How to fix craft. GGG and players, at least hear me out!

Omens are the best and intuitive craft mechanic in the game, but NOBODY has access to it. Most players will not use omens, they will sell and guarantee currency to buy gear on trading website.

To actually craft a good gear on endgame, you will need at least some dozens of omens of each type, which is not viable at all. Too much expansive, too much low drop, so you usually can't acquire them either way, unless find some really good way to make currency.

As consequence, the whole serve is farming omens for a couple of player, who are the ones that is actually enjoying craft.

Is such a nice mechanic, but such a gated content. Most player will never experience that.

1. Drop Omens should drop since act 1, from rares and bosses. That way players can actually learn how to craft from the begging. Orbs by itself will just brick thousands of bases. With omens available since campaign, players could actually keep their bases to fix later. And even if the item level become too low, that item can be used for leveling later. That way crafting will have a much more value in terms of fun.

2. I really feel like there is missing a omen to guarantee removal of high tier modifier of a prefix or suffix by using annulment orb. Why? Because is too much punishing having a really good prefix rolls, and them comes a max tier accuracy or elemental, which has tier 10, while all phys are 8 or 7. This will force the player to RNG chaos to save the gear. (I think some player will not like that idea if they came from PoE1, but hear my point through the rest of post first).

3. Runes sockets brick equipment's in the current state. I think the majority of the community will agree with me that runes could be much more if you could at least replace a rune with another one, losing forever what was replaced in the socket. This will help us keep our gear when a new one is equipped, by rebalancing the modifier that went missing. This will bring A LOT MORE OF FLEXIBILITY, and will promote a lot more the usage of runes, making them become a little more expansive and start having a better value. Will be more healthy.

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My main argument for all of this is:

1. If the game is already too much punishing on mapping and deaths, we should at least have a safe resource of power up, so next time we do a pinnacle boss we can have better odds, because those who reach these bosses already invested too much time playing. That resource could be the craft. And this path will make the value of the game increases exponentially, since EVERY SINGLE PLAYER that had access to craft on PoE1 loved. Honestly i really feel some players just play for crafting, and spend time leveling just to have access for the minimum first resources in the league. So basically craft is a game inside another game. You should really consider that GGG, if you want more player to stick in the game.

2. PoE1 is already know for its complexity, and you wanted players to have a better accessible system on PoE2. Making Omens that low on ritual rewards will only make omens expansive, and just the rich players will have access to it as consequence.

3. The craziest almost impossible crafted gear I feel it belongs more to PoE1 than PoE2. On PoE2 you could at least try to make a system where any kind of gear is guarantee if the player use the right resources and enough time, RNG will start to become a guarantee craft. The player spent time and resources on the gear, so he must get it at some point. That's why I think a new omen should be introduced to remove the higher tier. Could be something like "spent 10 annulment to remove the highest tier modifier" + sinistral annulment or dextral annulment (You create what the omen do here, just doing an example). Just to give players a chance to fix their gear instead restarting from scratch. If you want new players to stick, you must give reachable resources for them, even if they need to farm 5 hours to get. I'm sure a new player will farm 5 hours to get a resource to fix his gear that is 90% done. If you shown them a guarantee way to do it, they will stick in the game and accept more the other punishing mechanics.

4. If you want to introduce new players to the PoE universe, PoE2 should be more softcore, and less hardcore, and allow PoE1 to be the hardcore one. I'm not saying the enemies should be easier or harder, that's another topic of discussion, but I'm saying craft should be really easy to get resources in diversity, instead of getting 99% of the time wisdom, augmentation or transmutations. That's why i think craft should be a guarantee mechanic, and not a RNG mechanic, and for this omens needs to be droppable since act 1, they should not be scarce, because the weight for high tier modifiers will already make us spent a lot of them, and we should have a guarantee way to fix our craft, and trough a way that's viable for SSF players.

If anything is viable trough SSF, is it balanced good enough for any other realm. SSF should be the reference for these tunings 100%.

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If I was the one tunning and creating new omens, I would:

1. Make omens starting dropping from rares and bosses, and a lot less often from white mobs.

2. Return a orb to reroll magic affixes, and the correspondent Dextral and Sinistral Omens. That way craft will have meaning from early game.

