Breach tree is felt very good during progression

As a player only focused on completing 36 challenges playing a new build each league with some cool looking skill, I really appreciated the breach tree creating specifically rare gear. Several people mention poor player retention for 3.27, but with the tree, it was the most fun league I've played so far. I finished my goal in 2-3 weeks. Previously I took 4+ weeks and I always felt burnt out playing for that long to get great gear to complete the challenges.

It makes gear progression through maps feel so much better than spamming chaos orbs. While going from T1 to T16 maps, my gear progression (without resorting to trading) would be finding a good base then spamming chaos orbs until my resistance stay high enough and I get more defensive stats like armour or life. I hate rerolling items like rerolling flasks. Creating heavily influenced gear a few times feels so much better.

It also made 6-link gear SO much less stressful to get. I would only get 6-link after a long time in T16 map, waiting for the top chest base to drop, spamming chaos orbs until it is decent, then spamming links until I run out and then having to farm more currency to buy more links to spam more. It is already annoying enough just to get a chest stat upgrade and the link requirement on top of it makes it even worse to find an actual chest upgrade.

For balance, I understand the league's implementation was way too strong, easily producing T1 gear. Capping affixes to T3, I would still take it just to keep up with enemy scaling through maps.

I would much rather obtain my mapping gear upgrades through drops from monsters or league mechanics rather than through trade, chaos spam RNG, looking up specific crafting guides, or learning all mechanics to know how to craft specifically what I want. Once I can comfortably farm T16 alch-n-go, I am willing to use other methods to get upgrades.

Yes, it felt good early on, but the prevalence of near perfect items from tree and easy access to fracture bases, made the early league low-mid level crafting economy useless.

It sounds like you do not usually take advantage of this part of the game, but weeks 1-3 a good amount of currency can be made just doing simple essence crafts on fractured bases. This league, they are worth nothing.


side note, chaos spamming your gear is not a very effective way of upgrading it. I would highly suggest you look into essences, fossils, even harvest.

The near perfect items and fracture bases I definitely think is too strong. My suggested compromise is to lower the ceiling of affixes that can roll so instead of getting all T1 you can maybe only T3/4 at best. Something that can more easily produce ok/good gear during mapping progression outside of chaos spamming, knowledge checks, or trading.

I am learning a few new crafting mechanics each league, though they never come to mind when I am thinking about wanting to craft a specific good item. They simply never felt intuitive or reliable to me to use it for crafting unless I am going to near top tier items.

Most of my progression frustration was when we did not have asynchronous trade. This league with both the breach tree and asynchronous trade, I felt breach tree was sufficient enough for me to smoothly progress to T16 and start farming before I actually needed to trade for anything. If crafting gear from breach tree is removed, I will likely just buy all my upgrades starting in maps since it is so much easier to trade for items now.

Easy recipe for self crafting any 4-mod item:

1. Acquire fracture base. Generally cheap for <84 base <T1 fracture, basically free this league regardless. Attempt to get the fractured affix that is hardest/lowest weight to roll. Affix weights can be found on Craftofexile.com

2. Determine next required affix that is available from an essence. Spam with essence until you have essence modifier + 1 additional desired affix.

3. Bench craft a 4th desired affix.


This is plenty good for atlas completion on most builds. As for profit, do this repeatedly, selling 4-mods for small profit, and youll eventually also hit 5th/6th affixs via just via lucky essnce rolls or exalt slams, and those will sell very nicely in the first few weeks, if the item is stat'd for a meta build.

Unless tree stays in as is, and then this form of crafting is basically dead for profit.

My problem with the tree (and the league in general) is that everything was just too easy and done too quickly.

The bosses were laughable. The tree was done and fully upgraded before I even got to T16s. The actual breaches are just kind of tedious after having them in every map, especially the stupid wall crap in the incredulously large circle, especially in maps where that meant most of the monsters got trapped really far away.

All in all, foulborn items were okay-ish. The tree was EXCELLENT for progression, but becomes almost entirely useless beyond mid-tier gearing except for lottery. And it contributed heavily to the super fast completion of everything. The core bosses......WHERE ARE THE OTHER BREACHLORDS? Seriously...how can you release an "updated" breach and CUT content making it overall smaller than what it was before in terms of the whole "killing monsters" thing. The Esh/Tul encounter looks kind of cool, but that's about it....it wasn't hard and I can't believe THAT was the pinnacle of the league.


I feel like the OG harvest (actually planting crops and growing them) kept me way more engaged in the "gear grind" than the breach tree passives did. It seems like hunting GG items using the tree is the real "primary" focus of the league over the breach mechanic itself, and it was just....boring (in terms of interaction).

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Piousqd#0073 wrote:

Easy recipe for self crafting any 4-mod item:

1. Acquire fracture base. Generally cheap for <84 base <T1 fracture, basically free this league regardless. Attempt to get the fractured affix that is hardest/lowest weight to roll. Affix weights can be found on Craftofexile.com

2. Determine next required affix that is available from an essence. Spam with essence until you have essence modifier + 1 additional desired affix.

