I Don't See Why Forging Potential Exists

PoE’s crafting is extremely accessible now, Essences every map and multiple. Harvest every 3rd map, even if you dont know what you are doing you just put items in the ‘reforge as xx’ and eventually you get decent stuff, then you do things such as block attack/caster affixes or just do a craft and be done

I craft most of my gear now and have for a while, sometimes you buy them items to fill out your build but theres a few items that can be deterministically crafted, the other thing is gear in PoE become ‘projects’ can take days to finish, even then not even getting ‘insanely good’ gear can still be really good

My second char in Sentinel league had 11/12 ex ring bases (just for the rings each) I crafted them in Harvest, one of my rings has 2 dead rolls but I didnt need anything else there, sure if you want perfection you will spend hours and much currency

LE’s gear is boring. its mainly defensive affixes. I know and can feel it when I have low resistances and poor defences, getting upgrades feels better but not really good. getting damage upgrades outside of a unique item/skill upgrade is poor in LE, almost barely noticeable against a boss. Capping my endurance doesnt give me any satisfaction in this game for example

Ive hit a few good LP rolls, hit a 4LP Bleeding Heart. Hit a 1LP Titan Heart with % HP and some other cool things, thats the only rush I got in LE in the last times playing at all was creating LP Uniques and its few and far between to even try as most of the gear I have I wont use, exalt gear is mainly trash (rings/amulets are ok) so its more of ‘I expect this to be trash before I even look at it’ not ‘wow lets see what we got’

I don’t agree with this. In the new system, crafting in general is easier (success rates are generally higher and there’s a much better chance for ‘lucky’ crafts), crafting on better items is more likely to produce better results (FP is higher on exalts than yellows and yellows than blues), and I have more crafting options to work with (i.e. chaos, discovery, despair, ascendance).

I do, generally, agree with this. I’m not so concerned about making perfect items, but I do think the drop rates for some of the truly incredible stuff is absurd. 4 exalted affix items might as well not exist, and 4LP items for most of the uniques that are worthwhile don’t exist either. This is the stuff that I consider in the category of “I’m highly unlikely to see this but there’s still a chance.” similar to mirror tier stuff in PoE. Instead, it’s in the category of “the odds are so unlikely that probably no one will ever see this, so I should treat it as if it’s not real”. At this level, I see no purpose for those items in the game. They should be the kind of item that someone gets and just wants to tell everyone about because it’s so incredibly exciting, but instead it’s the item that no one will ever tell anyone about because it’ll never happen.

Yeah, same here… I am not a psychologist, but having something that is so unattainable as to be virtually impossible to get isnt something that I think should exist in the game… To me its demoralising rather than inspiring… If the game does have the ability to create such items then it should not be practically impossible (mathematically) to achieve this… it should be very hard, definitely, but phrases like “odds are less than the number of seconds since the start of the universe” doesnt really do much other than make me wonder why the hell I am grinding away to get something that I will never be able to get…

Athletes grind away to beat the record or win gold… Might seem improbable for all but the best, but its not practically impossible…

To be honest, I would love to see dedicated players like LizardIRL or Tunk (and even pimply little lenny from down the block in his mothers basement ) showing off a 4 T6 item because then I know its possible and I’d probably grind away another few thousand hours to try and get similar…

(note, actually getting a useful 4 T6+ is a different story obviously - just making a point).

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I think when the trade is introduced, crafting will be used only to raise the affix to T5. In other cases, it will be irrelevant, since there will be enough offers on the market with the necessary variations of affixes.

I don’t think improving one’s defenses will ever feel as good as improving your offensive stats 'cause you’re removing a negative (taking less damage) rather than adding a positive (doing more damage & killing more stuff more quickly). The devs have said that they want to shift some of the build power from skills to gear though so hopefully that will improve at some point.

But the only positive change was them increasing the FP on higher quality (rares/etc) items, before they did that they “just” removed one of the actual bad outcomes (being able to make an item worse if you critically failed a craft) & rebranded the main bad outcome (no sound on failure & it’s not called fractured).

