Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I had a request from one of my friends over on Mastodon to at some point do an explanation of the crafting system for Last Epoch. Apparently at one point I did one of these for Path of Exile… and here is proof that I do not remember half the things that I write here because my mind blanks on what I even said. That said I am going to do my best to fulfill this request but I feel like I need to start off with a few caveats. I am by no means a master crafter nor am I some god of Last Epoch information. This is going to be a rough explanation of the crafting system as I have used it, because in truth it is pretty straightforward and I have done a heck of a lot of “fixing” gear by tweaking one or two things on it. If you have any specific questions about how an individual item works, I suggest consulting Last Epoch Tools because it seems to be the trove of knowledge on the game.
The Forge Screen
Let’s start off with the most basic elements of crafting. At any point in the game, you can hit the F key to pop up your forge interface, or optionally you can click on any of the anvil devices scattered throughout the social hubs of the game. This will bring up the crafting interface allowing you to place an item into the window and modify the elements of it. The most basic component of an item is its Forging potential, which is a number that indicates how many actions you can take against an item in an attempt to change its elements. Each action that you take usually will remove some amount of this number, and these will be indicated by a range with the highest success being that it removes zero points, and the worst possible interaction removing the full cost usually somewhere around 10. Below the item is the Glyph slot which will allow you to slot in an item that will modify the way a current crafting attempt works. Below that is the Rune slot which will impact the item as a whole rather than an individual craft.
Item Rarity
Every piece of gear can have two prefixes and two suffixes. You cannot craft on Unique or Set pieces by default and I am not going to talk about the process of creating a Legendary item… so for now we are only going to focus on the four rarities of normal items: Normal (white), Magic (blue), Rare (yellow), and Exalted (purple). The primary difference between Normal, Magic, and Rare is how many affixes are filled on the item. A Normal Item will have none of its affixes filled, a Magic will have at least one, and a Rare item will have at least three. Exalted denotes something specific in that one of the affixes on an item is Tier 6 or Tier 7. The highest that you can craft on an item is a Tier 5 affix, as a result some of the most sought out items in the game have one or more exalted affixes on them.
I specifically chose the same base item for this visual to illustrate a point. There is another element of an item that I have not talked about and that is the Implicits, which are inherited from the item you are crafting on. For example, this is an Augury Plate which will always have 475 Armor and some amount of Increase Mana Regen with the range being a random roll between 18% and 35%. Before we leave the discussion of Item Rarity, I feel like it is important to note that when an item drops… its Forging Potential is determined by the rarity of the item. An exalted item will by default have more forging potential than a normal item. Forging Potential is a range of possible values, but it is something to note that the better quality item you start the crafting process with, the more wiggle room you have for modifying it.
Item Bases
Expanding upon this further, here is a selection of Sentinel Body Armors, aka items that will have what is considered to be a large amount of armor on them. Iron Cuirass is a body armor with 100 Armor and a range of Cold Resistance. Solarium Plate is a body armor with 420 Armor, a range of endurance values, and a range of increased fire damage values. Augury Plate which was used in the previous example has 475 armor and a range of Increase Man Regen. Finally we have the Apocalypse Plate which was newly added in with the 1.0 patch and features 513 Armor, a range of Stun Avoidance, and a Void Knight specific implicit that increases Echo Damage when a Skill is Echoed. Each one of these items is going to lean towards a specific type of build and use case. I’ve been working on an ignite Forge Guard and in theory I am probably going to want to be watching for Solarium Plate’s with the correct stat combination because that implicit would greatly increase the amount of fire damage I would be capable of stacking.
Affix Shards
From a very early level, you will be used to seeing explosions of brown text on your screen that you rapidly hoover up into your inventory. Eventually you hit the transfer materials button, at which point they are whisked away to your crafting inventory never to be thought of again. The thing is every single one of these crafting materials is an item with its own stats and text explaining their use. I decided to pull out four different Affix shards so we could talk about them a bit. Health is probably one of the first affixes that you will encounter in the game and it is pretty much universally sought. If you read the text it denotes that this specific variant gives you X% Increased Health and can be applied to Body Armor, Helmets, or Belts. Armor is another very early affix and this one gives you X% increased armor and can be applied to Helmets, Body Armor, Boots, and Shields. Chance to Slow on Hit specifically is something that can go on a weapon or a quiver which is the same for a lot of the “on hit” mechanics.
