Hey guys,
Great game, kudos for the effort. I love it. One problem I want to point out is the relationship with essence embers and hoarding. The lower the drop rate, the more people have to hoard items, eventually this makes space very limited in the current game. This is not a post to discuss the drop rates of essence embers because thats a very contentious and divided topic, but rather I want to suggest a way forward that solves the hoarding problem independent of the drop rate.
I know its not the best game, but Diablo 3 introduced the horadric cube to store affixes of legendary items. Why not have a system similar to that as in you can extract any one affix of an item at any time into device X, but the application to a new item costs an essence ember? In my mind the essence ember extraction could only select an affix from device X and then work as it does now, instead of extracting from the actual item. By having this intermediate step, people dont have to hoard items, essence ember drop rates can be tuned any way, and the affixes in the essence embers could still be traded.
Have a think about it. That would be pretty awesome.
Open to feedback