Given up on crafting in SSF

Early on "crafting" or rather gambling can feel alright, plenty of people I see in SSF global saying how great it is. However early on when your gear is pretty awful, it doesn't take much to randomly make something good. You find some magic boots with 25% movespeed and a dead stat, regal a res, and then slam the rest and its probably better than what you are using. Find a ring with res base, a life roll and a bunch of open suffixes, same thing, you'll probably slam at least 1 resist and thats going to be better than what you are using.

Later on however when you gear is OK, the chances of actually making something from scratch from a white base is just astronomically unlikely. When your gear already has life, res, and you are shooting for something similar but better or maybe you are looking for more attributes or chaos res it starts becoming pretty bleak.

I have my lootfilter setup to highlight bases I use, gloves, belts, rings, low level weapon (looking for + to melee with low str req), etc.

Id say I get about an entire inventory worth of these bases + magic items, breach map I might get 2 whole inventories worth, usually find 3-4 weapon bases I'm trying to craft. So I take these transmute them, if its any decent I'll aug. At this point after 3+ days of 6+ hours mapping sessions at 92 I would say about 1 in 25 items makes it to the point that its worth spending a regal on, and after that maybe 1 out of 4 (so 100 total) are actually worth exalting further if the regal didn't hit trash.

I do essence craft, but like I said just weapons alone not mentioning armor and jewelry I'll have like 10-15 pieces of base/magic gear per map to attempt crafting on, you just don't find enough essences to even factor that in.

At this point I just feel like its a complete and utter waste of time to bother with crafting in the current state. It's a meme in trade to say "Every single piece of gear I'm using I bought on trade I'm not using a single piece of gear I found on the ground" and in ssf I feel like its the case where "Every piece of gear I'm using I found rare already 80% the way there, and im not using anything I crafted from scratch". Which for me is pretty much the case. All of my gear was found on the ground basically already finished, I have boots I expedition crafted, and single ring I found tiered as magic that rolled well, everything else was basically as good as it was when I ID it as a rare drop, maybe I got 1 more good mod from an exalt slam.

I feel like all this time I'm spending picking up bases, picking up low level currency, putting it in a tab, having to leave maps multiple times to empty inventory, is all just time wasted I could be grinding out more kills, to get more rares, to ID them and find something already useable or near useable that just needs to be slammed once or twice. This is not crafting in any sense of the word. This also means item rarity is just as much a problem you have to solve in SSF as you do in trade, because you really need those tiered rare drops, and you get a whole lot more if you are near 100% rarity than if you have barely none, and you get a whole lot more if you aren't wasting time trying to craft on terrible odds than just grinding out kills to get the drops.

Playing around on craft of exile even in the limited state it is in for POE2 pretty much comes close to the numbers im saying above about items not even getting out of the trans+aug stage, and in SSF you have a very limited amount of currency to spend, you can't be taking bad gambles you have to trash items that aren't already somewhat there in the magic phase, because you will soon run out of regals etc.

If we had the deterministic crafting bench from PoE1 I would probably be able save more than quadrouple the amounts of items I end up bricking with the completely random system we have now, and a good majority of my gear probably would be self crafted isntead of found already good on ID.

Chaos orbs are also a terribly painful bottleneck in SSF "Crafting", I have multiple tabs of items that need to be hit with chaos before they are truely bricked, and 0 chaos orbs atm. And out of these 3 or so tabs I might save 2 or 3 pieces of gear from getting binned from that step, so its not even like chaos orbs are so powerful they are warranted to be 5-10x more rare than exalts.

I'm probably just going to run a loot filter similar to my trade character soon, forget bases and low currency exist and stop picking them, essence craft the few I have the essences for, and just keep grinding for rare item drops and praying they ID something usauble or just need a few exalt slams to be. Even in SSF I have more exalts than I could ever realistically use "crafting" so that isn't ever a bottleneck or a problem.

Mostly matches my SSF experience, though i was at a point where i was even slowly piling up on currency, despite transmuting, augmenting, regaling and even exalt slamming a multitude of items per map. (Lvl 94 monk)

I was spending quite some time thinking about how to fix this type of crafting system if GGG insist on keeping it mostly the way it is to avoid crafting becoming similar to PoE1.
I am convinced they dont want this game to have even close to the kind of control and determinism we had in PoE1.
I think the lacking options and abysmal droprates of crafting currency that would allow a margin of control for crafting are not a by-product of early access, but a deliberate design choice!


