Vaal Orbs aren't a gamble. They're pretty much pointless. I HATE that they mostly do nothing at all.

They're like loto tickets. Don't expect anything out of them.

Except to lock your item in place with any changes they've made ....

I do think they should have a higher chance to do 'something'. Not necessarily something beneficial or even something you care about, but some detectable change to item stats apart from 'Corrupted'.

Is it because certain kind of items have less possible implicit mods outcomes or is it just like that?

Edit: 13/28 did nothing http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/859581

I agree "nothing" is a very bad result. When using my fisrt one I was really excited to get something interesting as well as prepared to lose my unique item. No result I got was bigger dissapointment to me than losing an item :/

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Ludvator wrote:

I agree "nothing" is a very bad result. When using my fisrt one I was really excited to get something interesting as well as prepared to lose my unique item. No result I got was bigger dissapointment to me than losing an item :/

I agree, nothing changing was a worse result than losing my unique.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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M59Gar wrote:

I've used 33 Vaal Orbs. 2 wrecked my items. 31 did nothing at all.

That's extremely unlikely to happen, you have interesting luck there. They do not have a significantly higher chance to do nothing (other than corrupt) than anything else they could do, in general.
However, use on certain kinds of items will have an increased chance to do nothing.

There is already plenty of gameplay value out of it being hard to get what you want from the random Orb effects.
But you're going too far with the lottery mentality.
You should absolutely get rid of the "you get shit" part of gameplay.
Make Vaal Orbs harder to get. Split them into X Fragments that we must combine into a Vaal Orb.

But when we DO get a full Vaal Orb and use it, it should have a MEANINGFUL effect.
Maybe it's not what we're looking for - and for that you can create a variety of results per item - but it should be meaningful.

And by "shit" I don't mean "the worst" - as there will always be a worst result - I mean utter useless crap. Not suboptimal - useless.

Getting nothing out of your a so-called "meaningful" currency is ironic, to say the least.

I think the proper way of crafting with vaal orbs is to use them on cheap items that can easily be purchased en masse. Sure it makes a lot less interesting of a story than the guy who got vulnerability curse on hit on his 992 legacy Facebreakers, but some of those mods are really, really strong and are well worth having sub-par items.

Example, I crafted a pair of Hrimsorrows with elemental weakness on hit. Why? It's a crazy-good DPS boost when 90% of your damage is either converted cold or added cold, and elemental weakness on hit is strong enough that I am fine with the gloves having no life, attack speed, or leech on them. The total cost was around 52 failed attempts, with a currency cost at around 1 fusing/alch per pair of gloves, and 3 vaal orbs per chaos (people are willing to go for whatever ratio you offer if you're taking those useless vaal orbs off their hands for something as liquid as chaos).

I like this kind of crafting though, because the largest investment was in time. It took a lot of time to go down the list on xyz, tell each individual seller I wanted their goods, fail to get what I wanted, then continue down the list. Seems much more engaging than say, trying to six-link your item, where the vast majority of your time is spent on getting enough valuable currency together, and the process of converting it all and spending it all is rather short.