What's wrong with deterministic crafting?

PoE is built up of several systems: Essences, Fossils, Bench crafting, Veiled mods, Beast Crafting, Multi Crafting and Harvest crafting. While the sum of all these mechanics makes crafting semi-deterministic, it also makes the game very vulnerable; one of these mechanics can't be substantially better than the other, making other mechanics/content useless.

That was Harvest's biggest fault; it made the rest of the game/crafting mechanics redundant.

So if they were to make crafting more deterministic, it has to be done in a very balanced way. IMO, it has to be spread out on existing mechanics and existing content. Instead of adding a new type of content you have to farm to get the benefits, the benefits are spread out on existing content, so the game doesn't revolve around ONE thing, like it did in Harvest league.

But to answer the topic: There's nothing wrong with deterministic crafting if they do it right. But as we all know, the balance between drops, trading and crafting is - and will always be impossible.

There are very good postings in this thread, for example this:

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While the sum of all these mechanics makes crafting semi-deterministic, it also makes the game very vulnerable; one of these mechanics can't be substantially better than the other, making other mechanics/content useless. That was Harvest's biggest fault; it made the rest of the game/crafting mechanics redundant.

or this

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Harvest wasn't deterministic [...]. Most of the things were still RNG, but the pool was smaller. In a sense, crafting now isn't any less deterministic than it was during Harvest (using that for easy comparison, not because this is a thread about Harvest crafting), it just requires more intricate knowledge of the systems and more currency.

So after so many good postings I don´t even want to say a lot more about the very nature of how deterministic one thing is and others aren´t. But I fully agree, I don´t see where people think this game is just "complete RNG". It is clearly not.

Take a typical option for example: Awakener Orb. You can force 2 Mods on an item, multimod, craft 2 more. So you basically can guarantee 4 Mods of your liking. In what world do you call this "RNG"? Fossils increase the odds of 1 or sometimes 2 mods by a very large amount, crafting stuff with 30-40 fossils is really not that big of a deal. I would very much like people to stop calling crafting in PoE "casino". It´s only the case if you are looking for the right 6 affixes and all t1-t2, then it gets hard. And tons of people have shown that those are not needed to clear the game.
Allright, back to the underlying question of OP:

Whats wrong with deterministic crafting?

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They can always bump up the game's difficulty...

No, they can´t. Lets assume the crafting as it is right now. There are a bunch of people that just want to play and don´t want to get into the difficult and complex crafting-methods this game offers. Hell, even when I craft I have 3 or 4 tabs open, from poedb over craftofexile over the trade-side for currency-checking and ofc one page to buy fossils, beasts, etc. And I know pretty much everything there is to know about crafting at this point. I understand if people don´t want that and prefer to just kill stuff.
If you bumb up the difficulty you FORCE people into crafting, because now your 3 or 4-mod items that get you through the game right now won´t hold up anymore. The game, while not the hardest i´ve ever played, is nearly up there. Make it harder means make it even less friendly for casual players.

The current semi-deterministic crafting therefore is the ideal middle-ground between casuals who just want items that are "good enough", and people that want to min-max and spend hundreds of exalts on a char to push it to the highest numbers possible. If you change that then at least one of those groups suffers.

The crafting-system of Last Epoch was mentioned a few times here. I like this one, it´s clever, intuitive, and definately easier than PoE. But is it more deterministic? Honestly, I don´t think so, not in the sense of what we´re discussing here (that is having 6x T1 stats). To reach that in LE you need also tons of bases and pray to RNGesus that your item does not fracture/brick, if you aim for the best of the best the chance of not bricking gets incredibly low. Where´s the difference between using 400 bases for 1 base to not brick in LE or to throw 400 fossils on one base to get the stats you want in PoE? There is none. For some reason people just FEEL that it is more deterministic, when in fact it really isn´t.

No it's not fun when the driving force for ARPG are the drops and trading economy.

Drops should always be the primary source.

Being able to ignore everything and just craft end-game gear with near no effort has made this game way too easy.

They open Pandora's box and there's no going back now people will whine too much.

