Loved the campaign , Hated the crafting

I got my first character past the campaign and enjoyed it for the most part but the crafting system is keeping me from going any further. Now that I am on maps it seems resists and very important. Mine are currently sitting around 30-40% on all. Problem is I have no way to get any more. All of my runes are for resists but can't force resist on gear. I have used all my crafting mats and everything just bricks all the time. I've gone through over 30 pair of gloves and every one gets garbage stats on it like + accuracy, attack dmg, or attack speed and I use a cold staff so they do nothing. Rings are the same way , constantly get melee stats and never resists. I am level 68 but all my gear is still level 20-48 because it seems impossible to craft anything useful.

I check vendors every level but same thing. They sell energy shield gloves with 50% to physical damage and 130 accuracy . . .

Another thing I didn't like was the complete lack of drops. I got lucky and got a lightning essence that dropped and I was able to trade it for 137 exalted orbs. Without that trade I would have hardly been able to craft at all. I probably got maybe a dozen of these to drop my entire play through of the campaign.

It would nice to just pick what stats you like but you should at least be able to pick which ones to change on an item. Rather than, here are 6 stats, we'll let you randomly change one with an item that has a drop rate of .000001%. I managed a total of 3 of those on my play through. As you can probably guess all 3 times it changed a stat I wanted to keep.

As for the campaign I loved all the cold skill except Ice nova and Eye of winter. Granted with eye of winter I tried it and didn't like it and liked everything else so much, I didn't spend much time building on it. Initial impression wasn't good though. Ice nova I used until around level 15 and really struggled with the game until I stopped using this. It is a horrible skill that does little damage and takes too long to freeze/kill, causing ranged to constantly kill you.

I also chose not to use frost bolt but didn't dislike the skill, in fact I found it great for clearing , but Gelid staff ability, while worse for clearing, did more damage against a boss if you stood close. I decided I wanted the boss damage. Reason for not using both was that they basically used the same support gems.

Overall the game was worth the 30$ even if I only ever play the campaign. The campaign is very long and fun. I hope the crafting system gets some love though, so I can go further. :)