Crafting and modifying Items is TOO Resource Intensive; Suggested Change

3

The single most frustrating thing about endgame (but really most of the game) is that the crafting is too damn expensive especially on the orange (machine gods spark) and red (spark of glory) parts. I've just spent a week grinding when I could to get my orange craftable parts up to 100 and then tried rerolls on some sentinel armour (want to try something out see if it makes the armour actually viable instead of ignored by everyone - but it doesn't matter the item or the reasons, it applies to all items) and I just chunked those parts like nothing else and didn't get the enchant I wanted but now can't keep trying. Why? becauyse I am out of machine gods sparks again. 15 a day from the ordos shop then singular scrappings from relic items is simply not enough of these materials gained to make the enchanting sustainable. It is immensely frustrating. I don't even want to think about the spark of glory cost when I get a red item I am wanting to modify heavily...

On the flip side to this, The Week of the Omnissiah, which allows all iytems scrapped, to scrap for double their normal parts, ACTUALLY had me playing a lot more, purely because of this issue where there aren't enouygh parts to make crafting and refining your looted gear, anywhere near viable.

The reality of games these days is that there are too many for you to ever play all the games you want to play in your life time, so you're time is ever more valuable. When a game has mechanics that punish you for playing them, then it's time you moved on to something else, and most people do. Currently, any sort of crafting utilising machine gods sparks or sparks of glory is extremely punishing. You lose the want to play the game and you just stop and go and play something else instead. You want to play the game, you want to get others playing it because it is good, but everyone asks about endgame and about the crafting viability and you can't lie. It punishes you and it punishes you hard. 

When mechanics are like this, they need to be changed.

My Suggestion:

Double the amount of sparks of glory, machine gods sparks, and ancient mechanisms gained from scrapping items, just like in teh week of the omnissiah.


This would go a significantly long way to making the crafting and modifying aspect of the game enjoyable again and will help retain players for longer periods at a time.

What are everybody's thoughts here? Do you agree that endgame crafting is too resource intensive and if so that doubling the amount of resources from scrapped items would be an appropriate fix here or do you have other ideas that are balanced and won't break the game but will also retain you as a player for longer periods of time (because game burn out is a thing and it's why people rotate between games frequently, the key thing being rotating back here again though)?

Have a good day everyone,

Auretious Taak/Khorne on the Cob.

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3 comments
3 years 309 days ago
+3

As far as arpgs go this games crafting is relatively inexpensive try crafting top tier gear in something like path of exile it can take thousands of tries. I actually like the crafting on this game a lot. However having a list of possible mods for each slot would help a lot and would make this far better. 

edit: Im also not seeing any shortage of relic tier items to scrap at least 1 every other mission sometimes several in one mission. considering it takes less than 5 minutes to run even the longest missions this is a very generous drop rate.

This comment was edited 3 years 309 days ago by asharokh
3 years 310 days ago
+3

Hey there. So I suppose I'll offer a different viewpoint. Ultimately, gear in APRGs will always have an element of randomness, and randomness must be limited by *something*, otherwise the game just becomes a matter of how many times you need to press a button before you see its maximum value. Crafting is no different. Doubling the reagents for crafting just puts us at a new equilibrium with respect to what how many random rolls you get before you run out of materials. It's sort of like doubling the amount of money in a system---prices simply inflate to fit the new value. With extra mats, gear expectations simply rise to meet the new availability.


I actually like the current balance of crafting materials. I feel like I always have enough Ancient Mechanisms to experiment with different items, so I can always try things. Machine God's Sparks are common enough that I always seem to have enough to add crafting capacity and reroll relic enchants, but not common enough that I don't feel excited when I see them drop or feel the pinch when I am modifying archeotech relics. When I really want to invest in a piece of gear, I do feel like I need a pile of Sparks, which does require some stockpiling, but it also makes the resulting equipment feel valuable. If anything, I feel like I'm always running out of credits, which feels a bit bad. Perhaps I just experiment with new builds too much which drains my credits on test gear.


As for Kiliak's comment on knowing which enchants can roll, I use the config files (online here) and the language files (<game directory>/Strings/<language>/Lang_Artifacts.xml) to check. I am not suggesting that this is a *convenient* way, and it would be great to have a much easier-to-use reference, but in the meanwhile, I hope this might help you save mats and get what you want, from one player to another.


I also am not sure that I like the idea of converting low-tier mats to high-tier ones, because that means that low-tier mats effectively contribute to your overall crafting material limit. This weakens the rewards from harder content, since the crafting rewards could just as easily have been farmed from easy content. This pushes things towards a "farm fast" rather than a "farm hard" environment, which I don't particularly care for. Path of Exile got pushed pretty hard down that road, and now a good chunk of the endgame has been balanced around builds which have extreme movement and clear speeds. It narrows diversity. If we take the "convert mats" approach to its extreme (by automatically converting mats before they even drop), we get a game where there is only one crafting material. I feel like that would oversimplify things, since it would boil down to "get more money, spend on gear" as opposed to a system where you might try to prioritize certain rewards over others (via choosing certain Tarot cards, for instance).


There are all just my opinions on the matter. Hopefully they serve to enrich the discussion.

3 years 310 days ago
+2
What personnally annoys me is the fact that there is no way to know which enchants can roll on which gear piece. So you can spend a lot of crafting ressource trying to get an enchant that cannot be rolled...


I do agree that endgame crafting is expensive, but instead of doubling the amount of ressource we have from dismantling items, i would forsee a way to trade/exchange/convert low tier mats to high tiers one.


In the end it is all about balancing.