Post #0 Gameplay Improvement Suggestions: Crafting Overhaul, Unique Item crafting & More. PLS READ!!

Hello Grinding Gear Games,

First of all, thank you for creating such an amazing game! I absolutely love the art style, the music, and the incredible boss fights. There are a few areas I’d like to address that I believe could improve the overall gameplay experience:

• #1a. Crafting System Overhaul Proposal
• #1b. Crafting on Unique Items
• Gear system overaul - 6 Socket system - To be updated
• Corrupting items overhaul - To be updated
• Obtaining Energy Shield - To be updated
• Drop rewards overhaul - To be updated

Crafting System Overhaul Proposal

To enhance the crafting experience in Path of Exile, a comprehensive overhaul of the interaction between items and crafting currencies is needed. This new system aims to provide players with greater control over their gear, eliminating much of the reliance on chance, and offering a more dynamic, risk/reward-based approach to customization. Below is a proposed solution that introduces new crafting tools, affix runes, soul orbs affixes, and essences affixes to deepen the crafting and item customization experience.

Pointed out:
- Craft items & currencies interactions
- Non-chance reliant crafting system
- Affix runes/soul core orb/Essences affixes

For this system to function optimally, a craft/currency overhaul is needed, especially in how they interact with gear. Here is a proposed solution:

First note:
Corrupting an item: would allow players to increase the numeric value of an affix/implicit modifier while also potentially removing implicit/sockets associated with that affix or replacing them with others. This process would make crafting more dynamic and introduce a risk/reward element, where players can choose to enhance specific affixes at the cost of some flexibility.

• Artificer Orb: Adds sockets to gear, up to a maximum of six sockets.
• Transmutation orb: Randomizes the numeric value of prefix modifiers on magic items.
• Augmentation orb: Randomizes the numeric value of suffix modifiers on magic items.
• Chaos Orb: Randomizes the numeric value of prefix modifiers on rare and unique items.
• Vaal chaos orb: corrupts item with the chance to Increase socketed prefix modifiers/removes prefix sockets. Enables increase above tier cap of prefix mods/
• Regal Orb: Randomizes the numeric value of suffix modifiers on rare and unique items.
• Vaal regal orb: Vaal chaos orb: corrupts item with the chance to Increase socketed prefix modifiers/removes suffix sockets. Enables increase above tier cap of suffix mods/
• Exalted Orb: Randomizes the numeric value of a specific modifier on rare and unique.items
• Vaal exalted orb: Corrupts item and Highly increase the numeric value of a specific affix modifier on rare and unique. item.
• Alchemy orb: Randomizes the numeric value of suffix and prefix modifiers on rare and unique items.
• Vaal Alchemy orb: corrupts item with the chance to Increase all socketed affix modifiers/removes all affix modifiers. Enables increase above tier cap of suffix mods.
• Divine Orb: Randomizes the numeric value of implicit modifiers on rare and unique.
• Vaal Divine orb: Corrupts the item with a chance to increase the value of the implicit modifiers or removes those modifiers.
• Runes: These would provide flat affix modifiers and would need to be socketed into non-unique gear.
• Soul Cores: These would provide percentage-based affix modifiers and would need to be socketed into non-unique gear.
• Essences: These would provide flat affix modifiers and would need to be socketed into unique gear.
• Soul Core Essences: These would provide percentage-based affix modifiers and would need to be socketed into unique gear.
• Orb of annulment: Makes it possible to empty a socket without destroying the item in the sockets
• Vaal orb: Increases or decreases base numeric value: When used, the Vaal Orb would randomly adjust the base numeric value of the item. For example, it could increase the base armor of a piece of armor from 150 to 180, or decrease it from 150 to 120.

This crafting system would make it easier to manage affixes and modifiers, as well as add more depth to item crafting and customization.
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Example: Crafting System Using New Currencies and Items
Let’s say you find a rare chest piece with Increased Life runes as a prefix and Resist All Elements rune as a suffix, but you'd like to optimize its stats further.
1. Transmutation Orb: First, you use a Transmutation Orb to randomize the numeric value of the prefix modifier, "Increased Life." Now, the life bonus jumps from 50 to 70.
2. Artificer Orb: Want more flexibility? You add an Artificer Orb to increase the number of sockets on the chest from 3 to 6, enabling you to further customize with more modifiers.
3. Soul Core: You socket a Soul Core into one of the newly added sockets, granting Increased Armor as a percentage modifier.
4. Chaos Orb: You then apply a Chaos Orb to the chest, randomizing the numeric value of the "Resist All Elements" suffix, improving it from 20% to 25%.
5. Vaal Orb: Using a Vaal Orb to corrupt the chest, you increase the numeric value of the "Increased Life" prefix above the tier cap, boosting it from 70 to 90.

At this point, the chest is now corrupted, and no further modifications can be made using Essences or other non-corrupting crafting methods. You’ve achieved your ideal chest by strategically combining the available orbs and currencies.

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Crafting on Unique Gear: A Game-Changing Feature


Allowing players to craft on unique gear in Path of Exile would significantly enhance the crafting system by adding more flexibility, personalization, and depth to the gameplay. Here are several reasons why this is a great idea:

1. Increased Customization and Player Choice
Currently, unique items have fixed properties, meaning their stats are predetermined, and players often have limited ways to modify them. By introducing a crafting system for unique gear, players would be able to tailor these items to better suit their builds. This added level of customization would allow players to fine-tune their gear without sacrificing the unique qualities of the item, creating more meaningful and personalized choices.

