Yeah, that I get, and those are still available, right?
So what’s the probability of rolling those? Is that part of the “guaranteed” bit you mention? 'Cause that sounds a bit like how it’s “guaranteed” to get a double exalted with useful exalts on a useful base (or whatever is comparable rarity). Or maybe a sunk cost thing.
Like getting a 4lp unique is guaranteed “with time investment”, and then a double exalted item to slam on it. I think you’re understating the “time investment” required, including the amount of time it takes to acquire the knowledge.
Yes, but you can also choose what affixes to craft on an item, that’s a very big thing in LE’s favour.
Yeah, the base with several of the affixes you want already on it.
The ‘sell and buy new base’ method is when a decent valuable outcome happens. Cost recovery up to a degree where you might even make a surplus. That’s the core reason for it.
There’s a good amount of very very specific high-end crafts which have such fail-states though, agreed… but they’ve gotten less and less over the last years with the new mechanics.
As for the average user… it’s fairly easy to buy a fractured base and slap essences on it until it turns out decent. Meta-crafting also is plainly spoken… piss easy. But it’s simply tedious. Apply ‘suffix cannot be removed’, use craft, craft failed, scour, apply ‘suffix cannit be removed’… it’s a chore. Also it’s expensive (2 div per click). That’s the major limiter, cost.
The majority of players don’t get more then 50 divines a league. Why? Because the itemization combined with the core game mechanics are so complex to understand that it takes at least 2 leagues heavy playing to get a basic understanding. The game’s simply gotten huge.
But… as mentioned, I rather take the function in clumsy form then a nice form without the function.
The crafing systems have basically gone into 3 possible ways nowadays, we haven’t found a 4th, and those are following:
A very RNG heavy system which is either hit or miss, with few options between as otherwise the complexity go extremely high. The LE system. And the PoE 2 system currently (but that one’s even worse).
A RSI simulator where you have to do bothersome repeated chores or ‘repeat that click 1000 times until the result happen’, but it’s gradual and with a guaranteed end product unless you fall asleep and missclick once. The PoE 1 system.
The korean style automated crafting mechanics. Basically saying ‘I wanna have xyz’ and then you see it automatically re-crafting until it achieves it… or fails. I think that’s the best option… as the ‘fail-state’ which those games commonly use is not mandatory when outsourced to resource acquisition rate.
The third is in my eyes the optimal one. Yes… it’s very much automated, but you still need to have the knowledge of which step (or automated steps) to take as well as having invested the time to acquire the resources.
I personally think the ‘all or nothing’ method is the worst of the 3 available ones since it’s pure gamblind and deprives the player of the feeling of progression.
Random ones? I got currently 7 sitting in my stash… from a single league. They’re not that rare. The right ones? A bit harder.
With fractured mods and essence crafting? Piss-easy, just costly.
If you can’t repeat the step but have to search for a new base instead then it’s not a save-able craft. Those are rare. A good base is re-used in PoE 1 basically until a top result happens… or the result is so good that re-trying is not worth as much as getting a - vastly cheaper - base again from a player since you actually made profit to allow more crafting this way.
But… it’s not.
The layers of RNG beyond a LP 4 rare unique is vastly higher then a god-tier item in PoE.
The majority of mirror-tier items have a cost between 1-5k divines. Pure play-time would be hence between 100-500 hours, if you sell good outcomes though then it drops substantially.
My last mirror-tier item cost me… 40 exalts (yes, back when exalts where a thing) and the current one is at 3,5k divines or so but nearly finished.
Depending on the Affix I can also brute-force a 100% outcome in PoE at the starting steps. Those are the cheapest after all. The cost comes from making a near perfect item, not a fantastic starting base commonly.
Exactly.
In LE you need to have the base with exalteds that fit + having a decent spread of other affixes… and none which is a ‘wrong’ T5 as otherwise it’s pre-bricked already for a ‘perfection craft’.
