Farming up crafting consumables and creating items really isn’t fun. There’s so much randomness and variation involved that I end up abusing the backup saves to dupe materials rather than farm them. My perspective is that if the base game is going to require me to grind for an hour plus to create one item that may or may not REALLY suck, I’d rather spend that hour abusing the dupe system to farm up a small number of consumables and dupe them til I have 100+ of each. Then repeat with the actual crafting to get base items that are the best possible. I’ll end up creating 50-60 of each item in an armor set to get the best weight and stats, or dozens upon dozens of weapons just to get the best damage and focus stats. In the span of about 3 hours I can farm a full set of armor with the best possible stats, then dupe 3 pages of them in an inventory. Then another 1-2 hours abusing the backup system to enchant a hundred of the same item. Then when I get 4-5 versions of the best possible base item, I dupe THOSE and abuse the backup system to get the best possible values on socketing the gems. I end up spending 8-10 hours per armor set this way to get the most optimized gear I can get. And still, the echo knight completely destroys even my most optimized builds. I finally beat him after a month by using the process I just outlined to get a focus bar long enough to wrap once with enough recharge on hit to spam the highest possible ice spells on an int build. So after something like 40 hours of playing and grindning “normally” I was stuck on the endgame for 100ish hours. And that’s just play time, not including 15ish hours per level 30 build to farm gear (across 5 or 6 builds) and the only one that was effective was the stupidly OP min maxed int focus build.
This game is overall amazing, but there is just WAY too much variation in the crafting to ensure that you don’t get nerfed or badly broken (in both under and overpowered ways)
I think we need smaller ranges of variation in the stats of individual items as well as more control over the power level of crafted items.
Make the component grind less taxing and repetitive, and make the upgrade system less dependent on randomness at the time of crafting. If it’s no fun to upgrade and craft as intended, the backup and whatever else exploits can be abused to farm materials will be more efficient and players will do that rather than actually engage with the intended mechanics.
I think a possible suggestion to make it better is to lean into more drops with less variation for the crafting components. IE) small medium large versions of each type of socketable gem. give then a high drop rate so that farming looks more like engaging with the core gameplay loop to build the consumable, and make the consumables more predictable. small is always 6-10% chance of whatever it procs, medium is always 11-15, large is always 16-20%.