Idea: better crafting, less RNG with new Crafting Incubators

For my story and context see the bottom of the post.

I really dislike this crafting system based on RNG and currency burning.

The spamming until you get lucky feels more like gambling than actually skillfully work on an item to make it better or adjust it to your needs.

Even systems that give some control over outcomes like Horticrafting, Metacrafting and Eldritch crafting still expect a large deal of currency spending and cycling through random outcomes, hoping for the one unlikely outcome you're looking for.

The Recombinator is nice, but complicated and confusing. Ultimately, efficient use depends on arcane rules and an obscure classification of affixes that are not explained anywhere and require a lot of 3rd party internet sleuthing to learn effectively.

Grabbing half-decent items from the ground and working on them until they fit your needs or are made good enough for selling is not something you can really do, and I bet there are many others like me that enjoy crating and would have a lot of fun doing this. I often vendor stuff thinking sadly to myself 'this item is almost good to use and I would have fun making the edits it needs, if only I had a way to do so effectively'

In this scenario, no wonder so many people prefer to ignore crafting and just farm currency and pay a premium for ready-to-use items from the market.

So I would like to suggest a new league introducing crafting incubators to solve most of these issues and reduce to a bearable amount the RNG and repetition needed to inject effort and resources into crfating.

It would shift the effort/time required to obtain highly desirable items from

"

farming currency -> buying what you want

TO

incubating the crafting edits you need, paying with kill count or completion of game objectives that would take an amount of time similar to what would take to accumulate the currency needed to currently get a similar item off the marketplace.

Here are the main mechanics of this idea:

- Crafting incubators would be applied to items the same way as the current incubators are. It would be possible to apply only one incubator at a time. Lower tier or less deterministic incubator types could be allowed to stack in the same incubator.

- Incubators would be created in the crafting bench, a new NPC window like Cassia or vendor recipes. They could also be created in a system similar to resonators with fossils. I prefer the crafting bench, but that would likely require more changes to the game, so probably a new dedicated NPC would be the most practical while adding some flavor to the game's story.

- Incubators would be removed/destroyed after completing the requirements, same as current incubators (with an exception)

- The components themselves could have drop restrictions to increase their rarity and upfront cost. For example, a component that deterministically adds +life to an item instead of a random life modifier could have a much lower drop rate or drop only from certain encounters.

- Incubators would require a base component where one or more effect items (like fossils) would be applied.
1. A simple, one effect incubator would be 'add a random life modifier'
2. A 2 effect incubator would be 'add life' as above combined with 'can only add prefix/suffix'
3. Another 2 effect incubator would be increase by 1 tier a random modifier combined with 'repeatedly apply the effect to the same affix' or 'incubator is reapplied at the end of its effect'
4. Similar to 3, another incubator effect would be to reduce the tier of an affix repeatedly and after the lowest tier is attained, remove the affix.
5. There could be an effect 'remove the lowest tier modifier'
6. It could be possible to combine ex. 'add random life modifier' with 'modifier cannot be of Defense type', in a logic similar to fossils.
7. 'add an influenced modifier', that again could be paired with another component to further narrow the pool of possibilities. such an incubator with more than one component could require significantly more kills/objectives to complete
8. Life modifiers or prefixes/suffixes cannot be changed for the next x currency items used on this item
9. for the next x currency applications, changes to the item are considered to be crafted modifiers (can be removed at the bench) and become permanent once a certain condition is met (ex. the item is equipped)
10. remove a random mana modifier
11. remove all elemental modifiers
12. remove all resistance modifiers
13. add a random Elder modifier
14. etc. and so on

- completed incubators could be sold to other players, contrary to loaded resonators.

- when using an incubator to raise the tier of modifiers, exponentially more effort would be required the more high tier modifiers the item already has. So if the item has 6 T2 modifiers, raising one of them to t1 would take a lot longer than if the item had T4 or lower modifiers, for example. This would make the creating of 'god tier' gear take an adequately longer time, while making modest but usable gear faster.

- particularly strong effects could be gated by requiring all map bosses to be killed. To facilitate keeping track, the incubator would indicate which boss/map it would require next. Another variation would be to require killing a certain number of monsters in between killing a specific map boss.

- other gated mechanics could be to
1. Require completing a certain game objective to unlock another kill accumulation stage, like completing a memory tear, completing maven invitations, spend a certain amount of sulfite, hiveblood, etc.
2. Kill counts could only apply in corrupted maps, nightmare maps, unique maps, etc.
3. Some higher tier effects would only progress on maps socketed with a voidstone / require all 4 voidstones to be inplace
4. Progress could only start being registered after a certain amount of deathless experience.
5. Kill a Legion general to unlock progress in between monster killing stages or complete other similar extra-content mechanics. Another variation for the most powerful incubators would require completing a variety of specific optional content objectives that do not include spending items bought from the marketplace (meaning you have to defeat Oshabi instead of applying/consuming a Sacred Crystallised Lifeforce)

- perhaps consider allowing items in the inventory to accumulate progress at the cost of less available carrying space. One could for example work on an amulet to sell without sacrificing performance (by replacing their best piece in the equipment slot)

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So for context I played a lot during Harvest league and stopped shortly after, until coming back again recently. And that was because the crafting system disappointed me. Even then, when crafting was considered 'too easy' I felt frustrated with the constant reliance on RNG and repetition to get the outcome you needed. I remember ending up with T4 life on an item when the league ended, and the limiting factor was I couldn't get enough currency to keep re-rolling the craft until it hit T1. This is a very frustrating system for me. I would rather have an estimate of the average time it takes to accumulate the currency required to buy a certain item (lets say a mirror-level item) and just give me a method of crafting that achieves the same result deterministically in the same amount of time. Even if it would take longer, I would still prefer this. The random re-rolls and currency churning are soul-crushing.

When I came back a few weeks ago, I saw there are more refined crafted systems now, that give a better control over the outcomes, but the whole system is still based on currency accumulation, spamming and hoping for a favorable RNG outcome. On top of that, standing in the hideout spamming currency, either alts or cycling through essences or eldritch currency, etc. is not fun. And when you run out of currency or gold after a few tries without success and have to go mapping again, you're left frustrated and with a bad aftertaste.

I think it is possible to design a crafting system that gives more control over the outcome without making it 'too easy'. After all, given enough time and an adequate farming strategy you can buy pretty much anything you want even mirror-quality items, without going through the frankly bad experience of trying to craft the stuff yourself. We just need a system that shifts the time spent accumulating currency to a system where the same amount of time gets you the item you want with more targeted edits that feel less frustrating and wasteful.