In previous games, decorations were relatively easy to craft, and charms were your RNG element. Now, you can craft charms relatively simply, and decorations are your RNG element. Presumably this was to compliment the new skill system, since decorations now have more value thanks to activating skills instantly when you get them.

However, in practice, I don't think this works very well. I'm sitting here looking for a different kind of armor set I can make... but despite about 20 hours farming tempered elder dragons, I don't have a single attack boost, agitator, handicraft, evade window, or evade distance decoration, and I have exactly one weakness exploit decoration.

The decorations in my current set are basically filler. I put in three vitality boosts because there's literally nothing else that could go in that slot that would do anything. I have Affinity Slider, a 2-slot decoration, in a 3-slot hole, despite Affinity Slider being awful, just because there's nothing else that would go in there.

I'm trying to make a new set, but without the ability to get any level of any of the important skills via decorations, anything I want to try would be a significant damage downgrade. If I don't want to do worse for the sake of doing worse, I'm locked into a small handful of armor pieces that come with the handful of truly valuable skills.

The charm system, which in theory should be making this easier, does not, because the balance is dramatically off. In practice, the Attack 3 charm is almost always going to be the best, because unlike any other charm you can't get Attack 3 on a single piece of armor without those hyper-rare decorations.

I just completed every quest and I want to keep playing with different armor sets, but the decoration system really make that not a fun prospect.