Crafting Accessibility

Hi,

PoE 2 has an amazing crafting system. It’s deep, interesting, and clearly designed by people who care about long-term progression. This feedback isn’t about crafting being bad or too hard, because it isn’t. The problem is that crafting, in its current state, depends too much on the market for most players to realistically engage with it.

In a seasonal ARPG, not everyone can play for 10 or 14 hours a day. Many players have one or two hours after work, or only weekends. Difficulty is not the issue here. The issue is access. Right now, a large part of the meta is achieved through crafting, but the materials required to do so are rare, fully RNG, and quickly become very expensive. This means that for a lot of players, crafting is something you either can’t afford to attempt or something you interact with only by buying the final item from someone else.

When failing a craft feels too costly, players stop experimenting. They stop learning the system. Instead of crafting being gameplay, it becomes a financial decision. That’s a shame, because the system itself is genuinely great. It feels like something that should reward time spent playing and understanding mechanics, not just access to an inflated economy.
Early in a league, this feels manageable. As the league progresses, inflation kicks in, prices detach from realistic farm rates, and the window where a normal player can self-craft closes very quickly. Each league this happens earlier, as more players rush at the start and accumulate currency faster. The result is that the meta doesn’t just become difficult to reach, it becomes economically out of reach for anyone who isn’t heavily invested in trade.

To be clear, this is not about making BIS items cheap or removing RNG. Rare, expensive items should exist. Full optimization should reward dedication. The issue is that even reaching a functional meta setup often requires buying either finished items or extremely expensive crafting materials from the market. Crafting should be the main path for players to progress their characters on their own, while trade should be an optional shortcut for those who want to save time or don’t want to engage with the system.

A healthier direction would be making crafting materials drop more frequently, so players can actually practice crafting themselves. Let players fail, learn, and try again using what they find while playing, instead of being forced to buy items or materials just to participate. Access to the meta should come from playing the game, not from who had more time to rush the economy early in the league.
That’s the core of the issue. Crafting in PoE 2 is excellent, but it shouldn’t be locked behind the market for a large portion of the playerbase.

There should (and probably will be) more currency introduced in future leagues that will add more deterministic crafting in certain steps of your craft. Sure, some of that new currency will be rare to cater to the nolifers, but some will be common as well (e.g., vaal infuser gambas) for the general population.

Currently, Cheaper crafting methods are less deterministic, but quick while more expensive crafts are more deterministic and much more time consuming to do. It looks like the usual craft setups are something like this (not touching rings/amulets - they use breach catalysts in certain steps and are more expensive than other gear items to craft/buy):
1. Using a normal base -> perfect aug/trans -> magic base with 2 T1 mods
2. Using a magic base -> greater essence -> rare base with 2 T1 1 T3 mod
3. Desecrating a modifier -> unveil. Rare base with 2 T1, 1 T3 and 1 desecrated mod (whether that mod is something you want, don't care about, or you picked a useless mod but with a high weight value so that it doesn't get picked during the next crafting steps is something you determine when you're crafting your gear)
4. Depending on your in-game tax bracket:
4.1.Less Deterministic in your crafting:
4.1.1 Using 2 Regular/Greater Exalted orbs and finish your craft.
4.1.2 Using Omen of Dextral Exaltation + Perfect Exalt and finish your craft.
4.2. More deterministic (whether to get a desired modifier or be able to repeat a step without losing existing desired modifiers):
4.2.1 Using perfect essences + Omen of Dextral Crystallization or Omen of Sinistral Crystallization (usually used when you no longer have open modifier slots left in your gear and have some undesirable modifiers you hope will get replaced)
4.2.2. Desecrating again (if desecrated mod was replaced during a previous step of your crafting process) + Omen of Abyssal Echoes to try and get a modifier you want and at a tier you want to settle on and finish your craft.
4.2.3 Using Omen of light + Annulment Orb to remove undesired desecrated mod and try step 4.2.2 again until you want to finish your craft (I used this only once in my crafting attempts, too expensive for me...)

