Most mid- to high-tier crafting in poe is done in serveral steps, which are essentially checkpoints.
An easy example of this is:
essence-spam suffixes
lock suffixes
harvest reforge some guaranteed affix
craft another affix at the bench.
In these multi-step crafts, you can be mid-way in the crafting, if I am done with the suffixes of an item, I will not have to do that step again unless I make a mistake.
This is what I mean in that there is a sense of progression in POE crafting that LE does not have.
In LE, if I am done with an affix, I have no guarantee that I will not have to do it again, there is no ‘permanent’ progress to speak of.
Of course there are exceptions, but this is my general feeling.
True, there is probably not a best solution in absolute. But at this point I am not even sure of the solution that I would prefer if I was allowed to make the choice.
I know about those. There were systems of “actual” crafting. Where you spent 8 to 10 years of game time just to learn how to forge a rusted iron sword that would not break after the first swing, or after making contact with an object. The toil that the player endured in that particular setting many often gave up because they just did not want to learn they had reinforcement in all three ways, positive, neutral, and negative. The game would break at least 50% or more of the molds in the early stages. Once you got used to the process and refined the steps, such as that too much heat, and not cooling the mold quick enough after shaping, all these things played a part in the process.
There are people that want instant gratification the second they see something they want. Everyone’s viewpoint of ethics is different so you have to try to weigh the competing interests. Motivation is different for everyone, for some, it is an escape, other it is a hobby that they dabble in the gaming industry and are paid to go play other games just to learn and open their minds, and then there are the professional streamers/gamers that do this to make money.
Was that seriously in a game? Or are you referring to the game that some call “real life” (personally I think the death penalty is too harsh in that so I’m waiting for RL 2 to be released with respawns).
I wonder what it would be like to explore the thought of a base specifically for crafting.
Bases in LE are very important, a t20 pair of leather boots is significantly worse then a t20 pair of end game boot bases with res.
So what if you introduced a base of item type thats sole value was in it being able to be crafted to your liking? The numbers are just made up for now as this is just a thought exercise.
The bases implicit would be “Unlimited forging potential, Max affixes are t4” and it would never drop exalted.
Would giving players an option for t16 items in every slot with no shot at failure in exchange for no implicits be overpowered?
Where would the line need to be drawn for it to be balanced? T3? T2?
Currently I think funny enough, that grabbing white bases and crafting them to quad t1 or even t2 is actually possible given enough hope rolls and some crits.
Having gear that is very balanced aka, has all the affixes you want/need but in low value, is generally better then having a chest that has no other stats but has t5 health.
This sounds like a cool idea, personally I would like something like this as a special levelling unique much like tabula in POE.
With regards to the issue discussed in this topic, however, I don’t think that this would be targeted in the right direction.
This only fixes the issues with crafting in the early-mid game.
However, I would argue that in that phase of the game the current system is very indulgent.
I have not started a new character recently, but my impression from my last characters was that at that phase the progression was very smooth, with very frequent upgrades.
It’s when you start reaching exalted gear that the progression grinds to a halt.
You are obviously attempting to push a viewpoint onto me that I reject. I gave you the classic adaptation of a chance theory which you also refused to acknowledge. You have deemed yourself the subject matter expert and all must bow to your viewpoint.
While I agree there’s no need (I replaced purpose here, for my purposes ), it would still be nice if it were a realistic chance. As I said up above, I don’t want to shelve my higher level chars, but I really don’t see any other option, given that upgrades past the T16(T20 locked) item stage are basically unobtainable. So I’m just playing my character to rack up more gold, to buy more stash tabs, and mats to craft more “good enough” gear? And I have 10+ chars in this rut… so that just kills the incentive to raise more, because my thought is that it’s pointless because “good enough” gear is all they will ever really obtain anyhow. The shiny carrot is tarnished, for me at least. [Insert the ‘Perhaps this game just isn’t for you then’ simp chants]. Well, sorry. But this game actually appeared like it was going to be the game for me… until the shiny high-end carrot was teased, but then told it would (realistically) never be obtainable.
I don’t agree with you not agreeing (if that’s even a thing). The gear my chars have now isn’t much more impressive than the gear my chars had before the change. I mean sure, there’s more flashy runes, but the overall enchanting achieved is still about the same.
Hell, I wish we’d go back to the old system, and bring back the “X% for each item with this affix” mods. Those were interesting…
No, but it’s the same thing as playing with a cat. If you never let them actually win, and get the toy, then they lose interest and stop playing your game. Which is a perfect analogy here. Same with the carrot and stick… you have to let the horse eat the carrot at some point, otherwise it will loss it’s designed purpose as a motivator.
And just how impressive is/was your gear? From my experience, making a tier 20+ now isn’t all that difficult, so either you were making those before, and so the system is very powerful as far as it relates to top end power in the game, or you’re not making those and we need to figure out why.
Well we’d have to take sealing out because it’s not possible. I know the general math behind the crafting system, and while any one session could go either way due to variance, over time it will always skew much in favor of the new crafting system. Just using high FP bases alone gives the new system a huge edge, and since exalted have more FP, that would be what I want anyways.
Anecdotally, on stream today I ‘accidentally’ created a tier 20 that I didn’t even want. I was trying to make a fractured crown but kept proccing crit successes. It’s so common that I predicted it would happen and that the craft I want would be ruined (due to the crit adding an affix to what I wanted to seal). It wasn’t even an exalted item, just good FP and a decent (not even especially good) numbers of tiers on it. I also had an exalted with so much FP that I was almost guaranteed to get whatever I wanted. I think that one ended at tier 22 and still had FP left.
