I had a thought recently after some discussions I had related to affix shards. It’s kind of inconvenient having to pick them up and some of the responses indicated that part of why is out of a desire to make them feel more like a reward to get excited about. Setting aside that I don’t think you want to use inconvenience as a design tool, the shards as they are currently implemented don’t really fit that design goal. You get a lot of them and past the early game where you’re trying to build out your collection of them, you don’t really notice what you’re acquiring because you don’t really run out of them through crafting.
From my experience, I think part of the issue here isn’t just the frequency with which you get them, it’s that their value is limited because they aren’t the bottleneck in crafting good loot. You need to find items worth crafting on, and that’s limited by the stability system. Now that system is a good thing. It’s what I like about the game over other arpgs. I think the fact that you care more about getting an item which is closer to what you want because it’s easier to craft on makes drops actually feel relevant as opposed to PoE where you ignore most drops and can just spam currency on any item with a good enough implicit base. However, the effect of this is that spending a lot of shards isn’t a particularly reliable way to get good items, in fact, you can only spend your shards so fast because once you fracture an item you need to go find a new base, thus finding shards isn’t that great beyond the fact that you vaguely need to maintain a stash of them.
So I think it might help if there were some rare or expensive ways to make the shards more useful for crafting. Something to the effect of being able to circumvent or at least mitigate instability issues in crafting. Some possible solutions I thought of:
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Give affix shards tiers and weight their droprates accordingly. A T1 affix shard works as it does now, a T2 affix shard crafts on 2 tiers instead of one… Tn crafts on n tiers maxing out at a T5 affix at best. Probably only up to T5, shards but maybe it might be fine to make T6 or T7 ones be ultra rare. The obvious benefit of this option is that you get to see the higher tier drops shine in your drops, making them be a cooler moment of reward.
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Make a rare dropped item that lets you “refine” shards, combining several of the same type to make a single higher tier shard similar to what I described above. This could be the sole way to get higher tier affix shards or it could be used alongside dropped shards and this could just be a much more rare and valuable drop because compared to dropped higher tier shards, you get to choose which you make. Perhaps either in addition to or instead of, you could have a way to refine shards through gold since at the moment the game kind of lacks a gold sink, but this would definitely require more careful management of both the cost of the item as well as the game’s gold economy since at the moment it seems like you just get limitless gold once you hit endgame. I really only ever get strapped for cash if I go on a mass gambling spree, and even then only if I’m being exceptionally picky about what I’ll stop on. Presumably this refinement process wouldn’t be 1 to 1 since we’re trying to make it a sink for shards, but I don’t know what the right numbers would be.
In either case, these higher tier shards would allow you to craft more affix tiers on a piece of loot at once at some instability rate less than what it would cost to craft one at a time. I don’t know what that number should be, but the extreme bounds are probably something like [cost of a single affix upgrade, cost of n upgrades where n is the affix tier.)
So what do you think? My hope for such a system is that it would preserve that desire for looking for good drops to craft on while making shards feel more valuable and giving us some more chase options to create good gear.