Crafting has gone well beyond overboard and league mechanics gives us way too much loot that it's all diluted.

They have to now make old school Japanese mobs and boss with ridiculous difficulty because our power progression is exponential with every added league.

At the core of POE (and this genre really) is monster killing for the purpose of loot hunting to wear and trade. Harvest was a glorified item editor, effectively removing one of the main purposes of killing monsters.

You remove one of the primary goals and main forms of friction to success and the game loses purpose.

They made the right call with Harvest; except the part where they put it back into the game as they did last league. That was a mistake. You can't unring the bell easily.

Let's all remember this the next time someone makes the argument "what's the harm with trying [whatever], and if it doesn't work, then just remove it."

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Nubatron wrote:

Let's all remember this the next time someone makes the argument "what's the harm with trying [whatever], and if it doesn't work, then just remove it."

Yeah. Community is way more fine with not having stuff rather than stuff being taken away after it proved unhealthy for the game.

I think we all knew harvest was going away after harvest, the mistake was putting it back with a form I personally found more powerful than the original frankly.

As to OP's question the problem is contained in the question, its deterministic.

Crafting in a game like PoE is supposed to provide the possibility of power, without actually providing power in a vast majority of cases. This gives an objective without moving the bar for where the games at as well as allowing a myriad of systems that all feed into the same approach.

Deterministic crafting just provides power, it automatically moves the bar and the only criteria you can use to curtail it is to make it bad (like if you could only roll T3 or worse mods etc) or expensive (current). If its accessible it invalidates any other crafting method that isn't cost effective at producing similar results and introduces power creep far beyond alternative methods to pull on the slot machine.

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Vennto wrote:

Take a typical option for example: Awakener Orb. You can force 2 Mods on an item, multimod, craft 2 more. So you basically can guarantee 4 Mods of your liking. In what world do you call this "RNG"?

Well for starters, the item you get from the orb has between 2 and 4 other mods along the 2 deterministic ones that are purely random and prevent you from just outright multimodding it. You first have to yolo annul the item several times to remove the useless mods hoping that you don't remove the 2 deterministic mods you wanted. If one of those annuls fails -> start from scratch.

THAT's where the RNG is. I trashed 2 potential 6 link explody chests i created via awakener orb because both of them didn't have life but all 3 prefixes blocked. And both times the first annul i threw at it removed the explosion mod. What would you call that if not RNG?

With literally any other "crafting option" in this game it's even worse. Essences give one guaranteed mod, out of 6. If the other 5 are worthless, the item is worthless so it's basically complete gambeling if you are looking for a good item. Fossils is also gambling, it increases your chances on a positive outcome but there is nothing deterministic about it. Same for most beast crafts. The only determinstic crafting is the bench and that is limited to 1 craft per item.

What this game had during harvest was a way to take a decent item you found, with 2 - 3 decent or even good mods, and develop it from there by removing mods you didn't need and add mods you do need. Now it's back to "Oh hey, a drop with 2 decent mods and 4 bad ones, vendor trash". If you want to have certain mods on your item AND decent other mods to accompany them you have to trade, no other option available. Or, ofc, gamble away dozens or hundreds of exalts hoping to get a result that is somewhere close to what you want.


Personally i see it like that. GGG implemented trading, knowing it's way to powerful and therefor made it as awkward and annoying as possible to deter people from using it and now continues to balance everything around this which in case of harvest means that harvest had to die because TFT + harvest was too strong. So now we all have to deal with a horrible trade system that is literally designed to be bad because the only other means to get good items was annihilated.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

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Vennto wrote:

Take a typical option for example: Awakener Orb. You can force 2 Mods on an item, multimod, craft 2 more. So you basically can guarantee 4 Mods of your liking. In what world do you call this "RNG"?

Well for starters, the item you get from the orb has between 2 and 4 other mods along the 2 deterministic ones that are purely random and prevent you from just outright multimodding it. You first have to yolo annul the item several times to remove the useless mods hoping that you don't remove the 2 deterministic mods you wanted. If one of those annuls fails -> start from scratch.

