I've been playing for about 2-3 weeks so far and what I've seen has potential but the itemization feels very broad. This is similar to diablo 3 at launch, where most items that drop just dont work for any build let alone a specific build which meant most items were vendor trash.

Wolcen has a much boarder array of affixes due to how the damage types are setup. At a first glance that sounds great but what it leads to is 200% elemental aliment chance combined with rend damage and occult spell chance score on my sword that wont be used be to cast elemental or occult spells. No matter which way your build goes, two out of three of those things dont work for you in most cases. Another thing with weapons is, they are often massive down grades if they dont have 2 damage affixes that are aligned with your build out of the large variety of possible affixes.

This extreme diversity creates artificial longevity through RNG.The problem is it's a bad use of RNG and the crafting system doesnt allow any improved control over the overly board RNG either.

A method to fix this would be to add primary( say 3-4),secondary (1-3) and tertiary (1-2) affix categories on items and then have reagents that interact with those three categories as opposed to the whole item. This does allow for more affixes on items overall, but that is probably a good thing with how many exist and can be ratcheted up through leveling. This can be combined with adding more defined prefixes and suffixes for items (based on potential rolls for primary and secondary category affixes) to allow a better range of control during crafting.You'd also want to narrow the amount of affixes per gear piece. For example perhaps +damage% doesnt have a chance to roll on every gear piece but only 5 of 10 gear types.

In terms of crafting, with the added granularity I think alot of the RNG issues would be improved. One thing that should be taken into account though is adding affixes with tears. If you currently use a tear on a 3 affix item and then roll it with another type of mat, it can lose the added affix. This is terrible design and not intuitive at all.An added affix should remain when re-rolling, such that a 3 affix item turning to a 4 affix item still stays at 4 affixes as opposed to going back to a 3 affix or 2 affix item randomly.

Diablo 3 did some of these things, though not to the same degree and it improved itemization alot. This also meant that the rest of the game needed to be able to have longevity on its own without 99% of items being complete trash but that is already being planned with later updates.

Overall I feel some form of better itemization and crafting control will greatly improve the actual longevity of the game as opposed to having artificial longevity via overly complex RNG.