A Guide to Beginner Crafting in Path of Exile

So ... over the past few months, I occasionally see comments concerning my sales that I post in guild chat. I'm not doing it to brag about how many chaos or whatever I'm getting ... I'm doing it to give other members an idea of what things are currently selling for. The other thing I'm doing it for, is to let other members know what things they can make and sell that WILL sell. All you need is at least 1 premium stash tab in order to list and sell items through PoEtrade and Path of Exile's trade system.

The things that people will do to reduce their tedium or speed the process up are sometimes quite extreme. They are willing to pay (out the nose, even) for that EXACT THING that they NEED RIGHT NOW, and if you happen to have it at a price that seems reasonable enough to them, they will buy it from you. Even things as simple as flasks become extremely important if it's THE thing that you need to enable your build to do something it otherwise could not handle.

So ... now that we know why people way "way too much" for this junk, let's get into making stuff that they think they need more than they need their chaos and exalts... :)

Basic Crafting in Path of Exile

First things first ... Path of Exile's currency system is all about crafting. Nearly every single currency item in the game has a function or use as a crafting material. This makes it fairly unique among games out there, as you can literally spend all your currency and end up with nothing to really show for it, or you could just spend a little and then multiply what you had WAY beyond what it was worth. For crafting, the first place to start is the easiest thing to craft ... flasks.

Crafting a flask requires a few things that you'll want to have in decent supply. The first flasks you work on will be for yourself, because YOU need them, obviously, but it's also something you can get into very quickly and cheaply, and it has a decent return for your investment.

You will need a few orbs of Scouring, on occasion, to strip the magic mods off your flasks... You may think it's better to leave them magic, but a Glassblower's Bauble will only increase the quality by 2% per use on a magic flask, costing 10 baubles to take a flask from 0% to 20%. This is actually pretty expensive ... right now in Incursion, I can buy 8 glassblower's baubles for 1 chaos, and that's cheap compared to the 10 chaos I charge per flask, but once you factor in scouring, applying 4 glassblower's baubles, and then rolling the magical affixes to exactly what I'm looking for, you'll see that it can take anywhere between 2 chaos worth of crafting material and 20 chaos worth to get what I was looking for. Thankfully, finding a good prefix/suffix combination USUALLY isn't that hard to do, so it's generally in the 3 - 4 chaos range for crafting cost. The other crafting mats you'll need are transmutation orbs (just a few, all you need to do is make the 20% quality flask magic) and a BUNCH of Alteration orbs, with a decent pile of Augmentation orbs.

There's no need for Jeweller's or Fusing or anything else that are higher value items other than the Scour if the flask you started with was magical. Obviously, if the flask you started with has the EXACT modifiers you needed, then it's worth it to use up the extra baubles to quality it to 20%, because you don't need to go to the trouble and expense of rolling those mods again.

Now ... what are these magical modifiers that we are after, you ask? The ones that are the most useful or sought after for that flask type and their general use, of course!

So ... what makes a flask tick? How does it work? How do the prefixes and suffixes work together? These are things you need to know in order to figure out which affixes are important. For life/mana flasks, the major considerations are the amount of healing/mana given over how much time. This means that in general, you want either the most massive amount you can get (Saturated prefix increases the amount by 50%, but increases the duration by 33%, which means your bulb will fill more slowly), or you want the most you can get INSTANTLY (acts like a rejuvenation from D2), which would be the Seething prefix (66% reduced amount, INSTANT application). Various other prefixes can benefit you for life and mana flasks, but these two are the main ones people are after.

