The lack of a crafting system is the single greatest design problem in the game.

Ignoring the terrible Atlus in PoE 2, lack of a crafting system is the main issue.

With at least some simple, easily acquired, deterministic outcomes to upgrades (crafting bench PLEASE) it would alleviate most of the issues the game has and make the experience cohesive and enjoyable; just like in PoE 1 (I know a lot of people hate to hear that due to tribalism).

PoE 1's crafting system allows for:

- All the league mechanics to drop varying types of loot. So if you don't like the gear that dropped, then you can always grab the crafting materials for at least SOME reward/upgrade. The orbs that you get now are unlikely to ever give you an upgrade outside of trade.

- Giving players more agency in the market either through making gear that saves them from spending in the market (SSF), using the crafting materials to make sellable gear, or selling those materials because they are valuable to crafters. Always giving players value from their efforts.

- Allows players to have a good selection of upgrades in the market, for reasonable prices. Anybody that looks for resist upgrades in PoE 2 can see that they are VERY expensive for something that's bare minimum for surviving after campaign. Items with just half decent stats are very rare. The playerbase, at ALL skill levels, suffer and die way more than necessary just because they are at a disadvantage in an endgame designed around you having this upgrade. [This one can be alleviated by having the negative resist penalty be given throughout maps instead of the campaign. But crafting also fixes this so it's another argument in favor of a crafting system.]

- Creates scenarios where items that dropped, which were originally bad, such as a blank item with no stats or only 1 good stat, the ability to eventually always become something useful through upgrading/rerolling it. This makes more loot, more meaningful. GGG has this backwards somehow...

- Allows players to tailor items to use at any stage of the game so they aren't struggling. Otherwise players will either struggle or thrive, even in campaign, on pure RNG. This feels SO bad particularly when other people are speeding through campaign at a pace that keeps everything fresh due to good drops. Meanwhile, you are struggling at every other zone, dying constantly, and why? Because you didn't drop items that will help you survive even 1 hit or do enough damage. This takes all agency out of the player's hands and GGG's solution is 'well, guess you gotta spend x2(+) in previous areas for some drops, unlucky dude'.

- To hand tailor the challenges and approach to playing the game. Crafting is used for upgrading the challenges and rewards too, not just gear. The ability to reroll a map that's bad for my build gives me agency over the way I want to play and allows for builds to exist that are tailor made to do a certain thing or ignore a debilitating mechanic, in a game that would otherwise make that build worthless. [It can be argued the game shouldn't have as many build breaking mods but let's focus on one, simple rework to solve many problems instead of reworking and solving only one problem.]

Agreed. It's as if GGG made PoE1 completely by accident, and then undermined the great work of their artists (the visuals and animation in PoE2 are top notch!) by throwing out about 90% of what still makes PoE1 a compelling game.

Jonathan Rogers has said something like forty times by now that the socketables system in PoE2 is their replacement for the crafting bench. Rather than crafting a mod onto an item for a fixed currency cost, you have sockets on items that can accept a variety of socketables to patch build problems or enhance gear.

That system is not currently as broad as the POE1 crafting bench because the crafting bench went from "a stopgap to help players patch get-through-the-game stuff on basic found gear" to "literally the only thing in the entire game that exists for an elite player and the only possible way to create items worth owning." The bench ate PoE1 and erased any reason for anything else to exist; they're not going to make the same mistake in 2.

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1453R#7804 wrote:

Jonathan Rogers has said something like forty times by now that the socketables system in PoE2 is their replacement for the crafting bench. Rather than crafting a mod onto an item for a fixed currency cost, you have sockets on items that can accept a variety of socketables to patch build problems or enhance gear.

I can accept socketables as a big part of crafting and to balance out gear problems. I like the concept of socketables but I would like to see a way to add an additional socket to items on top of the current base sockets and the random vaal socket. If all items could have one more socket then you could really play around with socketing gear. Maybe even the new socket cannot accept a rune of the same type as already socketed to force some diversity of runes. Maybe even no socket on an item can accept the same rune.