Lastly we have a very specific type of shard that can only be found on items that increase the level of the Sentinel skill Warpath, allowing you to allocate additional points in the skill specialization tree. This opens the door to another aspect of crafting which is looking for items that you might want to harvest affixes from. There are a few specific ways to do this which I will dive into in the next subject, but essentially you can break down items with Runes in order to reclaim affix shards that you can then use to craft on another item. A lot of the loot that I pick up in a dungeon or monolith, is specifically things that I am snagging for harvesting purposes. When crafting on affixes there is the possibility to “crit” your craft reducing the amount of forging potential that it takes or giving you free levels of either the same affix or one of the other affixes.
Runes
Runes are a type of crafting material that applies to the entire item, not a specific prefix or suffix craft. These can have some pretty sweeping changes to your item and override whatever you have configured in your glyph or affixes. Make sure you remove runes before finalizing your craft if you do not intend to use them as they will stay slotted in the forge window after a crafting attempt. Let’s talk a bit about each of the types of runes and what it is used for.
- Rune of Shattering
- This is ultimately going to be your most commonly used rune. This is essentially the same as salvaging an item in other games. It will destroy the current item and return a random number of affix shards from the item. It could be all of the affixes slotted into an item, or it could be just one. When an affix shard is returned it also gives you a random number of them, which could be the full face value of the craft on the item or just a single shard. This is the most commonly used because it does not require any forging potential so you can use this to destroy items that have been “zeroed out”.
- Rune of Removal
- This is similar to Shattering but it requires forging potential and will consume between 1 and 25 per craft. The difference is this will remove a random single affix and return all of the shards on an item. So for example if you remove an exalted T7 affix, it will remove seven copies of that affix. Remember though that which one is removed is completely random so you need to have plenty of forging potential if you are trying to target a specific affix.
- Rune of Discovery
- This rune costs no forging potential and will fill any empty affix on an item with a random Tier 1 affix. So if you were to use this on a Normal item, you would end up with a Rare containing four random Tier 1 affixes. For me at least these have two uses, firstly in the very early game before I have access to rare gear I can throw a Rune of Discovery on something and my alt has at least some power quickly. The other time I would use one is if I have an item with otherwise good stats but zero forging potential left, and hitting it with a Discovery just fills up the affixes regardless of what the final result ends up being.
- Rune of Shaping
- This rune will reroll the random implicit values on a piece of gear. Remember above I said that each of the base types came with a certain number of implicit and some of those had random ranges. This would be used on an item that has otherwise great stats but really low rolls on those implicits. Unfortunately it has a high potential cost consuming between 1 and 25 forging potential so this is something you really need to do early in the crafting process.
- Rune of Refinement
- This does something similar to Shaping, but will reroll ALL of the affixes on your item giving you a new random value within the range of possible values for each affix. This will consume between 1 and 15 forging potential, but honestly feels like a pretty risky move because you could of course get nothing but top-tier rolls… or you could end up with an item with baseline stats. This is essentially the same as the Divine Orb from Path of Exile with the difference being that you are eating up Forging Potential each time you use one.
- Rune of Ascendance
- This is quite possibly my favorite crafting item. Essentially this is the Chance Orb from Path of Exile but one that works every time. This will take an item and upgrade it into a random Unique for that type. This will not respect item bases, but it will respect broad categories of items. For example if you use this on a Two-Handed Sword, you are going to end up with a Unique Two-Handed Sword as a result. I mostly use these to target specific slots that I need a specific unique for, but it is an absolute gamble. They are just fun and you never quite know what you are going to get from them. I do not believe you can get anything that drops in a specific location or has specific corruption level requirements in order for an item to drop. This is just based on my own experience and I do not know this for certain however.
- Rune of Creation
- This item is similar to the Mirror of Kalandra from Path of Exile for those who might be familiar with that. Essentially it will allow you to duplicate any item with crafting potential so as such cannot be used on Uniques or Set items which cannot be crafted on at all, it also cannot be used on items that have been zeroed out. This item will consume all of the forging potential of both the original and the duplicate so nothing further can be done with either save for using one of the runes that requires no forging potential. Essentially this prevents the nonsense that happens in Path of Exile where folks have “mirror shops” and keep duping the same items over and over. I’ve personally used this to create multiple copies of an Exalted item before attempting to make a Legendary, but again not going to dive into that process today.
Glyphs
Glyphs are the other part of crafting and I decided to cover them after runes since they impact specific affixes not broad change to the entire item. There are a few edge cases but largely in order to use a Glyph you will need Forging Potential, Available Affix Shards of a given type, and an Affix that is less than T5 aka the maximum level that you can craft on. Let’s talk through the various options.