In PoE 2 you got to grab another base from the ground again and then roll the dice once.
In PoE 1 you get the base and then roll the dice for those ‘segments’. It’s piecemeal progress… but since it’s separated in steps it’s also not as overwhelming as ‘you get a result once every 1000 hours of playtime’ but instead advance every… 100 hours for example. Same effort in the end, different in perception by far though.
Getting decent gear in LE is piss easy. It’s only the top tier that is harder. So same thing, except you don’t actually have to trade?
Sooo… kinda like LE, then? Get base, try your craft (mostly deterministic), failed, get another base, try another one. It might be expensive to get a new base (either in gold via MG or in time farming with CoF), but is otherwise as time consuming and a chore as in PoE.
I personally don’t see a difference between PoE1 and LE in terms of crafting, regarding what we’re discussing. To me it feels exactly the same crafting a single piece dozens of times or dozens of pieces once.
In fact (again, personally) I find it much more frustrating to keep a piece of gear I want to craft on indefinitely and having to reset it over and over again. At least with LE it either works or not and I’m done with it.
Then again, I’ve always hated crafting in every single game. So the fact that I can actually use LE’s says something.
Not anymore. You can manipulate the exalted affix now, either by chaosing it or by simply shuffling tiers between affixes.
So 7 from a ~4 month (or however long the current league has been) out of how many crafts? How long (minutes/hours/etc) did they take?
So, readily available to everyone then. A different temporal barrier to entry then, albeit on that can gradually be worked at to overcome by gathering currency.
It is, it has RNG involved, amd given you’ve not provided the probabilities then the LE scenario may even be easier!!
Is that the time required to drop those 1k-5k divines? 'Cause I’ve been playing for several thousand hours and dont have anywhere close to that much. Or does it require picking the tradelord ascendancy?
You can brute force the right double exalt on the right base in LE too.
You can also just craft it yourself? Alteration spam or drop, Fractured Orb, done., 25% chance, hence a 1 LP craft basically in equivalency.
You do that by setting your Atlas up for Harbinger, one orb drops every ~2 hours with a casual speed, 30 minutes when you got a speedy strong build. Hence 2-8 hours time investment. First step done.
Second step is spamming essences. You do that by setting your Atlas up for essences. You’ll need around 100 most of the time, sometimes more, sometimes less. 100 of one essence of the highest tier takes a while. Would say… 5-10 hours of gameplay.
You got your 3 T1 item ready!
Now, to get the equivalent of a ‘Oh damn this is ridiculous’ craft you put ‘suffixes/prefixes’ cannot be changed on, throw a random exalted orb on it, put a veiled orb on it and you already got a better item then 95% of the top-tier players have usually in their slots related to rares. That’s… 5 minutes.
Another exalted orb to fill the empty slot, random craft you want, finished item which is absolute top-tier, short to mirror-tier.
If you absolutely don’t like what rolled you scour it away while the meta mod is on and restart that bit simply.
Just that you don’t need to wait for the next base… which drops in maybe 50 hours… maybe 100, who knows? You just re-try it again. As long as the resources are available… and they can be used for every single base and not a specific one.
Sure, you get more ‘good bases’ in LE, but they’re not the bases for you, they’re something simply.
Not even remotely… not even close.
First of all top-tier bases can be counted on your fingers. You’re lucky to see a T7 rare affix on the best base… a single time in MG. So re-try? Nope, doesn’t exist.
Next up, that item also costs around 100+ mil gold, acquisition time through pure farming (not trading it up… takes away from others the gold to do the same after all so they can’t do it) is several weeks of grinding.
Because LE is not crafting, it’s a ‘finish your item maybe’ mechanic. You hope for the best.
In Torchlight Infinite or PoE 1 you actually work towards a end-goal with a single piece of equipment. More so in PoE 1 then Torchlight… but kinda close.
Which costs FP, hence at the cost of the ability to finish it. It’s a fringe-case situation where it can be used. Increases the amount of finished crafts mildly… but not much.
