I think this is generally fairly accurate, if a bit aggressive. We genuinely find a lot of players don’t craft early, and miss out on just how much power crafting can offer early. Many players come from other ARPG’s to not be named, where crafting materials are an extremely late game thing. This leads to a lot of players missing crafting in Last Epoch. The difference between an early character that just equipped drops, and an early character that used crafting can be quite massive. We even found this in internal testing. We used the same builds, but one person crafted items where the other just used natural drops, and the difference was… well, it was quite a difference in experience.
We want crafting to matter in Last Epoch, and be a core component of how you play the game. That means early on we need to strongly introduce crafting as something you should be doing, not just a system that exists. That’s the goal of the new tutorial: teach players that aren’t familiar with Last Epoch that you should be crafting, and crafting can result in very strong items. We certainly don’t want this to be a pain point for more experienced players, but we hope more experienced players can see the compromise given how important crafting is in LE.