Again. I’m sure where I’m being inconsistent.
In VT1, crafting materials were too scarce.
In VT2, I actually feel that crafting materials are too abundant.
Making those two statements isn’t inconsistent. This isn’t an issue with only two answers. Scarcity increases the value of crafting materials. But too few materials makes it so you can’t craft. So it’s about finding a good balance that makes resources scarce enough to have value, but abundant enough that players can still craft. This is an issue that affects every crafting system – unless it just forgoes crafting resources altogether.
In any event, I don’t agree with OP’s position. Dust conversion already exists – which effectively reduces the dust rarities to a single type of dust. I think this is why FS was so slow to add a converter at first – since it dramatically increases the total dust that can be used by the players. But they needed to, because they didn’t account for the difference in green/blue and orange drop rates between beginning and endgame. So adding the converter still kept the total amount of dust relatively constant.
OP is suggesting taking another step. He wants to add more total dust to the system. That seems like throwing gasoline on a fire from my POV. These other suggestions re converting scrap are also pretty bad – since, again, they increase total dust. If FS made these changes, dust would become so abundant that no one would really care about using it or not. Which sort of defeats the points of having a crafting resource.
And I’m not really sure the current system for dust drop rates is really as low as OP claims. Let’s take OP’s comment that it takes him 10 hours (5 days x 2 hours per day) to reroll one red item.
Let’s say that’s 30 completed legend games (20 min/game). Reasonable since it would be closer to 40 for me. But we’ll account for slower clear and some wipes. We ALSO gained 15 commendation chests (roughly 1 every 2 games). We ALSO gained up to 8 daily quest chests. So we had a total of 53 chests. Or 159 item drops. If we then assume that every item scrapped into at least 1 dust of any type (that’s actually low), then we just gained a minimum of 159 dust. We don’t care about type since we can convert at 1:1. This also assumes that we found NO oranges with decent property combinations (not my experience). We’re also ignoring the red drops we received. Probably somewhere between 3-5 in my experience.
So OP was able to reroll properties on his red almost 80 times for 10 hours of play. And he more than likely found several oranges with reasonable property combinations. And he also found 3-5 reds – further increasing his crafting efficiency by reducing RNG. Unless he’s the unluckiest person in the world or just burning crafting materials on dumb stuff, he just got enough materials to reroll multiple red items and now probably has between 3-6 max rolled reds.
Honestly, looking at the math, it’s actually pretty easy to see how people end up with huge resource build ups. And you all want to add MORE dust to this? At least the current system encourages you to be somewhat efficient with dust usage. The proposals you all provided would make it so we had basically infinite crafting resources.