The secondary consideration is for the suffix applied to the flask. You want it to have that "utility" application, that lets it go beyond being just an ordinary life or mana flask. It has to do more, give you additional benefit .... like removing certain afflictions or even curses, or increasing your movement speed, or even increasing your combat durability. The problem, however, is the duration of the flask effect. This problem can be attacked from two angles. One ... you want the flask and it's secondary effect to last as long as possible .... or two, you just need it for an instant fix to correct a problem. Thankfully, the second one is very easy to do, as Seething prefix is a 1-time instant use and has no duration to speak of. The first one ... well, the problem is that even if you have really long duration and great restorative power, if you reach full life/mana during the flask's duration it will then SHUT OFF the secondary effect early. Most people aren't too fussed about it, thankfully, but it's still a consideration, as many of the suffixes out there really shine if you can manage to make them last for longer, such as protection from being chilled or frozen, or increasing your armor or evasion for the duration. If they shut off early, it could be a problem, and using them while you have full life/mana for their secondary use is .... problematic. The best suffixes that sell reasonably well are "Heat", "Staunching", "Iron Skin", "Warding", and "Reflexes". Just for Life flasks, "Animation" combined with Saturated is an excellent combination for minion masters to help keep their minions going strong.

A lot of those suffixes are also excellent choices for Utility flasks, because a Utility flask doesn't have a point at which it can turn off ... it will always do it's thing for it's full duration. The best prefixes for Utility flasks are those that will maximize your use of the flask itself, either by increasing it's duration or the number of times it can be used from fully charged. This gives us a small range of useful prefixes to look for, for most of them, such as "Ample", "Chemist's", and "Experimenter's". Checking the flask's charges used vs charges at full charge will tell you which ones are best for your flask type.

Let's use a Diamond Flask for our example here. This flask has a base of 4 seconds per use, uses 20 charges per use, and has 40 charges max. In order to get 3 uses of this flask, Ample prefix would have to roll a perfect 20, giving us 60 max charges. Each flask use would last 4.8 seconds, with 20% quality, for a total flask time in use of 14.4 seconds. Chemist's prefix would give us no benefit, as you cannot reduce the flask charges used enough to give us 3 uses from full, but Experimenter's can increase flask duration by 30 - 40%. Obviously, this falls quite a bit short of the 50% increase from a perfect Ample prefix, but the problem is, how often do you roll a 20 on that? Experimenter's can at least give you extra time in use even with a "crappy" roll. So let's go with 30%... Even without 20% quality, a 30% experimenter's flask gives 5.2 seconds of use, for 10.4 seconds overall. With 20% quality and 30% experimenter's the duration is exactly 6 seconds ... so 12 seconds of use. At the opposite extreme, a 40% with 20% quality will give 6.4 seconds, so 12.8 seconds total time. This is at least comparable enough to a perfect Ample prefix to make it useful overall. All you need after scoring a perfect ample or any experimenter's prefix is any decent suffix on your list! These, of course, are the same ones previously mentioned.... Heat, Staunching, Warding, Reflexes, Iron Skin ...

You can follow the same process of though for all other flask types, with a few additions here and there as they warrant it. Obviously, a resistance flask is going to benefit best from ... even more resistance! For example, A Ruby flask would benefit from resist all being added, or having Dousing for the suffix to remove the effect of burning. A Topaz flask would work with resist all as well as Grounding, to remove being Shocked. This extends the utility of that flask type even further. Atziri uses a LOT of fire and lightning damage against you, and she hits as hard as a truck. She also reflects any curses you are using on her back at you! So a flask with Warding that also increases your maximum resistance to fire or lightning is just plain common sense!

So ... the process for this is quite simple ... get your chosen flask type, scour if necessary, raise quality to 20%, transmute to make it magic, alt till you have a prefix or suffix that you like (or the completed flask), augment if necessary, and re-roll with alts if you don't like what the augment did till you are happy with the results. For a very difficult combination that is hard to find, you may end up going through over 100 alteration orbs .... this is perfectly normal and why people pay so much for a really good flask.

I generally end up selling most of my flasks for 10 chaos each, with the really great combinations or hard to obtain ones at 20 chaos each, though near the start of the league some of my well-rolled flasks went for 1 exalt because there just weren't any that fit the bill for those people who REALLY wanted them early on.

Next up, I'll bring up other basic things that are easy to craft and sell