Just an idea I had when an item dropped and once I got my desired pre/suff I couldn’t do anything else. So adding whetstones could solve this issue maybe! There could be 3 types of whetstones and the drop rates for them can be on the low side and get lower as tiers go up.
Ex:
Tier 1 Whetstone - Add between 5-10 forging potential - Drop Rate: 5.5%
Tier 2 Whetstone - Add between 10-15 forging potential - Drop Rate: 1.3%
Tier 3 Whetstone - Add between 20-35 forging potential - Drop Rate: 0.35%
Can be even more fun if we add unique/legendary whetstones that can do more fun stuff. What you guys think? I want to see Last Epoch succeed so bad.
They’ve always said that it’s a hard no on deterministicly adding forging potential. They added several ways to make forging more favourable to the player when they reworked crafting several years ago.
Less RNG then before, but the bad ends and high ends both have been reduced, so you have a much harder time getting the ‘perfect’ outcome now.
Given the low amount of the right exalted mods with the right base and on top having the need for the right affixes to not enforce gambling your way through it with very low chances the overall amount of ‘successful’ crafts is minimal.
And that’s a bit of a problem as it ‘ends’ the progression fairly early on since it becomes just not realistic to get extremely strong gear beyond a point. Unlike in other games like Torchlight Infinite which puts all the RNG at the start of the crafting process and hence allows to repeat them relatively often to then follow up with a pure gradual progression system. Or PoE which has a myriad of crafting options that can be enforced piece by piece with investment on a single item.
Last Epoch’s system is a ‘all or nothing’ one, and that’s relatively close to the gacha-like upgrade systems of korean games at times, a pure gamble with a fixed fail-state.
Hence:
I’m for such a solution, albeit as a very very rare item and with 1 FP increase per use. It could even be the one crafting item in the game which is the rarest in existence… but just having it exist in itself to save up for the potential use of a potential good drop would be the difference between heaven and earth so to say.
The high ends haven’t been removed plus they added critical successes.
If it’s “very very rare” then why bother having it, especially if it only gives a tiny amount of benefit? It’s either common enough and impactful to be used or why bother having it.
I think it would be a good addition like it would add to the grind to perfect an item rather than just pray for an upgrade to drop which can be really rare if you are using something like a T7 affix or need a specific base for cooldown or crit. It can also be really helpful to reroll to get a good roll on certain items (Although I would prefer if some item/mod roll ranges were reduced instead) especially on uniques.
Aside from the item name I don’t think there’s any similarity to PoE.
If it has even less of a chance to appear than a Rune of Creation, maybe, although personally I prefer the randomness. The PoE reference is mostly because it sounds like a PoE item and I don’t mean the name.
Just vastly more unlikely.
Before FP was a thing you had the fail-state of it shattering, which in 99% of cases just meant ‘yep, didn’t work out’ and that’s it.
With the introduction of FP and the crit success there is nonetheless now a fixed end-point. With the old system the fail-state itself was frustrating as it could happen with a good item after the first try.
With the new system though you can see if your outcome is even realistic. Imagine finding Eternal Gauntlets with T7 armor/reduced crit hybrid… but it has T5 increased stun chance, Attunement and Mana on it… you know beforehand that you can throw it into the bin with a 99% chance despite the T7 on it. Barely a chance to get the T5 gone and made into something nice and the other 2 affixes are a gamble to become a decent outcome for your build.
Imagine being in end-game and you got the perfect item base with the perfect T7 affix sitting there. Now you don’t have FP on it anymore though, your crafting went awry, the outcome is crap.
This way you can gradually over time get singular tries for the item again, meaning you have a guaranteed measure of progression with time-investment based on the amount of play-time with a more strict medium ground. A singular drop-rate for a material is after all more steady then the drop-chance for a specific item… which you might never ever see in your playtime again since they’re simply that rare currently.
Mind you, such a system provides the difference between ‘gamba’ and ‘guaranteed progression over time’. That’s all it does. The point of the game design in which Last Epoch is the weakest compared to other live-service diablo-clones at the moment… outside of Diablo, because Blizzard couldn’t even get affixes half-way right for a while
Are they though? Do you have the figures on that? 'Cause I don’t think Mike has ever said anything to that effect so I’m not sure I’d believe it.
Yes, though it had several states
You couldn’t craft any more
An affix was reduced in level
The item was even more bricked (I think, could be misremembering & this is just the same as the one above).
