Homogenizing orbs made crafting feel like something other than gambling, please reconsider

TLDR: These orbs provided the opportunity for crafting to be something other than pure gambling. They weren't perfect (still had plenty of RNG) but they provided agency and pride over the ability to make your own gear. Does it need adjusting? Sure. Removal? No!
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I know that the combination of homogenizing orbs plus the 2x exalt slam was probably too 'deterministic' for POE standards, and I also understand that you want trade to be a primary source of interaction.

I also understand that if you make crafting too easy, then people play the game less because there's less of a grind for currency.

That said, for someone who doesn't have the play time to run 100 maps a day - maybe I can do that in a week - the current feeling of crafting is so bad that I feel I have no option other than to get the currency or lucky drops to buy gear from other players. This straight sucks.

Gambling, I mean crafting, in poe is already RNG. Even with the homogenizing orbs, you still might not get what you want, but maybe you get something decent or good and that 'feels' so much better than what we have now.

I hate 'gambling' 10 hours of my gameplay away to not get a good craft. Abyss desecration has helped to maybe get lucky and get what you want. I've missed desecrations with the help of abyssal echos on the same item up to 6 times in a row (meaning 12 reveals here). That's not deterministic, that's just upping your RNG chance.

The kicker is that that same 10 hours of gameplay will not provide me with the currency to get a good item from trade, and even if I want to look for the opportunity to 'craft' by annullinng or filling in prefixes, it still feels bad.

The homogenizing orbs gave the casual player an opportunity to feel good about the chances of getting a solid item. It gave crafting the feel of crafting, not gambling. It allows someone who isn't a streamer or has 30 hours of gametime a week the ability to trade for an item within a casual's budget and gave that casual the chance to make a good item great and this opportunity felt good.

Now, it's so RNG that I can buy a 4-8 divine item (big budget for a casual like me) and try to hit a single suffix or prefix and brick the item, even after sinking an additional 2-3 divine worth of currency to 'hopefully' get 'lucky' and make the item work for me. How is that 'crafting'?

Was it too strong? Especially when coupled with doubling down on an item? Sure, I can totally see that argument.

But instead of removing the homogenizing I would MUCH rather see you remove the 2x exalt orb. I would rather see you lower the drop rate of the homogenizing orbs by 50% and make it something that is attainable by a casual through some effort.

If it had the value of 1-2 divine orbs due to drop rate frequency or attainment methods, that would be fine! That is something that a casual can work towards.

Yeah their statement about not liking that it "made you think about mods the specific way that it did" is concerning to me. I don't understand how that's different from catalysts that interact with the tag system, or named Abyss Omens interacting with their respective tags. Thats the only thing I can interpret from that statement is that they don't want players thinking about tags? But that's been a staple of both games already. Seems like a pretty huge hurdle to expand crafting without interacting with the tags, or something else equally opaque that requires a third party website to begin to understand.

It being a bit too deterministic I do get somewhat but mostly felt it was a good thing here. Maybe the mod pool needs slightly diluted still.

Crafting. It's laughable to even call it that. It's nothing more than gambling - slot machine mechanics. You have better odds of success gambling with real money in a Las Vegas casino than you do trying to make something usable for your build in POE1 or POE2. Crafting should be far more deterministic. On top of that you have to go to a 3rd party site just to try and figure out your abysmal odds when you pull the lever on the slot machine.

X made Y feel *fun*.

This is the core issue as it conflicts with the vision.

Im against that. Deterministic crafting is so bad for the economy.

Well one thing you could do is create a new SSF mode thats not migratable. and add those there.