First Time Crafting and Lost Everything

You don't want to perfect exalt annul spam for loads two bolts, you want to chaos spam. That's far cheaper. Don't use whittling until the crossbow is nearly finished. If you care about crit the crossbow is a significantly harder craft. What you have currently isn't worth 3k div. It's about 500 div. If you don't get a suffix you want you have to yolo annul and then chaos spam again. Omens are more expensive this league so you want to limit their usage and use more currency instead.

Did you use any essences?

I think the guide you were using assumes 1-2 mirrors worth of currency. In the end you'd have something that is worth +3 mirrors.

Currently I go the following steps:

• Fracture desired prefix
• slam + annul until you got the other 2 desired prefixes. You can use the omen thingies to only slam prefixes.
• slam first suffix
• if desired slam again
• if undesired use perfect essence for +level (avaible for all weapons, right?)
• desecrate last suffix

It's not perfect. You will miss out on 1-2 level I think. One suffix may be undesired.

It's way cheaper, though. I get something good enough with <200 divs

For the way I personally craft desecrating should be your last step. I try to hit the prefixes first. Chaos slam until you hit something good. Add 3rd prefix using omen of sinistral exaltation. If it doesn't hit anything good I'll anuul and hope it doesn't remove the good mod. If it does back to chaos spamming and repeat. When you have your prefixes add 2 suffixes. Hopefully hit something good, if not you can add your essences with dextral crystallisation onen. Desecrate your 3rd suffix for what you want

welcome to POE :D sometimes, its better to buy those items than crafting.

Tip: don’t. Unless you’re willing to pay the price. I learned crafting this season for no reason other than to make a bow better than fubguns. I ended up crafting a SLIGHTLY better bow and it cost me like 10 mirrors.

We should all find a new word for "crafting" in this game.

It is not crafting.

It is gambling. ... so perhaps ... Crambling? Gamfting?

Appreciate all of the advice!! Trust me when I say I'll be way more prepared next time I try to craft something, and will certainly start less ambitiously.

First time ~~crafting~~ gambling.

Build up a base currency and always craft what you are willing to lose.

Start with recombine crafting, u can get 3 mods for 15% success for any item. T1+T3 on base, and a good T5 mod on donor.

Recombine like 10 at a time and sell them for consistent low level profit, (throw perf exalts and desecrate obviously) then from there go to chaos spamming / sanctifying and trying to get better than T1 stuff.