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Crafting is a core part ofPath of Exile 2, although it has seen some major streamlining in this installment. No longer do you need to juggle nearly a dozen league mechanics and copious amounts of player trading to make the perfect item. Thanks to a smaller pool of crafting materials and stats, making a solid item is now feasible for all players.
But that doesn’t mean the depth has been taken away from crafting, far from it. In this guide, we cover how crafting works in PoE2, how it’s changed from its predecessor, and give a brief overview of how every crafting material works.
How Crafting Works In Path Of Exile 2
Crafting in Path of Exile 2 has been heavily streamlined from its predecessor. Nearly every item you find in Wraeclast can be modified with a variety of crafting materials. The most common material you’ll find arecurrency orbs, consumable items that you can slam onto your gear to instill them with magical properties, otherwise known asaffixes. Currency orbs are also used as the cornerstone of PoE2’s player trade economy. Even if a currency type seems useless to you, it might prove valuable to other players.
Unlike most ARPGs, crafting in Path of Exile is more a process of refinement than fabrication.You are using crafting materials to improve your items, so you’ll need items to refine first. Fortunately, just about every non-Unique item in PoE2 can be crafted on, even common gear. The rarity of the item you’re modifying determines how many affixes it can have. Affixes are broken up into two categories: prefixes and suffixes. For the purposes of this guide, just know that they’re two different stat pools.
You can hold “Alt” on PC when inspecting an item to bring up advanced stats. This will tell you which stats are prefixes, suffixes, and the values each stat can roll with.
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By default, common items don’t have any stats at all outside of their implicit value. Some items might even come with intrinsic stats, such as free spells on caster weapons or elemental resistances on rings. These are known asimplicitsand are separate from affixes. Crafting materials don’t affect implicits at all unless otherwise stated.
If you want to add some affixes to a common item, you’ll first need to use a material that upgrades the rarity of the item to magic or rare—anOrb of Transmutationor Alchemy Orb, respectively. This will randomly add affixes to the item. If the affixes you rolled aren’t useful, you can either use more currency to refine the item, or you may opt to craft on another item entirely.
That’s more or less the process for making items during the campaign. Find a good base type, upgrade its rarity, and hope for good results. For more deterministic crafts in the endgame, you’ll need to rely on more advanced techniques.
Disenchanting Gear
Each hub town has a vendor who can disenchant magic and rare-tier items. This will return currency orb shards instead of gold. Ten shards make a usable currency type. Wehighlyrecommend disenchanting your gear during the campaign over selling.
Advanced Crafting Materials
Once you get further into PoE2, you’ll start to acquire more exotic crafting materials that let you bend the rules a little bit. Currency orbs are mostly random and don’t have deterministic drop sources, making some upgrades high risk.Essencessoften the blow slightly, forcing the item to roll with a specific affix type—mana, physical damage, life, etc. With the right strategy, you’re able to use two Essences on a single item, giving you a way to target two specific affixes on the item.
New to PoE2 areRunes, socketable glyphs you can insert into your weapons and armor to gain moderate stat buffs. These can range from damage boons to generic elemental resistance. Runes are invaluable for fixing a build’s shortcomings, so don’t be afraid to use them whenever you find one. They start dropping around Act 2.
Finally,Oilsfrom PoE’s Blight league are back and seem to function the same as before. You can use oils found from endgame league mechanics to instill passive tree notables onto your amulet through a process called anointing. Only one anointment may be on your amulet at a time. It’s unclear where these oils drop exactly since Blight isn’t in PoE2; we’ll update this guide with additional information once we learn more.
Crafting Currencies
Article-In-Progress
This is a compilation of all crafting currencies we currently know about in Path of Exile 2. As we delve further into the endgame and uncover more systems, we’ll update this section with each new currency we find.
Common
Adds an affix to a magic item.
Magic items can have up to one prefix and one suffix.
Uncommon
Adds an affix to a rare item.
Rare items can have up to three prefixes and three suffixes.
Adds a socket to a skill gem.
One socket per Jeweler’s Orb, up to a maximum of six sockets.
Vaal
Rare
Corrupts the item, changing it unpredictably. The item can no longer be modified.
This can reroll the entire item, add a new implicit, or do nothing.
Very Rare
Rerolls the stat values on an item.
Extremely rare currency. Only use on best-in-slot gear or for trading.
Exotic
Makes a one-to-one copy of a non-unique item.
Astronomically rare, comparable to your odds of being stuck by lightning in your lifetime.
Quality Enhancers
Quality increases an item’s base stat—damage for weapons, defensive stats for armor
