The @DisparateWorlds crew sat down with our very own David ‘Nephele’ Beach & Chris ‘Joppa’ Perkins to talk about Crafting & Gathering, check it out here:
Caught it live (slightly delayed). Was great interview.
One thing I heard during the stream that Nephele was worried about was penalizing players who worked for weeks to craft something and have it fail. I would think that if pieces you used were built from underlying components - if there were a failure of the final piece or close to it, you may only have to re-craft some of the base components rather than everything.
Regarding the idea of some rare items being returned on failure - I think it would be neat to have an item flag like "indestructible" or something (think of item tags in EQ like Lore, No-drop etc). Indestructible items would be returned if a combine failed. It would also be easy for players to know which items would be returned and which wouldn't be.