Thoughts on improving POE2 crafting system

Crafting System

Under the assumption of the current crafting mechanics involving prefixes, suffixes, weights, tiers, groups and mutual exclusions, let's consider the following enhancements.

Core enhancement
----------------

Items have cafting potential being an integer value. Applying orbs on an item decreases the value of the crafting potential. An orb cannot be applied to an item if the crafting potential will result in a negative value.

Items
-------------

The crafting potential scales with the item's level, tier, rarity and existing modifiers. It cannot be increased in any way during crafting (e.g. upgrading an item's rarity from normal to magic does not increase the item's crafting potential). So, finding a rare item with great modifiers, an open prefix/suffix and high crafting potential is a win already. You can sell it for profit or make it even better by crafting.

Orbs
-------------

The amount by which the crafting potential is decreased scales with the predictability of the crafting outcome. In other words, the smaller the pool of modifiers the orb picks from is, the higher the value by which the crafting potential will be decreased becomes. For example:


- Augmentation Orb adds random modifier to magic item: Zero predictability - crafting potential is decreased by zero (allowing infinite spamming but is limited by the number of modifiers allowed on blue items)
- Exalted Orb adds random modifier to rare item: Zero predictability - crafting potential is decreased by zero (allowing infinite spamming but is limited by the number of modifiers on rare items)
- Chaos Orb removes random modifier, adds random modifier: Zero predictability - crafting potential is decreased by zero (allowing infinite spamming of chaos orbs)
- Essences guarantee one modifier in a range of tiers, adds other random modifiers - low predictability, low decrease of crafting potential (thus cannot be spammed on the same item infinitely but does not brick it instantly)

etc.

We can now introduce orb tiers or other mechanics, for instance:

- Augmentation Orb of Exception adding a random modifier of higher tiers to magic items - low predictability, low decrease of crafting potential
- Exalted Orb of Exception adding a random modifier of higher tiers to rare items - low predictability, low decrease of crafting potential
- Augmentation Orb of Gods adding a random modifier of high tiers to magic items - medium predictability, medium decrease of crafting potential
...
- Omen of Exception upgrades the used orb of crafting to exception level if possible

etc.

There should be no orbs allowing to craft the highest-level modifiers. These must only be obtainable through loot.

The Cost of Predictability
--------------------------

So, why not just introduce orb tiers? The answer is pretty obvious: without the crafting potential as restriction, crafting the strongest items would be too predictable and too easy. This cannot be balanced by simply adjusting the rarity/cost of the orbs because you still want them to drop in decent amounts to enable crafting.

Instead, crafters will have to decide between the cost of crafting and the amount of crafts on the same item (always asking themselves whether they should go for the one potential high-level modifier or multiple mid-level ones). Depleting the crafting potential of items (thus disallowing further deterministic crafting or only totally random modification) will still create a demand for fresh crafting bases in the game economy. It would still be possible to pull that RNG trigger, however.

Balancing
---------

The system has two axes of balance: crafting potential/crafting cost vs. rarity of orbs. Due to depletion of the crafting potential, this mechanic cannot be abused easily because you will still have to

- get your hands on a decent crafting base
- get your hands on a high-tier orb
- get lucky on rolling the modifier you want

Please feel free to comment and share your thoughts on this idea.