I Love Not Having A Crafting Bench (Genuinely)

Removing the crafting bench has made exalting for that 6th affix more rewarding, exciting, and i actually want to take the chance instead of just crafting a 6th affix on it. IMO for crafters this is extremely fun, combined with the increase in exalt drops.

Balancing the early game is a bit hard though due to no bad luck protection, so maybe bring some crafts that only work on campaign level gear?

Cool story. It sucks for most of us.

GGG can add "no crafting bench" mode for masochists and bring it back for the rest of us.

I think it's a missed opportunity, especially in a loot centric game that more often than not, doesn't give us loot that we can use. Crafting becomes the natural solution people would rely on when they need new gear and didn't drop it, but it's so RNG after RNG that it takes many tries to have an item that doesn't suck, let alone is good enough to use.

In the current system, you're quite happy when you get that 6th stat and it doesn’t suck, and would be extatic when it becomes a maxed roll item with BiS stats or something, but there's so many useless junk stats/affixes for your build that trading becomes the solution to get new items primed and ready for those exalt, or to get rid of your "failed" experiments. We shouldn't have to rely on a trading website or even rely on trading to progress. I mean, you can play SSF, but it requires luck and a lot of time, and is probably easier with some builds than others.

I think that they should let us craft the first 3 suffix/prefix or something. It's important for the items to at least have 3 valuable stats. The rest could be RNG for all I care, but having a good base be officially wrecked right by the time you put an orb of augmentation just feels bad/tedius.

I just want Augs to work like Alts in PoE1 and I would be fine with no bench. Aug gamba, then regal, exalt/chaos gamba, forget to qual and/or socket, then vaal it.

Because rather than exercising any kind of self-control and CHOOSING to not use benchcrafting you want to remove that OPTION for everyone else because that's what an intelligent person does.

Maybe increasing the drops of chaos orbs would be a good idea too. If we can't craft, then spamming some chaos orbs is an alternative.

I agree with the OP and this is one change I like as there was too much deterministic crafting in POE1, but suspect it will be added back at some point in the future.

Troll?

The current "crafting" is not working. Instead of alt slamming we are transmute and aug slamming which is one extra step that often results in garbage and it just feels bad.

I'd like to see the bench make a comeback but costs need to be higher than PoE1 - it was too easy and OP.