Let’s be honest, in the first Path of Exile, crafting often felt like tossing your gear into a slot machine and hoping for the best. You’d spend hours farming, dump a pile of currency into an item, hit it with an orb, and cross your fingers that you didn’t just ruin it. It was exciting in a way, sure, but also frustrating. In Path of Exile 2, that whole approach is shifting. The devs are giving players more control and less blind luck, making the process far more about planning and smart choices than pure gambling. You’ll notice it right away, especially when you start dealing with PoE 2 Currency in the new system.

One of the biggest shake-ups is the arrival of Gold. This isn’t for trading with other players—it’s a resource for dealing with NPCs and, most importantly, crafting. In the old game, you’d need a stack of different orbs just to do basic bench work. Now, Gold takes over that role, making the process cleaner and easier to manage. It means items like Orbs of Fusing can go back to doing what they were meant for, instead of being burned on meta-mods. It’s a straightforward change on paper, but it completely changes how the game’s economy flows and how you approach upgrading your gear.

Where things really get interesting is in the control you now have over your items. Say you find a pair of boots with a killer life roll and great movement speed—both prefixes. In the old days, fixing the suffixes was a nightmare. You’d risk losing the good stuff with every reroll. Now, you can pay to lock those prefixes in place. Once locked, they won’t budge, so you’re free to reroll the suffixes until you land something you actually want. It turns crafting into more of a puzzle than a coin toss—you’re building the item step by step, not just gambling on a lucky hit.

That doesn’t mean the top-end crafting is gone. If anything, it’s still there for the folks who want to push their gear to the absolute limit. Metacrafting remains a late-game thing—costly, tricky, and requiring a deep understanding of the system. The difference now is that it’s separate from the core crafting loop. You can make strong, endgame-ready gear without touching the ultra-expensive stuff, but if you’re chasing perfection, the option is still there. It’s a smart split that keeps the game fair for most players while still giving the hardcore crowd something to aim for. And if you’re planning to dive deep into that world, knowing where to get your PoE 2 Currency buy will be a big part of the journey.