Let's talk crafting

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I'm glad Alts are gone. I don't think Clicking 500 times till you alt into the One thing you are looking for and then Augment and hope is a good thing either.

And now you are forced to buy or collect 500 gamble rings/items from vendor.. to aug., regal, exalt them. Or collect from ground where ppl say its a waste of time unless its ssf.

Eventually a more refined crafting menue would have sufficed on that level - i would imagine my hero can craft for 10 alt. a fairly useful second stat to regal rather than only gambling these with augs like current.

I generally see crafting (and merchants) as a backup against bad luck.

You can be unlucky for ages and not find a single upgrade but at least you accrued a crapload of crafting mats to stand a very goodchance of crafting an upgrade every so often.

It's a way to generate an item with the odds in your favour to get the mods you need.

For that reason crafting needs to be potentially as good as drops. Otherwise you stand no more chance of getting an upgrade today as you did for the last 3 days.

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Orion_3T#5225 wrote:

For that reason crafting needs to be potentially as good as drops. Otherwise you stand no more chance of getting an upgrade today as you did for the last 3 days.

I agree with this....up to a point. Where that point is can be debated. I think there SHOULD be a natural place in a game (centered around trade), where the ONLY way to get an upgrade is via a lucky drop or trading with another player who got a lucky drop.

This is where the deterministic, yet weaker, crafting option comes into play. Even if an item overall is 30-50% weaker than a drop, if you can get all affixes to match your build it can still be a pretty hefty and lengthy upgrade.

My thoughts on the feeling of it being a "luck moderator": it won't work that way. It will cause the gameplay loop to shift from items to currency, just as it already had in PoE 1. I really really think the only possible way to avoid that is to gate the best possible items behind raw or near-raw drop state. Heck...even if the best crafting orbs were so absurdly rare, players would STILL trade currency for THEM instead of actually playing for the rare drops themselves if that meant being able to make a perfect item.

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I generally see crafting (and merchants) as a backup against bad luck.

Kindof agree to the last post. Sometimes i really wanted however this one exp. Self made item.. and it was cool that this ootion on top existed.

Requirements were hard enough - often.. as you had to grind for mats also.

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I agree with this....up to a point. Where that point is can be debated.

You cannot craft uniques at all. In addition certain uniques dropped only from certain bosses or game modes.. think on original sin.

Certain rares were game mod / drop restricted... think of ritual, betrayal.. think of delve and temple bases.

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Akedomo#3573 wrote:

Lets just get rid of the economy.

Then, when we play the game. We can just get good loot dropping for us instead.

This would be great....but its silly to say this. It will never happen. The game is centered around trade, period. It is what it is.

The goal of this feedback thread is to work within that confine to improve upon what we currently have or don't have, as well as learn from the pros and cons of PoE 1.

I think most have my posts have made this clear but my biggest con that I took away from PoE 1: Crafting and currency completely wrecked the loot system irreparably. Endless mirror copying helped make this an even bigger issue.

I want a crafting system that a) works well (not 100% random), and b) does not make all item drops irrelevant due to randomness and lack of power.

We are coming from the crafting angle, but there also needs to be changes on how items are dropped to truly make this work. Ex: The highest difficulty, highest tier endgame areas shouldn't be dropping rares that you would see at t1.

Yeah the problem with drops is the loot system doesn't care what you need. So you can go a long time without getting an upgrade to even your weakest item. Crafting (possibly combined with merchants) should mitigate this.

I went from Act 3 to Act 3 Cruel witout a single boots upgrade, and one of my rings was still lvl 32. My shield wasn't far behind. The crafting available did let me make some good upgrades though there was a lot of rng so it was mainly through rolling the dice a lot of times.

Buy lots of random boots, start with the best type, if nothing with MS, Trans then Aug see if you get it. Then reforge to get another roll. If still nothing reforge the Rares, consider Regal a magic to make 3. Rare reforging actually gives a lot of rolls as the number of mods on reforges doesn't seem limited by what is on the items. So reforging 3x3 mod items could give you 3-6 mods. For magics you can get 2 mods even if they all had 1, this is useful if both mods matter and the first whiffs.