5 dropped, 2 were made by mistake. Maybe 30 minutes of crafting itself?
As for active crafting for a 3 T1? 20-40 in-game hours if you got bad luck?
Exactly, readily available to everyone. It’s the go-to method for top-end gear. A segment below the god-tier items since you can’t influence them… but many items don’t profit from influencing them either. Weapons specifically often.
For other bases other methods exist. Boots can be force movement speed crafted with chaos resistance for example, which is the highest sought-after combination.
That’s Standard, which has a more costly market for resources.
If you wanna do it SSF then you need to do the content yourself and switch the divination card drops with a map where divine orbs are in those. Then you get around 2-5 divines per hour if you focus on it directly, which gives you resources for other content as well though (thanks scarabs).
That means while you set up your base you get divines… when you need divines you set up for the next crafts already since both can be done at the same time.
Would say 100-200 crafts with meta-mods are commonly needed to get a ridiculous result, hence… total time around 50-100 hours play-time if your focus is purely on that.
I can in 100% of the time guarantee a + level amulet of some types. I have less chance to miss a veiled movement speed modifier then getting one (I think the chance is 75% or so) and many many more.
Can you guarantee a T7 level to wraith drop on a top-tier base? No? Well, guess you’re out of luck then
Is it? I can craft whatever I want onto half-decent bases to make the items I want. The only all or nothing thing is LP shenanigans, but all super-end game crafting is that way in POE1 also. Corruptions/Double Corruptions, Bricking an item to not getting the Special Exalt slam you want. Great items either get greater or fall apart with one click. That’s just the nature of the beast in that game and this one. But now with this upcoming upate we get to mitigate some of that RNG which makes it nicer now (but not before know, if you’re to make that argument, ye)
Yes, that exists, absolutely agreed! Corruption and double corruption is a dangerous thing.
You don’t do that with ‘baseline crafts’ though, hence the mirror-tier ones. You wouldn’t be able to adjust it easily anymore otherwise, so usually corruption is abstained from. Not to speak of several bases where it would be detrimental, like two-stone rings for example where you rarely have a positive possible outcome, just not worth it.
It’s majorly reserved for uniques hence. ‘Normal’ items don’t get corrupted all too often.
What you’re talking about is how many streamers handle it since they got a single league of time… hence acquisition of value is not at the forefront long-term… it’s the lucky ‘my character got a bit stronger’ outcome mostly. Especially prone in HC obviously since it’s live or die there because of it. That’s not how it goes in Standard in comparison, the long game.
And that’s what I’m talking about, the ‘forever player’ and how the systems handle that.
I guess I just more or less don’t understand where you’re getting that LE is all RNG hellscape on crafting. Having a decent base drop and then adding whatever I want on it is certainly much nicer than exalt slamming on a good base on PoE bc it’s all random. There is the crafting bench in PoE1, but that’s only 1 mod and it’s generally weaker than if you got the mod “randomly.” The argument against that is that in LE, you can only craft T5, which I’ll grant you is a good argument.
And especially for the ‘forever player’ you’d imagine they’d be more invested in those super-high risk, super-high reward crafting options because they got all the time in the world in standard to mess with your gear and acquire back ups and all that jazz. On that, I think those high-end craftings are more high risk in PoE than they are in LE. Pushing affixes onto a 3LP item is way safer than slammin’ a Vaal Orb.
True. But I’m guessing that most players don’t enjoy that style of crafting. Not even the ones that know their ins and outs. Even Ziz said that LE’s crafting system is one of the best in any game.
PoE’s means you’re working on your piece of gear for days on end. It seems that all you’re playing for is to be able to craft on it a bit more. You pick a slot, you buy a base, then you spend hours and hours working on getting currency to finish it.
Then you pick another slot, you buy a base, then you spend hours and hours working on finishng that.
