Rolling out extreme luck onto precursors is wrong. Right now they are just way too valuable to be reliant on that type of luck. Its demotivating and depressing. Finding one from a chest when you’ve not opened that many or from your first craft in the forge just seems to undermine everyone who has tried countless times to craft one and failed. It could make you jump out of your seat and scream victory, but I’d like to explore the 2 ideas explained below:
I propose that a system more reliant on cumulative effects from crafting weapons might be lots more fun and people will feel like they’ve earned the precursor:
1) *Introduce a multi-tiered system of transmutations – each successful transmutation creates an exotic weapon of the next tier.
*When you transmute 4 same rare weapons of relevant level you have the same chance to get an exotic that you have now, but that exotic has a tick mark and an inherent +% chance to enhance the probability. Tier 2 weapons would need 4 tier 1 weapons and their chance to generate a precursor linearly.
*e.g. Tiers could be valued from first through to tenth. Each time you use 4 weapons that are for example first tier (you transmuted 4 rares successfully and received an exotic of the same type) the only thing special about this weapon you’ve generated is that it has a single tick mark behind the name which indicates that if transmuted with another 3 weapons of the same type it has a chance to generate a second tier weapon and concurrently a greater chance to generate a precursor.
I think a system like this would help to dilute the massively inflated cost of precursors into lesser exotics. For instance, tier 1 exotics compared to tier 0 exotics like what we have now would sell for a hypothetical 10g, tier 2’s would sell for 20g each and so on. I realize that there is perhaps a system like this existing now: tier 1 are high lvl rares, tier 2 are exotics and tier 3 are named exotics, but this system is difficult to follow and people who find named exotics probably profit more by selling them and buying lesser exotics and rares simply because losing 4 named exotics with a bad luck RNGed roll might just hurt too much to comprehend.
A tiered system would cultivate a sense of working toward an end goal, each transmutation would be cumulative while still relying on an element of luck.
2) Thinking about it now, imagine a system of item generation that suffers minimal losses that one would with bad luck. You find/buy 4 rare lvl80 shortbows, transmute them. RNG comes up with an exotic shortbow 10% of the time or whatever the current rate is. After many tires you eventually have 4 exotics which you have made in the forge. When you transmute those 4 you get an account-bound named-exotic shortbow with a hidden counter on it, say randomly generated, the counter could read anything from 500 to 600 to choose arbitrary numbers. Now it becomes a recipe component that maybe upgraded by transmuting it along with rare or exotic items of the same type, along with things like mystic coins, obsidian shards or maybe even mystic stones(imagine that). The idea here is that with each additional transmutation with another weapon, a new similarly-named, account-bound exotic is created, the only difference is that is has less counters on it, say 2 less if it was a high lvl rare, or 4 less if an exotic, maybe 10 less if a named exotic…see where I’m going with this? you constantly transmute all the rare or exotic weapons of the same type that you find until the named exotic you have reaches 0 counters and it finally transmutes into a precursor.
Unfortunately the grind doesn’t disappear but the profound sense of loss does, while it equalizes the whole process for all players.
Maybe this second system would make the recipe seem to be unattainable by casual players , mayhaps a hybridized system that always has a small chance to generate a precursor on each transmutation would keep players motivated to just try their luck while simultaneously feel that even if they don’t get a precursor they are a step closer to it rather than starting from scratch after each transmutation as is what happens now…..
These are just possible ideas, we can wait to see how the current system is changed with the new patch, it might make this post redundant but the idea could always be used for different future recipes.
) and still nothing . a friend of mine throws 4 random rare looted in CS and Bam TheLegend (350G) just try to imagine my state of mind after this.