I think, the devs have to take a look to other ARPGs in many ways. Path of exile for example has such Items and it is cool. Steal the best ideas! (Blizzards Way to success). 

I'm more in favour of unique models & flavour text than superior stats but I'll be interested to see it either way.

[This probably shouldn't happen before 3-4 months, so say them chickens, the difficulty needs to be adjusted since even now lvl-50 chars can be unkillable or one-striking everything, on +250 missions, so say them chicken]

What *could* happen during the next month, is the first free DLC - which *needs* to fix crafting - Wise Snakefist was there from early alpha - and this is the *most* confusing crafting so far. Some of components which has their place in Alpha/Beta just... lost it. There is *no* use for them. Chickens are pretty sure about it!

[This would add another layer, if not tier to crafting - for example Machine God Spark and Empyrian Conduit even lack description - this can be used in Relic Plans, this was highly talked about in community, or upgrading Purple or whatever]

If the lower tier items had a VERY small % chance to drop higher tier components they would be less worthless.

I.E White/Gray items - % chance for blue components/ and or upgrade in tier to a blue item

     Blue items - % chance for green components/ and or upgrade in tier to a purple item

etc, etc

If lower tier items could have fusion done on them so that they also had a VERY small % chance to increase a tier.

That it seems would possibly be more interesting than something you completely overlook for anything other than a few credits.

So when you hit the "Salvage" button you have a tiny % chance of getting either a complete upgrade to the entire item to the next tier or higher tier components or just the basic salvage you always get from the item.

Three possible different outcomes has to be a bit more interesting than one ?

Except you find a rather bad person to associate with (poor, angry little troll without any ideas or solutions - just flaming around, he has no basic knowledge of the mechanic - he's against everything, basically, and should design his own game), this specific topic was mentioned numerous time (where he probably read it and distribures now as 'his'). Except these thread has proposed solutions, proper argumentation and such, except weak nerd-rage...

The exact same thing happens with:

1) Normal

2) Blue

3) Green

... and finally Purples. 4 tiers of gear become salvage-food. As will Relics, as soon as/if another tier is introduced. Devs are, or should be, aware of that, but doesn't seem eager to solve this, so we are basically playing with 1-2 item tiers at best. 

Adding new tiers/types of items can't 'solve' anything, except if the drops are of extreme rarity, so they can't completely replace previous tier. 

Also, reroll of 'unique' trait on relic is a mistake - the chief mistake, along relatively high Relic drop-rate - yes, it's good and exciting in the beginning, first several give real thrill when dropped, but as the game progresses they become less and less interesting and exciting, and in (current) endgame the game is swarming with them. Therefore - lvl50's use only Relics (and have 50-100 stashed).

Introducing a new tier NOW is pointless, except if it had something like 1% drop-rate of 'normal' Relic (which, again, should have lower drop-rate themselves) and no possibility of rerolling main affix. This seems harsh, but have the same thing drop 20 time and it loses any felling of fulfillment.

Yes, all the players (not excluding myself) want the shiny, powerful things while they don't have them. When they have 10 of the, all the pleasure is gone - forever. Then we need another tier.

...and we get WoW. Or D3. Rarity of drop and effort made to get a certain item equals satisfaction. Otherwise, we might as well have "item ch0oser" where player could add any item with any affixes by choosing it from the menu. 10 Relic / Extreme Treasure is more or less the standard and where does it lead? Piling up Relic, Calal-trade, Land of Plenty. With the satisfaction decreaserd, each time...

Once you reach 40, anything below relic is obsolete, and serves only one purpose, to be sold for cash and fate.

Oh but you could salvage them... well, no, the whole crafting "system", asides from modify and fuse, is pointless, as you can not make any relics with it, which would be a VERY necessary link to give non-relic items any purpose at all.

If you find an item on the way to 40, you will only have use for it for a very limited time, and no, it won't help you with another char on that level again, as if you want to replay the campaign, there are much better ways to equip yourself.

These two fundamentally flawed systems, crafting and items, would need to be re-worked pretty much completely to make this work.
...work?

Yes, work, as items (and therefore also crafting) in any ARPG are THE driving factor behind player motivation and fun,
and right now, this game misses that part by a whole lot.

...

