345 new Vendor Formulas: A suggestion for actually *crafting* gear

Why is this important?
PoE has a great gambling system, by which I am referring to orbs. Seriously, as a gambling system, it is fantastic. However, as a typical crafting system, it leaves a lot to be desired. A good, traditional crafting system in an ARPG serves as a RNG reducer, preventing strings of subpar luck. An example of this, which is a particular frustration to self-found players, is to repeatedly find rare items, but to rarely find the rare items which your build uses. This is where vendor formulas come to the rescue; they are PoE's traditional crafting system, evening out RNG by allowing you to reroll items. For example, here's Kripparrian explaining how to get more efficiency using the Prismatic Ring formula.

The idea behind this suggestion is to enable balance for all six armour types, while at the same time ensuring that it's not abusively recursive. For example, using the above formulas, you can craft a rare Vaal Regalia, but you cannot use that Vaal Regalia in a formula chain to make another (rerolled) Vaal Regalia — the best you could do is use it in a formula chain to make a new rare Widowsilk Robe, ensuring that, for the most part, those trying to reroll the top gear are using Chaos; these formula are more intended for making decent gear, not the top stuff, and have increased utility if your current gear is two or three tiers below the highest available. And the components are body armours which your character could theoretically use, but aren't quite exactly what you're looking for, creating an interesting minor tension.

This is one of those ideas that I'm sure GGG has thought of up to this point in development (being the D2 fans they are), but for whatever reason purposefully chose to not implement. That they call the existing system "crafting" -- a buzzword in itself, sadly, which draws the necessary attention but shrouds what it actually is -- reflects this preference.

Regardless, have a gracious bump for taking your time to suggest an actual crafting system and enumerate all its possibilities.

On an unrelated note, I'm surprised, given your history with the notion, that you would concede this to self-found players at all. Anything change your mind? :)

EDIT: I would also change the thread title to something else: you are, after all, suggesting an entire crafting system here. That is greater than the sum of 345 new formulas, and will draw more attention to the thread. I would try something like "An Actual Crafting System: 345 New Recipes" to emphasize the fact that what GGG has in place does not really work.

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ephetat wrote:

On an unrelated note, I'm surprised, given your history with the notion, that you would concede this to self-found players at all. Anything change your mind? :)

I've never been unsympathetic to the problems self-found players face; I simply disagreed with them — strongly — about their proposed solution to said problems. There's a difference between saying "everything's fine" and "what you're talking about will do absolutely nothing to solve your problems."

Part of that was disagreeing about what precisely the problem is; in my mind, it has never been about trading, but about crafting (or the lack thereof).

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ephetat wrote:

I would try something like "An Actual Crafting System: 345 New Recipes" to emphasize the fact that what GGG has in place does not really work.

Reverted to original title, which I changed during the drafting process.

Definitely in favor of more recipes.

I really like this suggestion as an improvement for crafting your own gear and self-found viability, nice work there ;).

I suppose, since you dont talk about it at initial post (or I dont see it), the mods would be rerolled and not get inherited from any of the base items used right?

I've got nothing against the suggestion, but I don't think I would use these recipes either. No harm adding them.
+1

Great post, recipes like this are sorely needed but I wouldn't call them crafting per se. It may be semantics but when I hear crafting I think precise control over item properties, as opposed to RNG. To quote myself from the Design Philosophy of Affixes thread:

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Runes and gems have diverse properties, which touches on the subject of crafting. Diablo 2 allows considerably more control over generic item properties compared to POE. Notably through, horadric cube crafts, horadric cube recipes, runewords, and jewels, which themselves could be crafted.

What Diablo 2 has that POE lacks is the kind of control that sockets and diverse crafting recipes afford basic itemization. That deficiency is most clear when playing a new character and struggling to find anything useful. Most players take that as encouragement to trade, which may be the case, but I also think it demonstrates the necessity of a decent crafting system or set of crafting recipes for basic items.

I'm not sure adding something like jewels, runes or property gems to POE is a good idea. Sockets are not an affix and allowing such item customization, for end game items, would have severe consequences on balance. I do think there's some merit to the skillslot-for-properties trade off. But that's sort of what auras and curses already are.

What might work instead is adding various generic craft recipes for guaranteed properties but not necessarily ranges. Not guaranteeing property ranges would keep favor use in early game itemization. We could include skill gems somehow and finally give those stash pages a use. So, maybe a vendor recipe involving a specific gem puts a specific property on an item of a particular gear slot. For example:

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Life Gain on Hit Gem + White Weapon + Transmutation Orb(s) = Blue Weapon with Life Gain on Hit as a guaranteed property

Such a recipe would not guarantee the range you roll, or even if the item is useful, but I think it would be more palpable than trading for many players. Of course if a specific gem is too difficult to acquire for new characters, it might work with specific color gems or support gems. Like the existing resistance ring recipes.

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Red (Support) Gem + White Weapon + Transmutation Orb(s) = Blue Weapon with LGoH or Life Leech as a guaranteed property

Additionally, we could add more powerful recipes:

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Gem + Common Item + Alchemy Orb(s) = Rare with Specific Property
and/or
Gem + Rare Item + Chaos Orb(s) = Rare Item with Specific Property

These recipes are a little like turning a magic into a rare but with up to 6 properties. Although, unlike a Regal Orb, you would not have over more than 1 magic property or any of the ranges. (As an aside I think that Magic-to-Rare would make a fun currency but without restricting it to gear it would only be used in mapping.) The idea here is guaranteeing item properties (crafting) for the cost of currency (value) and a specific gem (ingredient).

I'm sure both ideas have come up in some way before. And there's likely reasons why GGG hasn't implemented them. One argument against gem-crafting might be that it undermines transmutation and alteration orbs. Although I think transmutations not requiring a specific gem would keep them useful and alterations would still have a great deal of value in rerolling. Gem-recipes of course could remain exclusive to gear and do not have to work with maps.

I would like to be able to 'bias' my chaos orbs to improve the ability of certain mods spawing

What if monsters in PoE dropped 'souls' that when sold with a chaos orb created a chaos orb attuned to that monster's soul?




i.e killing a voidbearer would sometimes cause it to drop a voidbearer soul, letting me sell it with a chaos orb stack for voidbearer attuned orbs.

These orbs would massively increase the chance of %fire damage mods spawning on the rare item





This would also have a side effect of encouraging players to kill all types of monsters as shitty monsters may drop useful souls
(ie cannibals drop a soul which increases % of iiq on attuned chaos orbs)

The last two replies were really non-sequitirs. Especially Teridax's utterly unreleated Souls idea. And Veta, although I understand there is a lot of potential design space in vendor formulas, I'd like to keep this suggestion focused on the ones suggested in the OP.

This is a good idea. The amount of effort it took to create the OP was much more than needed to get the point across though.