THAT's where the RNG is. I trashed 2 potential 6 link explody chests i created via awakener orb because both of them didn't have life but all 3 prefixes blocked. And both times the first annul i threw at it removed the explosion mod. What would you call that if not RNG?

With literally any other "crafting option" in this game it's even worse. Essences give one guaranteed mod, out of 6. If the other 5 are worthless, the item is worthless so it's basically complete gambeling if you are looking for a good item. Fossils is also gambling, it increases your chances on a positive outcome but there is nothing deterministic about it. Same for most beast crafts. The only determinstic crafting is the bench and that is limited to 1 craft per item.

What this game had during harvest was a way to take a decent item you found, with 2 - 3 decent or even good mods, and develop it from there by removing mods you didn't need and add mods you do need. Now it's back to "Oh hey, a drop with 2 decent mods and 4 bad ones, vendor trash". If you want to have certain mods on your item AND decent other mods to accompany them you have to trade, no other option available. Or, ofc, gamble away dozens or hundreds of exalts hoping to get a result that is somewhere close to what you want.


Personally i see it like that. GGG implemented trading, knowing it's way to powerful and therefor made it as awkward and annoying as possible to deter people from using it and now continues to balance everything around this which in case of harvest means that harvest had to die because TFT + harvest was too strong. So now we all have to deal with a horrible trade system that is literally designed to be bad because the only other means to get good items was annihilated.

Pretty much.

For all the fear they seem to have of deterministic crafting, they provided a way to circunvent it with trade. And now, it's back to it being the only way of obtaining what you want without RNG dictating what you can have. I loathe it.

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With literally any other "crafting option" in this game it's even worse. Essences give one guaranteed mod, out of 6. If the other 5 are worthless, the item is worthless so it's basically complete gambeling if you are looking for a good item.

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Fossils is also gambling, it increases your chances on a positive outcome but there is nothing deterministic about it

Sure, there is leftover randomness. I did not say there was none, I meant crafting is not entirely random. For me entirely random would be Chaos-Spamming. The given methods gives you determinism for one or 2 mods, and randomness (with increased chances) on other mods. You´re right about how that stuff works. But let me understand that: Your aim and fun in the game would be to throw 1 Essence on an Item and get a perfect item? Same with fossils, you want to use one filled resonator and get the perfect item?

If your answer is no, then all we are arguing about is numbers, not wether something is supposed to be deterministic.
And if your answer is yes, then we have a different opinion about how accessible good items are supposed to be. When it literally takes 1 Essence to get the perfect item then I would end the season the Monday after the starting weekend, like in D3.

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What this game had during harvest was a way to take a decent item you found, with 2 - 3 decent or even good mods, and develop it from there by removing mods you didn't need and add mods you do need.

With Harvest you were able to build up items from white to 6x t1. Having the fun of using dropped items and develop them is a fairly biased idea how people used it. It was an item-editor.

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Now it's back to "Oh hey, a drop with 2 decent mods and 4 bad ones, vendor trash". If you want to have certain mods on your item AND decent other mods to accompany them you have to trade, no other option available.

I don´t feel like this is a fair representation of the current state as well. You might forget, Harvest is still in the game. Reforge keeping prefixes/suffixes giving a 100% chance to keep certain mods, other reforges do also respect metamods, therefore can be used to further upgrade and improve items. On top of that, veiled chaos orbs also respect metamods. It might be a bit harder, but it is still very possible, even in SSF, to craft good items without the exaggeration of spending "hundreds of exalts" on items.

I think the deterministic crafting was too good, but harvest crafting now is pretty much the same thing as using either an essence or chaos orb (which is to say, it adds nothing to the game that isn't already there).

They should have made the deterministic crafts more general. Instead of having a craft like "remove 1 non-life mod, add 1 life mod", they should have something like "remove 1 non-survivability mod, add 1 survivability mod", which could result in an increase (flat or %) to armor, evasion or energy shield, +max life, or + to a resistance.

Another examples could be changing "augment 1 cold mod" to "augment 1 elemental mod". No guarantee you'll get something you want, but you still have a better chance than yolo slamming it.