You could just as well scratch all non-relic items completely, scratch power rating and replace it with simple, direct difficulty multipliers, hell you could even go as far as scratching the character levels also, and what would you get from it?!
- unrestricted re-usability of your items on any char at any point in the game (except for class-specific items)
- doing missions of any type and difficulty you want, and not looking at a fake "star-map" whose sole purpose is to force you to make many, many unnecessary clicks while you look for interesting missions between all the white-to-yellow obsolete stuff that no one ever looks at... instead of how it is currently where 95% of the "star map"-missions are completely useless
- therefore being able to slice through mobs and loot potentially useful items 24/7 instead of having to grind either the campaign or pointless other missions just to get fate for being allowed to play relevant missions
- no stupid, unbalanced leveling curves throughout the campaign that serve no purpose but to show how little the devs ever looked at that part, not to even speak of testing it before going live with that
...
The more I think of it, the more it shows how simply removing half of the game would solve half of the games problems,
but ofc that's not how it should be done.
On the other hand, we all know there will be no complete rework of items and crafting, so by ignoring this and failing at the most fundamental core part of an ARPG, I fear the worst for the future of this game.

And then there is this total lack of communication, the extreme rush of the release date, not to even speak of that ..."beta"... just look at games like Factorio, where devs not only show off how good they are at coding, but present to the community what they do and why. Yes, they actually do that.

OMG. When I said you should make your own game, I never thought how much I was right... This is plainly ridiculous.

Ok, two relatively correct points - Crafting system is worst so far, clearly needs more work. And the star-map is currently a waste of time, indeed.

"Items used unrestrictably whole  time?"???

"Unbalanced leveling curve"???

"Looting 24/7 getting useful items the whole times"???

This... you really, really don't understand basic aRPG mechanics. At all. 

And my favourite: "...ignoring this and failing at the most fundamental core part of an ARPG".  Really? Says you? How about I say that YOU have no idea what ARPG is, and I have so many examples of pure ignorance from your posts. Such as "If you find an item on the way to 40, you will only have use for it for a very limited time". No need to comment this, no need at all...

If you hate this game so much, please stop posting nonsense and play something worth your while. 

But by all means, uniques, sets, and stuff like that are an integral part of an ARPG, and even though neocore tries to do a few things... "different"... like with the power rating (PR) that replaces actual stats like str, int, dex....which has it's benefits for sure, is though a bit of a pitfall here and the whole PR-system with how missions are modified by that, imho does more bad than good.

Also, the whole crafting and any non-relic items are kind of only mildly useful for real casual players, whereas anyone who finished the campaign and then played a few more hours, has only relics anyways and would never use anything else,
making crafting and non-relic items completely obsolete.

I can't even start to explain how bad of a design that is. o.o

All in all, before they go into putting thought and artwork into uniques and sets, like you find them in other APRGs,
they would need to completely overhaul their existing item system, and this is a very interesting point.
I have still hope that they will do it, but chances are they won't, which would cripple this game as an ARPG to the point where it is dead, buried and forgotten in a year or two, because they will miss the main selling point of an ARPG completely by messing this up.

Even adding unique cosmetics or pets you can grind during events would be welcome, because as of now, for me and a whole lot of other people, there's just not much motivation currently in the game to keep up running missions.

I love this game; but there just isn't any meaningful thing (ie. Continued character progression) to keep me occupied.

It's called unique items.

And it's one of the biggest downfalls of this game in my opinion. Itemization is almost entirely boring, flat and just random generated. So many layers are missing compared the itemization of loot based ARPG's.

It's not the only major thing missing. Just add the goddamn inventory/character pane to be opened during missions so we can look at items/stats with various bugs up etc. It's nonsensical the way it is. I get it, they didn't want it distracting from the mission but that is the players choice this way is just works bad.

Finally playstyle hardly changes at all from low level till the very end, nearly everything is just changing of numbers and this is such a dumb thing to chase it might work on little kids who don't got a clue but it's not very interesting to an intelligent and quality demanding audience.

Buffs*
It is not like we haven't said these things a long time ago but it just seems devs don't get it there has been no attempt to add real depth to characterization from all i have seen.

Maybe it's a harsh thing to say but it's the truth and i just say it so devs can read the honest opinion.