2. More Build Diversity
Many unique items are designed for specific playstyles or builds, but they often lack flexibility for players who want to experiment with different combinations of affixes. Crafting on unique gear would allow for more build diversity by enabling players to adapt these items to their evolving needs or create entirely new synergies. For example, adding specific resistances, life bonuses, or other affixes to a unique item could make it viable for a wider range of builds, thereby expanding the diversity of potential strategies.

3. Enhancing Endgame Crafting
As players progress through the game, they often reach a point where unique gear is a staple of their endgame setup. However, once an item is obtained, it usually remains static and cannot be further modified, limiting the ways players can optimize their gear. By allowing crafting on unique items, it provides players with more ways to improve and refine their endgame gear, making the endgame crafting experience far more engaging and rewarding.

4. Bridging the Gap Between Rare and Unique Items
Currently, rare items are often preferred in endgame crafting due to their ability to be modified through various crafting orbs, while unique items are often left out of the optimization process. By allowing crafting on unique gear, these two types of items would feel more balanced. It would give unique items the same degree of customization that rare items have, allowing players to optimize their gear without being forced to rely solely on random drops of perfect rare gear.

5. Risk vs. Reward System
Much like crafting on rare items, adding the ability to craft on unique gear would introduce a risk vs. reward system. The process of crafting on unique items could involve more uncertainty, where players might have to use certain crafting orbs or currencies that come with inherent risks (e.g., corrupting the item). This would encourage experimentation and provide opportunities for players to take chances in exchange for potentially stronger or more fitting stats on their unique items.

6. Long-Term Item Investment
Many players invest heavily in certain unique items because they are essential to their build or playstyle. Allowing crafting on these items would add more long-term value to the investment in unique gear. Instead of discarding or replacing a unique item once it has outgrown its usefulness or no longer fits the build, players could improve it over time, making it a more worthwhile long-term goal. This would not only reward players for sticking with their unique gear but also give them more ways to progress and optimize their characters in a meaningful way.

In conclusion, crafting on unique gear would deepen the game’s crafting system, adding more layers of customization, strategy, and progression. It would give players greater control over their builds, provide more ways to optimize their items, and offer a richer endgame experience, all while maintaining the value and identity of unique items in the game.
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3. Trading System with Items
To make trading more meaningful and dynamic, I propose that the cost of trading items could increase based on the number of sockets, runes, soul cores, essences, and item tiers.

- Cost Increase Based on Crafting: Items with more sockets or higher-tier crafting would increase the cost of trading, ensuring that items with more investment aren’t easily exchanged.
- **Costly Trading**: This would create a more valuable trading ecosystem, where crafting an item becomes an investment, and players can make strategic choices about what to craft and trade.

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4. Rewards from Normal, Rare, and Boss Monsters
Rare Rewards: Rare enemies should drop unique items they equip, making encounters more rewarding. Alongside these items, players should find:

Affix Runes: Flat modifiers for non-unique gear.
Essences: Flat modifiers for unique gear.
Soul Core Essences: Percentage-based modifiers for unique gear.
Soul Cores: While these would also drop from rare enemies, they would be more commonly found in Chaos Trials, where they can be used for percentage-based modifiers on non-unique gear.
While rare rewards provide useful crafting materials, boss rewards will offer greater variety and quantity.

Boss Rewards: Bosses should drop significantly more crafting materials than rare enemies. Bosses will drop:

Affix Runes: Flat modifiers for non-unique gear.
Essences: Flat modifiers for unique gear.
Soul Core Essences: Percentage-based modifiers for unique gear.
Soul Cores: Soul Cores should be a rare drop from bosses but would also be available through Chaos Trials, where they are used to enhance non-unique gear with percentage-based modifiers.
Bosses provide more crafting materials, making them crucial for deeper gear customization and upgrades.

Linking it All Together
By integrating Affix Runes, Soul Cores, Soul Core Essences, and Essences into rare and boss rewards, players will have more options for gear customization. While unique gear may not be easily upgradeable right now, with the updated Harvest system, this could be expanded in the future to allow for more flexibility in upgrading unique gear. Chaos Trials would remain the main source for Soul Cores, further enhancing the crafting experience.

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5. Balancing Gameplay with Crafting
- **Static Nodes on Passive Tree**: Remove the static armor/energy shield nodes on the passive tree, which would allow for more flexibility in gear-based stat allocation.
- **Larger Maps**: Larger maps could be made possible with this new crafting system, as it would allow players to customize their gear without the limitations of the crafting bench, enabling more diverse and larger map designs.

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In summary, this system would build upon existing mechanics while enhancing the crafting experience and allowing for greater player creativity.
Players would have the ability to craft items on the fly, use dropped items more effectively, and create a dynamic economy around crafting and trading.

Thank you for considering these ideas. Keep up the fantastic work, and I look forward to seeing how the game evolves! I cant thank you enough for the great game you guys provided us with!

Will be updated in coming days, will be posting the points I adress In more different sub post.

Best regards,
An Exited Exile

Updates Edit:
#1. crafting system overhaul.

Will post a more expanded post on this idea later on today. Hope to gather some reads and suggestion on this.