What is this crafting

I refuse to believe that it was intended that crafting on base items 10+ times results in exactly zero improvements. +5% light radius? Am I being mocked? I'm not getting currency fast enough to continue with these +6 dexterity and +5% light radius modifiers. Only advice I've gotten so far is "get better luck" and "Use essences". Never seen an essence, and not sure how to increase my "luck" or what that even means. I have regal orbs and exalted orbs but I can't use them. The entire crafting process is just transmute and vendor the item because it's trash. The vendor guy has upgrades, but I can't afford them. I grind for currency, and waste it on these modifiers. I've been playing for like 10 hours and I've made it 4 zones into act 1. Please someone tell me I'm missing something obvious here. I could go to a casino and get better odds than this.

As an aside - Is it just me or is starting by playing a monk a bad idea? Bosses seem to negate most of my skills, so I end up just kiting and spamming the ice line skill 100x until eventual victory. Can't use power charges. Lightening slam ability can be used, but I'm going to take 50% hp loss for it. I heard the bell was good, but placing it is already super risky, and using it is impossible within range of boss AOE slams. If I do manage to get a hit on it, it does less damage than the ice line ability so it's kind of pointless? This seems scuffed, to be honest.

My favorite quote is that POE 2's crafting feels like identifying with extra steps. I remember one of the interviews with Johnathan Rogers where he was talking about the salvage bench and that the developers did not want to add the crafting table into POE 2 even though they had already programmed it in. In general it feels like they prefer RNG over having some kind of deterministic crafting buffer to help players solve problems and deal with bad luck. Really dislike crafting in POE 2 as it is since it is just gambling, we need some more deterministic options. Crafting bench would solve a lot of item issues, even if it they add a nerfed version compared to POE 1.

I think melee in general has issues and tends to feel even worse in POE 2. I ran warrior myself, and it is just tedious with my most damaging single target skill being my default mace attack which doesn't feel good. I don't want POE 2 to get as zoomy as POE 1 is, but right now POE 2 is a tedious slog, especially for melee. And don't get me started on how poorly balanced the trial of ascendency options are at the moment. Overall there is a really good game within POE 2, it is just being dragged underwater by tedious design choices at the moment.

The crafting is horrible. Last Epoch does crafting well, because they give you tools for deterministic crafting. This full RNG lottery might be acceptable with around 100x the currency drops we currently have. Right now it's just pain.

Agreed. Out of all the things in this game, crafting is the very worst.

Complexity killed - god forbid you be required to use your brain or game knowledge. Big nono. It's just dogshit RNG right now, not even worth being called "crafting".

And to top it all, they didn't even at least give up the mods that nobody ever needs or uses, like light radius, phys thorns, etc.

The fact that you can't scour is another terrible decision, having to buy or pickup a ton of white bases off the ground is annoying as hell. Even if I got 50x the amount of currency, I would still not enjoy this terrible system.

Worst aspect of the game by miles imo.

One (little) thing I can honestly praise Diablo 4 for - is that they got their crafting mostly right (better than average in arpgs).

It's not fully deterministic, but it's not just a plain gamble either.

PoE2 utterly fails here. Our "crafting" is just another gamble (same as vendor gamble), only done over a smaller pool of outcomes.

I agree, they either need to have materials to create specific gear with specific attributes or they give us a metric shit tonne more currency to basically gamble with.

This combined with the fact the loot drops are traaaash has effectively soft locked my monk.

Yeah, it's the same crap as in PoE 1 except that it's even worse, because we have no alteration orbs, no scouring orbs and no crafting benches anymore.

It's essentially a lottery. Better invest your currency in trading the gear from somebody else.

This isn't even the first game I've played with RNG based item improvement. It's just by far the worst I've experienced. To illustrate:

1) Typically, each item type has a subset of improvement types. I.e: A weapon roll might be +elemental or +physical damage or +atk speed. You wouldn't get +life / mana or +stat (int / dex / str). That would roll on armor somewhere.

2) Item subsets only contain rolls which could be considered an improvement. If you invest into something, you should get something in return that is useful. This is where my main complaint lies. All of my "improvements" are not improvements at all, but random modifiers to absolutely nothing that matters, and also...