Yeah, so this problem also exists in the old system, and since itemization hasn’t really changed, the odds of being in this scenario are effectively the same. What isn’t the same are the options we have at our disposal. Here’s how it plays out:
Old System
Option 1 - Accept the bad affix(es) and craft around them. Guaranteed to have undesirable affixes
Option 2 - Use Rune of Removal. Adds instability. Chooses affix at random, so worse odds the more affixes are on the item. Effectively ruins an item if it selects the wrong affix
New System
Option 1 - Accept the bad affix(es). Same as old
Option 2 - Use Rune of Removal. Costs FP, otherwise same as old except removed affix returns as many shards as there were tiers on the affix. Not helpful for this scenario, but super powerful for affix farming.
Option 3 - Use Glyph of Chaos. Costs FP. Guarantees we target the right affix, but doesn’t guarantee we get the right stat. Also upgrades the affix by 1 tier.
Option 4 - Use Glyph of despair. Costs FP. Targets the right affix. If successful, guarantees an open slot. If fails, upgrades the affix by 1 tier.
In the old system, removing an affix was awful. Most of the time it failed the first time and made the item worthless.
In the new system, I basically never use removal because I have much better options. On items that could be good but need a better stat on an affix, I’ll throw some chaos at it and see what happens. This makes those items valuable when they weren’t valuable before, because removal would cost so much that it wasn’t worth even trying, but chaos also upgrades the affix, so it’s not wasted FP it it works. If it doesn’t, I wasn’t gonna use that item anyways, so there’s not really a loss since chaos drop like candy. These are all items that I know my odds aren’t very good on, but by taking shots I’m increasing the pool of usable items. On high value items that I want the best chance possible, I use depair. If the affix is tier 1 or 2, I have a very high chance of succeeding on the first shot. This immediately opens up the slot for me. If it fails, the affix will upgrade a tier and I can try again until I hit tier 5, which cannot be sealed. In this way, despair lets me target remove an affix without risking the other affixes, and usually has a higher chance than removal, while also giving me multiple shots at it when it fails, which removal doesn’t.
So that’s a whole lot to say the new system is vastly superior to the old when it comes to removing unwanted affixes.
The old system was simple… find a base with afixes you need and make it better. You mostly worked with blue items. With 2T3 mods on a blue item yoou had a good chance to get a 4T5 item.
I NEVER had the need to remove anything. With the new System I have far more Slots in the slot machine called crafting then before. To me it was easier to craft good items by quatermile and you’ve been able to craft a 4T5 item out of a white base.
The new crafting system is far less potent then the old one from my point of view and when I look at my results I see my view proofed. I craftem a few good items with the new system but i crafted a ton of perfect 4T5 with perfect base in the old system.
The new system is just more useless options that mimic evolution but the result is worse then before. At least that’s my experience.
You’re welcome to think this, but it sounds like a strategy issue to me. If you don’t like it because you can’t craft on whites so easily, well, that’s part of the point.
I certainly don’t have the time or materials to test but it would be interesting to see the FP usage rates of taking rare or exalted items, doing 2 remove affixes and then putting what you want on it and try to get those to T4 or T5. Then compare the FP usage to just upgrading what is there. There certainly would be a difference because your adding 2 extra steps that cost FP. Question is how much of a difference. Is that method heavily weighted towards failure to keep it from being a viable crafting method? It should be possible to get some successes that way I would think if the weighting is not skewed to discourage it.
Outside of high level min/maxing, I think you’re exaggerating here. Basic knowledge of what stats you want and how crafting works is going to cover most people in most cases just fine. Like, you don’t need thousands of hours of testing to learn or infer that the closer an item already is to what you want, the easier it is to craft it into what you want, and that’s more than enough to make good crafting decisions.
Yes, but all goals are not created equal. If the game isn’t giving the player enough information to play through a reasonable amount of the content, then yeah, there may be an information deficit that needs to be addressed. But that doesn’t apply if the goal is “absolutely max out my character with the best possible items”.
Saying Nearly nobody is a very neat way of completely invalidating the opinion of the people whom you happen to disagree with.
It is totally reasonable to desire a system that guides the hand of the player, without a particularly steep learning curve.
However, I don’t think it is fair to assume that your opinion is universally shared or even prevalent.
Besides, how few barriers of entry should there be?
I am curious as to what your ideal system would be.
A system that is completely and perfectly straightforward has no room for creativity, if the best way of crafting something is obvious there is no decision to be made.
If I come across a puzzle, its design did not artificially pad out the game time by obfuscating the solution. In the same way, figuring out how crafting systems work and the best ways of using their tools to their fullest potential can also be a meaningful gameplay experience.
This line of reasoning puts the crafting system as something that is not part of the gameplay experience, strictly a tool that just funnels players from one gear piece to the next provided that they invested the prerequisite amount of time.
), it would still be nice if it were a realistic chance. As I said up above, I don’t want to shelve my higher level chars, but I really don’t see any other option, given that upgrades past the T16(T20 locked) item stage are basically unobtainable. So I’m just playing my character to rack up more gold, to buy more stash tabs, and mats to craft more “good enough” gear? And I have 10+ chars in this rut… so that just kills the incentive to raise more, because my thought is that it’s pointless because “good enough” gear is all they will ever really obtain anyhow. The shiny carrot is tarnished, for me at least. [Insert the ‘Perhaps this game just isn’t for you then’ simp chants]. Well, sorry. But this game actually appeared like it was going to be the game for me… until the shiny high-end carrot was teased, but then told it would (realistically) never be obtainable.