Time invested to reward gained

Feedback and Suggestions
93

I made the same point in another thread and someone countered that LE will be compared to PoE now, which is true. I still think it has some merit but it’s not that strong.

I would completely remove damaging fractures. Breaking an item from further crafting and reducing it’s power is just too much, breaking it is enough. Especially at the high chances of minor fracturing. You finally get a good T15-18 and instead of keeping that power it is reduced. If not removing then reworking it to feel more rewarding for the investment.

It’s possible to run monoliths for hours and gather a stash of good items, spend a lot of time sorting through them and picking out crafting options, figuring out the way they all fit together in your build and then have every single one fracture at less or equal power to current gear. Each time an item fractures you also have to reconfigure the crafts you were about to do to accommodate for it, potentially a few of the items you had set out are not able to be used because a different one fractured. On top of that you didn’t even get the blessing you wanted. That is far too much time invested for nothing back.

If people don’t think the chances are high I don’t think they really understand probability and percentages. It is common to be rolling a craft with a 75-80% chance of success (20-25% minor fracture). That is 1/4 - 1/5 times you press craft that it will fracture each time you press the craft button. So multiple times per item. Those are high odds.

The fact that you rolled those odds multiple times and won only to have it taken away by a damaging fracture is a terrible experience. I have repeatedly said that I think the balance between the time/risk and reward is out. Fundamentally it is a good system it’s just slightly off. I don’t think there needs to be a rework and redesign of everything, just some tweaks here and there.

Some other ideas -

  • Add a glyph that returns an item to before the fracture, like going back in time (fits in the story of the game). Possible side effects similar to vaal in PoE.
  • Currently instability on dropped items is based on the tiers of the affixes. Limit it to the T5 level of instability on T6/7 drops, so those items have more room for crafting before fracturing, making them truly special.
  • To really scale up over time invested and progress in the game there could be a crafting skill system. You start out inexperienced and fracturing chance is higher (at current levels) and as you level up and craft more you become better at understanding the crafts and the chance is reduced. It could be balanced by level so you can’t become a master crafter before level 100. It would still be rare to create top tier items but after investing multiple hours you are more likely to be rewarded.
    • I just thought of this idea right now but I think it could be a very good solution. The experience I’m talking about is not prevalent while levelling and progressing but at end game/max level is very sudden and at a stark contrast with the levelling experience.

End game is very important to ARPGs. Designing systems that reward you when the standard progression (levels, extreme gear improvement while levelling) are no longer available are key to success and keeping people playing the end game content. I say this even as someone who enjoys grinding arena for little reward, as to me gaining progress is a big reward. But in order to continue gaining progress I need to improve my power.

That definitely is an increase. If it wasn’t clear I am talking about being level 100 (or being close enough that it’s not important). I haven’t had what feels like a real gear upgrade for a long time, since probably early 80s. Almost everything has been a sidegrade or so minor it’s not worth recording as an increase.

A tangible power increase at this stage would be noticeable difference in running high echo MoF, or adding a few waves of arena onto my PB before it is difficult. I understand the room for increase at this point is lower but my gear is far from perfect T20 rolls, I have between T12-18 on all pieces, there is still decent room.

I’m definitely not talking about perfect T20 rolls with such frequency, as I think I’ve been clear about above and in my other posts. As for what makes me go “wow”, it’s hard to define. Not fracturing my only T7 drop with a relevant affix before it was better than what I had equipped would have given me that item.

3 Likes
94

History repeats itself :). There was another form of fracture ingame in the past that realy ruined items a lot, right now you experience an already improved crafting system and that’s maybe the reason why so many long time players are okay with the current system.
If they remove the damaging fracture things will be to easy and there needs to be another downside like different roll ranges or somethingelse arround this lines.

