Should they increase the drop rate of orbs? And if so, how much?

It's funny how many people think that increasing the drop rate is going to make things better. In my view, only someone who has never seriously attempted crafting would say such a thing.

Lets say you have 100 exalted orbs in your stash, and you cannot trade them. What are the odds that you're going to get the result that you want? Still infinitesimally small.

Drop rate is irrelevant. The way crafting works is what is keeping "casual" players from crafting.

I just want to have a chance of at least crafting something. I've spent most of my money that i've acquired over the months on 2 swords and actually got both the mods that I wanted within 14 exalts. They aren't perfect mirror worthy items, but they're what I wanted an achieved. I believe it would make this game a much better experience if people were actually allowed to build an item or 2 without having to play the economy simulator.

Right, the point is valid, if more exalts and chaos dropped we'd still be just as poor and wouldn't craft. What could be done is giving deterministic results for types of crafting which are accessible to average Joe, a lot of people don't try for fear of failure.

Like aforementioned 5L, people buy 5L whites, turn them into crappy rares and wear them only because they have needed links. Either that or they use great rares with suboptimal links because they don't dare to try linking them unless they got two or three times the needed fusings based on community average.
This can be remedied easily with no effect on economy.

We also got people using subpar hybrid gear because of obscene amount of chromes needed to attempt off-coloring high level gear.
This could also be fixed with little global impact, chromes aren't a huge economy factor and having slots of different color doesn't make your gear inherently more powerful, just more suited to a particular application.

As for item crafting, there could probably be ways to skew results towards mods you need, like specific recipes which would have very high chance to give you the mods you need the most but make rolls limited with half ILVL or something. So you could cover your immediate needs and get base-level gear cheaply (it's cheap now too, but it's a hassle chasing that kind of things up), but would need to resort to expensive orbs and luck if you want top tier and epic-level gear which would still be coveted and expensive.

Reading these, I'm just like, WTF. I play since the first days of the OB and I've dropped 0 exalted and 3 divines.

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raics wrote:

As for regals, exalts and eternals, those are materials for ultimate item crafting and should be rare enough so only the most wealthy of players can afford them.

Well seeing how crafting anything but ultimate items is a complete waste of money, it seems kind of silly to exclude the majority of the players from an entire game mechanic.

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Chancellor314 wrote:

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raics wrote:

As for regals, exalts and eternals, those are materials for ultimate item crafting and should be rare enough so only the most wealthy of players can afford them.

Well seeing how crafting anything but ultimate items is a complete waste of money, it seems kind of silly to exclude the majority of the players from an entire game mechanic.

Actually, if you tally up the cost, crafting ultimate items is also a waste of money, but hey, that's why insanely wealthy men buy a gold-plated ferrari, you got to spend your money on something. Besides, PoE was made for latent gamblers, those always hope they'll get lucky.

Besides, we get excluded here, that's what we do, those that don't play the trading game don't get wealthy, those that don't trade at all have little chance of settling in high-tier maps, yada-yada... what's one more exclusion, what's one more annoyance, what's one more frustration if player goodwill and enthusiasm are in infinite supply, or are they?

If "Crafting" didn't suck, I'd say yes. As it is? I just don't know that I care. I have a shop, I sometimes sell things. I sometimes buy things. But, I'm a stupid sucker for crafting.

There is no crafting. Just a variety of prices attached to slot machine levers.

Sometimes, you win.
Most of the time, you don't.

After I 5L the chest I'm fusing for an alt, I'm pretty much done with crafting in this game. I will just keep hoarding orbs, and I'll probably play nothing but standard again, and just buy the odd piece that isn't a bajillion exalts when I have the currency saved. As it is, the economy is terrible, and the crafting is worse.

no

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raics wrote:

Chaos is the main currency so it could drop more I suppose, recipe is all well and good but there isn't really much reason to restrict it on item level, anyone can reach merci docks in a hurry and grind there if he needs cash, it just hurts players that reroll often instead of farming.

There's a damn good reason it's level restricted. It wasn't always that way. When any set of rares could get you 2 chaos, you could get 5 accounts with level ~15 characters and just farm normal Merveil with your main for tons of rares. Not to mention, with a lot of IIR and the huge IIQ bonus from 6-man party you could also get a Dream Fragments or Tabula Rasa fairly often.

This was before they buffed cruel+ drop rates on bosses and limited the numbers of PoE you can run on a single PC, though.