I’m trying to make sure I understand gear crafting right. If a piece has four affixes and I only like two of them, rerolling the other two seems straightforward enough. But if those unwanted affixes are from the same affix group, can the reroll land on either one at random?
Same question for a piece that is already mostly good. If three affixes are keepers and the last one shares a group with one of the good stats, is there a real chance the reroll changes the wrong line instead of the bad one?
Yeah, that is basically the risk. The game is not letting you point at one exact affix and say this one only. It works from the pool the item is allowed to roll from, so if two stats are in the same bucket, the reroll can hit either one of them.
That means the more overlap you have, the more annoying it gets. If you are sitting on three good affixes and one bad one, but two of the good and bad lines share a pool, you are gambling a bit every time you reroll. The safer play is usually to wait until you have a cleaner base item, or to use the reroll only when the odds are still acceptable.
Short version, yes. You can usually influence the general category of what comes back, but not lock onto one exact stat if multiple stats share that category. That is why people care so much about item bases and which affix families can appear together.
If you already have something like two strong affixes and two mediocre ones, rerolling can still be worth it. But once you have a nearly perfect item, a bad reroll can wreck the whole thing, because the system does not really care which of the similar affixes you meant to replace.
Paper Lantern:
Got it, so I should think of it as steering the pool, not choosing a slot.
What trips people up is that “same type” does not always mean “same outcome,” but it also does not mean you get precision targeting. The game checks what can appear on that item and then rolls within that space. So if two defensive affixes are both valid outcomes, the reroll can land on either one depending on the rules of that pool.
In practice, that means the best way to craft is to start with items that already have the hardest-to-get pieces, then reroll the least painful slot. If the last bad affix is tied to a group that overlaps with a keeper, you are taking a shot in the dark and hoping the keeper survives the roll.
Think of it like this. You are not editing one line of text, you are replacing a line with another line from a restricted list. If two lines share the same list, the system does not know which one you were emotionally attached to.
So yes, if the bad affix overlaps with one of the good ones, there is real risk. That is why people usually want very clear separation between keepers and throwaway stats before they start doing expensive rerolls.
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Mossy Circuit:
So the whole thing is more about the affix pool than the exact line on the item? That’s the part I kept mixing up.