Omen of Recombination - Should You Use One?

The Omen of Recombination is a powerful crafting tool. It's also one of the rarest Omens in the game, although not very expensive in trade league, yet.

With really expensive recombinations, for example high end fractured items or very hard to replace bases, you should always use this Omen.

With really cheap recombinations, you never do (this Omen trades for 40 exalted orbs as I write this article; while this rate may change, you don't want to waste these on recombination attempts far below that price).

This article looks at the interesting cases - the ones in between.

In Path of Exile 2, "Lucky" means "Roll twice, keep the better result".

For those of you who are maths nerds (like myself) you may know that this adds the most to overall probability of 'winning' a roll when the odds are close to 50%.

It seems intuitive - "this Omen is best if the odds are near 50%". This intuition isn't correct.

You should consider instead how much it multiplies your odds of winning by.

Remember, Recombination in POE2 is transparent as to the probability of success.

'Lucky' allows you to roll twice.

5% of the time, the first roll 'wins', and the second roll doesn't happen.

The other 95% of the time, you get a second attempt at your craft.

What the Omen has done for you here is provide a 95% chance at a second try at your Recombination.

You can think of it as a 95% of a refund of whatever the Recombination attempt cost.

If your inputs cost 100 exalted orbs to trade for, the Omen is thus 'worth' 95 exalted orbs to you, and if it costs less than that to acquire in trade, you should do so.

There's also a convenience factor. It's quicker to trade for new Omens than for new 50 Spirit amulets, or the like.

In this case you are only 60% to get a 'second try'.

So it's only a 60% effective 'refund' on the cost of your Recombination.

This might still be worth it, but the Omen performs worse in this case.

If you value your time spend trading at 0, the 'correct' time to use an Omen of Recombination is if and only if the failure chance multiplied by the cost of trading for replacement input items equals or exceeds the cost of the Omen.

You probably don't value time spent trading at 0, so if it is close, use the Omen to save time.