As the title suggests, there exists a seemingly arbitrary limit on the number of times you can use tempering on an item. Have the developers provided any solid reasoning for this? Beyond the obvious player retention in having players farm for the same affixes over and over because you’re rolling an incredibly rigged set of dice. The likelihood of an item getting bricked is dramatically higher than the likelihood of the item becoming actually useful.
It is incredibly jarring. All other crafting options allows you to, in theory, craft indefinitely by using materials and paying an increasing gold cost. Then you get to the tempering system, which by itself is a huge part of a character’s power and scaling. The greatest boost to character power from items comes from legendary effects - something that we can change as long as we can pay the gold and material price. We can also reroll one affix indefinitely as long as we have the gold and materials. Then along comes tempering - something with an arbitrary limit that we cannot overcome no matter how many materials or how much gold we have.
Considering the number of absolutely worthless tempering affixes in the pool, I’m left with one simple question: why?
I’m not even sure the gearing process is actually more involved now, and I’ll be honest: I would rather go back to managing aspects than having to deal with tempering.
TL;DR:
The tempering system stands out from the rest in a bad way. The tempering limit makes no sense when held up against the rest of the crafting systems.