What's wrong with deterministic crafting?

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Vennto wrote:

I hope you guys can take something away from my view point as well and why I don´t consider crafting to be pure rng. :)

No absolutely, it was interesting and helpful to understand how the game actually is better/balanced for you and many players like you. I appreciate your thoughtful and meaningful replies even when you don't agree.

I also don't really disagree with your main points on crafting, my point would just be that when lots of your playerbase arent engaging with the main mechanic to get gear, its probably something to improve regardless of whether you can agree on exactly why people dont like it.

(I agree with Phrazz have meaningful drops would help. Why doesn't Sirus AL9 have modifiers to his rare drops? They dont have to be endgame but right now they are the same as a trash mob in level 16 map... think about that.)

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trixxar wrote:

I also don't really disagree with your main points on crafting, my point would just be that when lots of your playerbase arent engaging with the main mechanic to get gear, its probably something to improve regardless of whether you can agree on exactly why people dont like it.

I would have agreed to your point until a few leagues ago. Not anymore though.

"Craft of Exile" does exist and so do the Atlas passives.
Its not that hard to figure out the best way to get whichever gearpieces you need, then allocate the according Atlas passives and targetfarm those areas.

Granted, some perks arent that obvious like how do you get Resonators reliably, but they are there. Im pointing Resonators out because Fossils are dropping everywhere in abundance. Its not hard to get them at all.
For Resonators you´d have to allocate the "Out of the Blue" notable to generate a 20% to not only get sulphite but also an equivalent amount of azurite when farming this area.
This azurite can be used to buy Resonators from Niko in the mine endlessly and then spam away to craft your gear. Even if your sulphite tank is full, you can still farm azurite this way and dont need to delve for Resonators at all.
Costs involved: Zero - except for knowledge.


And this is the true divider.
A good player in PoE does research and figures it out. A bad one doesnt and blames the game instead.
Knowledge is king in this game. Always has been and always will be.
Embrace this and you shall perform better as well as enjoy the game more thoroughly. And if you dont have time to do research, the gameplay & help section is always there.

This may sound arrogant, its not meant to be arrogant.
Its how the game is designed. Knowledge will be rewarded and ignorance will be punished. Simple as that.

When it comes to cra... gambling since 3.14 knowledge is irrelevant at this point. It's not a matter of knowledge as it is a matter of time/money.

You won't get any relevant crafting results unless you are able to burn dozens or hundreds of exalts per project. You'll need tons of fossils, essences, hundreds most likely for every single project. You'll also need TFT for harvest crafts which in itself is incredibly bad design because of how unsafe it is. Not to mention that the volumes of craftig material required cannot be farmed by a single person. Like even if you live for POE and do nothing but farming crafting materials, you won't be able to get enough. You literally have to purchase them in large amounts if you want to get anywhere so even if you want to craft, there is still no way of getting past trade, it's literally the essence of everything, you can't really play this game without it unless you are willing to accept that your gear ceiling will forever be stuck at like 10% of what's possible for people who do trade.

I mean i guess it doesn't even matter for you whether it's knowledge or mere grinding that's required since you seem to be fine with the fact that this game is only for no lifers (i.e "good players") but honestly, don't make it sound like this whole thing has anything to do with skill, it doesn't. It's gambling where all you have to do is beat the odds and the key to that is endless repetition i.e time. Nothing more, nothing less. 3.13 harvest rewarded players for actually knowing how crafting works. 3.14 doesn't because all your knowledge is worthless if you can't invest enough time/currency to overcome the RNG barrier.

Oh cmon now, this is BS.

Yes RNG is involved but nowhere near to the extend you claim.
Aisling is pretty damn good, Awakener Orbs are powerful as well and do allow semi-determistic crafting.


You dont like the way crafting is in PoE, I get it and that fine.
It just has been like this forever and its has always been good enough to beat the game. Harvest was never needed and shouldnt have gone core.

All Harvest added was spoiled brats whining about what they lost, while being unwilling to accept that it was never needed in the first place and crafting is still an extremely powerful tool as is - its just not broken anymore.


Do yourself a favor and watch SSF streamers.
Learn how they approach this topic. They cant just buy gear and cant farm hundreds of exalts and yet they are fully capable of crafting insane gear and beat the entirety of the game - which should be impossible if your claims were actually true.

