I was thinking of the Shroud and DT tiered crafting systems. What was good about them and what was bad. Assuming that there will be a similar crafting mechanism used in the future, how could it be altered?

To review the current shroud/DT systems:

The good:
- items are desired by players and thus quests are repeatedly run
- end items are more powerful than typical raid loot or random rewards so justify their creation

The bad:
- same as for the good

At a time when new content has been extremely limited the shroud (and to a much lesser extent DT) crafting has been very helpful at keeping people running these quests. The problem is this becomes a grind for some players. What happens if you simply hate the quest or like to do a diversity of quests? Then you are seriously handicapping yourself since these items are better than most other named, raid, and random loot available.

How could we keep the same basic system and preserve its good components while removing the bad, ie the grind?

A better way would be to make running the flagging quests and the main crafting quest necessary to producing the base item itself and the tier 1 component only. So for DT armor this means that completion of the quest chain would allow you to make the armor and more than likely put a tier 1 rune into it. For example you could make fearsome DT leather armor from just completion the SoS quest chain. Tier 2 and tier 3 runes would then be made available as random loot drops much like portable holes or Siberys dragonshards. They would have very low drop probability, but could fall in any chest. The probability would improve with quest difficulty and to some extent by running the appropriate quest chain (so slightly better probability of getting a tier 2 DT rune while running Enter the Kobold compared to say Hound of Xoriat).

Why is this better?
1. It doesn't force you to grind a particular quest; however, running certain quests (ie high level and item-appropriate) maximizes your chances if getting that particular rune if this is your obsession

2. It rewards game-play of any type, since the more chests you open the better your chances of getting a rune

3. It balances loot better. Yes, DT armor will be the best armor when you have finally completed tier 3, but you can expect that to take a fair bit of time, which preserves the value of other loot in general

4. Additional tiers of runes can be added at a later date (or multiple runes of 1 tier type allowed) if the armor becomes relatively poor compared to other named and random loot available at the time

Im not sure under such a system whether the runes should be freely tradeable or bind to individual or bind to account.