The Current issues with crafting in POE 2 and a proposed solution.

CURRENT ISSUES

I think many people will agree that there is something missing about the crafting system in PoE 2 at the moment. It feels weak and bad and tedious and boring. I've seen people talk about how using Transmute > Augment > Regal > Exalt > Exalt > Exalt gives approximately the same results as using 1 wisdom scroll. However these people are incorrect. Due to the fact that items can roll tiers 1-10 (with 6-10 being shown to the player), currency orbs are actually much weaker than wisdom scrolls. This means that the best 'crafting' method is to run MF. So lets talk about specifically 'why' crafting is so bad in its current state:

No Agency
-The current crafting system presents 0 opportunities for the player to make any decisions during crafting. If I have a 3 mod rare, my only options are to use an exalted orb or a chaos orb, and then I just pray. Once I'm at 4 mods, my only options are to use an exalted orb or a chaos orb, and then I just pray. And so on and so forth. This means that I'm not 'crafting', I'm really just along for the ride.
-The only choice I have is whether or not I use my currency at all. In the early game, this can actually feel meaningful: "Do I use my 1 ex on my old weapon that is half decent, or do I wait and try and use it to get a new weapon upgrade". However this completely falls apart in the endgame. I already have more Transmutes and Augs than I could ever know what to do with, and my Regals are fast approaching that point as well. Therefore there is no 'choice' when using these.

Bad Odds
-In PoE, items need to roll both a good modifier AND a high tier of that modifier. This makes it rare to get a single good modifier, and very very rare to get multiple.
-PoE 1 solves this problem with quantity. If you use 5,000 orbs of alteration you'll *eventually* roll something good. Same thing with chaos spam, essence spam, suffixes cannot be changed scour slam slam, etc.
-By comparison PoE 2 has removed or greatly weakened every source of 'spams large quantities of currency'. However, this just leaves you with really bad odds and no real way to deal with that. Any currency item you use is very likely to just leave your item worse off.

The is no 'mid-tier' crafting
-With the current 'Omen of Whittling', 'Omen of Sinistral/Dextral Annulment', and 'Omen of Sinistral/Dextral Erasure', very high tier crafting is currently doable. Its very expensive, but you can theoretically keep locking suffixes/prefixes until you have a perfect item, just as you can in PoE 1
-However, PoE 1 also has systems that allow you to have 'decent' items without needed to spend multiple mirrors locking suffixes/prefixes. Essence spamming, Eldritch implicits, Fractured items, and the crafting bench are all systems that enable mid-tier crafting.
-PoE 2 by comparison is missing this mid-tier. You have low-tier regals/exalts, and you have high-tier omens, but absolutely no inbetween

There are other issues with crafting such as: difficulty 'saving' a craft, lack of interesting mods on items, tedium of acquiring bases, runes being un-removable, the inevitable inflation in trade, the difficulty of target crafting in ssf, and likely several other issues I haven't thought of yet. All of which I could go into way more detail on their ramifications, however the three I've highlighted I feel are the most fundamental issues that need to be addressed.



A PROPOSED SOLUTION

Omens in PoE 2 are fantastic, in theory. The ability to modify how your next currency orb functions gives you a ton of interesting decisions you can make with every currency orb you use, however their current implementation misses out on a ton of potential with this system.

For one thing, I'm not sold on omens being exclusive to ritual. I understand wanting endgame mechanics to offer distinct rewards, but it feels too fundamental of a system to lock entirely behind one mechanic. It would be like if all bench crafting in PoE 1 required you to run harvest. A system similar to runes would work a lot better, where 'basic' omens are global drops from level 1 and the 'high-tier' omens are locked behind ritual.

For this to feel good, the pool of omens needs to be reworked:

Remove the 'Greater' omens
-For example: 'Omen of Greater Exaltation' : 'While this item is active in your inventory your next Exalted Orb will add two random modifiers'
-The only purpose this serves is to save you 1 exalted orb or 1 annulment orb, its not interesting to use and is honestly more hassle than its worth

Simplify Prefix/Suffix crafting
-There are currently 10 omens dedicated to modifying prefixes and suffixes, I believe this can be simplified down to 4
-'Omen of Sinistral/Dextral Augmentation' : 'While this item is active in your inventory your next currency item which adds modifiers will favor adding Prefix/Suffix modifiers'
-'Omen of Sinistral/Dextral Annulment': 'While this item is active in your inventory your next currency item which removes modifiers will favor removing Prefix/Suffix modifiers'
-This preserves the functionality of these omens while making them easier to manage.
-Splitting into 4 instead of 2 allows GGG to retain their current stance that removal is rarer and harder than addition.
-This allows the omens to be used alongside essences making them very interesting for some items (Though it can be limited to just Basic Currency if GGG wants to be boring)

Remove the combat omens
-These are weird and boring, they detract from the idea of omens as a crafting tool, and it is techinically always optimal to sacrifice an inventory slot for one of these.

