Suggestions for Crafting - Anti-Bench and Runeforging

Credit to OmegaSybers and HarryN as well

If you don’t care about my initial thoughts, skip down to “Proposed Solutions”

I can't say I understand GGGs stance on the Crafting Bench but here's mine:
- It's boring: Having a box of extremely specific bandaids is, just in general, not as interesting as coming up with solutions.
- It's not crafting: As in, it's not like any of the other crafting in the game. In PoE1, I think the closest you get is unveiling things. People say currency is just a lottery system? Well so are drops. Exile-like games are entirely about random chance. Something that works completely different than that feels out of place.
- It shouldn't feel necessary: It wouldn't feel so necessary if it weren't for how extremely limited our deterministic crafting options are right now. If Omens and Essences are our only methods currently, they need to be much easier to obtain. (Distilled Emotions count as well, but they're a unique case, not core crafting.) I think there needs to be at least one thing much more readily available throughout the campaign and more essences. I'm not a genius, but I see very little issue with making essences 4-6x more common.
- We need to be able to go up from here: This is perhaps the most important element of crafting right now. The game's not even at the very start of full release yet. The simpler we are right now, the more room we have to grow. However, players want it to at least be interesting now. If they drop a Crafting Bench into the game to tide everyone over, they can't just get rid of it at full release. That kind of choice has a long history of making players upset, so it’ll have to stay.

Runes are huge. They still drop randomly, to a sometimes frustrating level, but that's not an inherently bad thing. Resistance runes are the most critical, and they drop more often than any of the others, as far as I've seen. They feel like a good balance between lottery and the bandaid that a crafting bench would be.

Proposed Solutions

An “Anti-Crafting Bench”
This would be something like a Forge, possibly combined with the current Reforging Bench but looking more complex. The premise is that you can “block” certain mod categories while crafting on an item. I think the best method, keeping it engaging but not too powerful, would be for it to function similarly to PoE1s Fossils, but specifically about making certain types of mods less likely. It could be a gold sink, and it would maintain the randomness of crafting while still giving the player more of a feeling of control.

Runeforging
This one is simple: Allow one or two tiers of combining Runes: Three Storm Runes becomes a Greater Storm Rune with “2 to 20 Lightning Damage / 18% to Lightning Resistance”. Personally I think the cap would be one tier higher, bringing the max resistance from a Rune to 24%, but I’m not an expert on balance. The merged Runes could have fun names too, ex. Tempest Rune.

Corrupted Soul Cores
The most obvious problem with the above is making Runes comparable to, or even more powerful than, Soul Cores. But, honestly, this idea would be great even if no other changes are made at all: Allow Soul Cores to be Corrupted. Possible effects could include:
- Altering values from 80% to 120% of the base, just like with items
- Adding an additional effect
- Changing values to negative
- Swapping the effects between Martial Weapons and Armour
- Changing to a different Soul Core (but, as is always the case with Corruption, only once)
- Can be added to a Corrupted item that does not have an open Rune Socket
Also, maybe Corrupted Soul Cores cannot be overridden once placed in an item.

A final, but important note. Helping players run the game functionally is more important than any content release. And a reminder to other players - There's a difference between requests for help, thoughtful criticism, and noisy complaining. The last is rarely helpful.

I think the analysis of the problem you gave is basically right ... to summarize in my own words you have the following types of crafting:

1. Pure RNG -- Trans, Aug, Regal, Exalts. Not very satisfying but they are nicer early on during league start. I wouldn't call this crafting per-se.

2. Slightly more interesting -- Chaos, Annuls, Essences, and similar are nice in that there might be a touch of strategy going on. There's at least some room for "opportunistic" experimentation with these and we're almost at what I'd call crafting or at least introducing some thought to the process.

..

3. Mirror tier crafting where you work on getting a nigh perfect piece of gear created.


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IMHO we likely need at least several other tiers between T2 -- slightly interesting opportunistic crafts -- and end-game mirror-tier worthy crafting.


I'm not sure of what could fill these tiers but some examples from PoE1 would be:

1. A full range of essences of varying power to DETERMINISTICALLY add a mod onto an item [and rerolling the rest of the item]

2. Fractured items to guarantee a mod no matter what is done to an item.

3. Fossil combinations to block specific mods and make other mods more likely.

4. Basic Harvest Reforges: Allows you to add a mod from a pool of potential mods to an item.

5. Meta-modding to block certain types of mods / change behavior of currency like Omens, etc.

6. Old-style veiled orbs to add a special mod onto an item

...


I'm sure that there going to be some way to balance having more than just 3 types of "crafting" [Wild RNG, opportunistic RNG, Mirror-tier crafting] without crushing the dev's vision for the game.

Great write up, and I think this is a great idea, if GGG is forgoing the crafting bench (for now) in PoE 2. And I like how it uses what's in game already.

I mean I wish we had crafting, but like Sirgog, Lolcohol, and a few others have said already, it's just Gamba, no actual "crafting".

I know that I have been credited here, but I think there are some valuable things to keep in mind.

1. The current crafting system is not done and in a very rough shape. There are a plethera of ways to get us more control and feel better about the system. For example culling unwanted tiers from item bases when they go up in tear or reworking the way the tier system interacts. The obvious solution of "Just give us a crafting bench back" is one that solves a lot of the issues brought up by a lot of the community, but I agree that it would just be a bandaid.

2. Giving us more control via systems like the "anti-crafting bench" that I suggested is one of the many solutions for lack of control, but it does not work, if you don't have at least decent chance at a good item. Stuff like T1 Life or T1 Light radius are NEVER useful on a 84 base. So I think it is also a MAYOR pain point that there is such an imbalance between the mods. Stuff like "light radius" as a stat sucks for EVERYTHING not part of a discovery project while MOST Attack builds want as much flat physical and %increased physical on their weapon as possible, because that determines their base damage

3. I do agree that it does suck that MOST runes don't really scale into late game and a way to upgrade or expanded upon Runes/Soulcores would be awesome, but I think we are not at the stage where we should expand a brand new system until other complimentay systems are added