Making this thread to compile many ideas from other threads and some ideas of my own to try and find a sweet spot that people can be happy with.
Like many people I have given up with crafting as it isnt rewarding due to the large amount of RNG, I also belive that BIS items do deserve to be expensive and ‘hard’ to obtain but all players should be able to get BIS items in a reasonable time frame.
Right so I feel the best way to make crafting better is to reduce the RNG but not completely remove the RNG so people cant instantly craft BIS items but they dont have to burn millions of gold trying to get BIS.
My first idea is to remove all the weapon skill perks and instead intergrate them as some sort of skill mutations in the weapons skill tree. To unlock the modified skill (insatiable Grav well for example) you would have to use that skill and earn enough xp using the skills to unluck the ability to mutate the skill, this means you would have to earn the use of the modified skill and all players will have access to all the modifications on all the skills and all the weapon perks can be removed from craft pools. This would help make for a more balanced PvP experience and would reduce the perk pool which would also help with RNG.
Second idea is making it so you can choose perk pools, so instead of choosing a perk you can choose 3 perk pools that have a selection of perks such as the keenly perks or shirking perks or refreshing perks etc, this would mean you can narrow down the selection of perks but you still have to roll perks you want from those 2/3 perks polls, once again reducing the RNG. To balance this you dont use craft mods and you have to buy a specific item from a faction vendor that is similar to timeless shards and the items are Bind on Pickup. This would mean you can only craft these items for yourself and you still have to roll for GS600.
Third idea i to rework the expedition replicas, make them have versions for all attributes so they are more usefull and make it so they default with a ward perk and PVE perk pools. These sets should be great gate ways for people to craft good gear for PvE experiences make it more usefull and easier to craft decent sets that benefit players that want to focus more on PvE.
Fourth idea is to add in mutated expedition replica sets, these can have the perks pools from the mutated expeditons in the perk pools and NO PvP perks and of course Bind on Pickup but require 200 in the appropriate crafting skill to make and will be a flat GS 600 so you just have to roll for good perks that you want. This would help people craft sets that are good for mutators and will encourage more people to give them ago and make it easier to have more builds to do all the content.
fifth idea is to just flat out remove useless perks such as accuracy and durability etc, certain perks are literally useless or never used they should be removed or reworked to make them usefull, this would once again clean up the perk pool and help with the RNG.
If you got this far thanks for reading! The crafting system is a cool concept but it is just way to RNG and isnt rewarding after a while. The amount of time put in doesnt reflect the amount of usefull items you get in return. Now im no game designer but I feel like ideas above are fairly balanced as they cater to most peoples needs and removes a good chunk of the RNG but without just letting people get exactly what they want.
These changes shouldnt effect the econemy too much as more people will be willing to buy mats to craft and the items they craft would be bind on pickup so they cant flood the Trading post with BIS items and drive the price down.
Also if any form of ranked 3v3 and such comes out you cant have a ranked experience when a large amount of the player base dont/cant obtain the right items for their build.
If you have any other ideas please add in comments and please dont be toxic just want to put these ideas out there so we can all try and come up with fixes that could work and majority are happy with!
