im starting to get a little annoyed with how hard it is to craft and heat items...
my suggestion here would be to remove the forge mechanic entirely and go back to the old way of heating or at least reduce the amount of fire crystals required for leveling because right now it takes a billion years to heat something so its ready to level up and THEN collect all the crystals needed to do the 100% successful level up (lets be honest I don't think anybody does it without 100% chance)
and as far as the crafting goes I wouldn't say to get rid of the orbs otherwise people would be able to craft whatever they wanted so long as they had the money but maybe reduce the required amount to 1 or increase the rate at which they can be found.
the biggest reason why I suggest these changes is because running the clockworks or missions gets quite tedious and doesn't feel very rewarding if you get nothing of what you're after...
Elevators are free. Forge was an alternate (yet extremely poorly proportioned) method of slowing down progress. I think if heat carried over into a "heat bank," which you could use after spending the fire crystals, it would be like the old system, except you wouod have to pay hundreds of crystals in addition.