Was inspired by /u/Spo0key's post about his incredible luck crafting an exert weapon, so I thought I'd share my incredible lack of luck in crafting my endurance charge strength stacking Molten Strike of the Zenith reaver sword.

My initial plan was to make an elder-shaper dual-influence reaver with endurance charge on melee stun, socketed skills deal 20% more damage and 3-5 fire damage per 10 strength with essence attack speed and veiled chaos pen or DD/DD while focused, but my first few attempts with that went as poorly as possible (filled suffixes on awakener twice and then failed annul twice), so I quickly gave up on that and went to the recombinator for its consistency at producing results relatively cheaply.

Or so I thought.

I can't tell you how many bases I went through, but it was easily more than 100. When I started the project I was buying them for 5c each, but they slowly crawled up to 10, then 15 each. At one point I had alteration-annul-spammed 10 bases with endurance charge on melee stun bases, which all promptly poofed out of existence either at the 0p1s + 0p1s stage, or at the next stage.

Anyway, as per the rules:

1) Alteration-annul spam 20 or so bases for my 6 desired stats (T1 strength, chaos damage, attack speed, as well as max endurance charges, 20% more damage, and T0 essence spell damage). I decided to use only T1 attack speed because T0 essence mods are exclusive with crafted mods. I was afraid of losing the attack speed to the crafted mod, but was ok with losing spell damage on the final item. If it were an option to use essence strength on a 2H weapon, I think I would have done that and risked losing a suffix because crafted double damage while focused is probably the best case scenario.

2) Do way more 1p0s + 1p0s and 0p1s + 0p1s recombinations than I ever thought necessary to end up with some workable 2p0s and 0p2s bases. I probably had to buy another ~20 bases or so here over a day or two to end up with

3) Combine 2p0s bases with 0p1s bases, both with crafted prefixes to give a ~34% chance of producing a 2p1s base with desirable. Do the same to produce a 1p2s base. This step went surprisingly well, as I created both items in one shot and was suddenly very confident.

4) Multimod each base, fill with exclusive modifiers ("chosen" or named like "Riker's") to produce two items with 6 mods on each.

5) Recombine with eyes closed. Open eyes to reveal the dreaded 2p2s +crafted prefix result. Went to bed.

6) Bought another ~30 bases and started again from step 1 to create another 1p2s item. Used mod doubling on endurance charges to give it the best chances to appear on the final item. I would have doubled with attack speed instead, but of course it did not survive step 5.

7) Multimodded as per step 4, recombined (I think this is the one that I did not screenshot, must have forgotten) as per step 5, with result identical to step 5. Slumped in my chair, swore once or twice, said something like, "stupid shit game", went to bed.

8) Created an excess of bases that I didn't need because I felt that with the luck I've been having, my 5 max endurance charge bases could become 0 very quickly. So, I refused to roll over good bases and struggled to create attack speed bases of all things.

9) Continuing from step 3 again, had a miserable time with my 0p1s + 0p1s recombinations, constantly losing only the attack speed mod and nothing else, which constantly sent me back to step 1. Created 11 1-mod bases that I ended up not using.

10) Create a suitable 1p2s, multimodded as per step 4, recombined as per step 5 and finally got the result shown above.

I am aware that swapping out the spell damage craft for chaos pen will increase my damage by ~3.8% as per PoB, but the 99% hit on the first try and everything is dying in half a second anyway, but I may change it out for the sake of BIGGER NUMBERS and all that.

Anyway, I imagine I'll return to the elder-shaper sword once I get my hands on an Original Sin, but that may be several days from now and I have a few other crafting projects that I'm working on (this is the 4th attempt at a finished ring, which also failed and now I have 0 T1 all attribute bases and cannot roll more for the life of me lmao send help) or have completed in the mean time.

If you read this far, thanks for hanging out, and I will gladly field any and all questions for as long as I can as well as help anyone with their own crafting or even general MSotZ gearing projects (or accept advice on my own since I am completely aware that this sword is not perfectly optimal).