So the “yep, didn’t work out” was the least bad of the fail states, the item could actually be made objectively worse.
True, but there was before, even if you were super lucky & you never failed & shattered the item, the chance for that would eventually reach 99% (& then presumably auto fail on the next attempt). It was never possible to, even theoretically, continue crafting on an item indefinitely if you succeeded on every roll, even if we ignore that you would eventually get to 4x t5 affixes & not be able to craft anymore anyway.
No, not entirely, you could YOLO it & try to remove one of the less desirable affixes with a rune of removal then add a more desirable affix. Depending on how many bad affixes there were you’d have anywhere from a 1 in 4 to 3 in 4 chance of removing a bad one, you just wouldn’t be able to chaos any of the bad affixes into a good one.
I know the benefits & I suspect that that’s probably why the devs wouldn’t go with it, I’d assumed that if it added just 1 FP that would be enough to allow for 1 more crafting attempt to try & change something. But as you yourself said, your desired use-case (you got the perfect item base with the perfect T7 affix sitting there) is phenomenally rare, then you also have to have one or more of these things that are also “very, very rare”, whether or not those chances are multiplicative or not (I’d suspect not since you’d be able to drop either, both or neither of the ideal item & crafting maguffin throughout your play time so the chances aren’t linked).
It was gone through in another threads already where you were part of, was before my PC tried to see how smoked products work.
The first thing happening is: There is a guaranteed end-line for the crafting.
Formerly you had a chance of it fracturing every try… but theoretically endless tries until that fail-state happened.
Now you need at least 1 FP, with a 25% chance to not use FP with a glyph of hope. Given that higher Tiers automatically cause a higher FP cost as well the common amount of FP used per try was… I think 6? If we solely stay in the absolute middle of possibilities.
This means that an item with 30 FP commonly gets 5 crafts with glyphs of hope. Which isn’t a lot. More of lucky, less if unlucky.
Now we also have secondary methods of adjusting the item, like glyphs of chaos, or a rune of removal… those can’t be ‘hoped’, hence we always have a guaranteed cost. That puts a guaranteed end-time of life to any craft to get the right affixes on it, before raising them.
That alone is a downside which can’t be alleviated as a chunk of items gets sorted out before even getting the right affixes on it with a guarantee.
What was done is reigning in the extreme unlucky draws of items breaking at the first try… but they also hence removed the extremely lucky outcomes of getting a normal item to 4 T5, which is nigh impossible to ever happen in the new system, not so much in the old though.
Which all didn’t matter beyond the early Monolith experience. Getting 4 T5 items is and was always easy, unless having a rare mod on it, and even then quite doable.
The situation which makes success important is for exalted items and exalted items only, not the ‘feel’ aspect (which is better with the new system) but the realistic outcomes happening.
If you don’t get your other 3 affixes to T5 with a T6 on it… then it’s garbage. Doesn’t matter if it can’t be crafted or simply crumbles into dust and is gone, it has no meaning. No more craft = bricked and that’s all the state we generally have for our characters.
That’s an outcome of the late Tiers offering exponentially more power then the early ones rather then the other way around, makes it a necessity to get them high. Which is a outcome of the amount of affixes at max per item… which enforces that they become powerful and hence rise accordingly as otherwise you can’t balance the early game accordingly.
Actually add ‘limited amount of tiers’ into the package there, it all adds up together to cause this, which is why I’m pointing regularly to the PoE affix system and tiering system for a reason, that one is simply better handled to circumvent the downsides and allows a more ‘smooth’ progression because of it.
So ‘actively made worse’ was the same as ‘didn’t work out’… since either way it’s the garbage bin waiting for it.
Very much so theoretically, which is a given.
Endless re-tries as a lucky lucky person.
Now that’s not the case simply. You by guarantee have a limited amount of crafts… and even if we take into consideration ‘it’s crafted to max’ for tiers, the re-roll of the ranges is a guaranteed limited amount which you have a max amount of n*FP, formerly you had simply n, which isn’t defined.
The desired use-case for the prospected implementation of that would literally be ‘95% of all top-tier exalted bases’. Every T7 rare Affix on a good base would be exactly the use-case, as the majority of those ‘bricks’ through the process. This would simply allow gradual near deterministic progression to an end-goal with vast investment unlike now.
Or to give a bit of thought: Why do you think MG offers no crafted items commonly?
Forgive me if I don’t remember the contents of every thread I’ve posted in over the years, there have been one or two…
I’m pretty sure the chance to fracture always increased every time you crafted, unless that was a critical success state.
