Crafting and Modifier Feedback

Just going to condense a bunch of feedback on my heavy disappointment with the reliability, usability, and value of crafting gear in path of exile 2, and some changes I think would push it a long way in the right direction.

I'm going to start with a basic premise that I think is very obvious to most invested players at this time:

Crafting in PoE2 is a fool's errand, and people who engage significantly with it are largely wasting their resources. The process of crafting good gear is long, arduous and unrewarding, and the only effective use of the crafting tools for gear in PoE2 is basically to slam good drops with open affixes and in hopes of a good hit. The majority of crafting material utility in the end game comes from rolling maps, and rolling maps has also taken a significant hit, as the ability to reroll a bad modifier from a map is very limited.

So now that the general is out of the way, let's talk specific:

1) There is a crafting bench shaped hole in my heart. POE2 needs the crafting bench for AT LEAST basic crafts. Meta crafting coming from omens is fine, although meta crafting omens need to be a lot more accessible for serious crafting to become a reasonable path to gearing. However, basic bench crafts being out of the game is hurting gearing a lot. The design intent appears to have been that socket/runes/soul cores are supposed to fill this gap, but they miss on several fronts right now. I'll add my voice to the chorus who have already said that not being able to overwrite or remove runes and soul cores severely limits their utility and leads to extreme friction when trying to replace a piece with different resistances in your gearset. That should be fairly obvious at this point, however, there is the further problem that the magnitude of resists provided by runes and soul cores aren't sufficient, and there is no rune/soul core solution for attributes, which is the second most common thing one fixes with basic bench crafting in POE1 after resists.

The meta-crafts in POE1 also provide an important sink for divine orbs that doesn't exist in POE2 and the economic consequences of not having good sinks for divine orbs are showing themselves in softcore right now.

I think the crafting bench for basic crafts should go back in the game, or at the very least we should get attribute runes, and higher magnitude resist runes, and the ability to overwrite runes to help us fix our gear. I also think some near mandatory affixes should be bench craftable for a divine orb to help make more gear usable, sink divine orbs, and allow players to abridge those stats in the early/mid endgame.

What do I think those stats are, well a good initial list:
+flat phys damage to martial weapons
+melee skills to melee weapons
+projectile skills to bows/xbows/quivers
+elemental/spell skills to staves/wands/amulets
+minion skills to scepter/amulet/helm
+% increased spirit to scepters
+spirit to body armor/amulet
+charm slots to belt
+movement speed to boots
+% increased block to shields

These should be craftable at 2/3 to 3/4 of a max affix value for a divine for anyone who has done a reasonable amount of mapping

The last thing the crafting bench does in POE1 that is drastically needed in POE2 is allow you to block a mod and exalt. This is basically the only way you get to target mods with exalted orbs in POE1 and is the basis for a lot of high end crafting. Given exalt slamming is the meta for crafting in POE2, not having the ability to block mods with a crafting bench is a huge miss.


2) Essence mods in atlas passives need to be drastically improved to increase the ability to find and farm essences intentionally in the endgame, and greater essences need to be vastly more common. I have an essence tab from POE1, I love essence, I've spent stints with all of the essence atlas passives selected, and I don't have more than 10 of any lesser essence and have never dropped a greater essence after progressing two characters into the mid 80s and into T16-18 maps.

Essence and greater essence crafting represents the only semi deterministic from scratch crafting in the game right now and it is not accessible enough.

Allowing the reforge bench to deterministically upgrade three of the same lesser essence into a greater essence would also be an excellent step in improving the availability of greater essences.

3) Scouring orbs really need to exist. Having to farm an infinite number of white bases to do any serious attempts at crafting is why crafting is currently a waste of time and largely not attempted by serious players. Being able to scour a base and try again would dramatically improve the ability to craft in the intended way of trans/essence -> aug -> regal/greater essence -> slam. I think there was concern about the experience of players who accidentally scour good items, but that is pretty fixable with a confirmation prompt on scouring that you can turn off in the settings if you are an advanced player. Scouring orbs are also the missing element needed to have a workable crafting bench.

