"Revered Orb" currency

Been spending a lot of time in the Suggestions forum lately, and last night I had an interesting idea.

Currently, real crafting is pretty much relegated to a very few, very wealthy individuals. The amount of investment required to reasonably gain value out of exalts/eternals is simply out of reach for most players (and rightfully so, given the power of the resultant items). And since such crafted items are themselves massively expensive (as are mirrors), most players don't even interact with crafted items. 99.9% of the player base simply gets more value out of trading an exalt than using it.

The logical solution (IMO) would be to introduce a lower-risk (less expensive/more common), lower-reward (to keep it balanced) currency, which for the purposes of this thread I shall dub the "Revered Orb". The basic principle is that it functions just like an exalted orb (gives an additional affix to a rare item), BUT that it cannot yield as good results as an exalt.

An example (subject to balance, etc) would be that it adds an affix, BUT that affix cannot roll the highest tier that the item would otherwise have available. So for an endgame item (read: T1 ilvl), it could not roll T1 mods (only T2 and below). This fills the gap where you have very good items with empty affixes that will never get filled, simply because exalting gloves with 1 T1 and 3 T2 mods which is worth, say, 3-4ex, will rarely if ever yield an item worth 4-5ex.

So it lets people who normally wouldn't craft, craft, but it doesn't affect cases where an exalt would normally be used. Obviously, you may need to say that the affix added is 2 (or 3 or whatever) tiers below the normal maximum tier, for balance's sake. And you would need to account for items where there aren't really tiers of mods (maps come to mind).

Perhaps just say they can't be used on maps, or say that they add affixes to maps, but the normal quality bonus from those affixes does not apply (so you could still get a good mod like pack size which would help, or you could get a mod like fracturing which normally is only useful for its quantity bonus, which you wouldn't get the quality for).

Theoretically, you could even introduce several levels of this kind of currency (Exalted-Revered-Sacred) with diminishing tier ability (and decreasing rarity).

What do you guys think? Is it possible to add crafting currency that doesn't upset the current balance of the game? Is this an example of such a thing, or do you have a better idea?

Not a bad idea, for an issue I've been giving a lot of thought to myself. I'd say that it would still have to be reasonably rare (maybe around the rarity of a chaos) and instead of limiting the tier of the rolls available it would have to be a percentage reduced effect, as the difference between T1 and T2 for different rolls varies greatly. Also I think that possibly there should be some chance of the item becoming corrupted, to add risk in order to balance the huge savings of not spending an exalted. Personally I find that few builds are limited because they didn't get that last mod they were looking for, but rather because of more fundamental problems such as they can't get a 6L chest that isn't a tabula rasa.

I think exalted orbs are serving their purpose. Because the 1% of player CAN make items that nobody else can, they then sell all the 'almost just as good' items for waaaay cheaper than they would otherwise.

That's the real purpose of crafting as I see it. It motivates the high end players to interact with everyone else and give us all the good items they find while they play 16 hours each and every day.

norak -- a % nerf would be harder to implement, but im not opposed to it in principle

bear: not 1%, more like .01% -- and they don't just throw a few exalts on an item and sell it if it's not perf, they eternal-exalt until it's pretty much perf (in tiers, if not rolls). they sink tons of currency into it and mirror service -- youre not going to see a crafted item selling for under 50ex, and most are much more. crafters don't interact with non-super top tier players (except by selling drops). don't get me wrong, if youre ok with that then that's fine. but i would rather see more people crafting and having access to (weaker) crafted gear.