I have a suggestion for the use of forges in towns/waypoints. Right now the appearance of them at a physical location is redundant, but they could become very useful if you considered making them more efficient at crafting. For example, you could have a 10% lower reduction on forging potential use. Or you could make the town/waypoint forges upgradeable with gold to make them more efficient. They could also be specialized for specific class upgrades in different towns/waypoints. There are many different combinations of usefulness that could be explored like different weapon/armor types being better to upgrade in different locations. This idea really springs from how Grim Dawn handled the crafting. They made different blacksmiths in different locations add small benefits to the items being crafted at their location. It wasn’t game breaking, but it did add some flavor to world exploration.
I like the reality of having access to the forge all the time with the hotkey but I think there is potential to make the physical locations useful as well.
Good luck on the continued development of this game. So far it is my second favorite to Grim Dawn. Nice work!
i think the freedom of crafting wherever you want is already such a good feature that should not get destroyed by the idea of getting advantages visiting a physical forge at a certain location/waypoint. But i like your idea and approach with upgrading the forge by adding perma bonuses like the 10% lower reduction as you mentioned similar to the minor blessing bonuses that you can unlock during the story or endgame. (Something like ''Class specific affixes have a x% lower reduction on FP).
The only cool implementation i could imagine is something related to the concept of Last Epoch using the Eras. Maybe each Era could have a certain ‘‘Time Forge’’ or whatever you wanna call it that grants specific bonuses fitting to that timeline. Something like ‘‘Void related affixes have a x% higher chance to get a critical success’’ only available in Ruined Era.