Unless, of course, you’re lucky on the glyph of hope rolls & they always succeed, just like your theoretical above where you could theoretically have infinite crafts in the old system (sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, after all).
Neither does it for the proposed crafting maguffin.
I don’t know. Perhaps mp/MG is too new & people aren’t familiar enough with it & what others want to craft then sell. I’d also imagine that crafting to 0 fp then selling would more likely restrict the potential sales price compared to selling then crafting. Or maybe people are too lazy and just want to sell as fast (ie, get through the listing process) as they can before getting back to buying snd/or crafting their own stuff.
Well, then ask yourself the question and get to the bottom of it, it showcases an integral problem with the itemization system after all.
First of all… a finished craft with 0 FP but maxed affixes is absolutely and definitely worth a multitude compared to the initial item, after all the effort to craft it to that stage as well as the potential broken items left in the wake to create it have to be taken into consideration.
So that means something else has to be the case why people don’t craft them, and there’s only 2 viable leftover situations as to why… and both are the case: The acquisition rate of the items which would even be valuable enough to consider crafting on is atrociously low, so trying a single craft would be a gamble (Yes, that is absolutely part of it). Or… the chance for a successful craft is so low that learning the viable affix combinations is just not a viable thing to do, which yes… it sadly is the case.
This is a fundamental problem of the game. In 490 hours of playtime my grand total of exalted items with a T7 rare mod on the right base have come down to… 7. The outcome after crafting? 0. That’s kinda a joke to be fair, and not a good one.
Or it’s none of that and it’s simply a normal case that also happens in PoE. For any given piece of really well crafted gear you find in PoE trade, how many uncrafted ones are for sale? 1:100? 1:1000? Probably more than that.
The fact is that most people don’t want to bother trying to craft a good piece of gear. They don’t want to gamble. They’d rather have a smaller but faster profit. Most don’t even like crafting and don’t want to waste time with it.
Value in PoE is mostly created from the ‘direct-use’ ability of the player. Any item rolled well enough to grab and slap onto your character without crafting… or with minimal investment and guaranteed success commonly. Same goes for crafting bases with specific mod rolls, which is very rare in comparison though.
Yes, obviously the ‘uncrafted’ to ‘crafted’ spread is still leaning towards ‘uncrafted’, which is obvious if an item retains some value.
In Last Epoch though? There are basically no finished items on the market at all… so we’re nearing 1:infinity here. You can’t tell me that’s not a sign of an issue
Aren’t there? I just logged in to check. From 408k exalted gloves in legacy, there are 17k with 0FP. That is not counting the ones that are “finished” but have leftover FP left. We’ll just ignore that. But that means that you have a 1:24 ratio.
I then checked helmets. 560k to 13k. About 1:43. And it makes sense that there’s less with helmets because of the class specific ones.
Boots are 640k to 33k. About 1:19.
So we’re a far way away from “no finished items at all”.
@Kulze I’m with DH. Just because you tjink that people aren’t too lazy to craft before selling doesn’t mean that they aren’t. Especially if they aren’t sure what they’re doing.
I’ll go a bit more into depth then what exactly I mean.
We got ‘finished crafts’ of 4 T5… ok, simple, that’s the ‘starter gear’ for a end-game character, that’s easy to achieve. It doesn’t need much crafting at all and is swift to do. That’s not a ‘finished item’ for a build though, it’s mid-tier gear at best.
The talk is specifically about exalted items, T7 exalted items to be exact, because those are the last ‘viably achievable equipment in the progression of a normal character’. We’re not even talking about min-maxing beyond, there’s so much unachievable space there it makes it actually hard to discern what sort of gear a character should wear.
And I’ve specifically taken ‘T7 on good base’ as a measure since otherwise you use any LP item… and that goes absolutely counter to keeping value in exalted items, which would be another issue, so I’ll ignore any items which aren’t crafted for a top-tier base with a T7 affix on it.
One coveted example: Eternal Gauntlets (best base after all and needed by every single class) with a T7 attack speed affix.
The total amount of crafted items which aren’t ‘nonsense’ are: 1 on page 1, a bit sub-par since health is the sealed mod at T2. Then 2 more which are doubled, hence a lucky drop from LA raised up. Double res (one being cold rather then elemental) and Attunement… not really a ‘good’ affix choice, so also sub-par craft, just ‘slapped it on’.
