Upgrading - In Maps

March 27th, 2024, 18:22

Harvest

Harvest is without a doubt the most powerful early league crafting system, and it’s super easy to use. Just enter the Sacred Grove when it appears in your maps and kill the monsters that spawn from each plot. Take the resources they drop to your Horticrafting Station and use the targetted reforges to make early upgrades cheaply and easily.

Reforges

Harvest targets the tags on affixes, like the Life tag above. Reforges apply one mod with the tag you choose and then generate the rest of the item. Mods are chosen based on their Weight.

Let’s say you want an evasion chest with Life, Lightning Resistance, and Spell Suppression.

Craft of Exile shows suppression has no tags but we already know life does. Since every life reforge has to choose between these 3 mods, pure life should turn up over 40% of the time.

That’s already enough to start seeing decent items, here I rolled several chests I could have crafted lightning resistance on and used almost immediately.

It doesn’t always go that well but those aren’t insane results either. If you didn’t hit anything good and ran out of red juice, you could try reforging Lightning instead. There is only 1 possible lightning affix so you will get resistance 100% of the time.

Resist Swaps

Able to save items that are good but have the wrong resists, this is a very useful tool. Any of the 3 elemental resistance mods can be swapped around and it isn’t expensive at all considering it saves you buying or crafting a whole new item.

At a higher gear level keep in mind that other very strong mods have the tags needed to use this, such as increases to maximum resistance which lets you go above 75%, or resistance+damage mods from Temple.

Guaranteed Crafts

There are some useful cases where only one affix can be added through reforging:

Elemental Resistance on all armour except gloves
Movement Speed on boots
Chaos Resistance on armour, rings, and belt

Chaos Resistance becomes very important in endgame but it’s over 5 times more rare than elemental. Luckily it’s the only chaos mod on most items, and just a little time spent in Harvest can get you all the resistance you need.

Curse Rings

The curse mods that can roll on Influenced rings are very powerful and rare, with a weight of 200 they will appear as an affix roughly 0.1% of the time. But the only other Caster mod is cast speed, so these are not hard to target at all.

Reforge + Fracture

Fractured mods are locked to the item, persisting through reforges.

This means starting with a fractured base makes any harvest craft easier, but that’s not the best part. Fractures can also make very rare mods easier to target by removing an affix from the pool.

For example, +1 to Lightning Gems on amulets is rare with a 0.094% chance to appear naturally. It has a weight of 200 against the total weight of amulet affixes: 213,850.

200 / 213,850 = 0.094%

But the total weight of Lightning-tagged affixes when reforging is only 14,950.

This puts +1 Lightning at about 1/74 odds compared to the natural rate of less than 1/1000.

200 / 14,950 = 1.338%

Those aren’t bad odds, but a fracture can improve them further.

Reforges will add their mod even if a tagged mod already exists as a fracture, meaning you can remove one mod from the pool of choices. If lightning resistance is fractured the total pool is reduced by more than half and the odds become:

200 / 6,950 = 2.88%

From 1/1000 to now 1/34.

Expedition

Crafting isn’t the only thing Expedition offers, each of the 4 NPCs is useful in its own way. In this guide, I will only talk about crafting and a bit about gathering the resources required for it.

The Currencies

There are really only 2 types of expedition currency:

Restock Tokens: Most of the time these are all you care about, they are used to refresh each NPCs inventory with completely new stock. You will automatically pick up the other currencies while farming restocks.

Artifacts: These are what you spend to purchase from the vendors. They are automatically picked up and usually don’t have to be targeted, although you can. Tokens and artifacts for the other 3 NPCs can also be bought from Dannig in exchange for his.

The Mechanic

Explosives: The green circles you lay down. These will explode in the order you place them, spawning monsters and uncovering reward chests in their radius. They can only be placed a certain distance from the detonator, or the previous explosive in the chain.

Remnants: When you detonate a remnant its mods are applied to monsters and chests from that explosion, and all following explosions, so you want to hit good remnants early in the chain. Monsters do not inherit mods from remnants that explode after they have spawned.

These are the best mods, especially the highlighted ones:

Monsters and Reward Chests: These are where your artifacts and restock tokens come from. Detonate good remnants to increase drop rates, restocks are affected by item quantity while artifacts have their own mod.

Logbooks

Logbooks have a chance to drop along with artifacts and tokens, they are basically a whole map full of expedition. Take them to Dannig and he will open an area to any one of the groups that are rolled on that logbook:

Knights of the Sun: Dannig
Black Scythe Mercenaries: Tujen
Order of the Chalice: Rog
Druids of the Broken Circle: Gwennen

The rules are mostly the same but watch for bosses. They look like this:

If you see a boss the goal is to hit it very late in the chain, after hitting as many remnants as you safely can. Bosses drop a large number of tokens and artifacts, and they gain more drops based on the remnants you hit.

Rog Crafting

When you buy an item from Rog he will offer to craft it for you, often in very powerful ways. Look for items with good stats regardless of their roll because Rog can turn 14 resistance into 40.

You can skip his current offer but you cannot skip 2 in a row.
The item can also be taken at any time, ending the crafting process.

Some of the usually good things he may offer:

And some of the more neutral offers, the value of these depends heavily what’s on the item:

Eldritch Crafting

The Eldritch questline starts in mid-tier maps and continues in the endgame. The quest modifies your map device, allowing you to target a boss while receiving eldritch currency along the way.

Each bosses currency can add powerful implicits to non-influenced items, while their shared crafting currency allows you to target prefixes or suffixes based on which implicit is a higher tier.

The downside is that eldritch-influenced items can never have other influences.

These will usually be the final step in making entry-level endgame pieces, since you can use the targetted annuls and chaos to fix crafts before adding implicits to finish.

Eldritch Implicits

The eldritch bosses and their minions drop crafting materials called Ichors and Embers, using either of these on a non-influenced item will remove any existing implicit and add one from that pool. The item will also gain either Exarch or Eater influence.

Eldritch items may have both influences at once, granting 2 implicits.
No other influence may ever be added.
Using more ichors or embers will reroll their corresponding implicit, not both.

So why are there 4 types of each if that’s all they do? Because the implicits have tiers of course!

Most of the time this won’t matter outside of min-max situations. In cases where you need a rare implicit at high tier, consider using an Orb of Conflict.

These will raise one implicits tier while lowering the other, allowing you to roll your mod with low ichors and then conflict up. If the lowered implicit has no lower tier it will be removed, which is what happened to my boots here.

Eldritch Crafting

The 3 remaining eldritch orbs are alternate versions of basic crafting currency. They allow you to target only prefixes or suffixes depending on which influence is dominant, meaning higher tier.

Very useful, but also far rarer than the implicit crafting currencies, you won’t use these as often. Personally, I love the targetted annuls as a last attempt to save a craft. If I make something like these boots that just need the INT gone I now have double the chance to hit it.

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