A Crafting Compromise - Psuedo-Deterministic Crafting

It's not really a secret that the playerbase hates the current state of crafting in the game. GGG does not want anything deterministic whatsoever and it's a hill they are willing to die on. Players have voiced their problems with this for a while now so I thought up a compromise for this.

We let players transfer a modifier (and tier) from one item to another with a system similar to the recombinator. We put in the item that we want to upgrade and the item whose modifier we want to take. Then the second item is destroyed and there is a chance for the selected modifier (and tier) to be transferred to your main item. This would guarantee the players can see progression in their gear and no longer go 50 hours without a single change in gear.

However, GGG wants full RNG gear progression. So instead of being able to get the best gear with this new system, make it so you can get close to the best. Any time a modifier is transferred to the item its tier is lowered by one.
The easiest example is movement speed of boots, for this crafting method it would be impossible to transfer 35% movement speed to your main boots. It can only go up to 30% (the tier below). This method ensures that the best gear is still behind the RNG system GGG wants, but allows the players to actually progress with their gear.

The typical crafting cycle would then likely be something as follows. Lets say we want to get some boots. We RNG till we get boots with 35% MS and good resistances. Then we RNG new sets of boots of the same class that have the other modifiers we want, like increases to attributes. We transfer those modifiers but they get lowered in tier. And we keep doing this till we get something close to the boots we want to use. They aren't the best boots possible, but at least its an upgrade the player can work towards.

With this method the player gets to balance RNG and crafting. If you want something viable you can spend time and grind to get something good. Or you can gamble and get the best item possible.

I think this is the best compromise for what the players want and what GGG wants when it comes to crafting. GGG gets their RNG system and players get a guarantee after grinding.


If GGG thinks gear progression with this is going too fast, they can adjust the cost for transferring a modifier, lower the probability of a successful transfer, decrease the tiers even more. Or make the resulting tier random, but never higher than the original. So transferring 25% movement speed can result in 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% or 25% but it cannot result in 30% or 35%.


I just hope that this gives some inspiration to GGG or other players who then make their own suggestions for how to improve crafting. It is just very clear that if the game continues the way it is now it will slowly fade into the background as players don't feel like the game is enjoyable/rewarding to play and quit.