So for my purposes at that point it worked but to craft the 3 upgrades cost me about 400k gold and a fair few regals. Just as an example of early game crafting.

Later on there are more tools but they kinda feel too rare to potentially waste. Like there's no point trying to craft with just a few mats, you need enough to stack the odds.

I am leaving trade aside for now as 1. Not everyobe wants to trade at all. 2. Trade as it stands relies on the values of crafting materials, which in turn is at least somewhat related to how useful they actually are as crafting materials, as well as how easy they are to find.

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Marrkix#5815 wrote:

First, current "crafting" (or rather lack of it), is fully intended and good for the start of the game. There will come time for more complex and powerful crafting mechanics later on. Now it is the "test the core game" time, however it seems many people can't understand that, maybe they missed the "early access" part.

The core is very good. It forces you to think about what you want to achieve and pursue it. You pick up white and blue items to craft on them, instead of having one highest ilvl base that you just spam everything on, and then ignore 99% of the loot in the game. Makes loot actually matter. And obviously, people may feel like it wastes their time because they know how it can work in PoE1, but it is how it is, you can't have satisfactory moments without some friction to get to them. I personally enjoy it a lot,

For what I would like to see like next small step, is essences being usable on any step of the crafting process, with reduced effectivnes depending on amount of already existing mods. So if you use it on white item, you may get highest tier of a mod. If you use it to add mod to blue item, like with augment, the available mods will be of lower tiers, and so on.

I was reading the entire thread and nothing seemed great but your essence idea made me turn on my PC and write. I believe this is a good idea, one that is worth thinking about, even if it wasn't an essence - maybe something new, it's about how it works, that is the good idea IMO.

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Orion_3T#5225 wrote:

Yeah the problem with drops is the loot system doesn't care what you need. So you can go a long time without getting an upgrade to even your weakest item. Crafting (possibly combined with merchants) should mitigate this.

I went from Act 3 to Act 3 Cruel witout a single boots upgrade, and one of my rings was still lvl 32. My shield wasn't far behind. The crafting available did let me make some good upgrades though there was a lot of rng so it was mainly through rolling the dice a lot of times.

Again though...this is where the crafting bench would fill the void. The area you describe is precisely the area where I feel deterministic crafting is necessary. Players should be able to feel gear progress act to act, maybe even area to area. I don't EVER want smart loot: that was the worst, most game breaking decision ever made by the other arpg companies. But without smart loot, it creates a randomness that is enormous which in turn requires a stopgap in between.

But once you're blasting maps and seeing far more rares, that randomness is okay. At that point you likely know what bases you want, so you only need to pick up the right rares. And if difficulty scaling also scaled the item innate power quality, all the more likelihood you'll find something in a relatively short amount of playtime.

But naturally, in games like these, you will hit a very very steep wall. I think that is important: people will make every effort and grind to overcome that wall, or it will encourage people to set aside that character and explore other options. A few people might get frustrated and quit. But its a grind game....if grinding makes you quit, you probably don't really belong in this game in the first place.

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cowmoo275#3095 wrote:

But naturally, in games like these, you will hit a very very steep wall. I think that is important: people will make every effort and grind to overcome that wall, or it will encourage people to set aside that character and explore other options. A few people might get frustrated and quit. But its a grind game....if grinding makes you quit, you probably don't really belong in this game in the first place.

Grinding pretty much by definition involves progress - it might be slow progress but there needs to be some.

People stop when they feel the level of progress is unacceptably low (or they tire of a particular play experience, but that's a seperate issue). A good crafting system should mean that while they play a long time hoping for an item, while their chances of it dropping today are no better than yesterday or the whole last week, they stand a better chance through crafting.

If crafting couldn't potentially match a drop, this sense of progressing dsspite bad luck would be lost.

Of course there are also Uniques which for some builds fit your idea but they are a somewhat seperare beast.