Why aren’t I asking for Uniques to be changed you ask. Because that’s not crafting nor is it the topic of the issue I’m expressing. Multi-issue threads usually don’t do well (because people get held on on singular issues when discussing them, thus ignoring everything else).
Maybe you see crafting as a “loot 2.0” but that’s not how I see crafting. Crafting is a meticulous system where players choose their gear in any other game. Hence why it’s called CRAFTING, and not Gacha or Bingo.
Some unpredictability is and should be expected within such a system, but to suggest it has to be entirely random dependent doesn’t follow the meaning of the word used to describe the activity. Otherwise call it something other than crafting.
It’s not entirely random. You get to control the changes that happen and you even have the same average number of crafts whether it’s 1-20 or 5-7. You just don’t control how many crafts you can apply to the item.
It’s the same thing with unique drops. You can have 50 uniques drop with a range of 20-90 or have 5 uniques drop with a range of 50-60. Both will produce the same average value (65) but one allows for higher numbers (and also lower).
If we had no possibility of infinite crafts (by removing glyphs and critical successes), then 1-20 would actually be better than 5-7. Because with 5-7 you would get 7 guaranteed crafts but you’d get 10 max crafts (on a 48FP item).
Whereas with 1-20 you’d get 2 minimum crafts but you’d get 20 maximum crafts.
Both would give an average of 8 crafts per item, but the 5-7 one would require you to get gear that is in already a much better state (since you can only do 10 crafts) but the other one would allow you to pick marginally useful items and actually get something good out of it.
So, considering that most crafts will not use the glyph nor hit a critical success, you can actually do more crafts on an item with the 1-20 system than you could with the 5-7.
Again, unless you are crafting thousands of items then Averages don’t matter. Averages are not applicable to most players. I’ll say it again; Averages. Don’t. Matter.
So players are left with a system of pure RNG within their play time. Again, Averages are only applicable on a macro scale. Developers love averages becuase they can see all the items crafted across the entirety of the playerbase.
But Bob gets 30 bricked crafts in a row, he’s not saying “Ahh don’t worry, I’ll now get 30 good crafts because that’s how averages work”. Not only would that be a false statement, but he would have already quit.
At average… or you can get a bad roll and use 20. Which is the whole issue.
The layered RNG with lucky re-rolls and all those shenanigans can help you substantially or screw you over as substantially. The range was and is simply nonsensical and I’ve argued about it since a long time now.
And even then, the whole system doesn’t properly sync with the demands at all. It’s been designed with the same chances as the old system in mind and the old system was designed before even exalted items existed, solely with rares in mind. Exalteds have thrown over the outcomes entirely.
They weren’t a necessity back in… I think 0.6? 0.7? But swiftly became one when the end-game was adjusted repeatedly and nowdays with Aberroth/Uberroth and the weaver content as well.
So, why hasn’t it been adjusted? That’s something which isn’t to be waited for but has to be done in line with core itemization changes when they happen… but has simply not been done at all.
BS, the scale of how progression in LE works is completely out of whack. You can design FP in a way that it drops according to the difficulty you run, hence with a proper scaling method that upholds at least a somewhat realistic outcome. This problem is slightly visible the moment you traverse over to empowered and becomes extremely visible even after a short while in empowered.
If EHG wants players to play longer then they should provide properly designed content rather then the enforced ‘shoved in your face’ garbage design style they did with weaver. And they gotta provide a proper challenging progression mechanic beyond the initial hurdles of situation yourself into empowered timelines rather then shoving it into the face of people from the get-go.
Harbingers were a method to fix that nothing of relevance was there at all in empowereds, which is a good solution… but heck… they could’ve simply provided the harbingers and then given us special ones specifically designed to be a stage above em starting at 300c, those unlocking Aberroth which would’ve been in a good position at ~400c back in 1.1 already. And instead of the nonsensical Uberroth slap-on bandaid of ‘please give us pinnacle content’ asks to be fulfilled properly with a similarly handled method of defenders to unlock actual content rather then ‘here have this randomly dropping extra rare pinnacle content that nobody can do’.
It’s just poor design and myriads of oversights accumulating. EHG had the time and the foundation to make it but simply didn’t.
That’s… not how averages work
An average works by providing the 50% chance for a -6 to happen, and the chance accordingly for every point above and below adjusts accordingly.
The -20 is extremely rare, yes… but a -10 is already devastating anyway… so who cares? The overall FP usage for higher-end items is too high for the provided ones. We get what? 60 tops? With all the new methods we can potentially go through to acquire a proper item? Removing/sealing unwanted affixes, having to re-roll which exalted Affixes are on it, having to switch the position of those, re-application of another Affix as one’s been removed. All of that in line with what? 50 FP? 60 FP? Don’t joke around… that’s a 1/200 chance to happen in most cases, for bases which each need 20+ hours to acquire at the later stages.
Only if you use glyphs of hope, hence simply increase Affixes… otherwise it goes down. Which has become ever more prevalent. And 8 is low when you have a substantial chance for at least 5 tiers to be added in a single slot without any other changes.
Yes, critical success exists but the reduction of RNG is quite miniscule in the grand scheme of things for that to happen at the right time.
It’s not. It hasn’t been properly balanced since pre exalted item times.
Saying otherwise is delusional, plain and simple. Either you weren’t there when it happened or you’ve just pushed it mentally to the side. Adjustments never happened properly to take the new situations into consideration.
It’s years overdue by now.
If you prpvode a 3-9 FP range without the lucky re-roll system in the background happening then that alone would already reduce the issues substantially and make the balancing easier.