Doing the above reduces the number of omens from 17 -> 6, which leaves us a lot of room to add much more interesting options.


Basic Tier:
Basic Tier omens should be global drops that you can start finding from level 1, just like runes. They should be inherent to the crafting system.

Change 'Omen of Sinistral/Dextral Augmentation'
-As discussed before, if addition is meant to be easier than subtraction, then 'Prefix/Suffix' addition should be moved to the basic tier

Add 'Omen of Augmented Body / Mind / Defence / etc' : 'While this item is active in your inventory your next currency item which adds modifiers is more likely to roll "Life / Mana / Defence / etc" modifiers'
-This allows me to actually make decisions when using transmutes, augs, regals, exalts, alchs, and chaos orbs, rather than blindly praying.
-Its hard to say without knowing the weights of affixes, but I think this should be ~10-15x the weighting.

Add 'Omen of Minimized Body / Mind / Defence / etc' : 'While this item is active in your inventory your next currency item which adds modifiers is less likely to roll "Life / Mana / Defence / etc" modifiers'
-Similar to 'Augmented', but this gives the opportunity to avoid modifiers rather than fish for them.

Should probably be ~0.1x the weighting.
-This is less powerful in general than the 'Augmented' version, so they should probably be more common

Add 'Omen of Possibilities': 'While this item is active in your inventory your next currency item which adds modifiers is lucky when rolling values'
-This omen, when presented next to 'Omen of Augmented X' forces the player to make a decision, do you use an 'Omen of Augmented X' to make it more likely to get the mod that you want, or do you use an 'Omen of Possibilities' to make it more likely that the mod that you get is good.


High Tier:
High Tier omens are found exclusively when engaging with Ritual. They should be able to drop from Ritual monsters and be found in the ritual window.

Keep 'Omen of Corruption'
-This omen is cool as is and should stay. And since Vaal Orb's have a chance to 'add an implicit modifier', there is now a choice of using this omen or one of the basic omens to make good implicits more likely

Change 'Omen of Whittling'
-This should be changed to 'While this item is active in your inventory your next chaos orb will remove the lowest tier modifier'
-Basing what's removed on 'level' instead of 'tier' feels super bad since we have no way of knowing what 'level' modifiers are

Change 'Omen of Sinistral/Dextral Annulment'
-As discussed before, this is to simplify the current omens

Add 'Omen of Annulled Body / Mind / Defence / etc': 'While this item is active in your inventory your next currency item which removes modifiers is more likely to target "Life / Mana / Defence / etc" modifiers'
-The corollary of the new 'Augmented' omens from the basic tier
-This should give you 5x the chance to target the specified modifier type.
-As an example, for a 6 mod rare item with 1 life modifier, this gives the life modifier a weight of 5, while the other mods collectively have a weight of 5, giving you a 50/50 chance to remove the life mod
-This omen gives an interesting choice when presented next to 'Omen of Sinistral/Dextral Annulment'. Do you use 'Omen of Annuled X' which gives you much better odds of removing specific mods, but it risks removing mods that you may want to keep, or do you use 'Omen of Sinistral/Dextral Annulment', which will guaranteed keep a certain set of mods, but it is less likely to remove the specific mod you want gone.


Boss Tier:
Finally, we should have an omen that is powerful, and is boss drop only

Add 'Omen of Endless Dark Horizons': 'While this item is active in your inventory you may activate 2 other omens. This is consumed when either of the omens are consumed'
-Obviously very powerful and leads to a lot of interesting combinations that can be made



HOW DOES THIS ADDRESS THE ISSUES WITH CRAFTING?

This change brings the total omen count to 26 Basic Omens, 16 High Tier omens, and 1 Boss tier omen for a total of 43, vastly increasing your choices and agency while crafting.