I can’t remember the last time when I had a stash of good items I want to craft with :slight_smile: then again I’ve no idea how many hours you talk about. Isn’t it a normal thing that at some point in a game the progression is more horizontal then anything else?
In the late game I only craft if I have two Items to craft with and still my old item on my toon. I don’t even start crafting on something I wear without an equal substitute. This removed almost all frustration for me.

What about changing the fracture percentages to 33% instead of 25%? Easier to implement ( At least me programming bonobo is thinking this) without drastic changes to begin with.

You keep in mind the 2 missing endgame related entrys that will rise and shine in the future? I realy hope Monolith isn’t part of THE endgame because if so it needs a ton of tweaking.

So the most important thing at last :D. Nice feedback! There is a lot of reasoning behind your words and you painted a good picture where you are coming from. I like it a lot, keep it up.

95

As I totally worked out by myself with no help from anyone else cough @boardman21, the chance to fracture is the total of the instability + 5 per tier of affix you’re crafting. The other affixes on the item are irrelevant to the calculation & since you can’t craft on t6/7 they are also irrelevant to the chance of fracture (though they will obviously push up the item level requirement, but that’s not the topic here).

Another option to fracturing would be that instead of removing the ability to craft, the game just consumes the crafting mats. Therefore as the instability increases successful crafting becomes RNG-based more expensive. At 50% chance to fracture, each successful craft would on average cost 2 affix shards, at 75% it would effectively increase the cost to 4 shards on average.

This way crafting becomes more expensive as you craft, but not impossible, there’s still RNG in the system as well as determinism (you choose what affixes go on the item in what order at what level) & it gets progressively harder to successfully get an item up to higher tiers.

2 Likes
96

I’m not sure exactly what you’re meaning, but I meant the instability that is already on an item that dropped. From looking over a few in my stash it seems to be based on total tier of affixes, although it is not exactly consistent. I’m saying, for example if an item with 2xT5 (total 10 affix level) drops with 12 instability then an item with 1xT6 and 1xT4 should drop with 10 instability, giving a bit more room for crafting extra on to it before chance of fracturing is too high.

I think your idea would need a bit of tweaking as that would practically guarantee a T20, albeit a very expensive one.

97

Ah, no, I was talking about the chance to fracture. I think @Tunk or someone similar worked out the formula for how much instability an item that dropped with affixes would have.

It would be closer to PoE’s method of crafting (where, unless you use a Vaal orb, you can’t brick an item by crafting) while still retaining the determinism & some form of RNG so crafting isn’t just a straight run up from t0 to t20.

98

I explained instability on dropped items here:

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99

So on drops, you get the first 5 tiers for free, and anything over 5 should drop with 2 instability per tier above 5. So a t15 item that dropped should have 20 instability (15 tiers - 5 free = 10 x 2 = 20)?

100

Yeah, though only first 3 tiers can be free.

So 2/2/2/2 (T8) would have 6 instability while 7/1/0/0 (also T8) would have 8 instability.

1 Like
101

But Harvest aside, mod acquisition on items in POE is random. So you cannot think about “bricking” an item the same way as LE. Having a random mod added which doesn’t synergise with the existing mods is effectively a brick (arguing you can scour the item and continue crafting the white base in POE is beside the point).

102

I think we’re also using terms differently then. I get that if you get a “bad” affix on an otherwise good item you could view that as bricked, but as you say, you can still scour it & have another go (or “just” chuck chaos at it & avail yourself to full RNG, though I thought you could also “just” chuck other currency at it to reroll that item). To me, an item is only bricked if you can’t carry on crafting on it (vaaling in PoE & fracturing in LE). YMMV.

103

I don’t suppose you could put that down in a formula/flow char/if/then statements could you? My brain is having difficulty getting to grips with it.

104

Just something to add to the discussion , yesterday they released a manifesto explaining why they are nerfing again deterministic crafting , and that they are not OK with the current system , they want more RNG.

