Crafting needs a rework

I've played POE for well over 10 years now, and for most of that time I've tried to be patient with the crafting system. But with POE2 in EA, I think it's time for the devs to look at reworking the crafting system.

Without delving into the numerous issues (tiered currency, floor drops being 99% worthless, RNG playing way too much a role, etc) I'm curious WHY crafting is unnecessarily complex? I've got a few friends who play the game casually, and I've spent multiple hours explaining how to craft items to them. I'd venture to guess that most casual players are NEVER going to fully grasp crafting. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that most devs do not fully grasp the crafting system.

Is there a reason crafting has been made so needlessly difficult to understand?

I don't know anyone who thinks crafting in POE/POE2 is fun. And it's certainly far more difficult than necessary, with most serious players investing a ton of time, effort, and money into squirreling away gear into dozens or hundreds of stash tabs. Not to mention spending dozens of hours finding crafting materials (Omen of Light, Echoes, Greater or Perfect Exalts, etc) only to get terrible RNG. Does it really sound fun to waste hours and hours finding these mats only to get trash rolls?

Easy solution: ditch useless affixes like "light radius" and the dreaded "lower attribute requirements", and maybe link/weight certain affixes to certain items (for example: hp more likely on armor, +melee damage more likely to appear alongside flat damage on gloves)

More complicated solution: rework crafting altogether so floor drops are more useful and crafting doesn't require hours of watching videos or reading guides.

The greatest games (Mario, Tetris, etc) are great because woven into their simplicity is a gradual ramping up of difficulty that teaches the player how to master the game. So much of POE is already complex. Why make crafting so byzantine and miserable? As an HCSSF/SSF player, the game is fun and playable, but crafting is an aggravating slog that often takes a lot of enjoyment out of the game.

Thanks for reading.

PS. I'd also recommend an update to the tier system for floor drops. I can't count how many hours a season I spend simply look through floor drops in hopes of finding something other than trash. It's sad to ID a tier 5 floor drop only to find max lower attributes or some other trash. I'd recommend a system that weighs synergies between modifiers to rate gear. For example, if a quarterstaff drops with % phys and +phys (both high tier) give it an A rating or something. The current tiering system is a joke.

I agree but they said they have 1.0 almost ready (in terms of planning).

I don't think there's going to be any meaningful changes to crafting, just more choices to target certain mod pools.
Floor drops will keep being bad forever just like PoE1 after a decade.

I think this is a huge issue because trading becomes the cheaper and safer route, making crafting like any other annoying thing in the game: better off not engaging with it (like rares with ultra-annoying mods, maps that roll awful mods, etc).

It's because of trade. If good items drop regularly, trade becomes meaningless.

I don't think crafting is the main issue. It's more of unwillingness to interact/understand and misplaced expectations. If crafting is a guarantee then ground items are 100% worthless and vice versa. So where's the balance? Lots of drops with robust options for modifications even if some of those mods are outright bad. Which is what we're getting in 0.5, even a method of making unique items more viable so picking up every one you see would be more reasonable now.

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Cicsero#2961 wrote:

I don't think crafting is the main issue. It's more of unwillingness to interact/understand and misplaced expectations. If crafting is a guarantee then ground items are 100% worthless and vice versa. So where's the balance? Lots of drops with robust options for modifications even if some of those mods are outright bad. Which is what we're getting in 0.5, even a method of making unique items more viable so picking up every one you see would be more reasonable now.

The main issue is RNG, which crafting gets the biggest share of.
This extends the game content's life. You may know what you need, you may even be able to get it easily, but you won't get it in most of the attempts that you make to get it and you may need more than one attempt to get it (fragments, etc).

The issue is that RNG is so overtuned in general that, when it comes to gear, there's a hierarchy that makes anything a bit less reliant on RNG beat anything else. So the hierarchy ends up being loot < crafting < trading.
Ground loot is trash because it fills items with useless mods. Because crafting allows you to target certain mods or mod pools (essences, abyss, omens...) it's a lot better to pick a base, or maybe even a magic item with a high tier mod you want, than going looking for rares which have higher chances to include trash.
But the issue is that the further you go into the end game, the more you're going to need to min-max your gear. So while you could be OK with crafting an item with 4 out of 6 good mods while you're doing T1-T13 maps, when you get to T14-T16 maps you can't afford to have items with redundant or useless mods. Because of how insane RNG is (it can brick items, make you waste high value currency like crazy, etc) trade becomes the end-all-be-all tool in the game. Why waste 90d worth of currency when you can find a similar item for 25d without risking wasting those 90d for nothing? Unless you're giga-rich and can afford to spend loads of currency to craft mirror-tier gear (something that's beyond the reach of most players) there's no point.

Crafting makes ground loot less relevant and trading makes crafting a deficitary choice.
Because gear is what allows you to advance in the game (everything is mostly a gear-check, the skill ceiling in this game is very low), crafting good gear is the key for progress (you won't find what you need with loot unless you only use uniques) therefore the central problem of the game.

