I have in mind one idea for a game mechanic to make it a bit easier to get better items:
Introduction of a new group of items: Lets call them Item Core for now.
The item core consists a perk which you can add to an existing item. With this way you can upgrade non legendaries to legendary. In order to keep the balance, they should be expensive to craft.
For this i would have to ideas:
By using like 50 of the craft mods of a perk to craft an Item Core
Salvaging a legendary returns one random perk of it as Item Core
To add this to an item you use like 10000 Umbral Shards (or maybe more).
This would make umbral shards more useful from the point you have a couple of full 625 sets.
To balance it even more, using the Item Core on an item, would bind it to the player.
This whole mechanic would make it much more easier for casual players to obtain better gear, since crafting or buying it is not a feasable option, if you dont play daily for hours.
With this approach it would give more players the opportunity to get different builds and adapt themselves to in-game meta changes
50 craft mods seems sort of excessive as some are exceedingly rare but you can always use the legendary method to gamble for it.
10k umbrals while it seems daunting its litterally just saving 10 days of about 3 620 shards which is nothing.
since trying to roll those items are on you BOP is fine. the
core could also be BOP too for all i care. (this is to stop people from flipping them off TP purchased legendaries.)
With the shards i cant really give a balanced idea, since iam not even close to be maxed out.
And i also dont have the time to get all gypsum daily. Some equivalent of 3-5 T10 Gold Mutations sounds reasonable to me.
And ofc. making the core item bop is a must.
Regarding to the craft mod amount: yeah, true, but some are also pretty cheap.
I mean i think a balance would be to get both option (by salvaging legendaries aswell)
This would also open the market more for dropped legendaries for people to buy and gamble to get a certain perk.
once you get 1 slot to 600, it would take 4 OPR wins to get one item from 590 to 600. then 1664 from 600 to 620 (620 is an arbretrary number as 619 on 3 items should be close enough too)
so say 50/50 wins at 75 umbrals. per run. would take 22 oprs. at like 4 oprs a day would take 5 days (basicly a week per item at minimum which i think is a fair rate) after which those slots will forever generate a decent rate of umbrals to upgrade other slots and bump up named items.
so i dont think 10k umbral is unreasonable at all.
(and this is minimum not counting additional caches or mutations if you are doing it at the same time)
Makes absolute sense! But it shouldnt be too much as well, because you still need to do a lot of gypsum.
The main problem with this balance: it mainly benefits the casual players. The grind players, that are online a lot will get this alot anyways. And if you put the border higher, they basically will get the biggest advantage out of this. By scaling the whole amounts down you would mainly benefit the casuals
imho the gypsums arent that much of a problem for a casual.
1 diamond is trivial.
1 emerald is also trivial when you are burning cooldowns. (this may take a little work as you may want to stock up on mats over the weekend enough for the rest of the weeks cooldowns and meter it based on aptitude pips)
1 ruby is trivial. its 2 oprs (yes it sucks on low pop and dead servers)
the other ones are a bit more involved but catching a zerg train for an elite zone, mal pants farm, or topazing your self for 1h or less will net you more gypsums. and if you dont have the best of schedules you can save up your orbs to make casts and umbrals on your off days (presumably when you are making your cool downs).
(OH also completely forgot the 1 orb per day on the faction shop)
i think it should be fine for any casuals that have hit the 600 starting point of the game.
the problem is for them to get to the 600 starting point