Partial Components are just poor Quality of Life. They require more management, they blend in with completed components, they make crafting an absolute nightmare, and seem to do so with very little (no?) real benefit now that completion bonuses for components is gone.
My suggestion is to eliminate partial components entirely. This would entail:
Reduce drop rates for components to 1/x where x is the number of partial components required for a completed one
Increase crafting costs of partial components by a factor of x where x is the number of partial components required for a full component
The benefits would be huge. You’d have half the number of inventory slots taken up by components while farming. There would be no need to use the ‘combine components’ button. Crafting would be far simpler since it would require less clicking around for components. It would reduce confusion since some components are already only crafted as full components and some are only partial.
And what would we lose? Absolutely nothing, as far as I can see it. It would just be 100% upside on the Quality of Life scale.
Totally agree, I see only benefits as well. And as an addition, we have 1/3 or 1/4 of the stuff to pick up with the correctly reduced drop rates. And lorewise doesn’t make too much sense as well. No recipes require partial components, so shouldn’t be too hard to implement the changes. And as an addition, I would like to see all components to drop, even if the new valuable ones as a very rare drop of course.
In one way it would be very nice indeed but I wonder if they are kept in to make the rares hard to complete and increase interest in farming, as at the moment you could be at 3/4 of a rare one and still have the interest to find the last 1/4 because you have already seen 3 drop, but if it was all or nothing with a much reduced drop rate, would people have as much hope in farming?
Really not sure, just a passing thought while typing. :undecided:
That only matters if this is your first character and maybe in the first 20 hours of the game. At low level only basic components drop, and they are abundant anyways. And rare components are rare anyways. When you are high level, you farm anyways, you don’t really farm for specific rare components, they will drop anyways.
I’d do 1/(x-1). So 3/3 components appear 50% as often, 4/4 components appear 33% as often, etc. Just to avoid a sense of ‘barren-ness’ that might arise when components begin to drop too infrequently so a player’s sense of reward isn’t too diminished.
Not always doable. Unless this bug was fixed, I believe that crafting can only take one component per slot of the crafting menu, of which there are six, and some recipes already have all six slots in use. What I mean is, if a recipe lists, for instance, 77/1 Scavenged Plating (meaning the recipe requires 1 but you have 77), you can’t change the recipe to be 77/2, you’d need two slots to be filled with 77/1.
For the left side item, like Aether crystals or the like you can use more than one. Couldn’t the same functionality work for components? At any rate, some version that works within the dev restrictions is fine. Anything to keep me from playing an inventory management simulator.
Why are you not using the auto-complete function in your stash? Shift+Click to move them over to your stash, then auto-complete and even with a full compliment of every lootable component, only about half a stash page is used.