- Glyph of Hope
- Let’s start off with the best glyph, aka the one you are probably going to want to use every single time you do any crafting. Using a Glyph of Hope while upgrading an affix gives you a 25% chance to use zero forging potential. The more upgrades that you can get for free, the more wiggle room you have on an item to perfect it. If I am just grinding a stat up to T5 I am going to be using one of these and the 25% roll is independent of the normal “critical” crafting process allowing you to both get it for free and get a bonus stat level at the same time.
- Glyph of Chaos
- While there is no true equivalent to the Chaos Orb from Path of Exile, this is probably the closest that exists. The Glyph of Chaos essentially allows you to replace any affix on an item with a random affix that is possible to roll on that item. It will also raise the Tier of that affix slot by one, therefore placing a limit on the number of times you can attempt to reroll an affix. This is really a yolo move for an item that has three great affixes, but one that is meaningless to your build. Sometimes you luck out and get something good… worst case is you just get a different stat that is meaningless. Unlike POE, I don’t really know of any times when a single stat line can brick your build.
- Glyph of Order
- Okay, this is probably the most complicated to explain. When you apply an affix, it gives you a value within a range so for example if that range is 1 to 10… you could get any of those values. When you raise the tier of an affix, it rolls again giving you another random value within a range. Glyph of Order allows you to preserve the location in the range while bumping it up to a higher tier. If you have an item with the maximum stat for a given tier, then it is worthwhile to use a Glyph of Order to keep making sure you are pegging out the top of that range each time you move up in tier.
- Glyph of Despair
- Glyph of Despair does something weird with an item, and in theory allows you to have more than four affixes. Essentially when you use this on an item there is a chance to “seal” the affix and empty the slot that it previously occupied allowing you to craft something new in its place. This is chance-based and the lower the tier of the affix that you are trying to seal, the higher the chance it will succeed. When the craft “fails” it simply upgrades that affix to the next highest tier.
Experimental Gear
Up until this point, I have been covering “normal” crafting. As with any game that gets new content over time, there begin to be a few edge cases. In 0.9.2 Rune Prisons were introduced to the game, and with them Experimental gear. When you open a Rune Prison in a map an Exiled Mage spawns and if you manage to kill it, it drops an experiment type of gear. These contain prefixes that cannot be gained through any other way and that cannot be extracted in shard form. These can do some really interesting things like for example there is one that summons X zombies to fight on your side whenever you use a potion. Some of these are very powerful, but the majority are sort of interesting edge cases. With these items however introduced a few other crafting options that I left off the table as not to confuse you too early.
Experimental Crafting
With 0.9.2 there was a new rune and a new glyph added to the game that interacted with these experimental affixes. Runes of Research can only drop from Exiled Mages, and Glyph’s of Insight supposedly can only drop once you have used a Rune of Research. I cannot confirm nor deny this… but I can confirm that I did not see a single Glyph of Insight drop until after I had used a Rune of Research and then I found it within a few Exiled Mage kills. Could be a coincidence but I am not certain. Let’s talk about how each is used.
- Rune of Research
- This item allows you to take an Experimental Item and seal that affix so that you can craft another prefix onto the item. Unlike Glyph of Despair, this is 100% chance and will always seal the prefix taking somewhere between 1 and 20 forging potential to do so. Really I cannot think of a downside to doing this as it allows you to make an Experimental item better.
- Glyph of Insight
- This Glyph on the other hand allows you to take an existing item with a filled prefix and replace it with a randomly chosen Experimental Affix that is capable of rolling on that item type. Folks have apparently mathed out what the chances are and what affixes are available in a bunch of different scenarios so you can check out this calculator to determine what you might get. So this is an option if you have an item with a useless prefix that might be improved by an experimental one.
The Wrap Up
Well, folks, that is the crafting system. Like I said going into this I am by no means an expert, but have been crafting items regularly since I started playing this game in 2018. What I dig about the system is that it is really powerful while still being relatively deterministic. Path of Exile crafting potentially is more powerful, but it is also way the hell more random… and you need a whole slew of community-supported tools to really understand it. Last Epoch thankfully is simple enough that I could cover almost everything in a single blog post. While it might seem complicated, I promise it is pretty easy to get the hang of. I hope my post helped some of you who might have had cold feet about diving in. I’ve likely missed some elements and I am sure someone will respond in the comments to fill in those details.