Yes, you can have a ‘jackpot craft’… but the issue is with every jackpot the counter-balance of ‘shit-pot’ has to exist too.
And the ‘shit-pot’ is substantially higher to happen as a single high value crafting step over a multi-step process is causing it to fail.
If the drop-system now would provide you with the proper chances accordingly… that would be nice!
But that’s why crafting exists! To alleviate the drop RNG of a complex Affix-based system like LE has.
So the crafting system has to be designed according to the RNG of the base system in mind.
You cannot have the best of both worlds here, you either simplify the drop-system or you make the crafting system more reliable and re-usable especially.
That’s why I’m repeatedly saying that the crafting system needs to have a way to bypass the drop-system itself by repeated chances of a specific outcome. Like a initially used rune that allows resetting the state of the item back, for example at the cost of having 10 FP less from the get-go for the whole crafting process.
Just as a quickly thrown-in example for the direction, not with real numbers, didn’t do the math there.
Oh yes… they small idols having weaver versions was such a dumb implementation. Pure creep which completely de-valued all normal small idols right away. Could delete those things to even drop after exiting the campaign now and it wouldn’t have any major effect
Another absolutely dumb implementation from EHG. Simply making it easier with absolutely no reasonable effect. Worst patchwork design-crap style a company can provide. Really poor stuff.
The chance for repeated crits is abysmal, so ignore em… this is not a casino forum but one for a game.
It does reduce the reliable top-end amount of crafts while increasing the reliable bottom-end of crafts.
That’s it.
Don’t bend and twist around it like a slinky. That’s all that would do in reality, and that would be a good start. Lack of reduction of RNG is a primary point of issue people have with the game currently.
Oh, the weaver idols (small ones) are? Really now?
They’re just less prevalent but the power they provide is ridiculous comparably, up to a degree where a mid roll is better then a perfect roll on a normal one, making it substantially easier to acquire powerful ones.
And the class-specific ones? Welcome, EHG implemented for 1.3 weaver nodes to allow re-rolling them! So now they’re also substantially easier to get.
EHG implements tons of power-creep and has absolutely no clue seemingly on how to reduce the impact of those things at least to a degree.
Depending on the Affixes you’ll get 50 perfectly rolled double-weaver small idols in the meanwhile before seeing a single base even remotely fitting for the 2 LP slam though. Given it’s a rare unique and hence is respectively hard to acquire. Or you just don’t care and have a common unique so you slap something sub-par on it anyway.
Yes, which is why those extreme negative outcomes need to be reigned in, at the cost of the positive ones. Balance.
So you like gamba… which is fine! Gamba has its place. But not when it comes to repeatedly used and mandatory systems which can cause you to get stuck for dozens or hundreds of hours otherwise.
A jackpot is great. A ‘shit-pot’ is not.
Yes, that definitely has to go.
Agreed.
It’s a detriment and not a boon.
Yes, but with one you have the chance to be utterly screwed over and the other does it only mildly but repeatedly.
Exactly. The reason for crafting in a game with such a drop-system is to alleviate the RNG of the base-drops. Which mandates it being reliable to a degree.
It’s what’s called a so called ‘lucky-roll system’.
They exist in several games. For example if it rolls twice then the average is at the 33 or 66% (however set up) of the roll range. You have a 50% chance to hit the 33/66% marker of that range and the chances change accordingly.
It still creates an average, but the average is different from a singular roll simply.
Slippery slope argument.
‘If we do it at one place why not at all others?’
Because different situations allow different perception and handling of it.
Gamba items are gamba items, that’s fine, they’re specifically designed for that in mind.
We’re not talking about a gamba mechanic though, we’re talking about a anit-gamba mechanic, one which is supposed to reduce RNG and not create RNG.
Which doesn’t uphold as you progress to the exalted stage anymore, it does during campaign and normal monoliths only.
As mentioned a bazillion times already.
True, but it’s one if not the worst contender in the ARPG genre currently.
In PoE 1 you get such substantial amounts of currency to re-do the try that you create a average swiftly, and hence high and low results as swiftly.
In PoE 2 they screwed that up by removing alteration orbs, which brought them only issues and has provided no upsides for the game yet despite over a year of dimpling around to try and find solutions.
In Torchlight infinite you also get a myriad of crafting tries and endlessly repeated.
In Grim Dawn you simply have fixed crafting outcomes outside of the bases, but the variety of potential rolls is comparativaly miniscule as it’s a ‘1 Prefix/ 1 Suffix’ system.
Last Epoch tries to go far too close to the crafting methodology of Grim Dawn which is a ‘one and done’ method… while the repeated one is necessitated ever more the more variety in Affixes are present. We’re working with a 2/2 split here, not a 1/1. We don’t need it to be as lenient as a 3/3 either… but it’s substantially closer to the methods needed for it
Ive seen multiple threads on this and I 100% agree with FP - I think the high end rolls on things are too high for the “average” FP of a world drop. If you get an item from Nem with 62FP then you’re lucky but it can still get absolutely wrecked with say 2-3 redemption rolls or 1 remove + 1 add using 20-30FP then you’re trying to havoc an item to the spot you’ve removed (I used removal because even at 69% on a tier 2 seal chance with 4 affixes it still fails regularly) for the last 3+ weeks of this season all me and the lads have been doing is farming imprints and crafting because we have 150+ stash tabs, tons of those filled with 77, 777 and 7777, the quads you either have to luck a removal or try redemption to get 2-3 that you want to use, people think quad 7’s are amazing, really its super duper hard and better to get trips a lot, anyway with 1000’s of runes redeptions and havoc and the amount of items that get bricked with 50+ FP its honestly crazzzzzzzzzzzy.