I am convinced think this game would be so much better if items would drop identified and we could actually filter items in maps for specific affixes via lootfilter (Kinda like its done in Last Epoch). I even made a thread about it, but it got lost in the sauce.

As a fellow SSF player, what do you think. Could that already be an answer to the problems you listed?

"

way2stupid#9491 wrote:

Mostly matches my SSF experience, though i was at a point where i was even slowly piling up on currency, despite transmuting, augmenting, regaling and even exalt slamming a multitude of items per map. (Lvl 94 monk)

I was spending quite some time thinking about how to fix this type of crafting system if GGG insist on keeping it mostly the way it is to avoid crafting becoming similar to PoE1.
I am convinced they dont want this game to have even close to the kind of control and determinism we had in PoE1.
I think the lacking options and abysmal droprates of crafting currency that would allow a margin of control for crafting are not a by-product of early access, but a deliberate design choice!


I am convinced think this game would be so much better if items would drop identified and we could actually filter items in maps for specific affixes via lootfilter (Kinda like its done in Last Epoch). I even made a thread about it, but it got lost in the sauce.

As a fellow SSF player, what do you think. Could that already be an answer to the problems you listed?

I dont think it will happen, I wouldnt care either way I guess. I just want my damn crafting bench back, or something to make crafting not just gambling or so prohibitively rare/expensive that its not worth interacting with for 99.999% of players. If I find an annul omen I'm just gonna transfer it over to trade even though I barely play there anymore because 40div or whatever is worth more to me than using it on some piece of crap in ssf.

"

BossOfThisGym#2062 wrote:

"

way2stupid#9491 wrote:

Mostly matches my SSF experience, though i was at a point where i was even slowly piling up on currency, despite transmuting, augmenting, regaling and even exalt slamming a multitude of items per map. (Lvl 94 monk)

I was spending quite some time thinking about how to fix this type of crafting system if GGG insist on keeping it mostly the way it is to avoid crafting becoming similar to PoE1.
I am convinced they dont want this game to have even close to the kind of control and determinism we had in PoE1.
I think the lacking options and abysmal droprates of crafting currency that would allow a margin of control for crafting are not a by-product of early access, but a deliberate design choice!


I am convinced think this game would be so much better if items would drop identified and we could actually filter items in maps for specific affixes via lootfilter (Kinda like its done in Last Epoch). I even made a thread about it, but it got lost in the sauce.

As a fellow SSF player, what do you think. Could that already be an answer to the problems you listed?

I dont think it will happen, I wouldnt care either way I guess. I just want my damn crafting bench back, or something to make crafting not just gambling or so prohibitively rare/expensive that its not worth interacting with for 99.999% of players. If I find an annul omen I'm just gonna transfer it over to trade even though I barely play there anymore because 40div or whatever is worth more to me than using it on some piece of crap in ssf.

Just a friendly reminder: transferring from SSF to Standard is currently not possible.

"

clorys#1391 wrote:

Just a friendly reminder: transferring from SSF to Standard is currently not possible.

Ya but it should be eventually, or they make it so you cant because they add special modifiers to SSF, either way its a win.

"

BossOfThisGym#2062 wrote:

"

way2stupid#9491 wrote:

Mostly matches my SSF experience, though i was at a point where i was even slowly piling up on currency, despite transmuting, augmenting, regaling and even exalt slamming a multitude of items per map. (Lvl 94 monk)

I was spending quite some time thinking about how to fix this type of crafting system if GGG insist on keeping it mostly the way it is to avoid crafting becoming similar to PoE1.
I am convinced they dont want this game to have even close to the kind of control and determinism we had in PoE1.
I think the lacking options and abysmal droprates of crafting currency that would allow a margin of control for crafting are not a by-product of early access, but a deliberate design choice!


I am convinced think this game would be so much better if items would drop identified and we could actually filter items in maps for specific affixes via lootfilter (Kinda like its done in Last Epoch). I even made a thread about it, but it got lost in the sauce.

As a fellow SSF player, what do you think. Could that already be an answer to the problems you listed?

I dont think it will happen, I wouldnt care either way I guess. I just want my damn crafting bench back, or something to make crafting not just gambling or so prohibitively rare/expensive that its not worth interacting with for 99.999% of players. If I find an annul omen I'm just gonna transfer it over to trade even though I barely play there anymore because 40div or whatever is worth more to me than using it on some piece of crap in ssf.

