Essences!?

Why is nobody talking about essences? The system in the first game is better. You use 3 to upgrade to greater of the same. Why is this not a thing in PoE 2? Crafting, excuse me, lottery winning, something good is hard enough. The point of crafting is to be deterministic, not like the random crap from the ground. So essences gonna be improved when?

The point of crafting is to add determinism. But if it gets too deterministic we get an Item Editor.

Don't get me wrong. I really think a lost aspect of classic Diablo 2 days is that casual players had the chance to just use a save editor and tweak their items for offline play or LAN play with friends. But this whole idea has been erased from the canon of ARGPs as we made the online component mandatory.

So really at the end we need a good balance between determinism and random. And the more determinist aspects should be more expensive.

That said, the effect of greater essences is itself quite random. So maybe not having the choice to upgrade essences is a problem. But the other side of the coin is that greater essences are incredibly inexpensive to begin with. Or perhaps the fact that divine orb cost inflation really ends up trivializing the costs of a lot of crafting elements. Really, once you are playing like tier 5 maps and divine orbs have a chance to drop every once in a while, then the price of a lot of materials becomes really trivial.

Quite random? In PoE 1 there are bunch of tiers per essence, except the very special ones. Because of that you know exactly what they gonna roll. They were key to crafting something good once endgame was entered.