LE’s means you’re playing the game for the game and any drop can potentially upgrade your gear. And in 1 minute you know if it did or not. You don’t play to get currency to work on a single item, you play for the gameplay itself and any drop can potentially improve any slot (or be worth selling and improving your currency to buy something else, if you’re MG).
It’s always a matter of preference, but the fact that many die-hard PoE streamers (like Ziz or Ghazzy) have said that LE’s crafting system is great (some even say it’s better than PoE’s) makes me think that it probably is.
Quite the contrary. Now all those triple exalted drops are suddenly much much much better. Because their affixes might not synergize, but you can now switch them. Whereas before you just tossed them because you couldn’t really do anything to them and could only change one affix.
That’s because PoE 1 is not exalt slamming, it’s planned step-by-step improvement of an item.
In PoE 2? Absolutely, 100% agreed!
The difference is that in LE the grinding is frontloaded and all at once. One drop, one try at crafting, done. Either it’s good, or not.
In PoE 1 it’s gradual. The easiest example is… well… to give an example.
In my example I want to craft boots with double Energy Shield + Movement speed for Prefixes. I take the Fossil route. So, I know I’ll need ‘Dense, Sanctified, Shuttering’ for the cheapest and still quick results. Around… 600 crafts, 33k chaos or around 220 divines.
When I have that… I have that, it can’t be taken away unless I personally screw up. It’ll always stay 3 T1 for whatever I do after.
I can then go ahead and get my wanted Suffixes, since it’s boots I’ll influence it and go with meta mod + harvest crafting for example, re-roll chaos until I get it. I’ll have a second on as well, if I got a third I need to remove one in the hopes chaos stays… otherwise I repeat from the meta-mod chaos craft.
When I have it and can put the meta mod back on I for example want a veiled mod and put that one, 50/50 chance to hit chaos, if it does repeat from the beginning of the suffixes.
If I get that as well I can remove the crafted mod and add for example spell supression on it, top tier item.
Piece by piece.
To be fair you can endlessly copy a mirror-tier item in PoE but can’t with a corrupted item, that plays heavily into it when playing Standard with trade. Your craft has not only value for you but maybe others, and the more you have the more often people want to copy your stuff… see it like dividends being paid out. You don’t do anything actively but people give you money to make more stuff and better stuff That’s not available in LE or Torchlight, which plays heavily into it.
And the double corruption still happens. I went and corrupted 300 uniques until I got my wanted outcome… but the ones I didn’t want I could at least sell again to someone who needs it since I don’t.
Ziz is a HC player, speedrunner and SSF player… it’s like putting a Nascar driver into a rally car and say ‘off you go, win!’
Obviously his perception is entirely different, the system is much much better for a single cycle… it’s awful for the permanent player though.
Why? Because it does well to progress you towards the end, but it does really badly in the min-max department as with higher gear obviously time investment rises exponentially… but to see a ‘positive outcome’ you simply need a magnitude more time in LE at that time compared to PoE… because in PoE you get several ‘smaller positive outcomes’ along the way.
Potentially better, there’s still a weighting involved. But as said, it improves the chances, I don’t think we’ll suddenly see people running around with ridiculous gear though from one moment to the next because of it.
It’s not a weak rune… but also not game breaking, simply a fitting decent implementation that works to reduce some shortcomings of the system formerly. If you trop a 3 T7 item you’re supposed to be elated after all, rare! But if they’re crap then that’s kinda counterproductive, so at least a chance to make them decent is given.
But the chance for them to synergize with the usage of runes is also fairly low, usually some specific affixes are ‘must have’ on some slots after all, and missing out on them means you can’t really use it quite often. Definitely an improvement on the top-end though.
One would think that an SSF player would actually be invested into crafting, since they do have to make their own gear 100% of the time.
Honestly, I think crafting in PoE1 suffers the same problem as most other mechanics: they’re completely focused and geared towards the “-lords” of the game.
-Passive tree is geared towards the theorycraft-lords. They know how to make the most of it. Then you have some people trying to muck around with mediocre results and the majority just follows a build.