3. Create a special omen to remove the highest tier modifier.

4. Make the overall drop rate of omens to be like 1 omen for each 5 correspondent orbs of that omen. Annulment is very rare, I dropped none in 270 hours of gamming, so the idea of spending 10 annulment to remove the highest tier modifier is not too much op, because I know I can buy them on market for example.

5. Reduce the bases drops by 10x since the craft will have much more meaning, which will make base drops much more relevant and less spamming.

6. Make rune socket be replaceable, but destroying the the one that is being replaced.

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I really think these fixes could improve the fun of everybody by 100%. If you want PoE2 to be a accessible game, you should avoid any tunning that can potentially gate the usage for just a couple few players. PoE2 must have a identity, and its identity I really think it could the path of teaching players the ideology behind the game, while PoE1 can be the hardcore as it always were.

Yes, i would like to do some crafts.

My hope is that some systems are just missing. Current state just feels not good. There needs to be something like the crafting bench or alteration orb in some new form. That would at least fix early campaign.

And i would rather do reroll some blues than to blow millions of white Items to trash after Trans/Aug.

Getting some decent starter Gear with crafting feels bad now.

Mid/Lategame crafting also needs some love.

The question ist what they have in their backpocket or what the general vision of crafting is in POE2. I hope they will come up with some good things in the next few weeks and month.

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XXXHaaaseXXX#5897 wrote:

Yes, i would like to do some crafts.

My hope is that some systems are just missing. Current state just feels not good. There needs to be something like the crafting bench or alteration orb in some new form. That would at least fix early campaign.

And i would rather do reroll some blues than to blow millions of white Items to trash after Trans/Aug.

Getting some decent starter Gear with crafting feels bad now.

Mid/Lategame crafting also needs some love.

The question ist what they have in their backpocket or what the general vision of crafting is in POE2. I hope they will come up with some good things in the next few weeks and month.

I know that I hear at some point in one of GGG interviews, that they wanted crafting gear to be more progressively reacheable. And after playing the game, Omens probably was the mean to progressively progress the gear. But by gating Omens though Ritual, they shot in the foot their own ideia on my perspective. If they want gear to have a really good feeling of progression, I see no other way than allowing omens to be dropped.

They don't need to make all omens easy to drop. They could give them a drop relative to the respective currency being used. Like Dextral and Sinistral erasures, that uses Chaos. So for each 5 chaos, 1 erasure omens could be dropped. Following the drop rate of the currency being used in that omen, is a good strategy to make them viable, and not too much easy at same time.

To problem is when we don't even get to use them.

The only ones using them, are those doing mirror crafting. Investing like 10 mirrors to make a mirror tier gear, and selling them through the strategy of giving them a mirror + div fee, to give you a mirrored version of their expansive crafted item. So, its a fact that omens are gated to be used only by the rich players, since each omen can cost 1+ divines each.

I know it is gated, i saw some of Belton Videos. And even someone like Belton has only 1 Mirror Quiver atm i think, and that after investing 2000+ Divines.

No need that everyone can easylie go out and do Mirror Crafts, but Omens are a waste for the average player to use them on their own Gear instead of selling. I have no problem with linking them to Rituals, but with this rarity nobody under 300h Playtime will ever use them(the better ones).

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XXXHaaaseXXX#5897 wrote:

I know it is gated, i saw some of Belton Videos. And even someone like Belton has only 1 Mirror Quiver atm i think, and that after investing 2000+ Divines.

No need that everyone can easylie go out and do Mirror Crafts, but Omens are a waste for the average player to use them on their own Gear instead of selling. I have no problem with linking them to Rituals, but with this rarity nobody under 300h Playtime will ever use them(the better ones).

I think the issue with ritual, it's not the ritual by itself. But it's because rituals start just after endgame. That ritual from Freythorn does not count for omens, and happens only once in the campaing.

If the rituals just start after endgame, the craft system is not know until the player starting noticing omens on rituals on endgame. So you effectively hiding a really great mechanic, that could potentially build a really big community around it, behind a expansive gate of currencies, and behind a hours played gate. Which makes no sense, since craft it's a such fun idea, that could be took advantage since early game on first levels.

My point is, this is really big potential mechanic that can make players stay in the game, improving the game retention a lot. But it's not being used at all.