Crafting imbalance between leagues.

I feel like the crafting prices are very inflated in standard essence, so much that I don't know if it's worth using meta crafts.

I finally, finally hit 8 masters and thinking about it a bit noticed that the 6 pure exalts I would need
to do my desired craft go for at least 384 chaos right now. In Essence hardcore, 6 exalts goes for around 162 chaos.

Now I can see why the hardcore league has a more desirable economy due to less botting and the gear sink from people dieing, but the issue really is this:

To craft the exact same gear in ESC I have to be thinking:
"if I were to use 384 chaos+ on this gear instead of crafting, could I not get something better?"

In EHC:
"if I were to use 162 chaos+ on this gear instead of crafting, could I get something better?"

I feel like, if I we had HC economy, I would go the master crafting route no doubt. Due to the price of exalt being lower, the alternative chaos/essence spamming you can do is much less.

But in SC, I'm just not sure and I feel like I may be wasting my currency crafting. It's weird... Using a exalt in SC feels wasted because you could have used 64+ chaos instead and had probably better chances? I don't know what the solution would be but wanted to share how I felt about it.


(the craft I was planning on doing is a +3 staff, which requires 6 pure exalts, without counting the other currency needed, instead, I'm wondering if it would be better to just spam essence of spite which is about 2c each, so i'd get at least 150+ uses to hit +3)

Low-tier and mid-tier gear is nigh-worthless on softcore because there's no real sink for it. Once an 80 life + double resist pair of boots enters the economy it will never leave it unless there are so many boots of that quality that it's not even worth the time for people to sell it. You probably could get better gear by chaos spamming, but you should be able to get even better gear for the same price by surfing poe.trade and buying a hand-me-down.

For crafting to be worthwhile, there has to be a very low supply in the economy, when there is no gear sink that means you have to be shooting for a piece of gear that is in the top 0.1% of all the gear that has ever been created in the league.

But there's something else to consider: that perfect piece of gear you COULD get is worth way more to you as a softcore player than it would be to a hardcore player, as there's no chance you could lose the item. You can use it on the character until the end of time even if you screw up, if you give up on the character because you lose too often you can even use it on the next character if their build is similar enough to be able to use it or just sell it to another player to fund the gear you do need for the new build.

If you want a game with cheap, easy crafting, then you can go to something like World of Warcraft where crafting has historically been completely useless aside from occasional Bind on Pickup recipes. What you produce will be 100% garbage that other players don't want instead of the 98% garbage you'll get in PoE, but at least you won't spend a stupid amount of currency to get your nothing.

"

Nykken wrote:

If you want a game with cheap, easy crafting, then you can go to something like World of Warcraft where crafting has historically been completely useless aside from occasional Bind on Pickup recipes. What you produce will be 100% garbage that other players don't want instead of the 98% garbage you'll get in PoE, but at least you won't spend a stupid amount of currency to get your nothing.

I lol'd

Don't get me wrong, I do have the currency to craft a +3 staff right now. It's just im having a tough time convincing myself to do it :P, because if I use 384 chaos or ~150 essence I could possibly get something better. (even if it's not perfect for my build, I could sell it and try again). It is a hard decision though because rng is rng and it could just fail.

On the other hand on HC exalt are worth little so it would be so worth to craft. It just weird to have crafting not be an option on SC due to the way economy works.

Fun comparison: (I found a mjollner yesterday)
They sell for about 20C, Would need to sell 3 to get 1 ex, so about 18 for 6ex to do my craft.

On HC, they sell for ~55c, so 1 would net 2+ exalt, so you would need less than 3 to get the same craft.

But the drop chance is the same? So in conclusion, don't master craft meta mods if you're playing softcore unless you are crafting the 0.01% best gear like mentioned in the post above(which is not you anyways, so dont craft)

Not complaining tho, and I can't think of a solution either, It's just unfortunate so I'm sharing what I feel with others.

I definitely regret playing SC though but I'm too invested this league to make the switch.


EDIT: I guess what I realized is, because economy is inflated and good things are worth little in softcore, the price of meta mods not changing accordingly makes it not worth it in most situations