I (personally) think 1 of 2 options should be explored - add 10-15 base FP to all item drops as world drops based on my data show most are 30-42 FP on average (nem is better least for COF) or the high end value roll of all items should be lowered a smidge, it won’t make crafting insanely easy and with the new primordials and how powerful they showing a trend I dont think its going to do what some of the comments in this thread will do.
NOW I mentioned crafting I have a pic with 29 77/777 daggers on the ground bricked in one session but take a moment here, crafting you add 10 fp or you make it slightly cheaper and suddenly its a tiny bit more possible to hit that double t7 craft yeah? Cool THEN you go and take your 77 to the erternity cache of bricks where dreams go to die, you still need crazy luck to hit both 77s, you pick 1 and bingo but the sheer crazy amount of 77 bricks ive seen, the heart ache, the shattered lives (lol)
Crafting is rng, cache luck is rng, getting the item to craft is rng, imprinting is rng, fp rolls on the runes/glyphs is rng, start of a new season getting in when the game launches probably the worst rng ever based on the hours spent waiting last season with their issues, lmao
People need to stop panicing everytime someone posts about changing crafting.
1: they’re not listening
2: it wont affect the game as drastically as you think
It really does need to be looked at. You can sit here and say “i tested this and that and the average was” - it’s RNG there is no average what you have is a data set for that day, that time slot collected by you on your own specific rng luck. Tell me I’m wrong and that means you believe that this isn’t infact a “random number generator”. If something is completely random there cannot by definition be an average because it’s random.
Whether you like it or not is another story and its fine discussing or criticing a system.
But I think everything with their initial intention still holds true to this day. There was quite a bit of balancing done already between those quotes and nowadays, because this system is very old at this point. 0.8.4 dropped Decemter 9th 2021, so almost 4 years.
And this new system was heavily, heavily praised, especially comapred to the old fracture system.
No I hate gambling. Unpredictability in a controlled enviroment where the game tell me all the framework conditions has nothing to do with gambling. I also hate stale predictable loot systems where there is almost no variance.
It makes interacting with item very stale.
It is the exact same psychological setup.
It’s identical.
You can tell yourself one is and one isn’t… as said, people enjoy it, and reasonable amounts have a positive effect, it provides dopamine.
But if you think it’s in any way different… then that’s on you there. Variance is a version of chance, chance is gambling, our brain makes no differentiation.
IF you’re crafting hundreds, then they do. And I don’t know about you, but I easily craft hundreds over a couple of weeks, especially on a new character.
Same thing with slammed affixes. Even with the change to allow you to pick an affix, you still get people with bad luck and they still complain that they want better odds, even though you now never get worse than 1/3 chances.
If you have a 50/50 chance of something, players will still complain.
Much like you can play for months and not get a single red ring. Or even a single Kestrel. Bad luck happens. Should we also change that? After all, it’s no different. It’s pure RNG.
Averages don’t only work on a personal level. They also work on the global scale of the sum of players. The average crafts on an item for everyone is about 8, using the numbers we’ve been using. But that means that some players will get an average of 4 or 5. And some will get an average of 11 or 12. That’s how averages work.
Although for the vast majority of players, the average will be pretty close to the global average.
Like I said before, players will remember the crafts that bricked in 2 rolls a lot more than they’ll remember the crafts that allowed 15+ crafts on them. Even though they’re not uncommon.
Exalteds have actually made crafting easier, since you have to make less crafts now. Especially with a double or triple exalted item.
Havocs/Redemptions increased that a bit, but overall you do need a lot less crafts for your item to be done, than you did when all affixes were rare and you had to craft on them all.
That is the current system. The higher your corruption, the more likely an item has to have higher FP.
That is unrelated to the FP costs for crafts though. The variance in those is because you get lots of items to craft on, so most are designed to fail. If most aren’t designed to fail, then you don’t get as many drops.
On a double roll and picking the lowest, it definitely is. You have twice the chance to get a -1 than you do a -20 (assuming the -20 is the highest roll). And that is because a -20 has to have both rolls hit -20, whereas the -1 just needs one.
This is why the average is lower on a double roll than it is on a regular roll.
A -10 is offset by several -5 or below, which is how averages work. Yes, you can finish all your FP in 2 crafts, or you can have 20+ crafts. But on average you’ll get 8 crafts.
No, with the numbers used you’ll always have an average of 8 crafts, without considering glyphs or critical successes. If you get an average of 6FP cost on a 48FP item, then you get 8 crafts on average.
To you. But clearly the current rate is how the devs want it balanced. And we can clearly see this because even with the current system, getting a very good item is still pretty easy and won’t take you more than a couple weeks.
It’s only going into pure BiS territory that it becomes unbearable, and that is likely by design as well.
EHG has never hidden that they like a big RNG variance, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that they haven’t changed it yet, nor are they likely to at this point.
Personally, I like the way it is now. It’s easy to get started, it’s easy to get good gear, it’s only hard for min-maxxing, which is boring to me anyway.
As I said before, the only difference that would make to the current system is increasing the minimum number of guaranteed crafts (while also decreasing the maximum number of guaranteed crafts).
It does. You can take a random exalted that has the affix you want but is otherwise crap and make it into a good item. You’ll just fail to get it “perfect” more than you’ll succeed. Which is offset by having lots of drops to craft on.
Yes, but what does that actually mean? It means that an item already has to be better than with the current system, because you now have a smaller number of available crafts.
