Rebalancing of Essences is essential

A rebalancing of Essences in Path of Exile is essential, particularly to ensure that Deafening Essences—the top tier (T0) versions of Essences—deliver on their intended purpose: to be the most potent form of crafting modifiers, specifically outclassing traditional T1 rolls in power and value.

Essences like Deafening Essence of Greed and Deafening Essence of Woe highlight a recurring problem. Currently, the top modifiers they provide overlap with T1 or even T2 affix values, rendering them underwhelming for high-tier crafting and item optimization. Here’s why a rebalancing of these top-tier essences is needed:

Expectation vs. Reality for T0 Rolls
Deafening Essences are intended to surpass standard T1 rolls, providing players with a reliable and powerful option to craft high-value items. However, current values do not consistently reflect a “T0” tier of power, as shown with Essence of Greed only granting (160-174) life, which is effectively T2 by other item standards. This mismatch leads to frustration for players expecting a unique crafting edge with these top-tier essences but finding a result no better than regular T2 rolls.

Reliability and Consistency in Crafting
Essences offer deterministic crafting, allowing players to target specific stats, and Deafening Essences should be the best within their respective modifiers. For instance, with Deafening Essence of Woe, the spell damage boost of (83-94)% for one-handed weapons is suboptimal, overlapping with T2 values and falling short of the T1 maximum (100-109)% spell damage.

Economy and Crafting Strategy Impact
Essences play a crucial role in the Path of Exile economy. Players invest in Deafening Essences for crafting, expecting powerful outcomes that reflect their market cost. When these essences do not deliver, the crafting meta suffers, leading players to disregard certain essences in favor of more reliable, albeit random, high-roll alternatives. This not only diminishes the value of Essences but also narrows viable crafting strategies, which is counterintuitive to the spirit of Path of Exile’s diverse crafting options.

Enhancing Itemization Options for Players
Rebalancing Deafening Essences to ensure they outperform T1 rolls would restore their intended power level and improve itemization choices. With properly calibrated T0 values, players can approach crafting with greater confidence, knowing that investing in Essences is worthwhile. This adjustment would also enable players to achieve higher maximum rolls on critical stats like life and spell damage, enhancing their ability to craft competitive, high-tier items.

A rebalance of Essence values—especially for Deafening Essences—would reinforce their role as premier crafting tools, offer players a clearer path to end-game optimization, and add valuable options to the crafting meta. By ensuring T0 Essences outshine T1 rolls, the Path of Exile experience can better reflect the strategic, rewarding essence crafting that many players seek, and reduce the need for fracturing orbs.

Your premise is that essences should be the premier crafting tool.

I disagree.

It's ok that they provide access to some special mods (making them interesting on their own), BUT...

...the simplicity of crafting good items with essences vs other crafting sources, doesn't warrant for them to be "premier", otherwise they'd just be THE way (in most cases).

Imagine the classic consultant decission diagram with Easy-to-Use to Hard-to-Use on the Y-axis, and Item Power Potential being on the X-axis.

With essences you can just get a decent fracture, click with essences until either suffixes or prefixes are to your liking, and then finalize with meta-crafting (lock+reforge, lock+veiled, multimod etc etc).

If you made essences outcomes be even better than normal mods, you move a crafting method that is already in the Easy-to-Use section and doing quite well in the Item Power Potential, to HIGH on power level potential, leaving most other crafting avenues in the dust; depending on the items ofc (looking at you jewels).

I personally think essences are in a good spot, as they serve as entry level crafting, with pretty good power potential, but aren't TOO powerful if you want the really good shit.

lots of words describing something that does not exist

people who craft T1 mods KNOW what they are paying for. and the price of essences PRECISELY describes their worth. nobody is scamming themselves there

and certain mods are ~t2 on purpose. ES is the best example. it is already stupid easy to craft 90th percentile ES gear, you just want to make it easy for 99th percentile. 1000 ES chests are already disturbing balance, once again making people stacking 15k+ ES on a budget making life suboptimal choice once again

the same logic GGG applied to crafting bench making you not able to roll hybrid mods.

essences are in a good spot - if they need anything it is de-bloating. there are too many tiers, some rolls are 100% worthless and too much power is tied to essence of Loathing