Scouring orbs also serve an important vacant roll at the moment of allowing players to get rid of bad modifiers on waystones, which can currently only be done by spamming chaos orbs (which are not very common) and hoping to hit the intended modifier, and largely if you roll a modifier that bricks or seriously impedes your build, that waystone is bricked, and a few of these do exist (reduced mana/life/es generation bricks progressing archmage builds much of the time for example)

4) Map rolling probably takes too much currency for how much currency drops for people not using significant rarity on their gear. Getting a 6 mod maps takes a minimum of an alch and 2 exalts. Getting a blue map to 6 mods takes a regal and 3 exalts. Map sustain is heavily dependent on getting 3 suffix modifiers on your maps to jack up the waystone drops. The result is, until you have significant rarity on your character, you run at a currency deficit to push your maps up to 6 mods, or you run at a map deficit if you get bad luck on how many suffixes you alch or how many drop from your rare drop waystones, and you have to backtrack map tiers. This sorts itself well when you run 100+% increased rarity, but the baseline of currency drops with no rarity is too stingy to roll maps the way, the experience of being forced to backtrack to much easier content due to the availability of access tools feels really bad. Increasing currency drops probably isn't a good solution given how the current currency drops are impacting the economy, but a specific waystone currency like chisels from POE1, sold by Doryani for gold to exalt specifically waystones, would probably alleviate this.

5) The tension between vendoring for gold and disenchanting for items you pick up but don't want after you identify them or brick them trying to craft isn't good. Gold and gambling feel like the correct way to handle this right now. Regal orbs are a hard bottleneck early in the campaign but really just accumulate afterwards. That might feel different if crafting with regals was a legit avenue for making good gear, but it really isn't, so regal is never a currency I need. I'm always short on exalts and alchs (for waystones) and I'm never short on regals, so I think disenchanting should have the ability to get you shards for alchs and exalts in some way. I think having rares disenchant into alchemy shards after a certain ilvl, then 6 mod rares disenchant into exalted shards would be a step in the right direction, or perhaps armor pieces could DE into regal shards while weapons and jewelry disenchant into alchemy shards and 6 mods always give exalt shards as another method of delineating it. As of now, I sell everything to vendors and then funnel that gold into gambling and I don't think that is the intended outcome.

6) Modifier affinities are great sometimes and poor others. For those unaware of what I am talking about here, staves that have an elemental type spell cannot roll modifiers of other elemental types is one example. So an ashen staff can roll +2 fire skills, but not +2 lightning skills, for example. You also can't use a lightning essence on an ashen staff. This makes a fair bit of sense, and is quite useful when hunting for the right gear for your build, but there are certain things about it that suck. For one, there are no lightning affinity wands. So, +X lightning skills on a wand is substantially harder to get than +X to physical skills on a wand for example.

The other place this is somewhat detrimental is in attributes. You cannot have an armor base roll intelligence or dexterity for example. I think these all or or nothing affinities should be changed to a weighted affinity instead. Where an ashen staff can roll + lightning skills, but it is 1/10th the weight of +fire skills for example. It being possible to get a an ES base with strength or dexterity on it would be supremely useful and that being a rarer than usual makes for interesting decisions and market opportunities and opens up build possibilities.

7) There aren't enough prefixes that benefit spellcasters, especially on gloves and rings. This is part of the rarity problem. Gloves and Rings can roll accuracy and flat damage to attacks for melee and ranged attackers, along with life, mana, defenses, but casters only have the latter 3 for useful options. Similarly with rings, %increased elemental or chaos damage is available, which will affect casters and some melee/ranged attackers, but flat damage and accuracy do not. What happens here is that caster builds usually only have one or two useful prefixes and end up more easily and more freely running rarity in these slots making them more effective as magic find characters, which with the current state of rarity makes them largely more desirable than attacking characters, which is one of the reasons stormweavers are dominating the ladder right now. This is doubly true of CI characters who do not need life as a prefix (and life not having modifiers on the tree and as such being very limited as a defense, plus the overabundance of chaos damage in endgame has pushed people hard towards ES and CI, to the point where CI feels almost mandatory for me).

That's all for now, sorry that this ended up being a novel, hopefully the devs can find some useful points in there.

I love this writeup! I agree with all of it. Well written and i hope it gets taken into consideration.. may i also add that divine orbs should reroll tiers on items aswell, this would decrese the supply of divines as right now the price of items only inflates because the quantity of divines only increses with time because noone uses them. I believe if rare items could be rerolled with divines for a chance at better teirs would make some of these low tier rolled items to be more valuable and the fact that +x to skill mods on gear are only a spacific teir would some crafting a little more