And I guess the new runes do give us more options, I like the chaos to try & change a non-useful affix to a more useful one.

Maybe, depends how they do trading.

Chronicon is honestly a great example. I didn’t believe how great that game was until I gave it a chance. The crafting system is great, you can invest almost infinitely into a piece of gear and it feels great - being able to fine-tune gear towards your goals is a highly rewarding system.

Despite having owned Last Epoch for far longer, I have nearly invested greater time into Chronicon (despite being a mostly single-player experience) than I have with Last Epoch.

This is possibly one of the most well written and articulated responses to the current issue. A lot of good will was lost when this system was introduced.

Thank you, @JustSomeGuy, for speaking the hard truth.

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The old system had glyph of the guardian, which became weaker the better the item became, vs glyph of hope, which is just as good from start to finish. In the old system, you ran into some chance of fracturing the item no matter what very early, vs now there can potentially be many crafts before there’s any chance of running out of FP on good items. Like you said, we also have no chance of making an item worse through crafting, which is pretty huge since now we can craft all the way to 0 FP with no risk. I, for one, wasn’t expecting a completely different system with no similarities to the previous one and no rng, I was just hoping for a system that felt better and gave me more control while also making inherently good items like exalteds more valuable for crafting, and that’s pretty much exactly what we were given.

Recently purchased, only about 40h in and I am surprised at how its sparking thoughts on how it implements things differently to LE and where it succeeds imho (not just in crafting), where its different, and where I prefer LEs “way of doing things”… Was toying with opening a thread comparing the two but I havent had enough time behind the Chronicon wheel yet to do it justice…

I think this is the reason for the constant misunderstanding of the current situation.

Players expect to see the mechanics of creating an item, not a way to correct an existing one.
It’s like if you came to work in an engine workshop and were told that first you need to find an old engine somewhere, and then we will have four hammer strikes to get something better, but it’s not a fact that you will get what we want.

It’s not really much like that at all. We’re not working with an ‘old engine’. It’s more like buying a high end processor vs a budget processor and overclocking them both. With manufacturing imperfections, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get a great overclock on either, but you’re much more likely to get it on the better processor.

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There is no difference, an old engine or a budget processor. Tuning is not crafting.

Even in your example there are more features and stability than in the current casino system.
On your budget processor, you can change the voltage as many times as you want, provided that you do not set destructive values. Moreover, when changing the voltage, such a characteristic as “frequency per second” did not turn into “potatoes per hour”. In your case, you can tune the processor indefinitely, and its characteristics will not suddenly become something that it did not have before.

Returning to the topic of the topic.
The question is specific, why the FP limit?

Crafting is limited by the affixes T5
You cannot change affixes if they are already T5
Why is there also a limit on the number of changes?

It turns out that the limit on the number of changes is only to prevent the player from crafting a rare item with four necessary affixes from 0?

So crafting isn’t just an item editor. Given you can choose which affixes to put on an item, if there wasn’t anything like FP then you’d just find your desired base & trivially craft it up to t20, or an exalted item drops with desired t6/7 affixe(s) & you hope a rune of removal removes the correct affixes & you then craft the missing slots back up to t5.

Yeah, it’s a very flawed metaphor.

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Yes, with removal runes, you can remove everything unnecessary with a certain chance to remove the necessary.

The screen below on the left, the boots that I picked up from the floor. On the right is an analog that I would like to improve to a level no worse than on the left side. With FP37, I have no chance of doing that.
https://ibb.co/LrCXPBd

As a result, the restriction that exists in order to make it impossible to easily make a T20 item, devalues all 37k of my shards and exilted items that do not have a close set of needed affixes.

This is provided that the T6+ affix that I need, I can get with a low chance, and on the base I need with the same low chance / 10

Based on this, I have a question.
Is the devaluation of the entire crafting system in the late game really worth these restrictions in the midgame?

