A few suggestions regarding runes/gems, crafting, and Grinnich’s store.
It would be helpful to be able to destroy (i.e. remove) runes and gems from gear. It would let players be able to try different runes out without potentially ‘ruining’ a weapon. It would also be helpful if the game balance changes which can easily affect weapon/armour build. I know it’s already been suggested many times, but descriptions of what each rune and gem does when you’re in your inventory would also be great.
I’ve played both a strength build (2H great sword) and an intelligence build (2H staff and 1H sword/shield), and in both cases I found myself having to re-build/re-upgrade replacement weapons/armour because I couldn’t remove a rune or gem that didn’t work out as intended. A couple good examples have been the gems for focus regeneration and cold potency, which either need to be better balanced or implemented. Focus regen would be very useful on my intelligence build, though I think it’ll be a balance between giving enough focus regen to actually provide an effect and not so much that you can neglect the melee component of the game.
Crafting is another thing that’s been a bit of an issue for me. Some of the weapons require a lot of hard to obtain materials. For example, the Cronus sword (recipe sold by Eleanor) requires several boars tusks, which I’ve had a hard time finding and seem to be completely at the mercy of RNG. With so many different crafting materials, RNG is not in your favour… I’m not even close to finding enough boar tusks yet and my character is already beyond the point where a tier 2 sword would have been useful since I’m already getting tier 3 drops. To be honest, more often than not I’m just upgrading the tier 1 weapons since it only requires wolf claws (which are relatively obtainable) for upgrading to tier 2, then switching to a tier 3 weapon because it’s hard to obtain bear claws. It may be a moot point long term as I’m sure things like a boar/plague boar and bear/plague bear would make great monsters to fight, and a consistent way to obtain crafting materials like boars tusks, bear paws, etc.
The last point, which could also help with obtaining specific crafting materials, is the refresh rate on Grinnich’s shop. As far as I can tell (haven’t made any concerted effort to check), the items in the shop refreshes once after every shop upgrade and once each real time day, which makes the shop somewhat irrelevant at the moment, though occasionally he will have some excellent items. It would be great if he refreshed his goods at least a few times per game time day, I haven’t checked the numbers exactly, but if I’m not mistaken its roughly 3 hours of real time per day of game time, so 2-3 refreshes per game time day would be every 1.0-1.5 hours of real time. It could also be possible to refresh the store every time the player leaves and returns to Sacrament, but that could make it too easy to farm rare materials for crafting. Either way, increasing the refresh rate on Grinnich’s store could be one way of making it more feasible to obtain some of the harder to find crafting materials. It may be a moot point in the long term as the game balance is tuned, more enemies/monsters are added, and it becomes easier to find specific crafting materials throughout the game world. But personally I think Grinnich should refresh his goods at least once or twice per game time day, kind of like he’s restocking the store at the end of each day or as other NPCs buy and sell items from him throughout the day.