Isolation Crafting: The Most Important Advanced Crafting Trick To Learn

Isolation crafting is a general crafting philosophy where you 'ban' all of the 'RNG' elements except one when using RNG crafting options. You rig the odds in your favor, so that when the dice are rolled, they can only land exactly the way you wanted them to land.

This guide has been written during patch 0.3.0.

The general principle is timeless, but specific examples given might not work if you are reading this long after patch 0.3.0.

This is an advanced guide, and might be hard to put into use if you aren't solidly across basic and intermediate crafting in POE2. If you are looking for a guide to these earlier steps, check out how item modifiers work.

The Orb of Annulment or the Chaos Orb (including improved variants) are intrinsically RNG orbs. The removed mod is picked at random and might remove a modifier you wished to keep.

However, imagine you use one upon this item.

There are two possible mods that could be chosen to be removed, but one of the modifiers is fractured and thus is 'banned' from being removed.

This means you are absolutely guaranteed to remove the "+2 to the Level of All Minion Skills" modifier. No other options are allowed at all.

Let's break down why this simple case works, so we can build upon it later.

The game is insisting that one modifier be removed from the item.

There are two choices, which by default would be a 50-50 pick.

But the chance to remove the Spirit modifier is entirely removed because of the fractured modifier, and so we go from two equal chance options, to just one option.

Isolation crafting is taking this simple case further. It is the process of setting up a craft so that EVERY possible step, or at least all but the first steps, have absolutely no RNG elements.

A lot of modifiers can roll on amulets.

Imagine - we have a 2 modifier rare amulet that already has two locked-in prefixes.

"Ranger's" - Tier 1 accuracy (347-450) and "Countess'" - T1 spirit (47-50).

You can create this with recombination, although the probability to hit on each attempt will be under 10%.

We now use an Omen of Homogenizing Exaltation to 'rig' the results of our next exalted orb.

Immediately, all the possible modifiers that do not have the "Attack" tag are banned, leaving three options. Note that this 'bans' every single prefix that could otherwise have rolled.

"Of Combat": +1 to the level of all Melee skills

"Of Duelling": +2 to the level of all Melee skills

"Of Battle": +3 to the level of all Melee skills

By default, that doesn't really 'lock in' the hotly desired 'of Battle' prefix, which is still 2 in 17, or about 12% to roll.

But if we use a Perfect Exalted Orb here... we ALSO ban the level 5 mod 'of Combat' and the level 41 mod 'of Dueling', because the Perfect Exalted Orb bans mods under level 50 from rolling unless they are top tier mods.

The game is still forcing the Orb to add a mod... and so the 'perfect' mod, 'of Battle' has to be chosen.

There's no other options - we have isolated them all.

One of the simplest but most powerful examples involves the rare and precious Omen of Sinistral Annulment (sometimes called a 'Left Annul Omen').

If you have an item that has very, very good suffixes and a single fractured prefix, the Omen 'bans' Orbs of Annulment from hitting suffixes on the item, and at the same time the Fractured status of the item 'bans' the Annul from hitting the fractured modifier.

If the item has only five modifiers, you know before using the Annul what the result will be.

And that's Isolation Crafting. The process of taking a fundamentally RNG process, and rigging the dice so that they always come up in YOUR favor.