-Trade is geared towards trade-lords. They know how to properly flip items, what to snipe and undercut. Everyone else just goes through 2 pages of results waiting for a reply.
-Even the atlas tree is geared towards the minority that understands what the best strategy is and how to do things correctly. Even Rax, in his build guides, always says to just copy fubgun’s tree. And Rax is a guy that actually tries to understand these systems. So most people also just copy one.
Likewise, crafting is geared towards the craft-lords. The small minority that actually understands how it works and how to best use it. For everyone else, it’s almost always better to just buy the end result because it’s cheaper for them than if they were to try crafting it themselves.
Even if you follow a crafting guide to make the best bow for build X and you end up succeeding, you don’t really understand it. And if you have to make a bow for build Y that is slightly different, you can’t use your previous experience because many times it doesn’t even follow the same method.
So yes, you can excel in making BiS gear in PoE… if you spend dozens of hours trying to understand all the intricacies of it. And no UI will help you do that, either. You have to intrinsically know that to get to the end result A you need to use one method, for end result B you need a totally different one, etc.
So, for the craft-lords (of which you clearly seem to be one), PoE1’s system is definitely better than LE’s. But not for the majority of players.
Like. It’s all RNG. And it follows what I was saying about it. Yes, the crafting has ways to influence/help determine your results, but at the end of the day… it’s a ton of RNG rolling until you get what you want. You described this, to start, as a min 600 craft piece to get your base. That’s insane.
In LE, I find boots with a mod I like, I craft, deterministically, non-RNG-like, the other mod I want on it to get the boots I would like to wear. This is, of course, gated behind finding boots with a good mod first that I wanna craft on, but there’s enough loot dropping, especially on CoF (and in the case of MG, you just buy the base you want, ezpz) that it’s a non-issue and incentivizes playing the game, not playing the crafting (another huge bonus).
Edit: I realize I neglect the fact that crafting has random amounts of Forging Potential taken off on craft, and you’d be right to point that out, and I concede it’s an RNG element. But I find that much less RNG-Annoying than what you described to me as crafting your perfect piece on PoE.
And then, for big upgrades, LP, and if you are on a Standard character/account, you have all the access ever to all your Uniques with all the 3+LP rolls ever. Not a problem, very deterministic so far as RNG goes, getting 3/4 mods from a good rare onto the unique you want it on.
Edit: Personally, I find the crafting in LE much nicer than what we have in PoE1. And don’t get me wrong, I love PoE1. My nearly 4k hours are hopefully proof enough. But there’s a reason I never engaged in the larger crafting mechanics and opted to just purchase better gear through trade. It’s hella RNG and even if you disregarded that RNG, it’s a very, very large time sink, and I wanna spend my time blasting, not sitting in my hideout for forever.
You are playing a boring game of semantics, use whatever word makes you happy. You should have gone after my shit grammar in all honesty.
For temp league players, which make up the overwhelmingly vast majority of PoE players, a new league is an effective wipe, plain and simple. I have 8 mirrors in standard, and they shall stay there until the servers become mummy dust.
Yes, this is why I dislike PoE1’s crafting even more than crafting in general (which I generally dislike as a rule in any game). In our clan we had a player that liked crafting and he would spend almost the entire league just crafting. He would craft one piece, sell it and use the profits for crafting another. On and on.
And I especially agree with the first sentence I quoted. In PoE1 you focus on the craft you want and you play to enhance it. Whereas in LE you just focus on the game and take what drops.
Like I said, PoE1 crafting is for the craft-lords, not for the majority of players.
Which system do you objectively like right more now. PoE or PoE 2? Id take PoE 1’s all day in comparison to what we have at the moment in PoE 2, I think the only way to get a deterministic craft right now is essence? At least in PoE 1 you can alt spam a usable magic, now we are totally at the mercy of rng, its bad.
Yes, it is.
