You can craft or upgrade really strong items for yourself in Last Epoch. This is done through the game’s crafting system. However, it is quite opaque – as a player almost at the end of their journey has realized.
How does crafting work in Last Epoch?
- Items in Last Epoch come with affixes (prefixes and suffixes) that determine their properties, such as: attributes, damage, and defense.
- Through crafting, you can remove unwanted affixes and add new ones or improve desired affixes. This is important for increasing the necessary resistances.
- Through the crafting system, even items that appear weak at first glance can potentially be strong for your build. Even players with thousands of hours in Path of Exile love crafting in Last Epoch.
Another important choice you have to make is the right faction in Last Epoch – here too, you’ll get better items in any case:
This mistake was made by the player: In order to upgrade an item for your build, the affixes must be right. Items typically have up to 4 slots that you can fill with the appropriate properties.
On Reddit, a player only noticed at level 91 that they can simply add desired affixes directly. All you need to do is click on the ‘+’ on the left (prefixes) or right (suffixes) and choose an appropriate shard.
The player says: Until now, they had filled a random affix into a slot using a Rune of Discovery and then hoped for something suitable using a Glyph of Chaos. They did not know they could choose a value directly:
“I get a lot of questions about how I overlooked this huge plus. Definitely foolish of me, but for everyone wondering: It didn’t look like a button to me. When I first started crafting, I saw the rune and thought it was meant to fill these slots. […] Now I know better.”
More Tips for Crafting in Last Epoch
Chaos Runes are rather rare, especially compared to the number of shards you find. This alone makes it almost necessary to add properties directly to the items. Players are still discussing other tips. We have summarized some of them here and expanded them with our own experience:
- Smashing Runes do not guarantee every shard contained in the item – only Removal Runes do that, but with a random affix
- Removal Runes create an empty affix slot that you can fill again yourself
- If an item is already nearly perfect, you can also “seal” an unwanted affix with a Glyph of Despair to free up the slot – but the glyphs are very rare
- Experimental affixes can also be directly sealed with a Rune of Research, thus giving you the slot back
With the extremely rare Glyph of Insight, you can even convert an existing affix into an experimental one. One user has created a useful website that calculates the probabilities for you beforehand.
The goal of crafting is always to find the best possible item for your build. Depending on what you play, you will need different properties on your equipment. But remember to always include defensive values – in Last Epoch, attack alone is not enough.
Most loot filters you find in guides have already incorporated a corresponding color code for useful affixes. This way, you can quickly see which affixes are useful for you, either for direct use or for extraction. For a quick overview, you can find the best builds for Last Epoch in our tier list along with links to the corresponding builds with loot filters.