Page 2 got 3 finished, a decent one, also no health. People are averse to health it seems. Second has Cold res again, trash mod since you either take ele or use the blessings to free affixes. The third? Actually FINALLY a good one. Hybrid health + sealed affix. Really good one! I mean… it got dodge rating on it but still some builds can need that.
So, there are ‘a few’ in total. But if I search for T7 attack speed + T5 health I got a grand choice of… 4 gauntlets! 1 is finished, one nearly and combines experimental ward with endurance, prime nonsense choice.
And that’s one of the bases which have a really small amount of affixes too, so getting T7 attack speed is relatively easy… in comparison to other stuff.
Now let’s look up a proper craft one might actively search! T5 health, T7 Attack speed directly. Minimum requirement. 1 outcome… freeze multi and frailty. Not the best… but I’ll accept it as an item that someone might want and searches for!
Now, I went to look for helmet for my mage build, Runed Visage since I want a ward build, let’s say spellblade with mana strike, classic one after all. Either enchant weapon or melee ele… other viable options but we take the ‘generic’ mana strike one as an example. No results to even craft.
Onward to boots, they are simple and have not much affixes, right? Citadel Boots, Arcane boots would be nice with more armor, but we wanna actually stay alive. T7 crit reduction + T5 health + T5 movement speed. None available. There is one non-crafted which has T7 movement speed instead but no 4th affix. 1 Billion. At least a guaranteed good one. Finally! A single item to play towards!
Now an item for my lichlord build. Making it more broad! Profane Regalia, Necropolis Plate, Immortal Regalia or Sanguine Regalia, each could be useful… the immortal being the worst, but let’s add it!
4 outcomes, 1 is basically bricked, 1 has lightning res and minion life which I don’t care about, one actually has the T7 sealed (interesting) but T6 minion freeze… which is useless, and is night bricked too. The last is 0 FP and not finished. So no hit either.
I’m starting to get kinda desperate here guys… relic maybe? Putrid Souls, T7 int, T5 health. Ah! I see a hit, uncrafted. could potentially become decent at least, has a really undesirable mod on it though, gamba.
Turquoise ring maybe? T7 minion damage, T5 health. Nah thanks… don’t need throwing damage at all… you can keep that.
Amulet? Opal? Ah… phys damage and fire res.
Yep… looks really like I can upgrade my character here!
Thanks and goodbye. Doesn’t mean shit when items to progress are not available even if crafted items in general exist (which a large portion is absolute garbage of ‘just pushed all tiers to max’ without thought). What am I supposed to play towards?
MG in LE is roughly comparable to the PoE hardcore market, hence a really small subset of people which populate it. Which is fine. But heck… in PoE I can progress my character to top-tier levels of equipment after 2 weeks there… and here I’m talking about Legacy, which has what? 10 months of time to populate it with items? Actually more given quite a lot of items could be put in from before 1.0?
I’m going to summarize everything here in this paragraph. First:
I don’t think there’s any data to say one way or another. poe.ninja shows 100983 characters created in Settlers league and 18635 in HC Settlers league. Seems too small for the 228k peak they had at league start, but maybe they filter some results out, I don’t know.
As for LE, all we know is… nothing, really. We don’t know how many play cycle vs legacy. We don’t know how many play MG vs CoF. We don’t know how many play SC vs HC.
All we know is that, for the majority of the time since launch, LE has had less daily players than the 18k PoE HC seems to have.
Are you still talking about HC trade? Cause that is not the case.
Most items couldn’t be sold when 1.0 launched. Some could, for some reason, but not most. And pre 1.0, only a small minority of players were around.
Also, as we’ve already said, most people play cycle. And the cycle MG from 1.0 was scrapped. So even with 10 months, it’s not surprising that you don’t have a booming market like SC PoE does.
But lets compare it to PoE Settlers HC trade, by searching for our best gloves for Pohx’s RF build, which is one of the popular ones.
There’s roughly 1000 Vaal Gauntlets, of which only 21 are both Exarch and Eater of Worlds influenced. With “Ignites you inflict are spread to other enemies within x metres” implicit there are 2. Both have crappy rolls and none has the dex affix we want.
If we look for the item we want in SC trade, there are a total of 13 with all the affixes we want. 3 are excluded because they crafted life into it and we need to craft another prefix. Only 2 have the implicits we want but one is one of the crafted life ones and the other has bad rolls. What a joke.
