The Community is Really Bad at Articulating the Problem With Crafting

The community describes the problems with POE2 crafting with "its overly random" and various comparisons to a slot machine and this is likely confusing to the devs because the level of randomness in POE2 crafting is basically the same as the level of randomness in POE1 crafting, and this complaint is not articulating what is wrong.

What is wrong is the ability to problem solve with crafting and the emphasis on using a massive number of bases, rather than simply a missive amount of currency to craft good items.

Lets consider an example of a similar campaign crafting scenario in POE1 and POE2 and figure out what the differences are:

The example. It is mid acts, lets say act 5 in POE1 and act 3 in POE2 as these are both around the halfway point for the campaign. You've replaced a piece with a big upgrade but it has created a problem. The piece you replaced had a significant amount of your fire res, and an int roll, and now you need to find more int to continue using your gems, and bolster your fire res for survival. You identify that your character has a ring slot that is providing you very little value and is a good slot to target for a gap filling piece. The ring has a decent max life roll so we'll want to try to replicate or improve on that with our replacement.

POE1 how do we solve this?

Well we have a lot of control. We can go to a vendor and use the vendor craft recipe to get a normal ruby ring to craft on. We transmute it, we use alterations to get a reasonable life roll, regal it, bench craft intelligence, slap it on, and get back to the campaign. We've made a low impact item, but we had the agency to address clear issues with our character and let us move forward and use the big upgrade we just had drop immediately.

POE2 what can we do?

Well the answer is not much unless we knew this problem was going to happen ahead of time. With the recent addition of attribute runes, we can use 1 or 2 rune sockets to fix up the int. We would also need a couple of rune sockets to bolster our fire resistance. No guarantee we have spare runes of the right type at this point in the campaign, and we're going to create other problems in our gear that our sockets are already solving to use them this way. That or we'll have to sacrifice life and defenses by replacing body and iron runes to get there. If we have a weak ring slot, there is very little likelihood we have spare ring bases to throw currency at, and almost no chance we can find a base with a good implicit on short notice. Rings are very expensive on the vendors and we can't guarantee from vendors or gambling that we get a clean base or that we get useful stats so we probably have to spend a lot more resources gambling to find a partial stopgap that we can then invest some currency in to get fixed up.

In a lot of scenarios, we shove the big upgrade in the stash until we can find some way to address the problems it creates, or we live with large weaknesses or trade offs that steal a lot of the enthusiasm from that good drop we just got.

So what makes the POE1 crafting work so much better here?

1) The crafting bench can address any slot in our gear, while socketables can only address items with sockets, and we will often need multiple rune replacements to rejigger the position of a few runes to actually come to a solution. This limitation means it is hard to target weak gear pieces when finding solutions so we usually have to sacrifice more from our overall character to solve gear problems. This also asks us to have a spend a lot more resources on the problem, because we need to have orbs to create sockets, the right type of runes for the problem at hand, all of which reduce the liklihood that we can solve the problem immediately. The crafting bench uses generic currency that we will always be accumulating so we have flexibility both in what slots we target for filling gaps and what gaps we can fill.

2) Crafting bases for stopgap items are abundant and there are tools to deterministically access them on short notice that give us flexibility. In POE2 crafting bases are mostly drops, there are no ways to guarantee clean bases, and very few ways to target the bases we need for a short term stopgap craft.

3) Alteration Orbs and Scouring Orbs in POE1 mean we usually only need 1 base to successfully produce a stopgap craft. In POE2, the absence of these mean in addition to currency resources, we also need a good supply of bases to craft even low impact items, which demolishes the ability to make an item right this minute to solve a problem.

What does POE2 consequently need to make crafting feel better (specifically for stopgap crafting and solving gear problems):

1) The means to address non-socketable gear slots (jewelry) when stopgap crafting especially during the campaign where bases are scarce.

2) Better agency around accessing white bases to craft on, especially early.

3) Less emphasis on sifting through an incredible volume of white and blue bases to produce decent items and/or the means to clean/recycle bases to a low number of mods or no mods to re-attempt crafting (Alterations/Scours).


