Adventures in Recombination

I missed Sentinel league all together, but afterward a friend urged me to investigate recombinators. I had assumed that they were already crazy expensive, having gone legacy, and never gave them a second thought, in spite of how OP they obviously were.

This friend assured me that they were relatively affordable still, and since I had just sold 2 IIQ gems, I had some cash laying around. I bought a small stack of all three types.

First off, the jewelry recombinators were a complete, utter wash. Since those were the most expensive, I had the least of them, and NONE of them gave me a successful result. Well, that's not completely true. I was trying to migrate max-rolled t1 elemental damage mods from various other ring bases to an opal ring, and none of them worked. :( I just wasted all of my recombinators, opal rings, and fractured mods combining them onto the wrong ring bases, and then losing the mods trying to migrate them to the correct one.

I didn't give up though, I immediately began trying to put a quiver together. I had spent a good bit of time during Ritual league collecting fractured quivers (they were relatively new in the drop pool at the time), and after it ended I had a fairly nice stash of them. I started trying to combine physical damage with elemental damage, but then it hit me: I had a few weapon elemental damage mods fractured on quivers, and since that mod had been replaced by increased bow damage, my idea was to double-dip the elemental damage bonus by bringing back the elemental damage mod from the dead.

After 4 failed combinations that all ate the t1 lightning damage over and over again, I finally got this, my first successful recombination: Those mods are NOT supposed to spawn on the same item, as one replaced the other. I was officially addicted.

Next I decided to try my hand at some other quiver combinations, since I had so many fractured components already. After many expensive failures, I finally landed on this: When you use an essence you can get 40-50% increased bow damage guaranteed, for a total of three guaranteed t1 mods.

In spite of that I tried twice to add a third mod (attack speed), with disastrous results. :( None of those quivers survived the attempt.

So I decided to try my hand at a weapon. Since I'm a bow addict I went with that, and got this on the very first try:

Just so you know... NONE of these are finished, just shown to illustrate a successful recombination.

That in now way was going to satisfy me however, in terms of recombining a bow.

...But more on that later. lol!

First I was going to have to try my hand at recombining some armour pieces, and again, I had been collecting several fractured components to combine, over these many leagues. Since I was rather shy about risking my best items for something that might just make them go "poof!", I went with my less-good fractures to start with. Lo and behold, I got this: .

Whooo!! This was the best armour of this type I had ever had, much less crafted myself. So you know I had to try my hand at combining my very best component pieces... And the result was this, all t1 defense prefixes: ! It doesn't look like much, but if you add together those defense numbers together, that number is higher than anything else on poe trade - in standard league. Put it on a trickster with the "Escape Artist" ascendancy node, and it's freaking amazing. Again, the suffixes need to be re-rolled. These aren't finished so please don't rag me too hard...

All of this was all well-and-good, but I was really, really dreaming about recombining an all t1 bow. I lacked the component parts to combine, however, and they weren't exactly falling from the sky in standard league, either. The closest I had come to crafting an all-t1 bow was this: , and the essence flat phys always bothered me a bit.

Soooo... I decided to go against my recent preferences by actually playing a new league - just to collect as many component parts to bring back to standard league for recombination as possible. By the end of TotA league, I had amassed 5 179% physical assassin bows, 3 178%, and 1 177%. I also had 2 179% Harbinger bows just for good measure. For the flat physical I had 14 pieces - 4 max-rolled, 2 that were 1 away from max-rolled, 4 that were 3 away, and a few that were 4-5 away. Almost all were ilevel 85. That was 11 entire pairs, with 2 matching parts each (and some extras).

It cost me 50-60 divine, and I was spending almost ALL of my money in the league on recombination components, while I ran around in garbage. My armour was literally 15c, my bow was 50c, etc etc.

Well the big day finally came, after 5 months of preparation, and I was able to roll out all of my recombinations. I had collected 37 weapon recombinators, which was more than enough for what I had, and all of my component bows were crafted to have 4 prefixes with 2 of them doubled in the same way.

I wanted desperately to make 2 identical, max-rolled assassin bows, so that I could craft them in 2 different directions and compare them side-by-side. Well the first combination worked flawlessly - easily. I was stoked... but then all 3 of my other flat physical Assassin bows were eaten, one by one. Then I remembered that I had just one max-rolled flat phys Imperial bow to try! If it succeeded on an Imperial bow I would be okay with that, as well as on an Assassin bow, and if it failed it didn't really matter either way, so I tried it. It failed, but it moved the flat phys to an Assassin bow base, which when I tried one last time - gave me one more perfect rolled, double-fractured Assassin bow!

Here are all 4 that I succeeded at making, the 2 first ones are the perfect ones, the next ones are close to perfect though!! I will sell those, if anyone wants to buy them.

!

Oh, and last but not least, I had one more success with a quiver!

...And now I'm mostly satisfied, but I still have 17 weapon recombinators left!!