The ideal base is four T7 affixes.
Given the fact that you cannot craft affixes above T5, having now an ideal base, you simply do not need crafting.
Also, it is not needed if you do not have the necessary T6-T7 affix. Just because you can loot out an item with three necessary affixes T5 and one T6, and such an item will be better than what you craft.
As a result, now the crafting system is needed only to get an intermediate items, a patch for the build. And the crafting system will never allow you to get the desired item.
Just because it’s not possible to craft the best possible items, be they 4xt7s, uniques or legendaries, doesn’t mean crafting is irrelevant. I’m kinda confused by what you meant.
Using “we” as if every player only looks out for exalted items sounds like every player will have fully T20 rare items eventually, which is not the case.
At the top end a lot of very dedicated players will eventually transition from T20 rares into having exalted items almost on every slot, but that is basically top-end min-maxing already.
On top of that, you will still craft on exalted items and especially on exalted items crating is even more intereting, because they can have multiple purposes (using the item itself for your character or using it as a legendary crafting material).
So in that sense you will have even more different strategies on how to make these items as good as they can be, depending on what you wanna do with them.
And a lot of these methods (Glyphs and Runes) are not predictable. Both the outcome and the FP consumption.
You and me might have different things in mind when talking about “asian grind”.
But being on the look out for the perfect item, even if it takes ages doesn’t bother me.
I was not refering to “asian grind” because of the time it takes, but because a lot of these type of games (especially MMO’s) have a lot of resources that you need to farm over and over and over and over again to eventually get the desired result 100%.
I’ll try to describe in more detail what I think.
I apologize in advance, English is not my native language.
The author of the topic does not understand why the FP limit is needed.
As an argument, many players say that the FP limit is needed so that it is not possible to get the perfect item from 0.
I apply two conditions existing in the game to the current motivation.
Firstly, we cannot craft affixes above T5. Which already says that it will not be possible to create an ideal item from 0.
Secondly, even after getting the desired affix T7, we are faced with a restriction in the form of FP.
As a result, having received a full set of items from the floor, with the T6-T7 affixes we need, we will somehow craft useful, but not priority T5 affixes. And next time we will return to crafting only when we get an item with better T6-T7 affixes from the floor.
And in the absolute end, crafting in the game will never give the desired impact.
I’ll try to give an analogy.
Imagine that you have a game in which there are 10 locations.
Starting from the 4th location, you are forbidden to move by any ways except teleport.
But the first three locations you move by running.
In this case, the speed of running in the game as a whole is not useless, but it has zero effect from a certain point.
And in this regard, the restriction on increasing the speed of running looks like a shot in a crippled knee.
Thanks for your other post, that helps a lot. I guess I’m normally more active in the “first 4 locations” so only being able to teleport to the others doesn’t affect me much, but I do get the metaphor.
Because with collecting 100500 resources the expected result will be predictable and you will have very slow contionous progression towards that specific item you want to create.
(The statisfaction of creating that item will be very low, because you could see it coming)
But with 100500 items, you never know when the next item you can use will drop, it could happen at the 50347th item aleady or maybe it will take 120475 items to get something useful.
My point is, you will get surprised by it and also the item itself will not always be exactly what you want, but rather something that is as close as it can be and you will try to utuiize the crafting system to slightly adjust the item to better fit your needs.
Being able to create exactly the items that you want is not exciting, its just tedious busywork.
Dropping an unexpected item can take your by surprise. And with a lot of meicre items dropping you need to eveluate if some of them might be useful enough to be worth spending time and resources on them. Which is anotehr aspect that would not be the case with the resource sink system.
There’s been a lot of really great feedback and other perspectives here which was cool to see. I wanted to touch on something you mentioned though that might elucidate the different perspectives here.
You mentioned:
Versus:
And you go on to say the former isn’t exciting compared to the latter.
See, I generally disagree. I’d much rather a system of levelling, dropping, and crafting that sees incremental progress and rewards based on ‘building up’ than random drop chance (if that makes sense).
That is totally fine and that’s why we are here in a forum discussing different points of view.
I personally like to focus on the actual gameplay and do stuff that I enjoy and don’t want to actively think about my next upgrade that much. (I still have things in my mind that I would like to upgrade next, mostly the “weakest” parts about my character).
Randomly encountering new potentially good items and evaluating on the spot if they could be a potential upgrade is much more engaging than knowing: “I have to do 20 more echeos to finally upgrade my boots to the point where I can replace my current boots”
And with that you will have these “WOAH moments”, where you get this totally unexpected items.
And in my opinion these very few “WOAH moments” outweight any of the annoyance or frustration that the system sometimes can bring with it.
With the system you proposed there would literally be no “WOAH moments” (unless an item dropped perfectly already). And you will only get continously mediocre feelings.
That might be relevant if you were ever going to see even a 3xT7 base. But you’re not.