Crafting in POE2 does not feel bad because it is random. It is not significantly more random than POE1 crafting (I would argue it is less random in many many cases). Crafting in POE2 feels bad because bricking an item means you throw it out and look for another base to try again, and consequently making good items means sifting through and attempting to craft on hundreds to thousands of low value items to produce a good one, which makes the process tedious. The busy work of collecting, sorting, storing, and administering hundreds to thousands of low value items, and then navigating the value proposition and decision points on when to abandon a base and start again vs when to invest further is exhausting and not enjoyable. It steals time from the core gameplay and detracts from the experience. In POE1 while we spend similar amounts of currency, we spend less time crafting and more time killing monsters. Crafting has more place in the gear path (which I understand if the devs don't want crafting to be as prevalent for gearing up as it is in POE1) yet still takes less time away from the core gameplay because of the tedium of sorting a huge pile of bases vs scouring and starting again on the current base.

I'll throw my 2c, as always I use D2 to point out this game's flaws

in D2 you had charms to fix problems with gear while you were building your char

your final goal is to be able to use +skill charms, but in the character-gearing phase of progression (the majority of the game) you could opt for life, resistance, stats, run/walk speed, or extra damage charms.

and that's pretty much it, as those are the main problems that are faced (notably life/res/stats).

as you said OP, it feels bad when I get something that's a clear upgrade in every way but it's missing the right elemental resistance or +stat or maybe has low life roll etc, and no way to fix problem.

What crafting?

What exists in PoE 2 atm is only a slot machine, a lever you pull each time you use an orb on an item. A gacha system. Mobile games probably have better deterministic crafting than whatever this is.

OP has very little understanding of POE1 crafting. I play HCSSF, leaving aside broken recombinators, you can reliably figure out a way to craft most pieces of rare gear. It will take days of farming and has rng factor but you will get it eventually, in poe2 that simply does not exist.

Throwing my opinion here as well.

I agree with what has been said, but this example shows how to solve gearing issues while mid-game.

While I am fine with suffering for a while to figure out those issues on the way, I wouldn't mind to have an easy way to fix it.. although I'm afraid PoE2 has lately adopted a lot of things to make gameplay easy.. which is borderline boring.

What is a bigger issue is this crafting in the endgame. PoE 1 proved that such crafting can create ridiculously overpowered items and nothing picked up on the ground can be matched against it. Uniques is what remains and even that is often corrupted or modified by crafting. That is a total fun-killer for me, knowing that nothing found will ever be even on the same level as crafted.

I'd very much like to avoid that state and still keep crafting as a secondary source of gearing, rather than primary.

Random crafting blows. Set a very strict item filter, and just pick up currency to use on the trade site. It's infinitely faster, you get exactly what you want and don't have inverse-reward moments (great I used 3 ex and this item I desperately needed is bricked, whomp whomp).

At least just put the bloody crafting bench back in 1:1, hell it would have the bonus effect of providing a currency sink to deal with inflation at the same time.

Poe1 random crafting sucked, at least the crafting bench gave me secure options. Poe2 doesn't have crafting at all, it has slot machine simulator. Yeah, nah bro.

The issue with "crafting" is every item has a required stat for it to be useful. Phys damage, movement speed, evasion etc etc. If the base provided these implicitly you have much more flexibility with the currency and runes.

PoE2 crafting is all RNG at the moment. PoE1 you had the crafting table. Costs more to get what you want, but you get what you want.

Here you go
Perfectly articulated.

There is no crafting.

"

Sargoth_CZ#3391 wrote:

Throwing my opinion here as well.

I agree with what has been said, but this example shows how to solve gearing issues while mid-game.

While I am fine with suffering for a while to figure out those issues on the way, I wouldn't mind to have an easy way to fix it.. although I'm afraid PoE2 has lately adopted a lot of things to make gameplay easy.. which is borderline boring.

What is a bigger issue is this crafting in the endgame. PoE 1 proved that such crafting can create ridiculously overpowered items and nothing picked up on the ground can be matched against it. Uniques is what remains and even that is often corrupted or modified by crafting. That is a total fun-killer for me, knowing that nothing found will ever be even on the same level as crafted.

I'd very much like to avoid that state and still keep crafting as a secondary source of gearing, rather than primary.

That is the beauty of PoE1
The items are epic.
But the best of the best are achieved by crafters playing the game.
Top end players , some kill pinnacle bosses, some craft "The Sword of a Thousand Truths" broader game rewarding 2 sides of an equation ... character builders , item builders.