3. Bench craft a 4th desired affix.

Likely due to my inexperience, but this process does not sound reliable. My first thought I cannot think of any reliable farming strategies for many fractured bases. I am aware fracturing orbs can be extremely expensive so that is not an option early mapping. Trading for them is pointless because I could just trade for the item I want (though this self-craft could be cheaper). So I would need a strategy to focus on while progressing maps to find fractured items as drops.

In my experience, my find rate for random fractured items are about as rare as divine orb drops or if I am running sythensis maps. So unless there is a mechanic I am not aware of, this is not a reliable way to obtain gear upgrades while progressing maps. It sounds more like a post-atlas completion T16 farming strategy.

To still keep profit crafting, I think they could tweak the numbers so that players would need heavy investment to farm for low drop chance gear womb to obtain good progression gear from the breach tree. A low enough drop chance so players could not amass tons of wombs to grow which floods the market and ensuring womb always drops level-appropriate so T16 farmers would not be able to get low level progression gear. A workaround would be farmers would have to exp-penalize themselves to keep at a low enough level to keep obtaining low level wombs.

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Leezurli#0616 wrote:

Likely due to my inexperience, but this process does not sound reliable. My first thought I cannot think of any reliable farming strategies for many fractured bases. I am aware fracturing orbs can be extremely expensive so that is not an option early mapping. Trading for them is pointless because I could just trade for the item I want (though this self-craft could be cheaper). So I would need a strategy to focus on while progressing maps to find fractured items as drops.

In my experience, my find rate for random fractured items are about as rare as divine orb drops or if I am running sythensis maps. So unless there is a mechanic I am not aware of, this is not a reliable way to obtain gear upgrades while progressing maps. It sounds more like a post-atlas completion T16 farming strategy.

To still keep profit crafting, I think they could tweak the numbers so that players would need heavy investment to farm for low drop chance gear womb to obtain good progression gear from the breach tree. A low enough drop chance so players could not amass tons of wombs to grow which floods the market and ensuring womb always drops level-appropriate so T16 farmers would not be able to get low level progression gear. A workaround would be farmers would have to exp-penalize themselves to keep at a low enough level to keep obtaining low level wombs.

Sorry, yes this is with a focus on trade league. You would buy the fractured bases. You can target farm them a few very niche ways, but for the purposes of league start and low/mid profit crafting, you just buy em. Fracture orbs are generally reserved for higher end crafts, due to cost, as you noted.

Buying fractured bases is significantly cheaper than buying a crafted item, generally speaking, for several reasons:

1. Lack of knowledge. Many players simply do not understand crafting or cant be bothered.

2. RNG. The cost of crafting varies based on your luck. With a simple 4 mod craft, its fairly low variance, as you dont need many tries to hit a single desired mod/ <T1 mod. But there is still variance.

3. Market availability. If you are playing off-meta builds, there just may not be items with the mods you want for sale.

4. Being ok settling. Fractured top tier bases with high ilvl and T1 fractures can be expensive. But a lvl76 base, with a T2 mod fractured may be 50x less, but plenty good for your current needs.

^to add to this: the difference between t1 and t2 in terms of MATH (power) is very very little......but the cost is astronomically different because of demand.

Everyone seems to want "perfect" right away. But no one needs perfect. Perfect is nice, but unnecessary.

A very quick example from just today: I had a double foulborn United in Dream. The quality roll was 1% off from perfect. The difference in price for a 29% versus a 30% was the difference between 20c and 13 divines. But the actual functional difference? Nothing.


Same is true of "high end" items. One low mod might mean 5% less "power" for your build, but in terms of value it might mean you save HUNDREDS of divines or chaos.

Good to know about the fracture crafting.

I guess my self-imposed SSF until T16 will still lead to a rough mapping progression. I am very much willing to trade for upgrades to keep progressing, though personally it feels better at least craft something sufficient yourself. That is what I am hoping the breach tree can do if it remains in the game. Some better way to get progression gear for those that like the SSF feel without the full SSF restriction (it should better pure SSF players also).

Regarding the gear power range I am refering to, I am mostly thinking of T3-T5 range of gear power and mostly on the defensive gear. I settle a lot with chaos spamming. I mainly want to be able to swap to better bases and improve my defenses while still maintaining my resistances. Sockets are a whole other level of restriction that makes it so much harder to upgrade gear (specifically body) during map progression. I typically get craft one full set of white map bases, then craft one full set of the top1/2 bases.

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Leezurli#0616 wrote:

Good to know about the fracture crafting.

I guess my self-imposed SSF until T16 will still lead to a rough mapping progression.

honestly though....for general atlas completion (without HARD juice like delirium), all you REALLY need is essence plus benchcraft, 2-mod gear. For many builds. Perhaps not minion builds or many DoT bilds, but most others. The only thing you do is keep upgrading the essence mod value when possible (and the bench as you unlock them).

This is something that people don't realize because they tend to follow a guide that never actually spells this out.