"Semi determinstic" 2 stats out of 6 with no means of altering the remaing stats without yolo annuls. That's worthless shit and you know it. What's even worse, you can't even reuse the items for another awakener orb afterwards because there is no way to remove the influence and you can't use awakener orbs with items that have more than 1 influence.

It's luck and nothing else. You use a "craft" with whatever method, awakener orb, fossil, essence or whatever and hope that the result is useful. If not, wasted currency because your means to improve the result further are close to zero and always involve the risk of bricking the item entirely.

You do realize that the difficulty of content has increased drasticly since 3.9 right? This so called "crafting" being perfectly fine in 3.0 means jackshit today. Back then there was no 100% deli maps, there were no Maven or Maven Invitations, there was no deep delve, there was nothing, just Shaper and he had like what? 17 mio HP instead of 84 mio now?

I've watched plenty of SSF streamers and even if they actually tackle endgame content, which is rare enough, it's pretty much always with the same 2 or 3 builds that can scale high enough without trading. Plus, these are streamers we are talking about. They literally have this game as a fulltime job. And they can barely do it, if at all. This literally proves what i am saying.

You can call me a spoiled brat all you want but you don't even play real endgame content because you don't care about it and the only "arguments" coming from you is elitistic bullshit. I don't mind the game being tough and complex, it's one of the things i actually like about POE. But stacking layers upon layers of RNG on top of each other has nothing to do with difficulty and that's pretty much the only thing GGG does. For the most part it's harder to access content than to beat it.

Dude I dont want to start a fight here, feel free to PM me if you want to.


You clearly watched the wrong streamer.
Try this one:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1047040241?filter=archives&sort=time

He is going for "The Feared" (at 3 hrs 42 mins) in SSF, about 5 days into his private SSF league.
Hope thats difficult enough content for your liking. And yes, he is good and does play a lot.
Still, if he can do it in 5 days there is no excuse for league players not achieving this in 3 months and even less for standard players not achieving this with unlimited time available.


Im not anywhere near as good as he is, but "The Feared" isnt meant to be pushover content. I cant do it in 5 days. However I did learn a lot simply by watching this guy.
And no, he isnt playing some Slammer Champion or any of the 3-4 builds you had in mind.
And yes, he had to craft ALL of his gear himself. Its pretty insane gear considering he had only 5 days to get there.
It wouldnt be possible, if crafting was like you think it is.

Orbaal the problem with that is its literally balancing around streamers, which isn't what they actually do despite the memes about it.

There are actually an enormous number of excuses available for why regular players won't get there be they casual or not and current difficulty trends is one of them.

Basically just because somebody can do something doesn't mean its appropriate or balanced. Doing things quickly in SSF requires high play time, very high knowledge and generally 1 of about 10 skills OP enough to overcome most of the SSF drawbacks.

Fireburst just about = slams btw and i'll be amazed if it isn't nerfed next league, in some ways its superior as you don't even need to 6l it though less OP in the damage department. If you genuinely think this isn't some busted skill you need to go look at its values and consider its a 7l by default.

I think Baharoth is bringing out the hyperbole to some degree but really they are on the money, what crafting in PoE comes down to is good enough. You can use fossils, essences, now harvest spam etc to make items that are good enough but that shouldn't be confused with good items. Good items are extremely expensive, or a result of extreme luck and that automatically gates any skill that requires higher tier or more expensive gear to progress and that is ALOT of skills right now.

Or abyssus 800% multi and crutch it all, but thats a bad solution.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Orbaal the problem with that is its literally balancing around streamers, which isn't what they actually do despite the memes about it.

There are actually an enormous number of excuses available for why regular players won't get there be they casual or not and current difficulty trends is one of them.

Basically just because somebody can do something doesn't mean its appropriate or balanced. Doing things quickly in SSF requires high play time, very high knowledge and generally 1 of about 10 skills OP enough to overcome most of the SSF drawbacks.

I agree. Its not easy and its not meant to be but its also far from impossible or unobtainable as often times claimed.
That was my point.

I also agree Fire Burst is busted and is likely getting the nerf hammer - although it just got buffed to where it is this league. We´ll see.


