In Path of Exile (POE), weapon quality refers to a hidden stat that provides in-game benefits. Here’s a breakdown of how it works:
Effects of Weapon Quality:
Increased Base Damage: The primary benefit of weapon quality is a direct increase to the weapon’s base physical damage. Every 1% quality translates to a 1% increase in base damage. This applies to all physical weapon types, including swords, axes, maces, and bows.
Enhanced Crafting: Quality also improves the success rate when using crafting orbs like Jeweller’s Orb and Orb of Fusing. These orbs are used to add sockets and link them together on weapons and armor. Having a higher quality weapon increases the chances of achieving the desired number of linked sockets.
Quality Thresholds:
Standard Cap: By default, weapon quality is capped at 20%. This can be achieved through various in-game methods like using whetstones or crafting benches.
Exceeding the Cap: Certain crafting mechanics allow exceeding the 20% cap. These include:
Beastcrafting Recipe: This recipe allows corrupting an item to 30% quality, but comes with the risk of completely changing the item’s properties.
Perfect Fossils: These fossils can increase item quality within a range of 15% to 30%, but also reroll other existing modifiers.
Hillock in Immortal Syndicate: Stationing Hillock at specific ranks in the Immortal Syndicate safehouse can increase weapon quality to 22-30%.
Importance of Weapon Quality:
While not always a deciding factor, weapon quality can be a significant advantage for physical damage builds that rely heavily on weapon damage output. The increased base damage and easier crafting open up possibilities for creating powerful weapon setups.
It’s important to note that the usefulness of weapon quality depends on the specific build and its damage sources. Builds that focus solely on elemental or chaos damage might find other stats like increased critical strike chance or attack speed to be more beneficial.