Crafting improvement suggestions - Post yours as well

Why change crafting?
1. Finding loot should be rewarding, fun, and it should be main way to improve gear.
It should get upgrade on it's own but it's part of the point.

2. Of course not all gear will be for you, but then there is crafting. It should be the second way to improve gear. So when things drop from boss fight, they are still exciting even if not all of them are for you, then you can use them for crafting

3. Trade makes you able to improve all gear in matter of few clicks and minutes, in the way that looting and crafting would in 30h or more, then there is a separate problem with tradeing compared to what should be the core of upgrading gear - loot and crafting. Even 10min of trade vs 10h of just playing the game is too big of a difference.

How to improve crafting - separate suggestions
Following suggestions don't create a single complete crafting system.
They are separate suggestions for what could be added and changed.
I hope others will add their own suggestions in response.

1. More base white items - More tries of crafting
If we have more base items we can try more often to craft something useful.
Not only one time and then spend hours to find another one.
This can be done in many ways (they can be combined/ mixed)
- Vendor with all type of white items for your level, that never run out.
- Orb of Scouring. And it shouldn't be that rare as it makes items white.
- Orb of Alteration.
- Orb of Copying. It can copy only a white item. Including it's tier.

2. Loot more useful for crafting.
Now you can disenchant loot for some shards, that are far from a good return with current crafting system. I think there are many ways this could be improved:
- Orb of Scouring and Alteration. You get useful white version from something you would change into a single shard.
- Recipies to scrap some items for a better yield than single shard. Maybe some mods when scaped give additional shards of exalt. Or if you have used an exalts on the item it gives as many exalt shards as number of exalts used.
- Orb of Transferance. If you find item with good mods but it's not for your characeter you could put that item + white item of same base level or higher + Orb of Transferance, and change the mods into a new item (from clube to axe, or from EX armor to Armor armor). This could change some mods to have sense of course.

3. Option to make the crafting less random.
Even if we can craft more often and easier because of point 1, and we get more out of the droped items becasue of point 2, for it not to be only a slot machine there should be options.
Most would be done with different benches or more orbs and omens. Many of this could be done together.

- Crafting Bench similar to the one in PoE1

- Essence Bench.
* You can put white item and two lesser esences.
This might require gold and/or additional orbs
(i.e. 1 transmutation and 1 augmentation)
* You can put blue item and up to four greater essences.
This might require gold and additional orbs.
(i.e. 1 regal + X exalts, where X is number of greater essences above 1)

- Mod Extraction (surgeon orb)
Using special orb you can choose a single mod from a magic or rare item to be extracted. This destroys the item (maybe costs gold and/or require orbs) but gives you crafting item that can add this mode (with it's values) to a rare item.
* If the Crafting Bench Exists this could be also used to add this tier of mode into the crafting bench. (So two different uses)
* If the Essence Bench Exists this could be called Orb of Essences and create a special Greater Essence, that could be used in Essence Bench (Or when extracting from magic item it becomes a essence, and from rare a greater essence).


- Gambling machine / vendor option
* It allows you to reroll mods or mod values on items, for apropriate gold nad currency (like chaos and divine orbs).
* For additional curency you can:
$ When rerolling mods, lock mods that won't be rerolled
$ When rerolling values lock mods that won't be rerolled.
* Locking mods is expensive and increases with each mode locked (so locking three mods is much more expensive then locking one)

Someone said that trading will always be fastert than looting+crafting.
Yes. Yes it will.
But the question is how much easier and faster.
For now the difference is just imense.
That is why improving drops, improving crafting is the way.

This would also affect trade:
If you can find and craft good loot, then there is less insentive to trade, and big percentage would only trade for big upgrade/ "perfect items" for a lot of currency, instead for every upgrade.

And you could further make it less profitable to buy everything:
If for the conveniance of trade you would have to pay a lot of orbs and gold (not to the person selling the item, but just to be able to buy it), then there would be more incentive to loot and craft and to trade only for big upgrade, not everything.

My small idea:

Replace lowest tier jewellers orb with poe1's orb of binding.

PoE2 orb of binding = adds 3rd support socket to skill gem OR can be used as an alchemy orb.

Needing to balance resistances hurts getting gear upgrades. The harvest craft in PoE1 where players could change resistance types on gear vastly increased how easy it was for players to fit a new and better item into their builds. Being able to more easily balance resistances would give players a lot more item agency. This mechanic single-handedly tipped the scales for me personally and I played about a year's worth of extra PoE1 leagues that I would not have bothered doing without such a utility.

While I would like to see a return of such a mechanic, it would also be good if resistances actually scaled differently too. I have a whole post about that:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3629096

Take form PoE1?

Seriously though, they went to all the trouble to make crafting "good" in PoE1 and it fixed the problems crafting has had.

I don't understand why they would take that agency from the players and replace it with a gamble.

The only thing they said was it was an attempt to make the loot dropped from monster more relevant because in PoE1 it was largely ignored because crafting was an easier way to get "good" gear.

The problem with loot drops though was that it was never really about crafting being so good that people ignored it, it was that the drops were so shit that it was not worth the time to even check, and they only time that i would pick stuff up is in early game or when i could use it for a vendor recipe (something that they have removed as well)

Ideally i would prefer currency to work in a similar fashion to PoE1 and that they would integrate the crafting bench with some additional stuff added to it (settlers had the idea if using the bench and the crafts taking different currency...they could expand on that and have it all through the one bench)