Budget Physical Crossbow Crafting (Grenades) 3-4 Div

This is written in week 1 of a league, while the Exalted Orb still holds value (around 1/100 of a divine and around 4/5 of a chaos).

Prices of items may cost comparable amounts of Chaos Orbs in a mature league.

Typical final outcome:

Loosely based upon Lolcohol's guide for crafting strong semi-budget talismans, this guide will take you through the process of crafting a Siege Crossbow with high physical damage that will not break the bank.

All prices are accurate at the time of posting, but in the world of instant trading, prices can change rapidly. I caused the price of Siege Crossbow bases to jump up 2 exalts just by buying 20 of them while writing this guide.

Selling and starting over

In trade league, you sometimes fail to hit the item you want but accidentally hit someone else's dream item instead. Or a step towards their dream item.

This craft is RNG heavy, and there's a couple of points where you might make something really good that is not the desired step.

At those points, if in trade league, sell your item and start again fresh. If in SSF, place the 'perfect for someone else' item aside for potential use in a different crafting project later, and once more start again.

Why Siege Crossbow rather than a cheaper base?

Because the implicit is so powerful that these crossbows are best in slot by a HUGE magnitude.

Why No Attack Speed?

Grenade builds don't really scale much with attack speed. It's not a worthless stat for you, but it's not important either - which is unusual for attack builds. This makes crafting grenade crossbows much easier than other attack weapons.

In my personal experience this is a 1 in 10, but my sample size isn't large and the odds may be different.

This step relies upon the incredible strength of Perfect Transmutes and Perfect Augments. By banning not just low tier modifiers but medium tier modifiers as well, they guarantee that IF you hit a +skills roll or a +%physical damage roll on your Crossbow, it will be a very high tier.

Our goal: Get a magic Siege Crossbow with Merciless or Tyrannical (170-179% or 155-169% Increased Physical Damage) and a 'filler' suffix that we don't really want. This 'filler' suffix will be useful later.

Reagents:

1x Perfect Orb of Transmutation (1ex)

1x Perfect Orb of Augmentation (3ex)

1x Siege Crossbow, item level 82 or higher, normal rarity (12ex).

Simply apply both orbs to the crossbow.

Do not skimp on the item level of 82; it is needed to allow Merciless to roll, which will make your results better on average. It also allows a couple of other modifiers, some desirable, some of which slightly dilute the loot pool, but overall, 82 is much better.

The Failure State (>80%):

Sorry, this is an RNG heavy craft, you'll end up here a lot.

In this case you get a prefix we don't want and a suffix that's not +7 to projectile skills.

Try to sell your failed craft attempt (it may very well not sell) and start over.

Tier 1 flat elemental damage rolls DO sell well here; consider those consolation prizes if you hit one.

The Absolute Dream (<1%):

You hit 155-169% increased physical damage OR 170-179% increased physical damage, and ALSO hit +7 to the level of projectile skills.

Congratulations, you just hit a massive lucky outcome.

Go sell this to someone who is wealthy enough to use it perfectly, i.e. someone who is not doing a budget craft, then start over. Do NOT sell cheap.

You might get enough currency from your lucky outcome to trade for a Headhunter or another chase item.

The 'Perfect For Someone Else' Roll (~5-7%):

You hit +7 to the level of projectile skills, but you fail to hit the mod you want for personal use.

Sell this lucky outcome to someone else (or store it for future crafts if in SSF), and start again with a new base and new perfect orbs.

The Goal - Tier 1 or Tier 2 Increased Physical Damage% (~10%):

Here you'll have an item like this:

Most of the time you'll get the tier 2 physical damage modifier, but tier 1 is possible too and will give better results. Both outcomes are good enough to continue with.

This item isn't useful yet, but we have an excellent first step here. The suffix does not matter, it's getting deleted at a later stage.

This one is really simple. Apply a Greater Essence of Abrasion. This will change the item from magic to rare, and add tier 3 flat physical damage, which has excellent synergy with the %physical we rolled earlier.

This step is very cheap, around 3½ exalts at time of writing.

becomes

Now, you COULD use this as-is... but we can deterministically make it much better.

Our next goal - add an excellent third prefix. This costs 4 exalts on a good day, 5 on a bad. (I wrote this on a good day)

Here, we are going to settle for something that's good, but not the best possible prefix. Higher budget strategies can achieve better results here.

We'll use a Preserved Jawbone (½ exalt), but rig the results in our favor with not one but TWO omens.

Omen of the Liege (¼ exalt) forces modifiers to be tied to the lore figure Amanamu. Amanamu has the most grenade-themed modifiers available for crossbows.

And Omen of Sinistral Necromancy (3¼ exalts) to force a prefix.

Put both Omens into your inventory and right click them.

IMPORTANT: check they are both red. You can ruin the item at this step if you don't do this.

At this point - fire away and Desecrate your crossbow, then make the Well of Souls pilgrimage in order to see what you get.

Select the 101-121% grenade damage roll; hopefully you will roll better than I do.

Why This Works:

The Omen of the Liege always (in my personal experience) presents Amanamu themed modifiers in preference to ALL other modifiers. And there are only three Amanamu modifiers possible as crossbow prefixes.

Note that this modifier is inferior to most Tier 1 prefix modifiers, for example, you'd rather Devastating: 120-139% increased elemental damage with attacks. However, those are not available as cheaply as this item.

Here, the goal is to hit +5 to the level of attack skills through the use of a Perfect Essence of Battle (75ex). There's two ways you can attempt this.

Option 1 is expensive and deterministic. You'll use one of the best Omens in the game, and in exchange, the game will absolutely, positively guarantee you to change the bad suffix into "+5 to the level of all attack skills", the third best possible suffix. (5-6 and 7 would both be better, but those are very expensive to hit)

Option 2 has some risk of failure, but in exchange is cheaper.

I'll detail both, and let you make up your mind which route to take.

Here, we'll use the expensive Omen of Dextral Crystallisation (2½ divines) to absolutely, positively guarantee we don't ruin the item.

In short - this Omen sacrifices itself to protect what we've achieved so far.

This essence guarantees the mod we want, but it will delete a modifier at random... we want to rig the choice of which modifier is taken.

Once more, put this precious Omen into your inventory and right click it, double check you right clicked, and then apply the Perfect Essence of Battle.

After this, you will have 4 deterministic modifiers:

- T1 or T2 %phys damage

- T3 flat phys damage

- Amanamu grenade mod

- +5 attack skills

This is the end of deterministic addition or alteration of modifiers (without extreme expense) and your best choice here is to use an Omen of Greater Exaltation and either a Perfect Exalted Orb (1.1div) or a Greater Exalted Orb (5ex), then jump to the final step.

Here, we don't use the expensive Omen.

We have 2 outstanding prefixes and one good one, and a trash suffix.

Use two Greater Exalted Orb to apply another two random suffixes.

If we are lucky, we'll hit +5, +6 or +7 to projectile skills here. We probably won't be.

If we hit +4, that's all we can get (this is not ideal but not awful). Move on to the final step.

If we hit anything else, now we RNG apply a Perfect Essence of Battle.

Good luck! This step can ruin your item, but sometimes, better to lose a replaceable crossbow than a very expensive Omen.

Your crossbow is almost ready to use.

Now, it's the very basic deterministic parts - apply 20 quality with Blacksmith's Whetstones and sockets with Artificer's Orbs.

Consider Saqawal's Rune of the Sky, although since 0.4.0 you can only use ONE of this powerful rune. Another rune worthy of consideration is the Greater Iron Rune.

And if you are feeling lucky, you can apply a Vaal Orb and probably ruin your item...