That means that with the current system you can pick up any exalted that has the affix you want and 3 undesired affixes and you can potentially get it just the way you want it to.
With this change you would need it to also have another 2 almost perfect affixes.
So yes, you can do more bottom crafts, but you also need better items than now, so you get less useful drops.
It’s true that EHG doesn’t actually need to change the drop rate, that is already handled by this system itself by making more of the drops useless.
They’re not. They will be just as hard because the system they implemented is just getting 1-2 more rolls per echo, from what I understand. This is actually worse than simply running idol prophecies.
The fact that this mechanic re-rolls the idol as if it just dropped means it’s useless. What would have actually fixed this would have been the possibility of choosing one affix and rerolling the other.
That’s not what we’re getting, sadly, so getting that perfect (or even near perfect) idol in CoF will still be just as hard.
For MG it was already easy to get the idols you wanted, so this change does nothing for them either.
I’m not talking about weaver idols, I’m talking about class idols. Especially because class idols almost always have huge ranges, so you need to hit the 2 affixes you need (among a bazillion) and you’ll also need to get that value between 20 and 90 closer to the end range.
Making a 1 or 2 LP for slamming is piss easy since 1.2. The actual base type is meaningless, so any exalted of that type can be manipulated with Havocs to hit the affixes you want. Even if the exalted is the wrong affix, you can just craft the affix you want and then switch it.
What’s still hard is getting the 3 or 4LP, because that requires more crafts to complete successfully.
Yes, but one also gives you the chance to get a good item out of a crap drop, which the other doesn’t.
It does. It just doesn’t uphold when you’re moving into min-max territory. Because you’re way more picky with your drops because very few things will be an improvement. You still get the same “lots and lots of drops”, you just ignore most of them because they’re not an improvement.
But that is always the case. When you start, you look at all items because almost all items are an improvement. As you get better and better items, less and less of them are an improvement. You still get the same lots of drops, you just get more useless ones the better your gear is.
Changing it at one point will also change it at the other (meaning a new character will be running with 4xT5s by act 3 with this).
High end crafts still have the same variability LE does, though. If you want to create a 6-link, you will need somewhere between 1 and potentially never. The average is 1k, but some people get it with 500 and others with 2k.
Why is that variability acceptable to you but not LE’s?
It’s not. Having a chance to fail doesn’t mean it’s gambling. Otherwise everything in life is gambling. You’re gambling that you won’t fall down the stairs or get hit by a car.
Gambling is when the key systems are out of your control (like a slot machine).
But here you can control what you want to do and in what order, knowing exactly the possible consequences of each result.
Like Kahzimi said:
That is part of your crafting strategy. You can take a route that will have a higher chance of spending more FP or you can take a route that will have a lower chance. You control the route. You just don’t control the results.
So no, it’s not like gambling. It’s simply failing. Which is part of games. Without the chance to fail, you don’t have a game. And LE actually has very few ways to fail, since even dying has barely any impact in the game.
I used removal in my example only. My first go to when needed is trying to seal, at 69% on a T2 you’d assume it would work a lot. It doesn’t and then fuck me its fun when it crits to a T4.
Problem is both seal and rune will chunk your FP then you have to add - adding a T1 won’t cost much but then trying to havoc onto it at up to 20 a pop? Good luck then the average players who say “oh but just get it to T5 then do it” that actually 1: doesn’t really work and 2: costs a lot more FP.
I don’t doubt for a second you’ve played a lot and been round years and probably have a wider range of all around knowledge than me but I do doubt that you play with the invested hours per day, intensity and end game farming that me and my friends play, the sheer volume of imprints from running 100s of troves etc per day - I’ll cycle 50 and juice with folly, then the next person takes over and the next, we always have a full party so yeah literally 100s per day for imprints alone. Those imprints will be on average triple 7 armor or weapons in the cache slot on the weaver tree but we get plenty of kill drops and echo rewards too.
It’s ok to not understand where everyone is coming from personally, I get it but to overlord your singular opinion like it’s gospel to others is really not cool. Not just in this thread I’ve seen it a lot since joining these forums and I don’t understand it. Launch day 250 THOUSAND people playing you can’t just jot down your thoughts and examples and maths and think it’s right to those players. If you do think that then, wow… just wow.
My point is that this is a system that requires decisions and that you have control over those decisions. Different decisions may still lead to the same outcome but with a longer or shorter router.
Yes, but a removal has a chance to use the glyph of hope, removing any costs, at the cost of having a chance of not hitting your affix. So it will depend on whether you will get lots of similar items to be worth junking most immediately (I usually prefer this because at least I’m already done with the craft immediately) or if it’s better to risk more FP for a more controlled result.
The best use of a Havoc is having affixes at the same tiers. If you have a T7 and 3T1 or 3T5 doesn’t matter, both cases have a 1/3 chance to get the one you want.
If you have 3xT7 and a T5, then it’s 100% chance to get the one you want, but 1/3 chance of getting the T5 you want less.
If you have 2xT7, then that will depend on what you want. If you want to switch both affixes, then it’s 1/3 as well. If you only want to switch one of the T5s for one of the T7s, then it’s 1/5.
Any affixes that aren’t the same tier will only increase the odds.
Not that much, actually. I joined a few months before launch, during 0.9.2 and I currently have 800h in the game. It’s not nothing, but I’m sure many players have more hours in less time.
Sadly, work commitments don’t allow me to play as much as I’d like.
Still, I did pick up on plenty of things in that time.
I do understand where people are coming from with this issue. I just don’t agree with it.
And I’m not trying to overlord my opinion, I’m giving reasons why I think it shouldn’t be changed.
