The problem
Currently, free trade does not exist. EHG have chosen (read: made the design decision due to reasons that I’ll give my best guess for) to time gate, progression lock, and limit the amount of times an item can be traded or sold.
Personally, I would prefer a free trade system, but I think I understand why they went this route.
As it stands right now, itemization and crafting are too shallow for a free trade economy to be healthy. If you’ve put a lot of hours into the game, be it in MG or COF, you’ve engaged with the crafting system enough to see how easy it is to take a drop with a good T6/7 roll and put the absolute best, highest tier mods you want in every affix slot. Sure, you might brick it a few times but it certainly isn’t a difficult thing to do between glyphs of despair and removal.
This is a huge issue in a free trade economy, because after not long the market gets flooded with perfect affix rolls in every slot for every popular build. This is why I think they’ve implemented the item sink. At that point, with a free trade economy, the game becomes about farming despairs and grinding out crafts with 5 good, high rolled affixes in order to make any real profit. But glyphs aren’t tradeable, despairs aren’t easily target farmable, and their drop rate is low.
The solution(?)
This honestly may be better suited for an expansion, and are purely my thoughts of what I would want to see in the way of expanding itemization and crafting to be better suited for free trade, opening up and facilitating free trade, and reworking MG into the crafting faction.
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Remove all trade restrictions, including the locking of items from being traded more than once. Remove all trade time/progression gates. Rework MG ranks to instead benefit crafting in some way.
- Maintain the favor cost to post items if you dislike the idea of people playing the game as “trade only”. If you want to allow people to strictly craft and trade if that’s what they want to do, then remove the favor cost to post items and instead rework the favor system entirely (possibly remove and leave it as a progression system for leveling your faction reputation?)
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Allow all glyphs and runes to be traded.
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Allow items to be listed for currency other than gold. IE; instead of being posted for gold, I can instead sell my items for whatever number of a specific glyph or runes that I select. Let me still trade for gold if I choose to.
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This will shift the economy from a gold based one to an item based one. Golds uses will still exist, albeit not much, but an item based economy has proven itself to be superior in ARPG’s for decades now.
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You will also need to allow glyphs and runes to be pulled into the inventory from where they are stored in the character sheet. Or just have them take up inventory slots in the stash (make them stackable, one slot, and allow the stacks to be broken down into smaller ones).
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Possibly implement a stash tab dedicated and designed for holding glyphs and runes?
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Expand the number of affixes an item can roll to 6 (3 prefix & 3 suffix). Balance stat weighting accordingly, factoring in the 50% increase in affixes rolling on items.
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Nerf the rate of items rolling with t6 and t7 affixes on drop drastically.
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Add a new glyph, Glyph of Power - Chance to elevate a t5 affix to t6, or a t6 mod to t7. Does nothing on failure, still uses forging potential. Unsure of what the success rate should be. (potential to crit a t5 into a t7 directly?) Make it somewhat rare, but not super rare. Target farmable in monos.
NOTE: This change is meant to allow and shift the meta towards crafting your rares into exalteds. While it would still be possible to find exalteds as drops, the purpose to make that a rare occurrence so they hold value long term. -
Revisit forging potential numbers and balance it around needing to craft most your t6 and t7 mods, and items now having 50% more affixes on them baseline.
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Move Glyph of Hope’s mechanic into the MG and COF rank rewards (early ranks?). Remove Glyph of Hope
- This may be too big of a buff to crafting? May need some tuning. But this would allow players to utilize new glyphs and runes more freely, opening up a lot of potential for adding new ones.
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Revisit Legendary Potential, maybe keep it at LP4 max, but internally test that 6/7(Rune of despair) affix exalteds won’t entirely kill legendaries. This might mean increasing the LP rate on things, or increasing the max LP from 4, maybe both. It would need a fair bit of testing.
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Add a new rune - Rune of the Legend - Rolls the Legendary potential of a unique from 0-Max, destroying the item in the process if it rolls 0.
- You can make this rune very very rare, its tradeable after all. I’m talking Ber rune rarity (for the Diablo 2 enjoyers), or headhunter rarity (for the POE folk). You can make it drop only from specific content and be not as rare but still really rare if you want. Lots of room to play here.
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Add a new rune - Echo of the Keepers - Duplicates an item. Adds the “Echoed by the Keepers” tag to the created item. You cannot use Echo of the Keepers on an item with the “Echoed by the Keepers” tag. Can be used on any item. Including legendries.
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Yeah, POE’s Mirror of Kalandra. You should never realistically expect to see one of these drop in your lifetime. They are extremely rare and typically reserved for use on the best items in the game. To put it into perspective, it is estimated that 1 Mirror of Kalandra drops every 280,000 hours of play time. While you will statistically never see one drop, with 100,000+ players, there will be enough of these in circulation for the richest players as the ultra end game carrot on a stick to fully min max their builds. Now, LE does not have 100k+ players, and POE has multiple ways to make getting mirror’s easier (magic find, mirror shards, divination cards). So while maybe an Echo of the Keepers shouldn’t be quite that rare, the general gist of it is for it to be that ultra late game carrot on a stick that most players will never see drop, and dedicated players can save up currency to buy in order to obtain the best items in the game.
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This items existence on it’s own incentivizes the most dedicated players to “meta craft” the best items in the game. Which is where you spend exorbitant amounts of currency on crafting the perfect item, something like when coupled with my previous rune/glyph suggestions could create an item with 6 T7 mods + 1 T5 mod, all near perfect rolls on the stat ranges, and near perfect implicits in order to sell services where you duplicate your perfect item for others for a fee. With enough luck
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Without an item that can do this, the incentive for creating items like this just isn’t there due to the insane amount of currency required to make them. To put it into perspective using POE’s equivilent, the Mirror of Kalandra… you can easily spend 10-20 Mirrors worth of currency and 10’s of hours of crafting just to make an item that’s worth using a mirror on. The goal is to make that money back and then some by selling the mirror service to those rich enough to afford to buy a mirror. This is the ultra late game.
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In conclusion
I would love to hear what people think about some of these things I suggested. Good or bad. I think the crafting system in LE is amazing and there’s a ton of room to add to it if the right changes get made to some systems.
Also interested to hear some other ideas for new glyphs and runes. 