Between the chaos and wisp runes, we are getting a fair amount of socketable items but not enough sockets for them to go into. Currently most socket slots go to just balancing out your resist.

A crafting system was not part of how they designed ARPGs before. Finding loot, playing the RNG / non-deterministic game WAS the whole game and it was totally fine. RNG is the nature of ARPGs. PoE1 was 100% RNG for a good while however good currency are rare in PoE1 and people started complaining about lack of loot and being forced to trade so they added crafting and more deteministic systems.

However in PoE2 Regal orbs and Exalted orbs are A LOT more common so it's much easier to find good gear which has been the case from my experience while in PoE1 you have to use the crafting bench or you're fucked.

I have to agree, it's starting to get on my nerves.
The crafting system in the game literally FAILED!
Drop of currency, specially like 'Orb of Annulment' is rare like a mirror drop.

WTF is going on here?
all my crafting methods leads to *Tier 1 bonuses* at hige level items (80-81).

Again, WTF?

I'm still trying to figure out what about POE1's 'crafting' is deterministic, unless you are one of the elite levels of players. More than 95% of the player base has never had a fracturing orb, and that's one of the most crucial currencies for deterministic 'crafting'.

I started a Reddit about a year or two ago about crafting, because, after playing the game for multiple years already at that point, I still was having severe issues with getting anything remotely close to deterministic. I had tried over and over, every league, even using the crafting website.

The only resulting truth about POE1's 'crafting' is that unless you are part of that exceptionally rare few who manage to get currencies like fracturing orbs, the entire process is like buying scratch-off tickets and hoping for that $10K payout that has a 1 in 8000 or whatever chance.

And, sorry not sorry, but slamming thousands of currency isn't deterministic. In that analogy above, it's like saying it's deterministic if you buy 8000 of the tickets. No, that's just simply wrong, and should never be a part of any gaming system.

With POE2, however, I have yet to play a character who didn't have pretty nice gear all the way to lvl 70+, and with really few items bought from the trade site. Almost the entirety of all of my gear has either been found or crafted.

I have more than a few complaints about parts of POE2, but the crafting isn't one of them. IMO, the biggest problem facing POE2 is tying skills to weapons. The best part of POE1 is build diversity, and that stems from skills being fairly open to be used by any class, and any weapon. There are some exceptions in the form of skills like slams that require a specific subset of weapons (staff, sceptre, sword, mace, etc.) but that's still a pretty long list of weapons.

POE2 feels like it was built to be so limiting that they can make certain what builds will be available, and keep control over how powerful players can ever be. It's the antithesis to POE1, and removes a great deal of the fun from the game imo. If it keeps this way, it'll be one of the primary reasons the game fails (if it fails, that is).

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NathanielM#4655 wrote:

Drop of currency, specially like 'Orb of Annulment' is rare like a mirror drop.

WTF is going on here?

Well, from where I'm sitting it seems like one thing that's definitely going on is you saying some absolute bonkers nonsense.

There are currently over 300 Orbs of Annulment available for exchange on the market for ~8 Exalted Orbs so I'm pretty confident saying they're at least a tiny bit more common than mirrors but I don't know I'm no economist.

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NathanielM#4655 wrote:

I have to agree, it's starting to get on my nerves.
The crafting system in the game literally FAILED!
Drop of currency, specially like 'Orb of Annulment' is rare like a mirror drop.

WTF is going on here?
all my crafting methods leads to *Tier 1 bonuses* at hige level items (80-81).

Again, WTF?

yup. i just hit a recom on a mace with some really good mods, but you're still stuck with blind exalts.
i exalted t2 accuracy/light radius, then t1 lightning dmg, then out of spite i filled it and got t1 % phys dmg and t2 something useless i can't even remember. deleted the item after deleting currency and will probably never try crafting again.

it literally is a waste of currency. it is not worth it. sure you MAY hit something, but you have to have enough currency to actually try crafting 400 pieces then maybe one hits. it feels absolutely TERRIBLE.

even if my craft hit it would have only been worth a divine or two most likely. if you're on trade league it is 100% always the case to just save all currency, sell all items you can't/don't use and just buy upgrades.