The only things I’m stating as facts are the numbers. And those are facts. You might not like them or might like other numbers, but I’m not making them up.
Just like you and other have the right to want the game to change to please your playing style, I also have the right to defend the game not to change to a playing style I don’t enjoy.
Mostly this is about a change in playstyle. I like the hit 2-3 crafts, see immediately that you failed, drop it on the ground and move on.
Other would like to be able to craft on an item for a longer time.
As I’ve said in other threads about similar issues, one system isn’t better than the other. Just some players will like some better than the others.
Personally I find PoE’s crafting system exhausting and depressing. I would hate to spend days and days working for the same craft on and on.
And even though I dislike crafting in general, I actually like LE’s. Because it’s controlled enough, results are pretty clear within the confines of the framework and it’s done fast.
So, just like I argued that I didn’t want mastery respec in the game because I think it’s a net loss for the game (which I still do) and will make me enjoy the game less, I will also argue against these types of changes to the crafting system because they will make me enjoy the game less as well. And given enough changes to make me enjoy the game less, it will eventually reach the point where I leave or just play a few days a year. Which I would like to avoid.
They haven’t as they changed the acquisition ratio. The crafting itself has become more risky instead. A rune of removal isn’t a brick-chance with a rare… but it definitely is with an exalted item, making it at least a 25% chance to brick with every use.
Given that they’re also drop-only that means the need for those specific items to provide a positive outcome is substantially higher. Instead of 50 bases per hour you after all start to get 1 base every 10 hours instead. If we craft for LP slams it’s substantially more but we’re limited with Runes of Redemption and Runes of Havoc, which also cost FP, hence reducing the chance for a positive outcome when used.
So, imagining the item slot which is most prone to issues: The chest.
We imagine I’ve already gotten a T6 skill Affix with decent - but not perfect - other Affixes.
The second that happens the progression beyond becomes extremely limited, which is the task of the crafting system to alleviate though.
I can go for a T6 with the perfect Affixes as a upgrade, which is the least viable possible one. As a LP slam item it’s decent still… but it needs to drop. Redemption is basically useless here as acquisition is ~60 Redemption to get an outcome which could become something decent. The follow-up is not important.
The next possible thing could be that I’m using no unique in that slot for some reason (set Affix is the only viable reason currently) So I need to get the T6 on the right base already. And that is a disaster. Immediately we get a really miniscule success chance.
So the most likely outcome is to upgrade to a T7 before either happens, that’s the easiest one. But the moment we have it… the same issue happens.
Progression to T7 + T6 is nigh impossible to drop in the right combination with the right base. Runes of Havoc have once again a ~1/100+ success chance there to ‘hit’, which is laughable.
If we hit we’re left with substantially less FP since it has no crit chance and no glyph usage included.
The acquisition of such an item with the right base takes tens of hours often, so a failure? That’s a awful feeling.
The major issue is that this stage of progression is still absolutely inside the core progression range, we’re not talking about ‘nonsensical upgrade levels’ but by now ‘mandatory upgrade levels’. We got Uberroth and more will come in the future as well, any realistic chance for a non-broken build to even tackle Uberroth is with a T7+T6 quality of gear for exalteds, and 2-3 LP uniques minimum unless especially rare.
So, the most likely outcome is achieved through the following way:
Have T7 + T6
2 Free Affixes
Add wanted Affixes.
Havoc into right combination.
(Seal unwanted)
Level up nearly from scratch for the remainder.
It is not easier for exalted items.
The only time it is is when the perfect drop happens, which is pre-aligned exalted Affixes. That is your Jackpot.
The problem that acquisition through the crafting mechanic is nigh impossible and takes several times more effort to do which causes you to be nearly fully reliant on the native drop is a major issue. Why? Because that’s the exact task a crafting system in such a game is supposed to fulfill.
Wanna make a list? Gimme a character of yours which isn’t advanced far, I’ll give you a lovely little crafting goal to achieve, a specific one… and you go ahead and tell me the exact timeframe needed and the exact amounts of tries to achieve it
Because all I hear is a ‘trust me bro’ which does in no way relate to a vast amount of player experiences.
I interrupted the post to try it out myself, wanted to make a example of how much is needed, had more then enough CoF favour leftover to fish for exalted gloves. Triggered 10 at once… not a single base drop. Bad luck, sure… but 15 exalted gloves prophecies and not a single chance at even Havoc-crafting? Big ‘ooff’.
1 hour of absolutely shoving favour into the system without a care where most people need a whole day to farm it up and not even a single try as a result? Yeah… screw that!
Not gonna do a chore for an example where I can count the potential tries daily on my finger when the resulting T7 which I want can be counted on my fingers in a week and then the resulting crafts that come even close to what I want (T7 Attack, T5 crit reduction and any Tier experimental DoT armor) probably being ‘0’. Yep, reminded me why the itemization is shit. You don’t get the chances even for something decent… not even top-tier… just something that’s at least ‘good’ overall.
Hours… go and name the game time and not some arbitrary real-life time nobody cares about. The progression from starting a character to Uberroth with the current content density of the game shouldn’t take longer then 120 hours for a potential realistic kill chance
In comparison: For a decently experienced player the in-game play-time to tackle uber-bosses in PoE 1 is around 160 hours. Which no, doesn’t mean absolute top-tier players.
So the 120 hours is very lenient as it’s already drawn out to hell.
This paragraph lets me plainly spoken loose all hope as COPIUM has set in hard here clearly.
