Unlimited Crafting of Common Affixes

[cavalier]

I’ve been chewing on this suggestion for a while and, after seeing another few threads pop up today here and on Reddit, I thought I’d throw it out there for discussion.

Instead of making shards vacuum like gold (the most common suggestion), increasing the pickup radius, or make shard labels configurable by the loot filter, would it be possible to make the most “common” shards infinitely available in the forge? I’m thinking things like:

• Attributes
• basic defences (Armour, Dodge, Block, Endurance, Stun Avoidance)
• Resistances
• added/increased Damage
• Health on Kill/Leech
• Chance to apply ailment on hit.

Remove these as drops and just allow us to craft them at-will. For most shards, I have hundreds (if not thousands) of them so they are functionally unlimited anyway. I don’t think this could be abused, since you still need bases to craft on.

The benefits would be: (i) less annoying clicky-click (particularly when starting a new SSF character or, in the future, a new cycle), (ii) when a shard drops, it’s important and valuable and impactful and you want to click it, and (iii) it avoids needing to configure shards in the loot filter, which I can only imagine will be painful/frustrating and very much prone to error for the average player.

Looking at my forge currently, these are the shards I have less than 100 of (designating this point as “common”):

• Critical strike chance (increased)
• Health/Mana (increased)
• [Element] Penetrations
• Movement Speed
• All Resistances
• Damage Dealt to Mana Before Health
• Ward Gained on Kill
• Extra Potion slot
• all 247(!) class-specific affixes
• plus are a few dodgy ones that are rare because they aren’t very useful to most builds

How would you feel if these were the only shards that dropped?

Currently, as a player, I know I just I mindlessly click the orange tooltip and move right on without looking. If there’s a rare shard in the pile, I wouldn’t even know it. Seeing fewer orange tooltips would mean that I can scan them better, and get excited when there’s one I need for my build (or an alt, or a potential new alt!). All without spending hours fussing over a loot filter

Interested in what other people think, though

[XLVI_carpo]

The common shards aren’t that common if you start your first character or play SSF. With the implementation of Cycles we will get a seasonal reset anyways. Currently there are many players that sink several hundreds of hours into that one EA cycle that is currently running and save up a lot of common affix shards in result.

Imho this won’t be that big of an issue later.

Making common affixes availible from scratch would have a huge impact on the early level progress.

Several times others and me suggested to implement some kind of shard transformation where you could

• Spend 10 shards of the same type to get a chance to create a shard of a rarer value

  • this would need to put affix shards in certain rarity tiers or classify them
  • maybe target a certain shard type or shard classes

• implement a shards vendor that exchanges shards at a ridiculously bad rate

  • Choose between 5 different shards to exchange
  • spend gold to reroll the availible shards
  • maybe limit the reroll attempts to 3 per day

• Choose to spend more shards of the same type on a craft to reduce the chance if a fracture

  • Spend 10 vitality shards to reduce fracture chance by 10%
  • just the fracture!% would be reduced, success chance would stay the same. On a failure the item wouldn’t fracture, but the shards would be consumed (maybe instability also gets added as if the craft was successful)

• Use shards as a kind of currency for ther stuff

This would be a more engaging attempt to deal with inflationary amounts of certain “currencies”.

[d3viant]

I have a ‘better’ idea; ADD SHARDS TO THE GAMBLING POOL; once you’re geared gambling for gear is mostly pointless, gold sink in rerolling monos is ONE way, make shard gambling another way. I STILL think PUR on shards is needed change, it still sucks (or it doesn’t enough :))

[Shadowex3]

I think combining shards for tiering up and tying this to in-town forges is the way to go. At the moment I don’t see any reason to ever use “The Forge” instead of just hitting F wherever I happen to be, giving some kind of utility tied to that would probably help make it seem less pointless.