They would have to add new gums for more boons otherwise it makes getting certain boons even worse as there is no way to get what you want when boons share the same gum and even then it’s still rng even with 3-4 gums at times.
This is true; more gum types might not be a bad thing either. Some RNG is fine, but yeah you dont need THAT many options per category. It would be nice to have more valid ‘offhand’ boon combinations though.
Being a relatively new player let me share with you the hurdles I came across while leveling up and attempting to forge…
Skills.
While leveling up you don’t have enough skills to make forging viable. You are too limited on your Stability and Vigour making any forging attempts nearly worthless.
Cost of forging ingredients.
The cost to forge something makes it worthless to actually try and forge lower quality gear.
Not only will you get poor results, but you will spend way too much money in the attempt, ultimately hindering your game progression.
Difficult to self gather the necessary materials in enough quantity to allow any sort of early game experimentation.
Gathering key resources that are actually required in enough quantity to actually make forging a thing is simply not possible. You spend exorbitant amounts of time and money to forge equipment and if you can’t guarantee its success, you’ve basically wasted all of that time, effort, and money.
You can’t hold enough ingredients to actually forge a full smart stack of items. While this is admittedly more of a late game issue, its rather frustrating to have to craft only a few items (usually 3-4) at a time max because you simply can’t hold enough resources in the forge to craft a full smart stack at a time. I would recommend removing the 100 count limit, and simply make it limited to a single ingredient. So if I wanted to take 900 boon (a full smart stack) into my forging session I could, I would still be limited on the number of different ingredients I could take in the session, but then I would be able to actually forge a full smart stack of tools at one time instead of doing it piece meal like you currently have to. A well crafted tool takes roughly 43 rounds to forge as I recall. While the round count alone isn’t a major issue, restarting the craft 20x in order to get the right stats is an issue, as is the in ability to carry more than 100 boon. At 43 rounds I believe it was 17 rounds of actual boon being applied. That means at maximum I can craft 5 hammers at a time, assuming no wasted rounds and full boon when I started.
Too much disparity between the high end and low end boons. This is one of the major problems keeping low level crafts from forging is the inability to reach high boon levels. New crafters who lack the necessary skills actually require higher end more expensive items to reach even low levels of crafting that a fully maxed crafter can easily throw together in a few minutes.
Coils. The cost of coils to max out forging is so significant that there is no way you can gain access to that at lower levels. Coils are a major undertaking and have a significant impact on your ability to craft.
Ultimately it boils down to the cost and effectiveness. You can’t craft tools that are worth the cost to forge them at lower levels. It is lost income that really serves little value. Crafted tools are great, but only if you can get enough boon points into them to actually make them worthwhile, especially given the cost of forging ingredients.
Solutions:
Make Crafting the Base ingredients significantly cheaper, or at least generate a much larger number of output for the base “empty” vials. Honestly these should probably be glass, and probably nothing else (they are empty after all). Maybe Glass and Coal as a heating source or something along those lines. This would help with earlier entry and adaptation of Forging.
Create a progression of higher or more desirable ingredients that start off with very basic common ingredients, and then progress to higher quality more difficult ingredients later. You already have this to some extent, by your progression is way off. I would recommend starting off with things like “Damage Buffs”, “Speed Buffs”, and “Durability” buffs being your starting lineup since these are core stats that people will likely want at all levels, but especially at lower levels. These need to be super cheap to craft, and these are the core stats you would want on lower quality gear to boost it up. If these were affordable you would see more and more people use them.
More predictable control over what stats you are getting. Currently if you are crafting certain items a single gum may have as many as 5 effects. That’s too many effects for a single gum without any way to try and control which effect comes out. Also, its rather frustrating when you attempt to craft an item you’ve used several gums for the boon you are after, only to have it roll a completely different boon which doesn’t belong to the gum you used. If this were a rare occurrence it wouldn’t be as frustrating, but I’ve gone 20+ crafting attempts without actually getting the correct boons applied. This “variation” makes forging incredibly expensive and difficult to do. This basically means at lower levels you simply forge whatever you can and you have to accept the results even if they’re horrible because you can’t afford to control them with expensive solutions like transmute or catalyst potions.
Forging is certainly frustrating, but at the same time, it is nice that there is something as a challenge. I for one, have gotten tired of the mass of games these days that just hand you what you want because players whine about it being too hard or just paying cash and BAM, you have what you want. I would like to see a little more control and less RNG for sure ( I would put the effort into more materials that AREN’T the coveted roadrunner feathers to get less RNG) If it was easy and simple to just up and get yourself a max 3x3 tool, there would be little value in it. What I dislike the most in the whole situation, is the fact that trying to mine for gems to even get coils and the like is basically wasted effort without AOE hammer (or at least gem-level tools, circling back around to the need of coils and gems that are near unobtainable without already having powerful AOE hammers). I remember thinking in my early days (not that long ago), “I will just keep at it and burn all of the iron hammers I have here until I have enough diamonds needed.” A lot of time and effort, very few gems found, Then I actually look at the required materials and number of gems needed just to make everything required to get to that point…
/searches-galaxy-for-aoe-hammers-affordable-price (total coin being ~8k at the time). At least, I had some good amount of titanium to upgrade from iron … Once you get your hands on an AOE hammer though, and some research about where to find what gems and how to use the atlas to navigate to the hotspots, you literally jump from a place where you feel like you can not go anywhere, to busting out most things you have been dreaming of crafting within days. This is a difficult game to solo as far as progression, but when you find others to offer advice, join in hunts, and purchase some starter non-perfect forged tools, you can soar.