First off… the first sentence you describe is the minimum viable state to even call something in the drop-system of this game ‘crafting’. The game would be non-functional without crafting as it’s not D2 which has jack-shit variety in Affixes and bases.
The second sentence about it becoming ‘perfect’ is also nonsensical, we’re talking baseline item progression here, not top-tier outcomes which are at the absolute peak of progression.
The third is just delusional… ‘lots of drops’… yeah, I’ll tell you the actual amount before long, gonna use at least 2 hours of rushing playtime total, which is something I don’t tend to do commonly, which is what a common player has during a weekend, which is a timeframe in which at least a few tries have to happen for it, anything below not being acceptable as a existing state.
Realiability increase without functionality loss.
That’s all.
It reduces the extreme outliers, which is hence purely the RNG.
Nothing else… not more… not less.
Your tangend there is not only unfitting to what I wrote but a fantasy wonderland example which has lost the plot entirely, nothing to do with any form of reality.
Because if you reduce the outliers you still have the same total chance to succeed, showcasing that instead of a ‘jackpot craft’ being mandatory to even be able to call it a success it would mean showcasing how poor the chances are actually.
So what is it now… is the progression ‘fine’ and we can hence simply reduce the RNG aspect of the crafting system or is it only upheld because it’s not. You can’t have it both ways.
If I remember right there were 2 options.
The first being re-roll of the Affixes on it.
The second being roll-range.
The second with the roll-range is the important one, because getting the right idol type is easy, getting the right combination of Affixes is not.
Unless I got it wrong, which then… yeah… useless.
And makes my follow-ups as useless.
Since we’re limited at the amount of crafting materials anyway it’s a more reliable way though.
You take mediocre options rather then wasting em on crap options, still run out and still get the result in roughly the same time.
Havocs are the limiter currently.
Min-max territory is post Uberroth.
Uberroth kill is still progression.
Sorry but EHG simply shot themselves in the foot, because implementing Uberroth makes it a progression goal and not a min-max goal.
Much like in Runescape doing the ‘Theatre of Blood’ (which most people do after a few years playing) is a progression goal and not a min-max goal. There min-max is reaching maxed account for example, or finishing the collection-logs. You got to differentiate between progression state and min-max state.
Progression has a distinct goal.
Min-Max not.
That’s why it’s a problem and wouldn’t be if it didn’t exist. But as long as Uberroth exists we need to take it as the premise to reach, the goal for the player. He’s not a side mechanic, he’s clearly a step-up from the boss simply. If they’d made a new boss and put it into the weaver stuff… sure, but they didn’t. The regurgitated Aberroth and made it hence a clear-cut goal.
Not really, I only look at the base because the base has vastly more power then anything else at the beginning.
Obviously, and that’s fine.
If it’s in a smooth curve.
Which it is not.
And with new segments of the game new methods to counteract that needs to be introduced. You cannot expect the game to work flawlessly in end-game when you introduce a completely new type of drop (exalteds) shortly before the beginning of it… but nothing that’s severely managing to counteract the drop-only limitation of it.
All of that could’ve been alleviated by progression locking the player simply… but nah, EHG wanted to be fancy and do drop-only, hence removing the vast majority of power from the crafting mechanic and expecting the curve to uphold. Obviously it doesn’t, as it can’t.
From before you suddenly get a fraction of drops. Those drops are ‘as is’ rather then being possible to be improved at those places, so you gotta have the extra drop-luck. It introduces a new brick-state (rune of removal can insta-brick) and puts the power away from the base type and into the Affix drop itself.
This gets even enhanced by the situation that unlike most games of the genre the power curve of tiers is exponential rather then inverted, so T5 to T6 is massive and T6 to T7 is even more so. While in for example PoE 1 T2 to T1 is miniscule comparatively. I’ve spoken about that already.
A T7 is 2 T5 in value, hence a T7 + 2 T5 is the same value as 4 T5 power-wise. Ignoring limitation of slots.
This all accumulates into making it a vastly worse experience simply. You go from ‘potentially every item could be a win’ to ‘I have to find a specific thing which is a needle in a haystack’ to progress in any way.
Progression crafts? No… not really.
And a 6-Link is a guaranteed craft if you wanna avoid the RNG, most don’t use it simply for the fact that quality reduces the medium outcome by 20%, 1% per quality specifically. Not well-known, but that’s why you don’t see people using that craft commonly. Incentive.
That’s why it’s acceptable and why GGG implemented this method, because it was not before it was implemented, people complained and reasonably so.
Fair, gambling is ‘play a game of chance for money’. We remove the money. Now it’s only ‘play a game of chance’
The psychological aspect is ‘chance of reward or loss’ and that’s it, our brain is very simplistic and doesn’t differ between many many things, and is atrociously complex in others where it takes in a myriad of aspects. In this case… it’s on the simple side.
Great, next time I’ll remember to turn it to 100% success then! Great to know we have it in our hands!
That’s… actually not the core topic here?
The core topic for itemization and crafting is always ‘time to progress’. It always boils down to it.
If you get stumped for ages without anything to show for it… or worse… not even getting a shot at it then that feels bad.
Overall it’s better to give players repeated chances at something then to wait ages before providing one. The result of a failure in both is entirely different.
People don’t mind failing 100 times if they can do it that often a day… but they absolutely mind failing the 1 they get in a day.
That’s nigh universally perceived this way, and yes… there’s outliers for that… but those are extremely scarce comparatively.
Hard disagree here. It’s in their own wording; POTENTIAL.
If something has 100 potential, then that would mean it has more potential than something with 50. It doesn’t matter what the developers say, they can be wrong and not understand what words mean. That’s their fail, not the users.
