Crafting system changes?

[Comrade Canuck]

So, I realize that the current focus is on the legion battles, but I did want to ask: are there any plans to have a look at the current implementation of the crafting system? I enjoy this game a lot, but in all honesty the crafting puts more of a dent in my enjoyment of the game than the legion battles do.

The battles are a relatively small part of the game that I can mostly just brute-force right now without it bogging my game down too much, but trying to use the current crafting system is a huge part of how you equip your main character and Praetorians, and right now it mostly seems to add a lot of unnecessary grind to the gameplay. This isn't a subscription game, there's no need to artificially inflate my play time.

The big problem for me is the sheer randomness of it- skills on an item are random, stats are random, and affixes are random, and I can only actually adjust one of those three things after an item is made (assuming I have the right schematics). The result is I routinely queue up 12 or so swords in the hope that I'll get *one* that's actually worth using, because most of them will have poor damage, skills I don't like, or both. This leads to a lot of time in game and in real life being wasted schlepping around waiting for my smith to churn through yet another batch of items, so I can carefully inspect them all, then scrap almost all of them when they end up being of no use.

A big part of the problem is that this feels almost opposite to how a crafting system in a game should, to me. If I'm crafting gear in a game, it's because I want specific equipment to fill a specific role. Think back to Expeditions: Viking's crafting system (which I respectfully submit was a much better system)- you could pick what specific kind of gear you wanted, you could add special properties of your choice, and it wasn't an utter crapshoot what stats you'd have on the item you got. You *knew* what you were making. The combat skills being tied to weapons makes this feel even more important, because in Rome a sword with good stats can still be of little use if it has skills that just aren't good for the character that needs it.

Now, you'd probably need to increase crafting costs quite a bit to balance the ability to get specific gear for your team on demand, but I'd genuinely happily pay five times the current cost and wait twice as long for stuff to get made if it just meant being able to reliably make gear that isn't usually totally useless to me.

Anyways, just my thoughts on it, I'm hoping the crafting sees some reworking because I think it's one of the weaker parts of an otherwise quite good RPG.

 

[Sarmatian]

I would definitely agree. I'd most often use a piece of equipment that grants the skills I want, and then add the unique thing to it.

[sweetsweet]

you can't  be more right .