I am currently playing the campaign and have made it to level 38, but most of my gear are Uniques that can’t be crafted on. Most of the yellow drops I find are really no better than previous gear. I’ve shattered some items but it still is just yellow gear with maybe 4 mediocre stats. I know the next step is purple gear but I haven’t had any purple gear drop yet.
I don’t fully understand gear improvement in this game. Can somebody explain or point my to an excellent in-depth, detailed video on how this works? I’ve watched Raxx but he doesn’t really dive into this in detail.
Is anyone else kind of confused on this? I’m so used to finding better equipment as drops.
Exalted items (purple gear) drop later, unless you’re really lucky.
The point of early crafting isn’t so much you picking a rare and crafting on it, but picking up a decent magic (blue) with a couple of stats that are useful and upgrade them. Or eventually add new useful affixes to them.
However, if it’s your first character, it’s likely you don’t have many shards yet. In your first playthrough crafting is more for endgame. Crafting in early-mid game is mostly when you already have a huge number of shards and you don’t mind spending them for a small improvement (or even no improvement if the crafting fails/consumes all FP).
Think of it less like “Crafting” and more like “Enhancing” in this game.
You don’t make stuff up, you get something that dropped and improve it or break it for shards to improve other items.
Anything has a limit on how much you can change and “improving” them might end up just making them worse if you’re not too careful.
Early game you’ll be getting items with good enough stats and trying to make them great stats. Even just 2 stats at T5 on an early item might be much better than an item with 3 or 4 stats at low tiers and maybe bad stats.
Most items have short life time in this game until the very end game, so you’ll always be looking for items that are similiar or slightly better as a starting point from your items and try to improve them to get a higher stat count on your character.
Since it’s limited how much you can craft at some point you’ll drop something simmiliar to what you have BUT with still forging potential on it, so that means you’ll be able to make something objectively better than what you have.
You’ll also want to hoard items later on because you might have T3 Health and Cold Resist on your belt and T2 Health and Hybrid health on your body armor else, maybe you then drop a belt you can upgrade to T5 Health and Hybrid health, so you’ll want to change your body armor to get cold resist no make up for it and in the end you’ll have more stats than before.
The game is more about having lots of items as a puzzle and whenever you get 1 new good item, you’ll shift everything around to become stronger than before.
A lot of unique items aren’t very good unless you have an entire build built around them. Just because something is unique doesn’t mean you should equip it. I’d generally ignore uniques unless you are certain it specifically enhances your build.
in the early game, your strategy should be to come up with a build that has an offensive focus and a defensive focus. Then you should begin crafting rares and trying to manipulate items so that all of your prefixes and suffixes are feeding into those offensives and defensives. (Life or Ward should be a part of most defensive strategy) Chaos useless affixes, fill out empty affixes with best choices. Don’t be afraid to brick a lot of items in the process. Pay attention to the implicits of item bases as they can be very important. Particularly the base DMG when it is relevant to your build.
Learn the loot filter. In the early game make a generic loot filter to highlight items that have a minimum of like 10-15 total tiers of affixes. Those will be things you MIGHT start crafting on. Also make a loot filter highlighting items that have a high tier of affixes that are specifically relevant to your build to either start crafting on or for the purpose of shattering/removing for shards. Carefully read the description of all the crafting glyphs and runes until you understand what they do then experiment with them and think about how that could be used to manipulate items to suite your build.