Did EHG also intend have areas of the game be completely unbalanced, in addition to powercreeping their old content?
If they want a system that is effectively entirely random (like it is now) then maybe they shouldn’t call the system a Crafting System. And maybe they shouldn’t add bigger/smaller numbers indicating the number of times you can craft.
And like you said, the system is old. So yes it does need a change. Especially considering all the added ways to target farm Legendaries. Kind of makes crafting Exalts obsolete.
Whether you like it or not, most people don’t like the amount of RNG in the crafting system.
It’s random from the user’s perspective.
Gambling in slots is the same if we all use the logic of averages, but you wouldn’t say you can predict the outcome of slot machines just because you know the averages; That’s called randomness.
They have a payout percentile, so you don’t loose everything! Just most of it!
So it has boundaries!
And it also has a fail-save, you can never go into the negative, so you can’t ever owe money beyond what you throw in!
Nah, but for real now… the RNG is far beyond any acceptable range for the crafting mechanic. And the support for the current systems is also inadequate.
The core game has simply advanced far beyond the former use-case and EHG has lacked the ability or foresight back then to create a system which can properly scale into the future. And if not the ability or foresight were the issue then their quality of keeping up directly when the situation changes so they don’t have to masisvely rework it at once and could’ve instead handled it piece by piece.
But you don’t know the boundaries of a slot machine. You don’t know all the possible results.
(I never used slot machines in my life in any serious capacity, so maybe I am oblivious).
Here LE tells you the lower and upper limit and has some bad luck protection. so your average will be higher then your regular average. That is not the case for slot machines.
They payout rate of slot-machines is commonly set between 96-98%, so for every 100€ you throw in you’ll hence get instead that reduced amount in return.
If you play long enough that’s the possible singular result that happens. The longer you use it the more likely that it becomes exactly that result.
It’s the exact same system, it’s just a basic mathematical outcome.
Or what do you think LE’s crafting system is? A miraculous system provided by a world beyond?
If you know math and how it’s set up you can provide a precise percentile of how likely your outcome is, for every single possible outcome there is.
RNG is simply how far it’s likely to divert from that outcome at any given time.
For example in Path fo Exile you got the recombinator, it has a function to simply showcase the chance for a combination to suceed (and the more commonly used random combining method, but that’s ignored for the example). There’s some combinations which happen with a 20% chance… and some with less then 1% chance, depending on rarity of the Affixes.
The same thing is happen in Last Epoch with the crafting system. If you optimally use the best possible solution for any moment you’ll have a distinct chance of success.
This percentile is the important factor here, how high is it for a specific craft? Obviously it goes down the higher up on the curve we go.
The issue with it is that when we say - for example, it’s vastly lower obviously - your chance to get a 4 T5 item is 30% it then should move on to reduce that gradually… to the next step being 25 or 20… then 10… 5… 2… and so on. What happens in Last Epoch sadly is that from this 30% it immediately goes over to 2% and the next is 0,05%. The curve is too steep.
This commonly is alleviated by implementing more distinctive ‘steps’ into a crafting system, that means as you progress you got another goal ahead already. Skipping a step is a good success, but usually you’ll take the majority of steps with a few exceptions only, and each one has a roughly fixed rate of success overall.
That’s called ‘balancing’ for a crafting system. And the drop-chance has to be included. Because to balance the whole itemization system the end-result to balance for is ‘play-time’. You get item ‘x’ after roughly 5 hours… and item ‘y’ following after roughly 15 hours of play-time.
In LE this isn’t upheld. The disparity from this ‘5 hour’ step is massive, it’s realistic to be between half an hour and 50 hours.
What people want is to adhere closer to the 5 hour baseline. Instead of half an hour and 50 hours the reliability of it being for example… 2,5-10 hours is what’s acceptable.
Because if the disaprity from the medium value is too high as it goes to the higher stages the realistic outcomes become simply nonsensical. Next upgrade in 100 hours? Sure, could be 10 hours… or 1000. Clearly too far apart.
That will happen with any system. Once you already have a good item, making a better one is always a more limited progression.
Either because you need more rare base items to craft upon (LE) or because you need way more divines to craft upon (PoE).
Min-max territory is where progression is always slowest, no matter which system you use.
They do not. If you have a T7+T6+2T5 (or 2T1, same odds), you get 1/11 chance, at worst, to hit whatever combination you want.
No, it’s a difference in design. In PoE crafting is supposed to substitute drops entirely. Drops are only relevant in PoE in regards to how much they’re worth to sell, so you have more currency to spend on your craft.
In LE it’s supposed to improve the quality of the random drops. It’s not meant to substitute drops altogether like in LE, just alleviate them.
You can’t do that with any system that isn’t 100% deterministic. You can’t even do that in PoE. Simply getting 6 sockets on an item can go anywhere from 500 to 2000 realistically. And that is not even discussing the more extreme outliers which also happen fairly often.
You mean that’s different from needing 3 divs to make a single craft when most people need a whole day to farm that many?
With 20h of gameplay you already have very good equipment. It’s not BiS or min-maxxed, but it gets you to about 80% of your build’s potential. Meaning you have your T7 affix on the correct base and 3xT5 with the affixes you want.
The last 20% will take substantially longer, but that is how it should always happen (and does, in any game).
Uby was an extreme difficulty outlier introduced with the clear intention that most people wouldn’t be able to kill him.
You might disagree with that, and many do, but Uby isn’t a part of the regular character progression. That stops at Aby, with the optional goal of getting higher corruption. Uby is currently only for top tier players (or cheese builds).
