Essences

Would it be possible to make regular essences upgrade normal or reforge magic items, kind of how some of them worked in PoE1. This would give them real value, and create an avenue towards deterministic crafting and still leave enough RNG in the process to be chaotic, just less so.

That would be nice, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

GGG has done a bafflingly good job of squandering all the faith they've built over the last 12 years that they ever knew what made POE1 fun in the first place. They've made some improvements to the gameplay between PoE1 and PoE2, but every high level decision they've made in regards to crafting, itemization, league mechanics, player balance, the passive tree, and so on, are so consistently awful that it's hard to be excited about playing. PoE's semi-deterministic crafting options were fun, and the devs seem to have eradicated them with extreme prejudice for PoE2.

80 hours in and I've only found one greater essence that helped me roll a mediocre upgrade to an early-game piece of crap I'd been using for way too many levels. And every choice they've made seems to reinforce the idea that this is exactly the experience they are going for.

I was going to make a post similar to this one, so will just reply here.

The removal of alteration orbs is an adjustment, but I think it should be added back to the normal essences tiers and keep the greater ones that same. This will still keep some value in the white item drops, but allow you to hit a higher tier affix more reliably before updating to a rare item.

Another possibility would be to allow the lesser essence to add a modifier to an already magic item that has an open suffix or prefix. This can be a bit overpowered however if the only mod available is + skills or damage, but the affix weights should take care of that.

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BeoBeo#7250 wrote:

Another possibility would be to allow the lesser essence to add a modifier to an already magic item that has an open suffix or prefix. This can be a bit overpowered however if the only mod available is + skills or damage, but the affix weights should take care of that.

yeah this is what i think needs to happen.


i dont think its overpowered, old essences guaranteed me say 70 life on gloves. like you say a new essence gives me a life modifier on a white glove, 50% chance to hit life regen, good chance of hitting life on hit, life on kill, life leech, if i hit life could be 10 life, 34 life...

the chance of getting a good life roll is so small. with old essences we got the roll it said and then we had a crafting bench and harvest and eldritch annuals, all these tools.


like you say theres some slots where theres only 1 stat and the only thing trolling you is the tiers. but the teirs still mess with you, its still less powerful than an old essence in many ways.




i think we need it, it would give us back some control of what is happening. an essence is pretty worthless right now and greater essences almost dont exist.




ultimately this is giving us what amounts to a 5-25% chance of getting a blue item with 2 good mods on. we could have done that in poe1 with alterations so easily. is that really problematic? if ggg thinks thats too powerful iwould think theyve lost the plot a bit tbh. the crafting systems power has been nerfed by 95%, the amount this would add back is an insignificant a rounding error.



we could occasionally get a 2 stat blue item that would have a 95% chance to brick on the regal and be vendored. in some ways its kind of mad were asking for such tiny amounts of agency and power in the system.

That would be great.

Having the same issues with 130h played in almost ssf, just got 2-3 pieces guildmates found as upgrades, no trading else for my stormweaver.

Greater Essences are almost non existend and with bad luck the one or two u get in 130h (atleast for me) is one u dont need at all, life when going CI.

Still having such a great rndm factor with Essences, unless u pick something like Attributes (atleast u get 100% an Attribute), is even more a problem because u need to have an absurd amount of bases to use them on to hit the first roll with the essence and than its far from over :D

Not having Scourings, or that Essences can be rolled on Magic-Items, or PoE-1 like Alterations is a real nightmare for Stash-Space.

Im having around 60 Stash-Tabs and 10 Quads and these are not enough if u really play without trading.
Life-/Mana-Flask as an Example, i picked them up 4 days straight, got my second best rolls, switched CI, needed new ones, picked them up 6 days straight again, still had to settle for second/third best rolls. And this goes with every Base-Type u use in your Gear and are trying to improve on.

I hope they reconsider one or more stackable currencies that help with this Stash-Problem. PoE-1 for me is far more enjoying in that aspect, where i can stack thousands of Alterations or Essences and only need a few good Bases and than start rolling them.
I know they said they wanted to reduce the Clicks, but now i have a big Problem with Stash, cant imagine someone new with almost 0 stash, to manage ssf in later progression, not even 50 Dollar worth of Stash (this would be fine in PoE-1).
Also i feel more disrupted in my Crafting and maybe even needing more Clicks overall.
First picking up hundreds, maybe thousands Base-Types. Second start with Essence/Alteration/Aug/whatever. Than stashing 3 in the Reforging Bench, picking up 1,.... stashing 3 new in, picking up 1, and so on...
It is now so disruptive and way more annoying, than the craftintg system in PoE-1.
And i hope this picking up Bases and creating Stash-Problems is not there to build an incentive to buy way more stash-space than u needed in PoE-1.
I liked PoE-1 for u support the game because u really like it and the Leagues and want to give something back to the devs. Yeah u need around 30-50 Dollar to play PoE-1 with Map-Stash and some things for QoL, but after that i would say it's not really needed.

Agreed