This league I played a bit more with crafting than in the previous one and I got a better feel for it, but I personally never felt that I had enough currency to try crafts using fracturing orbs (typically done in step 3 before unveiling a desecrated mod in order to fracture 1 of 3 modifiers [veiled desecrated mods cannot be fractured]) completely ignored some of the more expensive essences (e.g., essence of horror, essence of the abyss) and considered every other currency (e.g. omen of whittling) to not exist at all.

In other words, I just stuck to the crafting steps I mentioned above and ignored any other crafting strategies (e.g., annul orb + perfect aug/trans to get the combination of modifiers they want on magic bases, or just chaos spam in general)

For those like me who are discouraged that GGG does not (and probably will never) introduce somethin akin to a training/sandbox mode, but really want to play around with crafting, I strongly recommend craft of exiles Emulator to play with: https://www.craftofexile.com/?game=poe2

I also like the way PoE2 (and to lesser degree, PoE1 as well) approaches crafting.

You need to do a bit of thinking with it and over time, you improve in immediately recognizing good mods and bases, and learn what is the best approach for ensuring an outcome that is an upgrade over your current gear.

However I also agree that as it is, a lot of crafting is essentially blocked off from the majority of players. The interesting crafting possibilities really start to only open up with omens, orbs of annulment, fracturing orbs.

But the drop rates for them are so low that you can not use them unless you play the game full-time. Over this league I've had like.. 4 orbs of annulments drop. That's not enough to guarantee an upgrade. On SSF, I'd try to use them in some way, but the deterministic ways of utilizing them are also hard to get - like I've had round zero Omen of Lights drop - and of course after I remove a mod, I have to try to roll a new one which can again fail. It's likely I would not be able to create an upgrade.

On trade, if you don't have enough of these currencies to have a high chance at getting an upgrade, you're better served by selling them.

Essentially, the level of crafting where it becomes the most nuanced and most interesting is reserved to a minority of players who can play almost full-time and who are very skilled with the game.

I am not fully sure if adding the direct currency drops would be the solution. On SSF, yeah maybe, though, even on SSF, those high-skilled, high-hours players are kitted up with some darn good stuff only a week into the league. So there's a risk you'd cut off progression from these players. On trade, it's a similar issue. Yes, you can make currencies drop more, but that will increase the supply of good gear, and probably reduce the value of currency compared to good items (ergo; inflation of currencies). What that leads to, is that then players will get the affordable gear faster than now and they might get one step better gear then they get now, but the next step is going to still be just as unreachable as before.

The problem, as I see it, is ultimately that players, especially trade players, hit a soft ceiling to their progression too early into the league. The soft ceiling being that the next significant power curve threshold is too far for them to attain.

Essentially, as a crude example with made up times and percentages just to illustrate the issue:

In 20 hours, you have top 60% gear.
In 40 hours, you have top 40% gear.
In 60 hours, you have top 30% gear.
In 80 hours, you have top 25% gear.
In 100 hours, you have top 22.5% gear.
In 120 hours, you have top 20% gear.

Etc.

And you get stuck somewhere there around the 20% point.

I am fairly sure that simply modifying the drop rates will only shift the point of being stuck - and because gear prices are a proxy to drop rates, if you drop more, it means that yes, you reach a higher power level before you run out of progression, but you also go through the progression faster.

One of the things I think was actually very clever was making the Temple crafting be "use it or lose it". I also think it was a good thing they changed it to drop the orbs after Act 3.

Anyway, in Act 1-3, the fact that you need to use the crafting benches in the Temple in that instance or lose them is something that exactly encouraged players to try a bit of crafting at least.

Similarly, I think the max item levels on the lower abyssal bones are a good thing as they encourage using those yourself instead of selling them. And it reduces the FOMO of using them early.