Making Crafting more accessible without over tuning high end crafting

My understanding is that GGG wants more people to craft and more people to want to craft, but doesn't want a game full of perfectly rolled gear. I think I have a solution to that issue.


1st, to make more people want to craft, the crafting has to be accessible to more people. That means crafting currency and/or crafting league mechanics need to have higher drop rates in order to create a supply and demand curve that lowers the cost of crafting. Everyone crafts with transmutes and augs without thinking twice because they are plentiful. Ex is even plentiful enough that a lot of people are willing to use it, but Omens are 15d for add/rem, so the game is in a state where people aren't crafting and don't want to craft. It's also in a state where crafting is only worth doing on super expensive gear. The mechanics are too expensive to use on anything below lvl 81, so no one is really crafting anything else.


Obviously the problem with this is that now anyone that knows how to get rich in game is going to buy thousands of crafts and make perfect gear so what do we do about that?

There's a two part solution. 1st, lower the drop rate of high level bases. As it stands players don't care about most of the drops in the game and just ignore them looking for the unique drops worth lots of div. If lvl 81+ bases were so rare that they were worth as much as valuable unique gear, then it would be exciting for players to get a good base drop.

This isn't enough to solve the problem though because even if base scarcity made the bases worth 200d, you'd still end up with hundreds of perfect gear pieces which brings us to the 2nd half of the solution.

Add a crafting exhaustion mechanic such as a degradation stat.

Just to pull random numbers say an item has between 1-2,000 rerolls in it before it breaks and you have to get another base which cost you 100d because of scarcity. Items would have a counter of how many times they've been rerolled, but not a known number of how many times it has before it breaks. (This is to prevent rolling something 1500 times, then selling it like a used car salesman.)

Magic and rare drops would have a degradation number on them when they drop so lower degradation drops are more valuable and white drops have 0 degradation making them the most valuable drops at high levels for crafting.

That would make it super hard to make perfect gear without punishing lower powered gear crafting.

Frankly 2000 rolls probably makes perfect or even mirrored gear impossible so that number should be higher so that you get a few mirrored items, but that would work to nerf high end crafting without punishing everyone at scale. It also keeps the RNG GGG loves so much in the game while adding one more RNG of if/when your gear breaks. The break number could be a percentage chance that gets higher the more times you reroll the gear.

Edit: You could even make it more interesting by having higher tier levels of mods on the drops add degradation, so if you see a high degradation drop, it has higher tier mods, but has fewer rerolls before potentially breaking.

You could also have broken gear turn into currency shards like disenchanting. You get raw mats back from ruined gear.