WTF is wrong with r/POE r/POE2 subreddits?

**TLDR:** Since I don't see any reason why there shouldn't also be a ranking of "rarity" amongst crafted modifiers when executing 1p/1es + 1ep/1s you want to craft the **highest cost** veiled modifiers since this will likely increase your odds of your natural desired affixes 1p and 1s to be chosen for your final item.
**TLDR END**

To the best of my knowledge, my own math and empiricism this is correct. So at first glance we basically improve our odds from 0,59^2 to 5/9. **There is a small yet not insignificant detail which either many people are not aware of or forget to mention.** Let me explain why 5/9 might not be entirely accurate:

3.25.1 Patch Notes state "When Recombinating items, rarer Modifiers now have a much higher chance to be selected for the resulting item than before." [[1](https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3552513)]

**This implies that there is no normal distribution when modifiers for recombination are selected and maybe we can use this to our advantage by changing which kind of modifiers we craft.** The Path of Exile Wiki states the following "Higher weight modifiers are more likely to be selected, although the exact formula is unknown." [[2](https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Recombinator)] Since our goal on recombinating 1p/1es and 1ep/1s is to maintain both natural mods 1p and 1s what if the rank and "rarity" of your crafted mods also are taking into account the same way "rarer Modifiers now have a much higher chance to be selected". This leads me to believe that when crafting veiled modifiers for 1p/1es+1ep/s we want to choose the "rarest" crafts we can possible get assuming cost of craft correlates/implies rarity of the craft.

I've crafted plenty of PDPS axes this league and crafting 4ex veiled prefixes and 4ex veiled suffixes for 1p/1es+1ep/s yielded better results and higher success rate than crafting lower rank veiled crafts. Especially with Exalted Orbs being so common now and no apparent reason for why the "rarity" of a craft should have no impact on recombinating I will definitely keep using high cost crafts. I have no where enough data though to prove my thesis.

I came up with idea of using dust cost of recombinating items as an indicator and determining factor for the "rarity" of crafted affixes. And while low cost crafts end up being way cheaper when recombinating (1s axe + 55-64 maximum mana axe costs 14~k dust, while 1s axe + Flaring Axe costs 67~k dust) I discovered that 4ex crafted veiled prefix is incredibly close in dust cost to Flaring (1s axe + 4ex crafted prefix is 75~k dust cost). So if dust should be a conclusive indicator for "rarity" of a crafted affix, recombinating a 4ex veiled craft with a Flaring axe Flaring is more likely to be chosen.

Postscript: I made several more interesting observations like for example Celebration on an axe yields **HIGHER** dust cost than an 4ex crafted veiled suffix. Which to me wasn't intuitive because Celebration has 1000 weighting while Flaring has only 200 weighting. So apparently modifier weighting doesn't not necessarily translates into "rarity" when chosen for recombination.

If my thesis is correct, this also has many implications when you try to maintain an affix on an certain item. ~~For example if you recomb Xp/1s and Xp/0s and want to increase the odds of keeping the 1s instead of crafting low "rarity" modifiers you instead again want to craft "rare" affixes.~~ **See addendum A on why I chose to to strike through this part.** Another very cool use case is I made out is if you have a mixed bag of either prefixes or suffixes where one is desirable and others are not. To maximize probability to isolate the preferred affix you generally do **NOT** want to craft an affix. But if an undesired affix shares a pool with a crafted affix you should add the "most common" craft of said affix. This will **not only** increase your adds of your desired affix to be present **but also** **increase the odds** of your undesired affix to be eliminated. This is true since a crafted and a natural mod of the same type both cannot be present at once. And since you craft a "more common" or low rank version of your undesired affix this will have higher probability to be chosen.

I found so many more of such niche use cases with possibly increased odds, also very cool stuff with transferring e.g. Dictators/Merciless or any very low weighting mod from one base to another (beyond our NNN deterministic transfer tech mentioned here [[3](https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1ljll69/using_recombination_and_essences_for_guaranteed/)]) or possibly increasing chances when recombinating 1p+2p or 1s+2s since it is so hard to find any in-depth and quality info on recombination and more so very difficult to prove any kind of assumptions.

I've been working on a write up and a few videos to publish to hopefully showcase some possibly useful tech. Surely I'll manage to come around and get these done.

Apologies for the wall of text.

[1] https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3552513

[2] https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Recombinator

[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1ljll69/using_recombination_and_essences_for_guaranteed/

**Addendum A:**

As many have pointed out before in this subreddit and as it has been documented in [[4](https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Recombinator#Version_history)] Version 3.26.0 using the now Unpredictable Recombination method will result in fewer modifiers when using exclusive modifiers like crafted veiled modifiers.

Since recombinating Xp/1s + Xp/0s is affected by this nerf I removed mentioning this tech since I wouldn't consider it a "net positive" for increasing odds of desired outcomes. Assuming the nerf simply doesn't add more occurrences than 1 of exclusive modifiers to the mod pool I still believe for retaining 1s in our scenario still benefits from crafting e.g. two 4ex veiled modifiers: pre craft it's 0.59 to succeed, (assuming equal/normal distribution) post craft it's 1/3 + 2/3 * 1/2. So it is a slight increase in odds while also costing less dust on top. Still to me this is too marginal to deserve a spot as "new tech" but I keep it here as an honorary mention.

Also shoutout to user u/Switchersaw to have the same assumption that multiple occurrences of exclusive modifiers simply just not get added to the modpool [[5](https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1p73z30/recombination_and_essence_specific_mods/nqwsjzx/)].

[4] https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Recombinator#Version_history

[5] https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1p73z30/recombination_and_essence_specific_mods/nqwsjzx/