Ok then. Let’s search for a Royal Burgonet in HC. There are 1659 listed. Elder influenced: 37. With “Socketed gems are supported by Level x Burning Damage”: 8. With “Socketed gems deal % more elemental damage”: 1. For 8 divines. And we only get 1 more useful affix out of it.
Fine, let’s look into SC. Here things look better. We get 10 results with all our affixes. Although many are because of hybrid mods and thus the values are low. If we narrow down to values we desire, we actually find a total of 1 we can use. Yay.
What a joke.
I didn’t bother looking any further because I’m sure the rest of the results are the same.
PoE has a lot more players than LE does and a higher retention rate. The game revolves around trading and crafting. And yet, most sold items aren’t crafted at all. Most that are crafted are mediocre at best. Only a very select few are actually quite well crafted and are usually sniped by the top 0.001% players anyway.
I’d say that the amount of crafting done for selling on both games shouldn’t be too disproportionate. After all, most people don’t like to craft in any game.
You’re trying to use MG to support an argument for an itemization or crafting problem in LE (I lost track of which it was), but you’re bending your arguments more than Descartes did to arrive at your conclusion.
They usually only show above level 70 if I remember right, which is also GGG’s analysis start commonly for longer-term players.
And that’s created and played characters. Still… 10 months versus 2 weeks is a massive gap, it’s roughly 23 times the amount after all.
Nice and cheap definitely! Btw… in difficulty of procurring it that’s a T7 ‘optimal’ item, which… I actively avoided. I didn’t take the best of the best affixes for a reason and also didn’t limit it to a singular affix commonly, just the ‘base affixes’ of 1 rare good one and the health one. No hybrid health (as it would be a rare affix in itself) and solely core build ones. We won’t even speak about roll-range here.
The argument is that a long-term effort in itemization has major issues in LE compared to PoE. There is nigh never (rarely it is the case but nigh… never…) the question if there is ‘something’ on the market which can improve your character. The amount of upgrades possible are quite high at nearly every time in the game.
That leads back to the whetstone argument, that it would be a very positive adjustment for the current crafting system to remove the guaranteed end-point in the progression for it.
Because you’re leaving out a single very very important aspect of availability and ‘why’ they are available in PoE market versus LE market.
In PoE the majority of items on the market are ‘side-effects’ of crafting a personal item, they are literally the ‘sub-par’ results from the outcomes of personal tries for upgrading. Hence the ones you see there which are highly highly specialized (you’re talking about experimental-grade top-tier items, not ‘basic’ drops when it has combined elder/shaper influence, and those simply don’t even remotely exist on the market as good outcomes because of the rarity) are commonly those where someone sat down and crafted since something wasn’t available.
The major difference between LE and PoE in that regard is… in LE I have no way to get around scarcity on the market, there simply exists none. In PoE? I can buy the crafting materials and invest myself into making a project.
The equivalence would mean having at least enough base items available in LE to attempt a reliable crafting outcome for a potential upgrade towards the T7 max, which often simply not given. Unless a especially lucky roll shows up in MG then the common amount of tries to get it ‘right’ because of glyphs of chaos and maybe even using a removal would be over 10… which means forking over the price-tag of 10 items. That’s the 10-div value range in PoE… which is literally 2-3 hours top-tier content… if even that much for an experienced player with a already good build.
In LE this on the other hand is already the equivalence of 50+ hours of grind to acquire the resources, by properly putting all viable drops onto the market and acquiring the relevant funds for attempting for good outcomes. Also those funds are non-recoverable since resales are not possible.
Invested time in my highest outfitted online character is roughly 70 hours. I have lost options to upgrade items beyond 50+ hours of time investment by now.
In PoE I can play 200 hours on a character and can still reliably upgrade something on it with effort. The ‘progression end’ is vastly further back, which is important to keep players engaged. Because why keep playing when there’s nothing reliable to look forward to? That’s a very rare notion which is followed.
I honestly don’t know where you get these numbers. It’s like the 10% all over again. What 2 weeks are you talking about? Settlers started at 26 July. It’s been over 4 months already.
1.0 had a gold dupe, people left MG. 1.1 had a gold dupe, people left MG. The event reset didn’t bring that many people back. Were you really expecting LE’s MG to be comparable with PoE’s trade?
I mean, it’s better than PoE’s HC trade, but just barely. And that’s because of slightly comparable player numbers.
This I agree with. But that is because PoE is craft-centric (and trade-centric). It is the single most important system in the game around which everything else revolves, including the economy. It takes precedence over everything else, including combat.
