Crafting Items for a Sorc or her Waheed?

[Farproc]

All the strategy guides I read talk about Runewords, Set and Unique tems to aspire to, or build towards.

Are crafted items, Blood, Safety etc. So bad that its better to just MF until one gets the required Unique/Set/Rune'd item?

Or are there Crafted items that are worth attempting for?

[SeCKSEgai]

Crafted items can be more valuable than uniques. The reason the guides typically don't mention them is probably more because they are so varied. For example, I myself have crafted probably over 80 amulets with just a handful of keepers. It's easier to find a mara's as opposed to a Plus 2+ skill fcr amulet for your class.

But again crafted items serve a purpose, aside from amulets, there are items desired that can only be crafted, but its easier to aspire for more "commonly available" equipment.

[Scudstorm]

Most crafted items are bad. It's basically a shot at getting rare item with a few fixed mods. And good rares are, well, rare.

Even low-end uniques/sets/runewords are better than 99% of my crafts.

In other words, if you don't know exactly what you want on a piece of equipment, don't craft it. It is likely you wouldn't even know if the result is good or bad.

[rickster]

There are only 2 crafted items that are good for a sorc (well these are the only ones that are highly sought after).

Crafted caster amulet
Crafted caster boots

Well, caster belts are good for low level dueling.


A caster amulet has the potential to be better than a mara's or a tal's amulet.

However, the chance of rolling a crafted amulet with 2sorc skills, 15+fcr, +strength, and +mana is astronomically small. Most likely you'll have to trade for one of these amulets, and you'll have to settle for one with 2sorc/tree, +15fcr and one useful mod (mana/life/strength/resists) as getting one with 4 good mods would probably be out of your price range.

According to this site

http://diablo3.ingame.de/spiel/expansion/itemdb/affix_chances_crafted.php?type=amul&lang=en&version=lod&patch=111&item=Amulet&ilvl=99&qlvl=1&mlvl=0

You have a 0.0000095 % chance of getting an amulet with 2 sorc skills, 15+fcr, 70+mana, 21+ strength.

So you might want to use maras/tals as a temp as it might take you a while to find a caster amulet to your liking, and it will probably take you a long while to accumulate the wealth to buy one of those amulets. If you don't need the FCR, tals is a really cost effective amulet. Mara's is good too, but if you're an ES sorc, resists don't matter, and maras is like 5-20 times more expensive than tal's amulet.



Now for caster boots, you really need them to get above 40 mana, and roll 4-5% mana increase. As rares can get up to 40 mana, and have 5 other good mods. Crafted boots can get over 40 mana, but can only get 3 other good mods.

Right now for my sorc, I have rare boots with 30 run/walk, 9 dex, 10fhr, 39 mana, and 30 fire resist (though fire resists is a wasted mod as i'm at max resists without my boots, but these are godly for other builds that use spirit monarch).

The chance of getting a crafted boot with 30 run/walk, 7+dex, 10fhr, and 42+ mana is 0.0008545 %. I've scanned a lot of trading forums, and have yet to see a boot with 3 of these mods on West Ladder.

So my current rare boots are really hard to beat, and are a lot cheaper than finding the crafted version. I'd imagine I'd have to pay 10x the amount I paid for my rares to get the crafted version. I'd probably have to pay 100x if the boots had 58+ mana and 5% mana increase.

If you can't find good mana boots, then the best unique ones are sandstorm treks. They have 20fhr, add 15 strength (= 30 mana), and give you huge poison resist (poison damage goes through ES). However they need 91 strength, which is a lot if you're not using spirit monarch. Silkweaves are another option for an ES sorc. If you're not an ES sorc, then clearly waterwalks are the best.


In conclusion.
Crafted amulets and boots are the only good crafts for a sorc.
Uniques/sets are more cost effective than crafts/rares, and you can do just fine using sets/uniques.
Crafting items that are clearly better than uniques/sets/rares is extremely unlikely (if you craft by youself). You will probably have to trade for these godly crafted items. Expect to pay a lot for them too.

[renegademaster]

I go
Caster Amus, Safety Amus
+2 Amus, with faster cast or faster block
Blood Gloves, Hit Power Gloves
Ama/Assa Gloves with IAS, and hit power have Knockback!

that uses up low runes, gems and jewels you find all the time.
Keep doing it and you might get something nice.

[NoisemakerArrow]

I guess this isn't what you asked for, but a crafted Blood belt is useful for the OW, and I know a guy who keeps crafting Armets for his PvP zealots in the hopes of getting Visionary.

Edit: Back when I didn't have Arach, I used a Caster belt on my PvM hammerdin. It had 7% FCR, 26% Lightning Resist and some other cool mods. There's another option.

[SeCKSEgai]

Caster belts are definitely useful with the right mods for sure - I was using a 10fcr 17 fhr something str something res belt until I found my first arach.

It really is easier to get uniques vs crafts in the long run, since to craft something useful, the cost in crafting items will typically exceed a decent unique alternative.