This is a great example of what I said earlier in the thread - “If it isn’t the best, it’s worthless” thinking. Any line of argument or reasoning that starts at that perspective is invalid and does not contribute to the discussion.
Then you probably need to accept that games like this are not for you.
I got 1,000+ hrs of mileage from PoE, and many more from D1 and D2, Dungeon Siege, Grim Dawn, Titan Quest… so you’re definitely wrong on that. Different strokes as I said, no issue with that.
That’s not true Heavy, people like having put work into a thing, it makes them value it more (Ikea is an example of this). You wouldn’t get a “woah” moment but that isn’t the only source of satisfaction.
Then why do we have crafting at all? Surely it just takes away some of those “woah” moments?
You physically cannot get the perfect item by crafting in the current system. This argument simply has no weight.
Perfect items are not being crafted just because T6+ affixes are not being crafted. The current crafting system cannot give a “wow” effect.
Even if you get an item with four T7 affixes, you get a “wow/2” effect, because you still need to get a unique item with LP4.
And one more thing.
The predictability of the result of crafting, given that crafting is absolutely random, is the same as the predictability that I will ever get the item I need by drop.
Just for an example. I have an armor with two T7 affixes and two wrong affixes. What is the probability that I will be able to change the affixes I don’t need to the ones I need?
I can change the affixes I don’t need randomly until they become T5, then I will need to pray that I don’t randomly remove the T7 affix to remove the wrong one.
Even if I immediately randomly remove the affixes I don’t need, and I’m lucky twice with a 50/50 chance and then 33/66, then I won’t have enough FP to get 2 modest T5 affixes on this thing
As a result, instead of the effect of “wow, I got an item with two T7 affixes”, I get the effect of “oh shit, I can’t craft anything decent out of this”.
Totally agree with you, if there is no T6, T7 affixs, FP is a system to limit the access to Endgame equipment and improve playability, but because it is impossible to cast T6, the best equipment available through the casting system is only “available”, never "the best "
Considering the chance of T7 drops, and the randomness of changing affixes, most of the time T7 gear drops just add to the pain rather than the surprise reward - basically saying that I wouldn’t expect T7 gear to get the ideal gear through casting because the possibility are just too low
On a different note, instead of thinking how to rework the crafting system, which has recently been overhauled, you could also think about how it could be expanded upon using e.g. further dungeon mechanics.
In fact, here is a perfect example, Chronicon, which allows the player to re-roll any modifier at will and keep any modifier and change the value
I can still be addicted to it, at least until I get all the ENDGAME equipment, one of its characters satisfied me almost a hundred hours of gaming fun
But Last Epoch … I enjoy the game, but have to admit that due to some of the current settings, the game can almost never get the ideal perfect equipment, and therefore has almost unlimited replayability
After building a set of equipment that I thought was acceptable, I was knocked out after a hopelessly repetitive grind, and yes I still had the space to get stronger, but the possibilities and the unpredictability of the process, I gave up.
It could be infinite, but it’s not the only thing in my library - godfall, FFO, nioh2 (these three are ACT style grind games), poe new season, Diablo3 new season, Chronicon, there are a lot of other tried and new games here, so I been following last epoch’s updates but haven’t opened the game for a long time
My point is that the divergence is that even for players of the same type of game, the motivation that drives the player is not the same - the resources that can be accumulated into the joy of accomplishing a goal, and the moments of surprise in the long, worthless repetition , and the moments of surprise in the long period of worthless repetition that makes the player think that all repetition is valuable.
The same type of game offering content that serves not the same
I couldn’t agree with you more about the FP system, especially since with T6 and T7, FP is “meaningless”, but maybe the developers are trying to provide exactly the kind of experience that you or I think “feels wrong”.
As a game developer, I actually kind of understand the existence of this system, because it does add a lot of time to the game, and it does add to the playability
The point of disagreement is that when I am a developer, the project is all I have and I want it to be infinitely playable and fun (even in a slightly damaging and controversial way) but when I am a player, I see the futile repetition without expectation as a punishment - after all, I didn’t change a single piece of equipment or a single skill in the last ten hours of last epoch
I should say I’m glad we feel the same way, but, really, it should be sad - I hope you enjoy the game and don’t feel the pain like I do
The game is designed to be a balance of challenge (pain) and solution (pleasure).
For me, the pleasure of the FP system is greater than the pain when making mid equipment, and the pain of the FP system is too powerful and the pleasure too little in the endgame phase
Unfortunately, transitions are short and endgames are long
It is because of the difference in the length of the phases of the game that this happens. In this case, the longer you play, the more useless crafting is for you. In my case, it is 99% irrelevant.
And then why am I writing all this? I just want it to be relevant to other players a little longer than to me )
In general, I miss the days when crafting was crafting, not gambling affixes.
