Reboot on crafting. Crafting 2.0

I'll try to be as concise as I can so hopefully I don't get too long here.

With all the talk of late on PoE being "POE: The Best of Games and the Worst of Games" with many voices condemning the crafting system: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/686119. I have been giving some serious thought on this subject to see if a better way could be devised to improve crafting. Then after reading on Chris' responses to the above thread it hit me. Chris stated "The experience we are designing Path of Exile around is the experience we had playing Action RPGs when we were younger -..." and "Vendor recipes allow more controlled crafting." In a light bulb going on moment what Chris stated is the answer, add a crafting artisan that can allow you to increase the individual stats of an item. An example to illustrate and clarify my idea. Take an item, any item, say this:

with a couple of good stats and a couple of worthless stats. The worthless stats (+2 to maximum ES and reflects 1 physical damage) are the filler mods as this OP states here: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/744354.

The solution to all this is to have a crafting artisan who you can take an item to and place it on a crafting table and it would list each stat on a separate line with places to the right of it so that currency items and gems can by placed there and then have a craft button under it all to perform the crafting.

So for the above example I would take my belt to the crafting artisan, move it over to the crafting table, have all 7 stats listed with a grid of spaces to the right of each stat, and then be able to move currency and/or gems into these places for the individual stats to raise them up. No RNG rerolling the entire item, no RNG gambling, just a straight up increase of that stat with the amount of currency I sink into that stat. So with my belt I would want to increase ES and Reflect damage. So for the sake of this discussion let's say I can use AS to increase my ES so if I use a full stack of 40 AS I would raise my ES stat by 40 so now it would be +42 ES. Same applies for fire resist, Let's say I use a red gem + an alt to increase fire resistance up to a maximum of +30%. So I would need to use 21 red gems + 21 alts to get the fire resist up to the +30% max. 10 blue gems + 10 alts would get my cold resist to +30%. The +34 strength could also be raised with red gems + a currency orb to a max of 200. To get ES to the 200 max I'd use up 198 AS. There would need to be a sliding max cap so a level 1 character couldn't have a +200 ES or +200 strength or +30% resists but that would be easy to have max caps that increase as you level up until you reach the max by level 68 (lowest level of end game maps).

Other combinations of currency for all the other stats an item can have would have to be worked out and we would end up with a large table for sure but in this way we accomplish several things at once:

1. No RNG gambling with crafting the stats
2. The low value "filler" mods on high level items can be increased to desired levels
3. This is a great way to have a major currency sink to keep inflation down.
4. Crafting items is way more fun than currency farming and then buying the item.

We will still need to Chaos or scour/alch the base item to get the kinds of stats we want but then the crappy low value stats can be crafted over time to get them up to where we need/want them to be.

The only downside I currently see is with players using RMT to get the large amount of gems and currency required to do any major crafting. We can't stop that now with trading so that doesn't change with real crafting.

GGG is so tight lipped about the whole crafting RNG gambling debacle that no one knows what's going on in their minds. Other than Act IV, more microtransactions, more vendor recipes, work on the next 4 month leagues, races, and more bug fixes we don't have a clue as to how GGG is tackling the bigger issues such as crafting. Maybe my 2 cents worth of input will get the PoE devs to think about crafting without RNG in a new light (or sadly maybe not).

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Alysma wrote:

+100. Crafting implies a plan, tools and skill. Not roulette.

crafting is just the word people choose to use for it, i don't think GGG calls it crafting or ever implies it takes skill

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skinnay wrote:

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Alysma wrote:

+100. Crafting implies a plan, tools and skill. Not roulette.

crafting is just the word people choose to use for it, i don't think GGG calls it crafting or ever implies it takes skill

Well there's the problem! We want GGG to reboot crafting so that it is not RNG luck based. If GGG doesn't even call this "crafting" then that's why its currently a failure.

if u have an guaranteed way to get the best rolls of items, it has to be very expensive (in playing time).

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keeper190786 wrote:

if u have an guaranteed way to get the best rolls of items, it has to be very expensive (in playing time).

Having a 1 up way to increase stats is expensive. I don't have 100s of each gem that I would want to use or thousands of alchs, AS, BW, etc. to craft up very many items so unless I RMT buy currency and gems or become a no-lifer farming slave to PoE this is an expensive but viable method of crafting better gear without RNG luck.

Most players have real lives and don't play PoE 8+ hours a day every day.

Edit: Not sure why the arpg devs want us to slave forever to get to the higher levels. PoE has so many build possibilities that if we could get to level 100 and retire a character into a level 100 shrine for all to see complete with the final build and passive tree being viewable then it would encourage more players to play their build to 100, get pardoned so that our character can leave Wraeclast as a free citizen again, and move on to have fun with a completely new build and play style we want to try. This is the real fun of playing PoE.

The whole topic of build diversity revolves around GGG allowing more builds to work at the higher levels. If the end game maps are so uber hard that only a few builds can survive then GGG has just shot themselves in the foot by eliminating millions of builds that we would never try because we know they only work at low levels. GGG has to ease up on end game maps somewhere to allow us to want to play more builds that aren't the absolute best and be happy to see more unique builds and allow a higher quantity of players to get to 100 and retire their character.

Blizzard failed to get much build diversity in D3 by making Inferno so uber hard that only a few builds were viable and once made known then millions of players copied that build to finished the game. GGG seams to be making the same mistake with PoE.

I really like this idea. +1. To limit Op items at low levels, you can do two things:

1) Don't allow mod values to exceed the item level.
2) Warn player that they are exceeding the mod value of the item level and it will increase the item level.

I prefer the first approach because it means to get the best items, you still need to find the highest iLvl gear.

to make things clear: with very expensive i mean like hundreth of exalted.

the randomness fulfills one condition: constant average number of godly gear per overall played time. Since its a huge number of players and a huge amount of applying orbs the average is pretty "sharp".

If u dont like randomness, u have to make items so expensive to maintain the same ratio of good gear => insanly expensive.

If u really understand that, u will see that the randomness is advantageous for newbies.