Eternal orbs should work on sockets only

The forum meta at the time that Eternal orbs were released largely revolved around the complaint that chroming/jewelling/fusing all could completely brick your item if you didn't get what you needed by the time you ran out of currency.

The response was the birth of the eternal orb, which everyone believed would cure the crafting woes and allow restoration of the item to its original state. Then it released in game.

3x rarer than an exalt and valued approximately the same, obtaining the orb is now largely not worth it for your average player. It single-handedly destroyed any excitement in the rare item system. The mysterious RNG drops and yolo-exalt forging were completely outclassed by deterministic Eternal-Exalting. As a result, no naturally occurring rare will ever excite the player base again.

Coming to my suggestion, Eternal orbs should work for sockets only. They should save colours, links and number of sockets. Leave the affix system to the mysteries of the universe.

Although this would be far more in line with the original intent of Eternals, I fear the resulting orb would be worth little to nothing economically. It only makes sense if you craft on gear you're currently wearing... and only idiots extremely reckless people do that.

Also, we can infer from your post that the socket system is a shitty mechanic, undeserving of the respect due a proper system such as affixes. Which is true.

Eternals are what they are. With Vorici in place if you want a deterministic way to get sockets and links, he is your answer. Changing eternals in your way would do nothing more than reduce the value of eternals to scrap. Right now to get a 5 link from vorici costs 150 fuse, which is less cost on average than a single eternal orb on standard. For eternals to be worth it they'd have to be below that threshold, because nobody will eternal a 6 link (their sockets are already done). It might see some use as coloring for off colors, but again, Vorici offers a deterministic way to do this as well -- as long as you're not trying for 6 off colors, vorici can save you quite a bit of currency with chromes.

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BerMalBerIst1 wrote:

Nah, disagree

They are rare/expensive enough as it is, limiting their functions would be terrible.

They are intentionally rare because of their utility, if they were changed there is no reason they couldn't be made more common. Which would solve this issue:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

It only makes sense if you craft on gear you're currently wearing... and only idiots extremely reckless people do that.

Question: Is it worth to keep eternals as valuable and scarce? The status quo is questionable (some will disagree, of course)