3) The values of these improvements are always noticeable beyond their cost or text. Using my OP as an example, not only is +any% light radius not a mod that should be rolled at all, let alone on a weapon, it's in no way substantial or noticeable. I'd honestly be surprised if +5% light radius even expanded the light circle more than 5px on screen. It's a joke in every conceivable way.

4) Losing investment by failing upgrades is almost always possible, but so is over-investing to ensure success. The former is... very present. I haven't spotted the latter, or seen mention of any such method yet. Make things harder for the sake of them being harder? Where's the risk / reward balance? Speaking of which...

5) The value of the currency being risked is proportional to the value of the reward you're more likely to get as the value increases. So in a way, using less valuable currency should net you less rewards, while more valuable currency should be weighted to provide more substantial bonuses. On this, I'm confused. The way the crafting is set up, you're gated to use lesser currency, and when that fails, using better currency isn't possible. You'd need success first with low probably, and then risk it all with the harder to obtain orbs. This is completely backwards from how it normally goes. Again, using my OP as an example: Over 10 attempts at using the bottom tier upgrade orb and exactly 0 improvements outside of +stat or other tripe. I wouldn't use a Regal orb on an item with +dex / +5% light radius. I don't know every possible roll, but you don't further upgrade garbage.

6) Bad luck protection usually means that continued investment without results increases your chances of success on subsequent tries. I see no evidence of this being the case with the use of crafting currency, and you're just as likely to get nonsense modifiers at any attempt. Given that you always "succeed" in the sense that you always get a modifier as expected, you'd have to be creative in determining what would constitute improvement to the weapon or armor in the first place. I have some pretty creative ideas on how they could do this with the current system.

My whole point is that if you're going to push the idea that you should be upgrading gear as you go, and balance the game like that, then it should be possible to upgrade your gear. I like 12 transmutations and several augmentations and got nothing better than what I posted in the OP. It should simply not be possible to fail that much, or that hard. I can likely still complete the challenges the game throws at me, but that's not despite the game's system, it would be in spite of the game's systems. I would think that runs contrary to the design vision of any game.

So far the best solution I can come up with to circumvent poor crafting design is to run my head into the wall with piss poor gear for my class until anything good at all drops, or is in any other way aquired, and then competely re-roll onto a character that can use that gear to progress. Do so until I'm able to get gear for my other character, and thus leap-frog that way. I doubt that's what anyone had in mind for gear progression.

I get that this isn't everyone's experience, and I'm likely just an extreme outlier in terms of horrendously bad luck. That being said, the fact that anyone is able to fail so spectacularly at all is most definitely a problem that needs to be addressed. Mind you I'm like 4 zones into act I. I'm hitting walls before I've even really begun. I'm feeling frustrated long before I've even gotten to any real challenges. My failure to upgrade gear in any meaningful way is more indicative of a problem at large than an actual barrier, but it seriously impacts my future vision of time invested when such trivial matters create such a headache this early on.

TL;DR: No-one should spend this much time this early in the game trying to get a simple 10-20% damage or survivability boost using the games methods that itself advertises to such dismal effect.

PS: Stop telling people to check vendors. When you first start, you can't afford anything they are selling anyway. The first like 10 levels of vendor items are completely and utterly wasted. I didn't have 150 gold until like the 3rd or 4th zone.

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fatesunder#5310 wrote:

PS: Stop telling people to check vendors. When you first start, you can't afford anything they are selling anyway. The first like 10 levels of vendor items are completely and utterly wasted. I didn't have 150 gold until like the 3rd or 4th zone.

You should check vendors though. They allow you to do much more than if you just ignore them.

But that doesn't change the fact that current crafting system is utterly uninspired and directly competes with vendors and drop rates (while ideally it should be different enough to work along those, not "instead of").

Hey, you're probably right. I should have been more specific. The context is that at this stage of the game, checking the vendor for items only shows you what you might be able to get later, you know, when it'll be gone because you've likely levelled during the process of acquiring the gold needed. This exact situation keeps happening. When I check the vendor, they have a massive upgrade to my gear! Oh... I need more gold, I can't afford it. So I went and got more gold. Now the item is gone, and there are only white bases and a random +stat modifier available. With respect to this very specific case, I'm asking people to stop just blanket tossing "Check the vendors" as the solution. You could still buy bases and try to upgrade them. I did. It failed fantastically!