Post 60-- There's No Joy in Victory

[Concillian]

Gold sinks currently in the game include crafting, training craftsmen, stash slots, vendors, repairs, the Staff of Herding, and the 15% auction house cut. But the craftsmen training, stash slots, and Staff of Herding are one-time purchases. Once you max them out, there's no need to spend any more money on them. Crafting should be the game's major gold sink, but right now it's cheaper to buy things on the AH than to craft them yourself. That's why I think there should be a few very good crafting recipies that are create bind-on-account item in order to create a market for crafting materials and a place to sink gold. As stated previously, my suggestion is that these items would be only class specific items. The other slots could still be filled directly off the auction house.

I think picking modifiers for increased cost is a better option...

For example... craft a completely random item: cost = x
Craft an item where you pick one modifier = 2x
Craft an item where you pick two modifiers = 8x
Craft an item where you pick three modifiers = 32x

Something along those lines... I'm thinking that you can use a maximum of three degrees of freedom. You can choose to max out the affix range or choose an additional modifier with your 2nd and 3rd degree of freedom.

So if crafting boots for max price, you could choose resist all + armor + run speed
or
you could choose resist all with a number guaranteed to be in the maximum affix range for the item level (50-65? I don't really know) + run speed OR armor.

Something along those lines... of course only available as an option for the completely random items, and not available on any set or legendary recipes. I think 2x / 8x / 32x is probably about in the range you want it to be, given the crafting prices of the fully random items decrease some. You can potentially increase other materials, but that has the potential of decreasing the gold sink aspect. I actually think you want to significantly decrease the need for other materials in the base recipes with the current materials costs ending up at the place where you remove 2 or 3 degrees of freedom so that the slavage mats and books don't end up being a severely limiting factor to pulling gold out of the economy.

This would both create a gold sink and a source of items with appropriate affix allocation, giving drops some kind of baseline cost to work from for items on the AH. If any particular affix combination becomes popular, and prices of that combo spike, then items end up created for that particular affix allocation, which brings the prices back down to around 1x-3x the 3 degrees of freedom removed crafting cost.