This improves your crafting 'odds' without resorting to "mass quantity" crafting that is present in PoE 1.

Adding the 'basic' tier of omens allows crafting to be fundamentally more interesting for all players from level 1, rather than just for those with multiple mirrors at endgame.

A minor one, but this gives more meaningful distinction between chaos orbs and annul+exalts, since the 2nd option allows you to split up and use different omens at each step, but chaos orbs are also able to target lowest tier modifier, unlike annuls.

Overall, I think this system would greatly flesh out crafting while retaining the 'risky' nature of crafting.



THE POTENTIAL CONS?

This results in a *lot* of different omens. 43 omens means that they will make a mess in your stash until they release an omen stash tab.
-Ideally, omens would be able to stack, which would remove a lot of the clutter, as well as make crafting with them less annoying. I'm sure there is some technical challenge associated with this, but in my opinion it has to be done

The 'Augmented Body/Mind/Defence/etc' omens have a lot of overlap with essences.
-This is true, however the fact that essences guarantee a mod type makes them more powerful than the related omen.
-Additionally, if essences are allowed to consume omens, then it means comboing them with the new 'Omen of Possibilities' or 'Omen of Sinistral/Dextral Augmentation'

This makes it too easy to craft your own items vs finding items.
-This makes crafting stronger for sure, however since it is still difficult to 'remove' or 'undo' crafts compared to PoE 1, it is still valuable to find raw items to craft on.

A lot of options can overwhelm new players
-This is true, but the basic tier gives the player some simple onboarding. "If you cast fire spells, use an omen that makes fire modifiers more likely." There is more nuance and optimization available if the player seeks it out, but I think its easy enough to engage with at a baseline.

I am pretty sure POE2s crafting followed suit of Diablo 2 and projected away from POE1..

They want deterministic crafting gone which means mirror items will be far and few between compared to POE1.

Omens allow you to control some aspect of end game crafting but RNG is still favored. This changes the economic value of mirrors and mirror tier items.

EDIT: You can tell this choice was intentionally designed. The removal of Alterations and Scourging Orbs is clearly a love letter to Diablo 2s Cube Crafting RNG.

I've not actually played Diablo 2, so I can't comment on that aspect of it, but being influenced by something does not mean you need to be beholden to it.

As far as deterministic crafting goes, the changes to omens that I propose still require multiple layers of RNG. For example, using the 'adding is more likely to roll fire modifiers". 1.) You may not get a fire modifier, even at 15x, the odds are still around 50/50 ish. 2.) You may not get the fire modifier you want. Maybe you want fire res, but you may roll added fire damage to attacks instead. 3.) Even if you get the modifier you want, there is a large range of values and tiers that can be rolled. You might still roll 5 fire res.

This just gives the player some influence over the RNG, rather than just hopes and prayers.

"

QticaX#4168 wrote:

a love letter to Diablo 2s Cube Crafting RNG.

This love for D2 will be a PITA to deal with. I love the game as well, but... 20 years ago.

GGG needs to move on.

I need to read the second half of the post about Omen's, haven't got that far into the game yet and haven't seen one I'm level 75+ on 2 characters.

I agree with the first part, it's not crafting at all, it's purely RNG, at my level I get on avg 1 ex each tier 6-8 map runs, divines are way to hard to get, been playing since early release and I've only got 2, played many many hours already!

Perhaps a system where the more you craft an item of a particular type the more proficient you become at crafting that category?

I don't know what the cap would be for the proficiency level, maybe it never caps but you get less and less "points" as you reach mastery "one never stops learning"?

The the algorithm takes the proficiency into account, it would be even better if you get presented with some advance end game crafting after you reach a certain level of proficiency, now you have weights "sliders" you can adjust to focus on certain stats and roles?

Basically either we need to adjust the currency drop rate, if the point is to just craft "rng" everything, we need to make it possible for players to do that, if one spends all their time grinding for currency to not have much control over the crafting it's very discouraging, items are going in the marketplace for dozen's of exalts and divs, kinda wonder sometimes what's the point in playing if I'm honest, feel like grinding hours to get a few exalts that just end up ruining the base, not to mention how hard it is to find a base....

PoE2 crafting problem is that it doesn't have crafting, just casino orbs.

well they haven't really implemented they crafting systems yet...... Like we have currency yeah but this isn't the extant of it. I'd bet the first/second league we get in EA is a crafting league that will just become part of the base game