But vastly less RNG then dropping a specific base with specific mods
As for the 600 crafts being insane… not really… but it’s a massive hassle, I can only agree.
That’s why I mentioned the 3 possibilities for crafting above and why the third one is the ‘best’ solution. It allows gradual progression but doesn’t make you go through those repeated manual setups… which take a good 20-30 minutes.
Albeit to mention, usually it’s done with several bases and taking away whatever rolls quite well to sell in Standard. That alleviates it heavily. Plus you can get unintended outcomes which are good as well while doing that.
Yeah, it is… but the hassle of getting the drop is the hassle in LE. I’ve played 100 hours on my melee detonating arrow character now to get a pair of Eternal Gloves, T7 attack speed, T5 experimental armor to DoT. Not a single viable drop to even start crafting one.
That’s the other side of the coin.
In LE you start to run tens of hours of ‘empty content’, hence getting absolutely nothing in return for your efforts. No base to craft on which fits your character, and nothing else does exist to propel you forward.
That’s - luckily to a degree - alleviated with 1.2, which was high time, allowing to reduce that time with idol crafts and tries to get champion affixes for example.
In PoE you don’t run ‘empty content’ but instead do empty crafts, which yes… shackles you to the Hideout, which isn’t good. Hence the UI and mechanical adjustments being needed to alleviate it but not being there, to cut that time massively down as it’s not active playtime.
The difference is that after nearly each map you can nod to yourself and say ‘yes, I just got closer to my goal’, which is not something which is available in LE a lot yet.
So, why are you playing temp league if your content is the same as the permanent league?
If that’s the case why would you call it a ‘wipe’ rather then a ‘reset’?
Do you have to rush into the temp league despite it having not a single functional difference?
This is LE, not PoE 1, it makes zero sense to have that line of thought since it simply doesn’t apply and it provides people which don’t know how the game works a wrong picture, potentially making them stay away because of it.
That’s why I nitpick at the terminology in that case.
Edit since I scrolled too far down:
Yes, absolutely! But for the overall game progression. And especially when it goes to HC to reach the end-goal of level 100 and do all content. Not beyond.
There’s a difference in mentality for a HC player (be it HCSSF or normal HC) and a min-maxer.
The HC player primarily looks at the ability to handle gear during progression, which yes, in LE it is vastly better then in PoE, absolutely agreed. The feeling is just better and the options are overall much much better too.
A min-maxer on the other hand has long long passed the progression stage and wants to improve their gear after that’s done still. Hence… min-max.
And to be completely clear here… PoE 1 has no min-max streamers anymore, it had them years ago, Standard players which made streams which included crafting, content showcases, experiments for efficiency and so on and so forth. They’re all gone by now because the experience in Standard compared to League is absolute crap simply spoken.
There were talks about trade versus non-trade and how non-trade is treated as ‘second grade citizens’ in PoE.
Well… the same goes for Cycle versus non-Cycle… and plainly spoken that’s a bit similar to PoE, where Legacy simply is not treated all too well, already… so early after release. And that’s something which is important to upkeep too.
You won’t get much representation if what you wanna do is treated awful after all, people leave and don’t do it anymore.
Which is why a balance needs to exist, not a focus on a specific group.
Crafting systems should allow progression to feel right and min-max to do the same. Not either/or.
But… it does?
I mean, how do you think ‘Craft of Exile’ works? It’s already checking which fossil craft option would be the cheapest… or the one with the least tries needed. What does speak against doing the same including essences, including veiled crafts, including complex multi-step crafts? Nothing besides the code not being made further.
I think over time that site will provide the option to click on what affixes you want with a button stating ‘Simulate’ and then giving you the most optimal route to your end-result without having to know anything about crafting personally. But that’s also not the goal.
The issue with PoE 1’s crafting system are the edge-cases and complexity in the system. Yes, it has the ‘checkpoints’ as I call them… but also fringe cases where you can enforce outcomes for one thing but not another. Those fringe-cases are important… but they’re side effects, no proper mechanic from GGG has been implemented to make them the norm to progress rather then lucky side-effects.