Since crafting can be bypassed by trade, which is a non-engagement mechanic, the game encourages this by punishing you for choosing crafting over trade. And this is a recurrent theme in the game. Whatever is bad for your build, it's better not to engage with it because the punishment tends to outweigh the reward.
Example: A rare monster with a combination of mods that can be of high danger to your build. Engaging with it may lead to you losing 10% XP and access to the map. The reward could perfectly be the same reward for destroying a vase or opening a harmless chest, as divines and things like that can drop from those (or nothing at all, just like with the rare).

The solution to all this could perfectly be to make the game more feat-based rather than RNG-based (some RNG for flavour could remain), but that would work against the top aspiration of the game which is to maximize time spent in the game.

Not picking up even Tier 2-4 items, quickly identifying them, and deciding to toss or keep them in that moment is fundamentally a skill issue. No matter the league you're playing in.

In SSF I was able to find a good amulet base and roll a +3 skills mod multiple times with minimal thought. Yes I bricked maybe scores of amulets doing it, but that just means I was willing to check ground items and found scores of items worth crafting. Same with armors I couldn't wear or didn't plan on using. I found something, checked it, thought "ohh that's almost sick" and made some nasty full T1 mod body armors and helmets. I was blasting t15 maps on Oracle within a week and ended a month in due to a failed Temporalis run.

I expect most items I identify to be mid because in SSF I need to interact with crafting. Crafting makes ground loot more relevant in spite of the RNG. In trade league I don't even expect to interact with trade because inflation will outpace anything I can do alone whether it's due to an exploit or botting. So learning how to craft is a benefit to me regardless of the league. In my eyes trading is a non-engagement mechanic. Because crafting well can get me into t14 and t15 maps faster than farming divines can.

In the end when it comes down to whether the RNG is excessive I just remember that in Magic: The Gathering bad cards (mods) have to exist so good cards (mods) can exist and that this is an ARPG at its core.

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Not picking up even Tier 2-4 items, quickly identifying them, and deciding to toss or keep them in that moment is fundamentally a skill issue. No matter the league you're playing in.

Nothing to do with skill. It's an efficiency assessment.
You have better odds crafting a base with tiered currency and controlling the mod pool with omens, essences and desecration than waiting until you get the specific gear you need for your build with a tier 5 tag and hoping there are no T1 useless mods bricking it.

The rest of it doesn't really address any of the issues so I can't really comment on it.

Cheers.

The depth of crafting is literally the only reason I started playing PoE to begin with. I love it. Not sold on the socketables stuff in 2 yet, but overall still love the crafting complexity. It is actively fun for me, that's why I'm usually mostly a hideout warrior.

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Cicsero#2961 wrote:

Not picking up even Tier 2-4 items, quickly identifying them, and deciding to toss or keep them in that moment is fundamentally a skill issue.

How on Earth is picking up something, IDing it, and keeping or tossing it a "skill" issue? It's fundamentally a time issue, namely busywork for the sake of busywork with a statistically tiny chance of that item being worthwhile. That isn't skill. Or fun. It's a massive timesink, and one of the fundamental problems with crafting. Ground loot is nearly always worthless. And the time needed to verify that fact doesn't add to the game. It's simply a waste of time.

And to the gentleman above who said that easier crafting would make trade worthless. That's mind-boggling. POE was initially designed without trade. The trade system was essentially created by players. GGG taking over 10 years to add a semi-functional trade system is testament to this fact. POE isn't a trade simulator with an ARPG tacked on. It's the opposite.

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KaosuRyoko#1633 wrote:

The depth of crafting is literally the only reason I started playing PoE to begin with. I love it. Not sold on the socketables stuff in 2 yet, but overall still love the crafting complexity. It is actively fun for me, that's why I'm usually mostly a hideout warrior.

I get that, and totally respect your opinion. My primary issue with crafting is that it's complexity, while appealing to some players like yourself (and me to a degree), is so needlessly complex and heavy on RNG that it's a point of frustration for many players... so much so that trade is often seen as a necessity. When a system in a game is so complex that it requires spending a significant amount of time watching tutorials to understand it, there's a problem. Why isn't there an in-game tutorial on crafting? Probably because maybe two employees at GGG fully understand the system, and the amount of effort it would take to explain such a bloated and byzantine system isn't worth the payoff. Instead, there's a trade system and farmers and streamers and countless other resources that players turn to because crafting is simply too damn hard to understand.

I'm not saying make crafting stupidly simple. Just streamline it some so that the RNG isn't so crushing (consolidate tiers so there's half as many or weight stats so they have a tendency to be found together) or create more orbs that are specific to stats, like essences. There are some pretty simple solutions that would make crafting far easier to understand without it requiring hours of study or ruining the fun of creating an item that feels special.