Thanks, CodeMage, for the explanation. That does help focus it down.
I think these two lines are important. The top half is practically the core of my point. These items, both rewards from the Journey, are worthless because they engage in the decay system while the repair button doesn’t. As Croms_Faithful and many others point out, they could remove the decay and it’s fine. Not just fine, the Grindstone becomes ridiculously broken. Could you imagine repairing all the best weapons and tools with just 1 Oil each? Even legendaries, as he suggests. At least in that case, it seems like the Grindstone would need to keep the decay, like it did last patch. But that once again creates the discrepancy of ruining items one way, keeping them pristine another. I never used the Grindstone once, even before this patch, because of its decay. I know others are the same.
But inversely, if the change is that the repair button also decayed - even if just a bit - neither the grindstone nor the low kits are worthless anymore. They become options. A player has to accept in his heart that decay is going to happen regardless, so what flavor of it do you want? More decay, cheaper materials? Less decay, more expensive materials? Maybe get lucky and find the best kit in the game, which is even less decay for free (or relatively cheap materials). It’s an open buffet. It also makes hunting down a T4 to craft your own grandmaster kits a prime motivation, for a benefit as unambiguous as a T4 blacksmith is to your weapon’s base stats. The change I proposed is beneficial to the balance against other means of repairing at every stage in the game, including end game.
Now the drawback, which is the leveling experience. I think you’re over-exaggerating the impact. Unlike end game, where you stick with one thing, a leveling player sheds lower weapons. At say a -5% loss, what max durability will a player’s stone weapon still have when he replaces it with iron? And that iron when he replaces it with perfected steel (because steel is now completely skipped over)? And perfected steel, with its large base durability, how long will that last before it’s replaced by an epic weapon? And even if at some point in here it does decay to a difficult maximum and you recraft it, these low materials aren’t painful to get. You can use those free iron kits from Warrior to repair that iron weapon twice, to 70% max, before feeling the need to use your hard-earned iron on your weapon again, instead of feeling motivated to dump the kits and keep burning iron to keep it tip-top. Past iron, you can dismantle (boosted returns) your reduced durability steel weapons to recraft steel for a probably painless transition. I genuinely think it would not be tedious or grindy compared to the base experience, especially with an increased willingness to mix in repair kits at those levels.
I keep using the word “think” though because I have no way of experiencing this or testing it. I’m just going off of my latest playthrough for this patch. I didn’t repair my Bone Claws, made a darfari club which I repaired 3 times before making an Iron Mace, which I repaired twice before making my Steel Short Sword (for the Journey) and Perfected Steel Mace (for thrall). I’ve yet to repair my Short Sword yet, but I’m only lvl 37 so far (just unlocked Dismantler last night). The point is, even if all these lost -5% each regular repair, I wouldn’t have been suffering or made to grind because of it, and I would probably have looked at kits seriously instead of canning them and thinking about making this very thread each time I repaired during that time.
So if there is to be an added grind as consequence, a real drawback despite the much more favorable balance and open options elsewhere, it would be at the end game - where we both agree grandmaster kits are already better than lossless repairs.
That brings me to the bottom half of your quote. I take some offence to “you don’t realize,” “flawed premise,” “incorrectly,” and all your other assertions here. I’ve already pointed this out, but let me directly quote myself from the opening post to remind you:
In my very first post I already pointed out that using grandmaster kits multiple times before recrafting a weapon is “a better deal” than using the repair button multiple times. It is a better deal. I’ve agreed with you on this since my first response to you and before it. I commented on the feeling of setting out on an long adventure with a partially damaged weapon. I hate that feeling. It feels bad, and just outright recrafting a weapon with 87.5% max durability to satisfy that itch feels worse - because I knew it was avoidable. This was in the beta, I lamented to myself, “Why didn’t I just throw a stack of bars on my horse? He has so much inventory space. I didn’t need to use the dumb kits.” If you were there, you could very likely console me with math about how 5 repairs and a recraft was definitely a good trade, but I’m just a human driven by irrational emotions. I’d be more consoled if there wasn’t a way to avoid the decay - or if there was no decay.
But the one important thing here is that when it comes to end game, where we both agree mathematically that a player should deliberately move into using the best kits instead of the repair button, having the repair button incur that small decay doesn’t injure the experience. The player is already focused on kits, whether that’s self-crafted with that T4 or just farming Unnamed. The last place the proposed change could hurt most is actually the place where you are avoiding it regardless of the change.
This is outside the scope of the thread and my given feedback, but I truly agree. That’s also why even my proposed change took out the RNG. In the early proposed repair button decay by the devs, it was a 10% chance of a -10% max loss. A -1% average each repair over time. Mine is 5x higher than that and still preferable to me because I’m tired of RNG. I don’t want a chance for decay; either make it decay or don’t. With the legendary focus and changes, I wish they’d also work on the RNG in that and let certain chests have small tables for targeted farming. The Library is the worst for this for reasons we all know well, but man I can’t stand the fact that it can keep giving you recipes you already know. I truly want the RNG to be reduced in this game too, especially in the cases regarding targeted farming. I have faint hopes for Chapter 2’s loot redistrobution and chest rework, but we’ll have to see what that actually entails at the time.