crafting on whites and blues - a lot of people are used to doing this with good success in the old system. Effectively, the system was rewarding players for crafting on weaker items instead of more powerful ones. That’s been reversed now, with exalted items having the most forging potential. This means getting great exalted items is easier now, so our top end power increased from this alone. Add on glyph of despair and tier 20 is no longer the goal even for non legendary items. Many of you are going to need to adjust your filters to account for this. If you were targeting blue items, you need to switch to yellow and purple items, and be prepared to use chaos and despair in order to try and get the affixes you want on the item. Despair alone means that getting a sub par affix on an item is far from a death sentence. In fact, it could be a more powerful item then you had in mind if the affix still has value and you can seal it.
In summary, I understand why some of you are really concerned about the new system, but if you’re approaching a new system with the same strategies as the old one, you’re of course going to get different results. The fact is, the new best strategies for this system are far more powerful than the best strategies from the old one, so a shift in how you craft will give you greater rewards than you could ever get before.
Definitely this new system is catastrophic (to be courteous and not to say that it is a big purge, or just shit)
Impossible to create a correct item, still more difficult, the old system was not so bad, having a full T5 item was clearly not easy at all. Let’s not talk about it having an object with two t5 affixes is an incredible achievement. Ridiculous, it really doesn’t make me want to continue in these conditions, impossible to do this stuff properly without spending a thousand hours of farming. This game was enjoyable because the farming was balanced, a little but not too much. With this new system if you don’t spend your life farming it’s over, you’ll have to settle for a shitty stuff. Welcome to POE2.0
PS: the gambler is also dead. Thanks for that, anything you buy at a high price will have no potential or ridiculous potential. Really a great success this thing, sorry to return to the old system it was very good.
I agree… Old strategies will not work and need to be adjusted… The chaos & discovery runes are a great new addition that add a new way of doing things… but there still exists a concern that the finer points need to be tweaked/addressed/bugfixed - whatever the devs deem appropriate…
This feels like a case of over-correction. The gambler’s items really shouldn’t have been nerfed, the new crafting system already limits player control enough.
Gambling now essentially means that you need a rare, since white and magic items are useless bases with low forging potential. Getting a rare with decent, desirable base stats is still unlikely… EHG shouldn’t have gone further and nerfed Gambler’s Forging Potential.
The system could definitely use a second pass.
Absolutely agree!
The new system also is less powerful early game. You can’t create the imba story carry item at level 10.
That’s a good thing as it also balances the story experience.
I’d wish that people would be a bit more open to new systems and take the time approach it. I personally find the new system more powerful and alot less frustrating.
I’d bet money that in 3 weeks people will call for a nerf…
I agree that with the new glyphs, the net effect is probably that good items are overall easier to get. But IMO the problem isn’t so much about the difficulty of achieving good items - rather it’s about taking a genre that’s wholly defined by the excitement of picking up amazing items that you want to use and then insisting on those items going through an RNG-deathchamber. It’s just a total buzzkill.
I see a lot of people mentioning that the dev’s have to take balance in to consideration, and also to try not to rush to judgement so quickly in regards to the new system. I have to wonder though, why is there crafting in the first place? It’s woefully apparent that the dev’s want us to min/max or BOS our characters at this point.
To me giving us such a tight restraint on how much we can craft on any 1 single item, and the fact that in order to create “legendary” items involves an even more convoluted crafting feature, tells me that these dev’s have no clue what they have planned for endgame. I mean if i wanted to play a Diblo 2 style gear rewards system, i’d go play D2R which i have been tbh. Just remove crafting and actually use two or more brain cells to write in code for actual gear people can find that’s useful?