The more I think about how lightsabers are modded, the less I like it. You have a very expensive and very rare crystal that probably took a few adventures to obtain. If you fail your first roll on modding up the damage, then you can never mod that crystal's damage up further. It's pretty clear that the intent is that players do so, but the permanence of failure of this roll is too high for something so precious.
It also doesn't really work from a narrative perspective. You aren't modding the crystal, you are modding the hilt for the crystal. Why do the mods remain with the crystal at all?
What if the mods were moved off of crystals all together. They would provide the baseline stats, but the mods would reside in another less expensive and less rare piece of hardware.
A few options would include.
1. Other attachments. There could be other attachments (like emitters) that could improve the lightsaber in different ways. You could get some nice choices of this, like having one that focuses more on damage than crit, while another focuses more on crit and vicious, or even other traits entirely.
2. Directly modding the hilt. This way seems the most direct, and could lead to some cool options as well. The current attachments that completely remake a hilt (like curved or extended hilt) could become their own separate hilt styles. Each hilt could have its own set of mods, so maybe curved would give you more crit and defensive while standard would give more damage. It would make for more interesting combinations and choices.
What say you all? Do either of these options seem like a better fit?