Except that’s not true. D2 has lots of bases and affixes have range rolls. It’s not as noticeable because other than runewords (which also have range rolls), you’ll only be using uniques, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have variance. It has quite a lot of it, as you know when you try to get those 3/20s or any specific non-unique BiS gear.
I put it between quotes. I thought it would be understood that, in this context, “perfect” means reaching the end goal you’re looking for, which will depend on which step in the progression you are in.
Not nothing else, though. It changes the base for what items are even worth crafting on.
Currently, because you have a potential maximum craft number of 48 crafts (we’re still assuming 1-20 costs, avg 6, vs 5-7 costs on a 48FP item), you can pick any exalted with 4 bad affixes and you have a chance to to get the item you want. You will fail way more than succeed, you’ll usually trash it after 2-3 crafts if they don’t go your way, but it has a chance. Even crappy items can be made into something useful.
If you change to 5-7, your maximum number of crafts is now 10. Which means that any item that doesn’t have at least 2 affixes already primed for success isn’t even worth looking at.
So it does change a lot more. It changes how often you craft, how quick you are done with those crafts and what items are actually useful or not.
Getting your class idol with both affixes is still the hardest part of getting it. After about 70h on a VK warpath, going out of my way to chase idol echoes (and plenty of times even going into tombs in those echoes to get double rewards) and spending about 100k in favour for prophecies, I had a total of 2 4x1 idols with both affixes I wanted and 1 3x1 idol with both affixes I wanted.
2 of those 3 got a decent enchantment I was kinda happy with, the 3rd is still ongoing.
In that time I got all legendaries slammed (most are rare uniques so they only get 1-2LP), I got a Clotho Needle with pretty good rolls, I got the Sentinel WW Relic with pretty decent rolls and I got the 3 exalted slots I use with the correct base and correct affixes (currently looking at 2xT7 to improve).
The current system does nothing to adress this. It’s nice if you can reroll ranges, but that doesn’t fix acquiring the idols themselves in the first place.
All this does is to make life (even) easier for MG, because now you don’t need to buy perfectly rolled idols anymore. You can just buy the crappiest ones for a pittance and reroll them.
Havocs are the last step if you’re using it on a crappy item. You’ll only use them if you managed to get the 7555 out of that crappy drop. And the crafting materials you need to turn a crappy 7221 into a good 7555 are more than plentiful to allow you to do that on almost every drop.
So the current system allows you to turn crap items into the basic quality you’d need with more a more limited number of crafts anyway.
Like I said, what this changes is basically how often you craft and how many items are useless.
Besides, you can focus on generic rune prophecies (since those 2 are the only ones you can’t target farm with them, for some unknown reason) and you can even do LA and focus on rune rewards. You’ll actually have quite a lot of them to occasionally splurge on less optimal items.
Already addressed. If it’s not meant for most players to be able to achieve, it’s not actually progression. You might disagree with them on that, but that is just how things are right now.
Much like a 4LP red ring possibility exists but since it’s not possible to actually get one, it’s not part of progression.
Other than Havocs (Redemptions are only useful in the same place a chaos would be, which is on a triple exalted, at least). Which is already massive enough. Used properly it actually increases your available drops for crafting by quite a lot.
Except not all affixes have the same relevance, so not really. Having a T7 of your most important affix with 3 crappy affixes is often better than a 4T5.
And how is LE’s system any different than PoE’s in this regard? If LE’s crafting is gambling, so is PoE’s. They just differ on the gambling points.
You actually can predict a 100% chance to succeed as long as you have a good enough starting point. If all you need are 2-3 crafts and the item has enough FP, then yeah, it’s 100% success chance. Much like if you change it to 5-7 and the item only needs 10 crafts, then yeah, it’s 100% chance.
The more crafts you need, the higher the chance to fail.
It is, though, as a consequence of the change itself. With a high variance, as soon as you try to craft and 1-2 crafts spend 15+ you know you’ll fail and you’ll just immediately drop them. With a low variance, you can still fail but you’ll need to craft almost to the end to know if you’ll suceed or not.
But that is what a lower variance will do as well. Because now you need better items to even start crafting on, because now you get less maximum crafts to apply on it.
But you are getting a true average when 100k players do 100 crafts each. Which means that the average FP cost for the average player is 6-7. Some players will get unlucky and have a higher personal average, just like some will get lucky and have a lower personal average.
It’s no different from legendary slamming. The current average for a 2LP slam to get both affixes you want is 1/3. However, some people get 3-4 or more in a row and others will fail a dozen times.
That’s how averages work. It’s not just for you, it’s for everyone playing the game.
This I agree with, but I’m pretty sure it’s by design. It’s meant so that people will feel more encouraged to actually make a new character (with all the drops you’re getting from the main one to help) rather than spending 100h to improve your build 2%.
Because when you make a new character, you’re back at the 30% range immediately. Actually more, because you have all the gear from your previous character already.
So yeah, I’m pretty sure the purpose of the system (and many others, they all work together, like being so hard to get to level 100) is simply to encourage you to switch to a new character by giving you steep diminishing returns if you continue with the current one.
Again, you might agree with this or not, some players will like this more than others, but I’m pretty sure that’s by design and part of the game philosophy.
And the wide variance you get in crafts and in affix roll ranges are also a part of it.
EDIT: Also, while you’re playing with your alts, an actual improvement might drop for your previous characters as well. That’s part of their philosophy, which you might agree with or not, but that seems to clearly be their intention.
Which is why it’s baffling that they introduced mastery respec and heavily diminished this.