I think the next patches will bring us some clarity on where this game is going.
I might be completely off with this prediction, but i really do think GGG will not give us a lot of deterministic crafting options, if they even give us any at all. (current essences and omens imo strongly point in that direction)

So in my head, i am already planning a step ahead and ask myself, what steps could be made to improve a system that doesnt have a way to deterministically craft items. Or how could the current system be improved upon, without introducing deterministic crafting.

I also think that the current system, especially in SSF, feels so bad because the negative impact of two systems kinda double dips:
We cant craft in a deterministic way, but we also dont have a way to separate magic and rare items with favourable mods from items that are useless to us, unless we pick them up and identify them.
It makes the whole process all the more tedious.

So if we cant get deterministic crafting (again, this is just my hypothesis), at least make it easier to distinguish usable and non usable items without extra tedium.

Obviously you're gonna have to accept having shit gear in SSF as it currently is. Poe1 was of course better at it with 12 extra years of development into that area, and I could target farm a lot of the stuff I needed to craft specific things I needed.

Impossible to trade like many players out-there , 300 hours of crafting experience on PoE 2 : Crafting is pure frustration and it is not okay to play with a meh weapon ( raw DPS 310 ) because everything you try to craft for hundreds of hours afterward get RNG bricked . Last week i finally got a better weapon ( raw DPS 450 ) after spending hundreds of exalts , chaos orbs , and a dozen of divine to get the currencies .

Yesterday i crafted a lvl 77 Warstaff with the highest physical damage i got so far :



Troll Orb corrupted the 60 flat phys on it with 60 accuracy , making it's raw DPS goes from 540 to 270 , i'm keeping that shit around in the optics of selling it at some point but it's probably pure loss again ... crafting is so fun .

This is completely unacceptable to have a RNG heavy system where late game items have their attributes be switched from +6 Level to Melee Skills to a +1-5 Cold Damage when you Chaos/Vaal said items ( happened too ) . Yesterday again i had a Chaos orb adding and updating a Accuracy modifier to a Weapon 4 times in a row before i decided to throw it away .

> The chance for some modifiers to be added is way too high ( Accuracy / Life / etc )
> Chaos Orb should keep the tier level of a modifier or slightly alter it
> Vaal Orb should not be able to fuck over existing modifier
> Trading should not be the only viable solution to a piss poor crafting system when a large portion of players are unable to trade

Crafting should always just be an extension of the RNG of picking an item off the ground. Meaning choosing to upgrade good bases, good blue rolls, choosing to spend exalts on good rares etc. Chaos orbs arent meant to be used on items with 6 mods. They are used to fix an item with 3-4 mods and anything else is extreme luck. I do wish they were slightly more common though.

I do agree that having the ability to fix an item a bit with the crafting bench goes a long way, but any kind of targeted crafting very quickly devolves into the ground becoming useless again. Right now it's really not that hard to craft items. But it's indeed mostly rng, which is better.

yeah i think thats a fair assessment boss.



im fine with the crafting system being like this personally in terms of most of the mechanics, not having the reroll stuff like alterations as a principal. but i do think something fairly big has to shift in the tuning of it, i think it can get there but as it currently stands this is not it.


things i would personally like to see to help this:



change how essences work. the regal essences are fine, we should see more of them tho (i havent seen a single one btw), but the normal essences shouldnt work like transmutes they should work like augments. old essences gave you the actual specific mod, these essences can hit multiple shit mods and if they hit the one you want its got many shit tiers. its ok to make them more powerful like this, id argue its neccesary.



remove all these hybrid mods from armour. really, i dont want to use a defence essence on a chest and get +8 armour, +7 evasion and 10% armour and evasion to end up with a 1 mod 3 stat item that is essentially the same as the white item ever again. stop, enough already, get rid and get that weighting on life regen nerfed into the floor. i cant deal with 1 in 3 exalts/trans/augs hitting life regen any more im losing the will to live.


more alchs early game campaign and a lot more chaos orbs in end game.



it should be less about the trans/aug/regal/ex slam. thats got a place and it needs to be here but its a confusing mess and i think it becomes really fatiguing with how badly weighted everything is.




i really think we need to be able to resocket our runes too.