[2020] Crafting Changes We're Exploring

We are considering a number of potential changes to crafting. Please note that these are being discussed at an early stage of development, and there is consequently a greater than normal likelihood and scope for these changes to be revised prior to their inclusion in a patch. We also plan to introduce new Runes and Glyphs, however these will not be in Patch 0.7.10.

 

Fractures

Since the core of Last Epoch’s crafting system was implemented in Patch 0.4 in January 2018, items in Last Epoch have changed dramatically. We’ve added several new rarities: Unique Items in Patch 0.4.1, Set Items in Patch 0.6, and Exalted Items in Patch 0.7.9. Set Affixes for regular items were also added in Patch 0.6, and as we’ve created content for higher level characters we have been creating more powerful Unique Items with higher level requirements.
 

The game calling out that a fracture has occurred.

 
Minor, Damaging, and Destructive Fractures were implemented in Patch 0.4, and were intended to prolong the item hunt by introducing an element of risk on player’s journey to the holy grail… which at the time was four Tier 5 non-set affixes on a piece of equipment.

As higher-end equipment options become available, the need to gate access to less powerful items diminishes. We are currently experimenting with making some adjustments to both Damaging Fractures and Destructive Fractures, but not Minor Fractures.

 
Current Functionality

• Damaging Fracture
  • Item can no longer be crafted on.
  • All affixes are reduced by 1-5 tiers.
    • Affixes reduced below Tier 1 are removed.
• Destructive Fracture
  • Item can no longer be crafted on.
  • All affixes are removed.

 
Potential New Functionality

• Damaging Fracture
  • Item can no longer be crafted on.
  • One affix has its tier reduced by 1-2.
    • This cannot bring an affix below Tier 1.
• Destructive Fracture
  • Item can no longer be crafted on.
  • Between two and four affixes have their tiers reduced by 1-2.
    • This cannot bring an affix below Tier 1.

 
We’ll be looking at Glyphs after making these changes.

 

Critical Success

An issue with crafting we wish to address is that fractures inherently highlight a craft going particularly poorly, however there is no equivalent for a craft going spectacularly well. This leads to crafting feeling worse, as there is undue focus on the potential for being unlucky.
 

A mockup of a callout for the ‘critical success’ feature.

 
We are thus experimenting with the addition of a counterpoint for fractures, which we are tentatively terming a ‘critical success’. A critical success will be called out similarly to a fracture, and will cause an affix to be upgraded to a higher tier. This is most likely, but not guaranteed, to be the affix you had been crafting at the time. Please note that a critical success cannot raise an affix above Tier 5, which is the highest tier that can be crafted.

A critical success cannot occur if it would raise an item’s level requirement above your current level. We’re still discussing how much instability (if any) a critical success will add.

It is smart enough to only pick between ones that are possible to upgrade. The only time a Critical Success roll will not upgrade a tier is when none can be upgraded due to them all being 5+ or it would cause the item to be unusable due to level requirements.

Serious questions: how are you collecting this information? Manually or scraping the logs automatically? How big is your data set? If it’s automatic and you have all the roll data and the data set is over 5,000 I would be very interested to see that. I have recently preformed a ton of automated and manual testing on it and I was getting insanely close to perfect distributions.

edit: even if it’s not automatic or that big, I’d still be interested in it if you’re up for sharing.

I modified the game files to collect the data directly so I can’t share that method with you. Every roll is logged to the log files though so I thought you might possibly have created some python script to step through the log and find all the data automatically.

Character level has no impact on crafting success rates.

Yea, I start to see patterns in it too when I’m just crafting. Then when I have it to a few million crafts, everything is perfect in the long run.

Yes, it will.

Just for the record, we don’t have any sort of level scaling crafting chance improvement. We have considered it many times but we didn’t do it because people may feel that while leveling they need to put potential crafting items in their stash, switch to a high level character, craft on them and switch back. The burden of optional play can result in unfun and flow breaking scenarios. We try to avoid this wherever possible.

Level requirements for items are derived from the properties of the item rather than being a property of the item itself. We could change this but it would require changing item serialization alongside the change.

Serialization in this context refers to the order that the information that defines an item is covered to and from a string of numbers so that it can be understood by the game.

However, we do plan to add more item base types as we go on. Ideally all base types have custom 2D and 3D art. This takes a long time and we have a few new item types to make this patch for a certain new class. It’s one of those things that will keep expanding though.