It’s in the end about making a quality system, one which doesn’t need tens of hours of simply understanding how something works like in PoE 1… while also not stopping you to progress after a certain point like it does in LE.
A system which provides smooth, steady, gradual progression rather then becoming a detriment for progression or for min-max.
Sure, PoE1’s is better, but that’s like saying which passive tree do you like better, PoE or D3’s? You’re comparing to something that is non-existent.
And I still prefer LE’s to either.
Processing power and required time to compute all the combinations, most likely.
Also, it’s one thing to do all those calculations on a separate website than on a game that is already computing millions of operations per second across hundreds of thousands of players.
With high enough combinations, even on the site it would be really slow.
That can be done locally, even a really awful PC can handle that relatively swiftly. Sure, you need to wait a few seconds then… but plainly spoken what’s better? The current state in PoE 1 or at least a proper supporting mechanic which doesn’t enforce someone to get a master’s degree in ARPG-crafting? I would take the waiting time definitely.
One thing which I’ve realized while thinking about the system in-depth and for the ‘why’ I deem it actually better.
Crafting systems for the diablo-style loot mechanics have been implemented to counteract the high RNG coming from the large variety of bases combined with a big amount of affixes and those also combined with large roll-ranges at times, to allow getting from the lowermost 10% of possible power to the uppermost 90% of possible power in a sorta roughly planned timeframe.
It’s generally bad if items on the ground are basically worthless and hence ignored… but that’s as bad as the feeling of either getting stuck in progression or trivializing it. Neither of those things should happen.
In LE you get ‘stuck’, sure, you’ll sooner or later find the item you search for… but since powerful items need to be rare the chance to find ‘a powerful item for you’ is really really low. The combination of base type, fitting Affixes and a rare T7 affix happening at the same time is a literal RNG hell, and even with that you’re still not 100% guaranteed to have a maxed out upgrade available.
PoE is the exact opposite route there, trivializing the drops heavily by allowing everything to be adjusted fully, even corrupted items nowadays.
But what PoE does well is that you can actively ‘target’ your outcome. Either through specific content like re-running uber-elder 100 times to get the right watcher’s eye with a fitting triple set of affixes or by spamming your respective crafting option onto it, and all of that has been building up ‘on the side’ while doing other things.
I think a large portion is coming from the myriad of different mechanics available, I’ve looked a bit deeper into my decisions and the overall setup since I started a new character build today, checking out exactly what I need and how to obtain it on my own.
What I found was the following:
While I need to gather a specific unique item through a side mechanic (heist, replica unique, low chance to acquire so a hassle) that same mechanic at the same time drops currency for the generic crafts, alleviating the active time investment there. It also drops synthesized and fractured bases (which are rare and valuable things at times) which removes the active grind to get a specific one when going directly for them. It also gives some crafting resources for more specialized mechanics like the fossil crafting to reduce the time investment there.
Generally when farming for a single specific thing several goals at once get progression towards the end-state.
The same goes when you farm for a specific fractured base, divination cards drop which can provide you with rare uniques otherwise unobtainable in that content, resources to improve the outcome of other farming methods (scarabs) and also still… generic resources to craft generic items.
Basically the ‘generic’ currency drops are closest in relation to shards in LE, that’s not hard to see, but they don’t get inconsequencial in basically no time (common shards) or are for a single specific class with a single specific build (rare class shards) which are never needed though since you need the drop-only range for them, hence worthless despite being supposed to have the highest perceived value. With the rune exchanging tiers on a item this will change at least… mildly.
Basically in LE you get a boatload of ‘worthless things’ that had value but lost them entirely by having too much or no use at all anymore while in PoE the same drops you can get at level 1 stay highly valuable at level 100 still. And that’s something I personally see as a major positive.
That’s not available in LE or Torchlight, which plays heavily into it.