I will explain my point of view a little.
I cannot say that the FP limit is not needed. But it has an extremely negative effect on most of the game, in the form in which it is now.

I like this game. But as for the gameplay, after playing the character enough time to dress him in exilted items, you are faced with the fact that the only thing the game offers you is to grind items from the floor, without the ability to somehow influence it. And the value of these items drops dramatically after receiving rather mediocre analogues.

I would really like to be able to further improve my character (right now he doesn’t have a single exilted item with more than one T6 affix), but the game does not allow this.

It sounds like you’ve got to the long tail of the item search where the vast majority of items either aren’t as good as/better or can’t practically be made better than your current gear. This is what happens when you get to that point with all games (except PoE since you can continue to throw currency at gear to try for the miniscule chance of an item which is better than your current gear).

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Do you have any insight into at what stage the devs expect a player character to reach this “long tail” point? After how long grinding late end-game on the same char?

Reason I ask is that it seems to come quicker than I expected and if it were not for the nice way of respec’ing into trying other builds, I would be pretty frustrated with quite a few of my lvl 100 chars - essentially being unable to improve them anymore.

The “effort vs reward” loop tends to come to a conclusion hard and fast… and I find myself having nothing to aim for beyond just getting better/more skilled at playing that particular char/skills… and that gets old fairly fast too…

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Yes, it is. But I got into this long tail almost as soon as I got the exalted items.

In an attempt to improve the quality of the drop, I raised the monolith’s corruption level to 1200. And it didn’t help.

I became interested in this topic because the lack of an FP limit or the ability to restore it would significantly increase my interest in the game.

I suspect I’m not the only one.
I agree with the statements in the last video from the Lizard about the low impact of items in the game. In practice, the game doesn’t care if you have T5 or T7 affixes, at a low level they can’t kill you with a certain set of skills, at a high level they kill you with oneshots, this is another problem of game design.

But damn, the game, items already have practically no value, so you still don’t give beautiful numbers )))

Not a clue, but as @Enuw says, I suspect it’s around the time you get exalted items, since you can’t craft the t6/7 affixes you need to get them as drops which means you hit a speed “bump” in terms of item acquisition since they’ll be the only upgrade after you get to t20s. But in principle, it’s inevitable if you have an item system with a cap (affix tiers in this case). The only thing they can do is change where that bump/slowdown happens.

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Pretty similar experience… I think my problem is also that I hoarded exalts so I tended to transition into using them (usually max crafted) earlier than I probably would have if I was doing a char with a clean slate and had to find the items I needed… I definitely havent pushed corruption like you have… 350ish was as far as I was willing to grind…

Neither is engine repair. That’s what makes it an analogy. If it was crafting, it wouldn’t be an analogy at all, just a direct comparison

And you still would have a maximum performance that the chip is capable of. It doesn’t matter how many times they let me craft the same tier 4 affix on an item if it’ll never reach tier 5. The only difference here is that in overclocking, the maximum potential of the chip is hidden from you for longer and has to be discovered, whereas in crafting it’s very clear once you reach 0 FP that the craft is over.

I don’t know what this even means. I think you’re trying to find any difference from crafting in the analogy, relevant or not, so that you can dismiss it, which is a common tactic in debate but not a path I’m really interested in going down.

Every metaphor related to this will have flaws. It’s a complex system with lots of moving parts, but not all moving parts are relevant to the specific question at hand. I wasn’t trying to make a perfect metaphor, just a better one than old engines, which I don’t think really compares at all.

Do you feel like having no FP would improve this in any way? As far as I can tell, the long tail would just happen more quickly. You’d have nearly perfect gear and then nothing at all to grind for. This seems to me to be an independent problem from FP, and if anything, FP helps lengthen the tail a bit.

This is true of some builds for sure, but I’m not sure how removing FP does anything to help resolve the problem. This issue also seems independent of FP to me.

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