Anyways: Crafting is in an ok spot as far as Im concerned.
Given enough knowledge, you can absolutely craft insane gear w/o having to invest hundreds of exalts or abusing TFT or anything like that.
Thats just a cheap excuse - like so many others.

Harvest was the most broken mechanic ever introduced by a far shot.
It was also re-introduced in a shitty way and then nerfed in an even more shitty way. I´ll agree to all of that - but I´ll also stick to my guns that Harvest never was needed or is needed to beat the game.
Its just not true.

I´ll also add that anyone wanting Harvest back in its original broken form is willfully ignoring the consequences. There is no way Harvest can exist without any changes to the overall difficulty - that much is almost guaranteed.
At that point Harvest wouldnt be something fun to do. It would be mandatory to achieve the exact same thing players are achieving right now - just with more hoops to jump through and I cant understand why Harvest fans cant see that.
It would be horrible. Each league you´d have to spend weeks in Haewark to get your gear up to snuff. Hows that fun?
I dont get it.

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Orbaal wrote:

Dude I dont want to start a fight here, feel free to PM me if you want to.


You clearly watched the wrong streamer.
Try this one:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1047040241?filter=archives&sort=time

He is going for "The Feared" (at 3 hrs 42 mins) in SSF, about 5 days into his private SSF league.
Hope thats difficult enough content for your liking. And yes, he is good and does play a lot.
Still, if he can do it in 5 days there is no excuse for league players not achieving this in 3 months and even less for standard players not achieving this with unlimited time available.


Im not anywhere near as good as he is, but "The Feared" isnt meant to be pushover content. I cant do it in 5 days. However I did learn a lot simply by watching this guy.
And no, he isnt playing some Slammer Champion or any of the 3-4 builds you had in mind.
And yes, he had to craft ALL of his gear himself. Its pretty insane gear considering he had only 5 days to get there.
It wouldnt be possible, if crafting was like you think it is.

Look i am not saying it's impossible to do the Feared in SSF, i've got 4 attemps on my account so far and i got pretty close to beating them on the last 2 so i'll probably get it done at some point myself. That's not the point. The points are:

1) There are only a select few builds who have enough inherent power to be able to do this without trading. Slammers and Archmage BL are the 2 that i'll probably use to beat them. Apparently Fire Burst is another one. That streamer even said himself that he only ever did the feared on 2 builds, including the one in the video. The other being Psn BB. If you can't see anything wrong with the fact that your highly heralded streamer with all the time he invests and all that skill still just barely manages to do this content (it was a blue invitation with no relevant mods) on 2 builds out of god knows how many he has played then there is nothing more i can tell you to make you think otherwise.

2) Outside, and sometimes even including, these select few builds the sheer amount of time needed just to get the minimum gear requirement needed to do it is absurd because of the million RNG layers preventing you from reliably getting there. I couldn't check his gear indepth because i am a bit short on time atm but looking at his bow that's pretty much another example of what i am talking about. There were 2 relevent mods on that thing. The essence mod and the crafting bench mod. The other 4? worthless. His means of changing that? Yolo annul to hopefully not ruin the item and then multi mod to boost the number of useful mods to 3. Then yolo annul a bit more to hopefully manage to get 2 Aisling mods in there to get it up to 5. The chances of pulling that of without bricking it? Slim. Doesn't mean it will not work, i pulled off a bunch of really lucky annuls in my playtime, that's part of it being RNG, but is that healthy itemisation design for an ARPG? Especially for one where the drops themselves are pretty much useless? Not in my book.

Harvest should have stayed in a somewhat relevant form, POE would have been a vastly better game with it. If that's too much powercreep, just buff monster health again. But given how much most builds already struggle to keep up with the constantly rising powerceiling i honestly don't think it would have been necessary.
As Draegner mentioned. GGG looks at what streamers do with top end builds and balances around that in a way that hurts everyone BUT the streamers. Harvest is just the latest prime example. All those nerfs don't concern the top streamers at all because they can easily power through all the RNG and can use TFT all day long. The only ones who got fucked by it are the people who consider POE a game and not a job. If you think that's what this game should be, fine i can accept that. But i'll never agree with it.

What's wrong with deterministic crafting?


Nothing.

EDIT: On the contrary, Harvest crafting was a awakening. It showed everyone how awesome the game could be, if more people were allowed to enjoy more of the content.