About LE crafting , for me the worst part are those decent affixes combinations that drop in crappy bases.
I know this is a completely different game , but I would love a way to randomly reroll the affixes on a good base , trying to hunt a good affix combination to craft on.
Also with bettter loot filters (that let you hunt affixes tiers and combinations) I think it’ll feel better.

105

Wouldn’t happen to have a link to this manifesto would you? Dug around, but can’t seem to find it.

Hope it’s not the crappy kind of RNG…

106
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107

i dont follow the logic of this. All it means is the item is locked and you cant craft any higher tiers. You then have to start the long tedious process of farming for base items to craft again to try get gg T18-20 items. The advantage is that if you find USABLE T6/7 item in first place then you can try make it gg. At moment i don’t craft beyond T3 on those cos downside risk is too high. You will NEVER find another item like that again since

  • it has to be the right base item
  • the implicit roll have to be good ---- a winged Helm with 20% crit avoid roll is useless
  • it has to be an affix you use in the build
  • it has to be Blue 2 or Yellow 3 at worst (even then you need to run risk of 1/3 rune of removal) since Yellow 4 is impossible (and i do mean impossible as in over 1,500 hrs of gameplay i have never found a usable Yellow 4 drop or gambled one) to use

the crafting system is both beautifully elegant and frustratingly costly (time invested versus reward)

  • Lets take a very common end game item for many build being Crusader Gauntlets
  • Lets assume you work off a base drop of Blue 2T4 = T8 which is c. 3.3% gamble chance (1 in 30)
  • Now you need both rolls to be stats you want being 2/16 prefixes and 2/22 suffixes which is 1 in 88
  • Now you need to craft a T8 item to T20 which is 1 in 38.5 chance
  • That means you have to roll c. 100, 000 of these gloves to get 1 T20 item on average
  • Given that you need say 2 refreshes per getting 1 Crusader Gauntlets, the cost of each item rolled is c. 6,000 gold -----> i dont need to do the math for you to see how insanely expensive and time consuming that is
1 Like
108

The point is without damaging fracture, there is no downside to simply always craft your item until you hit the minor fracture. You need the tension of players asking “should I risk my item becoming worse than it is now?” when pushing for that T18-20 gear.

2 Likes
109

If this system were implemented, I would expect a corresponding decrease in drop rate for shards. There would have to be a counterbalance to the eventual guaranteed max roll item. I know I have thousands of the main attribute shards, so unless they increased the fail rate significantly, I could easily get multiple T20 items in this alternate system, without even slowing down my mouse button to decide if I wanted to risk further failure.

If the shard rate drops, then it becomes about hunting for shards, rather than just crossing your fingers when you push the Forge button. The few times I’ve wanted to increase a tier level of a rare mod and have lacked the shards to do so, it felt worse than when I fractured an otherwise promising item. In other words, it has always felt easier to find another base item to roll the dice on, then to find the shards.

110

i can accept that on white/blue/yellow items but i think it is way too punitive on exalted items. There is already such a low drop rate in that a) exalted will drop 2) it will be of a base type i want / need in my build 3) the T6/7 affix is one i want / need and 4) no more than 1 other roll which is useless to my build.

Exalted items should be exempt from damaging or worse fractures in my personal opinion.

111

There’s always going to be downsides to a crafting system, either it’s too much RNG, risk of the item bricking (LE), the cost of crafting (PoE) or the limited choice in crafting (PoE & D3).

However, I think you underestimate the cost of getting a t20 item with my proposal, though I’ll have to wait till I finish work to run some numbers. Just because something’s inevitable (as hitting t20 would be), doesn’t mean it’ll be cheap/easy.

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112

Your numbers might scare me regarding how much I’ve played this game. But, presuming I read your system right, the materials consumed on failure would be the same as if it fractured in the current system. So, I’ve spent whatever your calculation shows making the T20 items I have plus all of the materials I wasted fracturing countless items over time. In summary, it won’t be anymore than I’ve already spent (though less base items would be consumed in your system) and I still have plenty of shards to spare for most mods.