Instead of wasting most of our materials on RNG that have very low chance to get your ideal facet, can we do things like… put in extra materials on the crafting bench?
For example: 1 iron sword required
2 - iron
2 - wood
For a crit facet, you have to put in extra materials like:
2 - siren claw
2 - wolf claw
I totally agree with the idea that facets add a little too much of a randomness into crafting. I would suggest a slightly another approach: when a player crafts an item, they can choose one of the options:
craft it with a random facet which is not discovered for this item yet
craft it with one of the facets which is already discovered
(optional) craft it with no facet
So discovering facets will be similar to what we have for discovering items, but you can’t put papers in for random research it or just find an item with a particular facet - you need to actually craft it. It can even look the same in terms of HUD: also a list/table of items with a question mark as the first option (and maybe “no facet” as the second one).