Are high rarity drops common in this game, or have I just had incredible luck?

Forgive me if this is a bit too much (or way, way too much for that matter) to take in, but I just want to elaborate a bit on crafting. As mentioned above, while crafting sockets, colours and so forth is generally reasonable, crafting mods onto items can be obscenely expensive. Getting an item to have the six mods you want on it is not something you are likely to ever have the currency to do. For example, this dagger


belongs to a fellow called AXN. He's one of the richest people in the game. That dagger probably took thousands or tens of thousands of orbs of alteration and augmentation, hundreds of regal orbs, and hundreds or thousands of exalted orbs and eternal orbs to get those six mods onto it, and then a few hundred divine orbs for good measure to get them all nice and highly rolled. That's an absurd amount of expenditure, and other players generally pay dozens of exalts for the privilege of copying such godlike items rather than trying to duplicate them.

Now of course you don't have to settle for only the best when engaging in that sort of crafting, but even if you take slightly worse mods and rolls and end up spending a tenth as much as that, that is still months or years worth of accumulated currency for the average player. So yes, hardcore crafting is scary and not something you will be able to attempt for some time.

HOWEVER, there is much more affordable crafting in this game: master crafting. Your masters can thwack specific mods onto your existing rare items for generally very reasonable prices. These mods are usually slightly inferior to their counterparts that roll randomly onto items and you can only have one per item (please don't bite me for generalising, more experienced players), but in exchange they're cheap and you know what you're getting. This is obviously good for plugging holes in your gear and generally improving your stats, and I encourage you to make liberal use of masters once you hit level 60+ and start getting gear that you will actually keep using for a while.

Masters also enable a cheaper form of the crafting method mentioned above, however, and this is something I encourage you to experiment with once you get a bit more experience and understand how mods work. For example, I played a fairly generic Ranger build in the one-week race that recently ended, and crafted my own bows using this method as no comparable bows were up for sale at the time. Basically, you can pick up a white or blue item that you want to make a decent rare out of, and try to make a good magic item out of it. Throw alts and augs at it until it has two mods you want, regal it and cross your fingers, and if it works, master craft a missing mod onto it. You then have an item with four decent mods, which is not amazing but quite good. In my case, something like this:



Here I rolled a magic item until I hit increased physical damage and crit multiplier, lucked out on the regal with a good flat physical damage roll, then master crafted crit chance. The life gain on hit was a speculative exalt I used later, so ignore that. The point is, that's a solid weapon carried me through some of the hardest content in the game without much trouble, and it cost me very little to make. That's the sort of crafting you want to do, if any.

Edit: will reply to your new post later if no one else has answered it by then. No time now. >_<

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This is a tad off topic(derailing my own thread), but once I get to endgame how should I go about making money? My best guesses would be by doing maps and trading(but only if I really know what I'm doing), but I don't claim to have all the answers(in fact I claim to have very few answers). Also at about what level do you start doing endgame content?

Most of money in my case comes from vendoring rares and using choas recipe. Once you hit lvl60 areas, you able to sell set of rares for 1chaos: boots,gloves,helm, chest piece, 2h weapon, belt, 2rings+amy. All should be ilvl60+, or ilvl75+ for 1 regal. Basically full rare set of gear.
You can also sell them unidentified and get 2chaos or 2 regal instead. Its ok to do so with bad base rings/amys/belts or after like 1-2months after leagues started and flooded with decent items
Check Procurement tread and make shop also. To get a grasp about prices just check trade chat from time to time and poe.trade site.

As for endgame content, once you capped your res, get decent hp (dont got ES at your first characters) you can start doing Tropical Island maps, Sewer, Mountain ledge at level 66+usually. Farming Piety and Dominus later is fun too.
If you using spells then good thing would be level those gems to 16lvl and get 5-link gear as soon as possible.

Hope that would help little bit.

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JakeAlmighty wrote:

First time I've ever seen somebody talk about the amazing drop rates in PoE :)

lets wait until he will start make map runs or dominus runs :D

He is trapped by the noob treap. So cute..

By the way, I never saw the original Mr. Bane before, nice one.