If it were up to me. I’d have Hardened Steel be the top tier for crafting that you could make on the regular. Effectively becoming the standard weapon, or beginning of the ‘endgame’. Very common weapons until the majority of the population of a server becomes established. The only weapons that could be repaired in this list.

Star Metal would essentially be a slight upgrade (a few points of damage tops, and a moderate armor pen bonus), but the materials needed to make would be far more expensive, require the hardened steel weapon counterpart, and the meteors would drop ore the moment you cracked the shell (no bonus from pick). All other recipes requiring star metal would instead take hardened steel instead (such as DLC, and DLC would have their stats be the same as Hardened Steel). These would have like half the durability as hardened steel, making them a short boost when you get enough ore.

Khari, Dragonbone, Obsidian, Black Ice, and Eldarium weapons would have less damage than Hardened Steel, but have unique effects. Other special crafted weapoons will fall into this subtier as well.

Unique but non-legendary weapons would be effectively weak Legendary Weapons. Less damage than Hardened Steel, but similar (but maybe watered down) effects as Legendary Weapons. Just to spruce up some drops here and there.

Legendary weapons would be rare. Like really rare. Like on PVP, if one is stolen, there will be effort expended to try and get it back. Obtaining one requires killing and harvesting parts from dungeon several bosses. You use these parts to spawn a legendary boss. These bosses will require significant effort to kill and likely want a team of players to take down. They’ll have roughly the same stats as now, though weaker ones will be buffed to be in line with the others (no nerfs to the best ones, these are Legendary for a reason). They would still be random as to which one you get.