Crafting feel backwards

I am a more casual player, and I’m probably done with POE2 until 0.3.0 comes out. I’ve had a pretty good time overall, but I’ve reached the point where the only thing left to do is farm to get better at farming — and other games are coming out. Only two things have really been an issue for me: one is balance, which will hopefully be addressed in time. The other is that crafting feels backwards.

I really like the idea of the crafting systems, but every time I give it a try, I come to the same conclusion: my progress isn’t gated behind crafting — crafting is gated behind my progress. Crafting requires so many resources that unless I already have very good items, I can’t gather the resources necessary to have any reasonable hope of crafting anything worthwhile.

I was always better off selling crafting resources than using them. Even when I decided to try crafting, buying the resources was a hundred times better than trying to farm them. The exception to this is runes and omens — they have both useful, predictable effects and reliable farming methods.

By the time you can craft an upgrade with any degree of reliability, you no longer need an upgrade. You’ve already reached the point where you can do everything in the game and are just trying to be more efficient.

This whole system is extremely unappealing to me. The point where I can breeze through maps and bosses is the point I grow bored, and a system that’s only useful after that is pointless to me.

The fact that crafting resources and currency are one and the same means that crafting can never be better than buying the item outright for 90% of players — and this makes crafting feel bad for 90% of players.