Skill Requirement Modifiers In Crafting

First let me explain what led me to writing this: a crafted spell bow, simple enough, obvious ingredients, cancel the intelligence requirement. I love my crafted Spring, it is a perfectly fine secondary for my Ignis, I am using it to great satisfaction, but when I considered using it as a main weapon on another class, my monke brains two neurons activated and made me notice that I have a -20str/dex/def/agi req, which means I cannot use this weapon with any skill below -20 instantly killing all master hive armour, instantly killing Aphotic. An item that I used to lower skill requirements raised them by infinity (from -infinity to an insanely unachievable -20). I am a changed person, looking at Primordial Soul all I can see now is that if I use it I need 60-70 skill points to be able to use Aphotic.

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Now the problem in short is the following: the skill point requirement of the item "before" using the skill point req. lowering ingredient is not zero, it is negative infinity. I don't have to reach rainbow 0+ to use the item. I don't have to reach anything, my dexterity could have been negative one billion, I could have used hive armour and so on. As soon as I modify the skill point requirement by -20, it jumps back to -20.
For positive req. modifiers the current behavior makes sense and it might be the only sensible solution to just assume a default of zero and add the ingredients value. Having a zero base line for positive ingredients just makes sense, that is how the game is balanced.
But now when you have no strength min., "-10 Strength Min." setting the strength min. to -10 is almost a bug. The negative ones first raise the requirement to 0 and then subtract their value. It feels like it is a byproduct of implementation, where its all none, until it is initialized with non zero.


This behavior is definitely interesting, but is also extremely weird and nerfing items in the weirdest way I have encountered yet (and remembered). This behavior allows for "-1 dexterity req." to be a devastating nerf an ingredient and if you don't think this is weird, I think you are weird.
It is still an interesting mechanic, but I feel it is too out of place. Negative rainbow requirements can be easily way too restrictive. Now the point of modifying ingredients is to modify the skill point requirement and for positives the balancing works out pretty great. For negatives not so much, being locked into a trielemental can be considered bad for an item, but being locked into a trielemental and not being able to use other items in that trielemental that lower other skills, to lock those items into the trielemental, is devastating.

Don't get me wrong, a (maniacal) part of me likes this, having negative requirements is perfectly legitimate. It is somewhat hard to argue negative requirements (and by the same logic zero as an explicit requirement) should not exist at all. The best I can rationalize how negative requirements would even work is skills being on a log scale and the closer to 0 absolute skill you are, the closer you get to negative infinity skill points - that sounds insane to me, but not insane enough to call it unworkable.

My problem with this is mostly that it makes some crafted items and ingredients really bad in the worst and weirdest way, as well as existing zero requirement items being in danger of a harsh nerf if made consistent with negatives being allowed. So it is to some extent a consistency issue aswell. Also, I hate the aesthetic of negative requirements and if I didn't hate it so much, I would have suggested leaving them to non crafteds, but I just don't want to see negative requirements to be honest. I am literally shaking my head at -20str -20dex 102int -20def -20agi, five lines of reqs. Really I think it might just be that this is something that is new and unbalanced or not properly consided yet, but I also feel like it's rather hard to make the main point of negative modifiers work with letting items fit together and not being overpowered at the lowering requirements or other items being too bypassable with not enough negative skill points.


Ways to "fix" this
The simplest way to change this to a friendlier behavior would probably be adding or changing a cleanup step, removing the zero and negative requirements. It is a little bit weird to me how canceled positives would go to negative infinity, but it is very friendly and consistent with -100% effectiveness canceling requirements outright.

A more complex change would be to have positive modifiers add the requirement and later negatives to modify requirements, if they exist already. Again, I don't like this way of doing it, despite it feeling more natural to me. I definitely don't want zeroed requirements to appear as zero - which definitely would be very harsh on a lot of existing items, but it would be pretty hacky to make specifically zeroed reqs come out as actually -infinity. I also really like both the concept of zeroing and canceling requirements and well, 0 is not a canceled requirement, it is 0, not no requirement at all and I prefer to have canceling in the game.

A stupid way to fix this would be to add a billion technically different duplicate ingredients so you never have to apply skill point modifiers, that you don't want to apply.

 

What you are seeing is 2 leafy stalk (+5str min +5int min) and 1 hardened mandible (-10str min -10def min).
I tested this with -40 strength (blessed be eden blessed) and it was a usable weapon. I did another craft without the leafy stalks, it told me "This item requires your strength skill to be at least -10".