What this covers: one crafting vocabulary for Path of Exile 2, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn and Diablo IV — prefix versus suffix, implicit versus explicit, what an affix tier is and which way its ladder runs, and how a locked modifier (fractured, synthesised, sealed, greater) changes what you can still do to an item. Why it matters: the four games use the same handful of words for different mechanics, and two of them number their affix tiers in opposite directions. Reading a guide from another game is much cheaper once you know which word is which. Who should care: anyone moving between ARPGs, comparing crafting systems, or trying to read an affix-tier table without relearning the nouns first.

Path of Exile 2 and Path of Exile 1 both say “prefix” and mean a different pool. Last Epoch calls the same split by the same names but caps it at two each. Grim Dawn writes the split into the item’s name. Diablo IV removed half the affixes to make the words stop mattering. This is the shared dictionary — and, more usefully, the places where sharing a word does not mean sharing a rule.

The vocabulary at a glance

TermPlain meaningWhere you meet it
Prefixa modifier before the base name; usually offence or a primary stat“Merciless” on a PoE weapon, “Mighty” on a Grim Dawn helm
Suffixa modifier after the base name; usually defence, attributes or resistances“of the Lynx” in PoE, “of the Void” in Grim Dawn
Affixeither of the two above, as one category“an item can have up to 2 prefixes and 2 suffixes”
Implicita modifier baked into the base, not randomised onto itthe line above the divider on a PoE item
Explicita generated modifier, present only on magic, rare or unique itemsanything a currency orb adds
Tiera rung of one modifier family’s value ladderthe number shown when you hold Alt over a PoE item
Greater Affixa 1.5× version of a normal Diablo IV affixa starred affix on an Ancestral drop

The Path of Exile 2 wiki gives the cleanest short definitions: a prefix is a modifier that “typically enhance[s] primary stats, such as increased damage, life, mana, and movement speed”, a suffix “usually focus[es] on secondary stats, like resistances, accuracy”, and “affix” is the umbrella for either. It then lists the rest of the family — implicit as “an innate modifier that is, by default, present on all versions of an item”, explicit as “a modifier generated on an item of non-normal rarity”, plus enchantment, corruption and desecrated modifiers as separate slots rather than affixes. PoE 1’s wiki draws the same lines and adds the local/global distinction, which is the one most often misread: a local modifier changes the item’s own base stats (a weapon’s #% increased Physical Damage), while a global modifier adds to the character. If you have read the site’s DPS and EHP glossary, that is the same additive-versus-multiplicative trap wearing different clothes.

Prefixes and suffixes: same names, different budgets

The number of slots is the first thing to unlearn. Path of Exile 2’s wiki states that “magic items can have up to 2 modifiers (1 prefix and 1 suffix), while rare items can have up to 6 modifiers (3 prefixes and 3 suffixes)”. PoE 1’s wiki says rare items get “(1 to 3) prefixes and (1 to 3) suffixes (but always at least 3)” — so a PoE 1 rare can theoretically carry one prefix and two suffixes. Last Epoch compresses the budget: “An item can have up to 2 prefixes and 2 suffixes,” and its support pages add that “all stats granted by affixes are global”.

Grim Dawn does the opposite of compressing. There are no fixed affix counts at all; rarity is a consequence of what rolled. The official game guide puts it plainly: “Magic items are Common items that have rolled a prefix, a suffix or both,” and “whenever a Common item rolls at least one affix of rare quality, it becomes a Rare item.” A rare item “can be any combination of Magic and Rare affixes”, and “an item that generates both a rare prefix and a rare suffix is considered a double rare.” Grim Dawn also has one more base type that neither PoE does: Monster Infrequents, which “always have some base attributes” and “can still roll the usual affixes.”

Diablo IV sits furthest from the older model. Since Season 4 the affix count went down, not up — three affixes on Legendary items and two on Rare items, per Blizzard’s Loot Reborn notes, with the complexity moved into Tempering and Masterworking. Season 11 (the 2.5.0 update) then pushed “the amount of base affixes found on non-unique items from 3 to 4”. When a Diablo IV guide says “affix”, assume a numbered slot on a short list, not a rolled family with a ladder behind it.

Implicits: the line above the line

An implicit is the modifier that belongs to the base, not to the roll. That is the whole idea, but the four games let you do different things to it.

In Path of Exile 1, implicits “always spawn on entities before the addition or change of additional modifiers” and can be altered — most commonly by corruption, which “can add or replace an implicit modifier depending on the item type”. In Path of Exile 2 the implicit is listed alongside enchantment, corruption and desecrated modifiers as its own category, and the enchantment slot is where Runes and Distilled Emotions land. Last Epoch keeps implicits separate from affixes too, and gives players a direct lever: the Rune of Shaping “rerolls all of the implicits on an item.”

Grim Dawn’s nearest equivalent is the Monster Infrequent’s fixed base attributes, and Diablo IV’s is what its reference sites call an inherent affix — “slot-typical base stats that every item of that slot carries automatically”, such as movement speed on boots.

Affix tiers: which way the ladder runs

A tier is not a quality grade on the item. It is the rung of one modifier family’s value range. Hold Alt over a Path of Exile item and the game prints it; the Path of Exile 2 wiki’s example is a tier 13 maximum-life prefix on a body armour worth “+10-19 maximum life” against a tier 12 worth “+20-29”. The two wikis agree on the top of the ladder in their own games — “a tier 1 modifier will always have the highest possible value range” — but the PoE 2 wiki adds a warning that this is “different to Path of Exile 1, where Item Affixes and Unique Rarity tiers worked in reverse.” PoE 1’s own wiki numbers tier 1 as the highest-value tier throughout its modifier-tier-rating section, so the direction of PoE 1’s numbering is a genuine documentation disagreement: trust the in-game Alt tooltip over any table.

The tier mechanics that actually change how you craft are these:

GameTop of the ladderCraftable tiersWhere the tier shows
Path of Exile 2Tier 1 has the highest value rangetiers are rolled, not chosen; unidentified item tiers cull the low endAlt tooltip; a “Tier” suffix on unidentified rares
Path of Exile 1Tier 1 in wiki listingscurrency rerolls; crafted mods use their own bench domainAlt tooltip
Last EpochTier 7Tiers 1–5 only; T6 and T7 must drop on the itemaffix slot in the Forge
Grim Dawnno numeric tiers; rare-quality affixes outrank magic onesaffixes roll from a pool gated by item levelthe item’s name and colour
Diablo IVno numeric tiers; a Greater Affix is 1.5× a normal oneone selected Tempered affix in Season 11tooltip, star icon for Greater

Last Epoch is the most explicit about what a tier means, because its support documentation states the rule outright: “Affixes have 7 tiers, with tier 1 being the lowest and tier 7 being the highest. However only tier 1 through 5 can be created through crafting. Tier 6 and 7 affixes must be on the item when it drops.” It also fixes the roll-range question — “the lowest roll of a tier is always higher than the tier below it” — and gives you a way to re-roll inside a tier without changing it, the Rune of Refinement, which “rerolls the values for each affix but does not change their tiers.”

Path of Exile 2’s tier culling works from the drop instead of the bench. Unidentified items carry a tier; the Item rarity page records that an Unid Tier 2 item (minimum item level 20) culls 50% of magic modifier tiers, rising to Unid Tier 5 at item level 65, and that “tier culling will not remove the highest possible tier of a modifier type if it would be excluded entirely.” Patch 0.2.0g tightened the top of the ladder, so tier 5 magic items “will usually only roll the highest modifier available for a given type” — which is precisely why a high-tier drop is a better crafting base than a clean white one.

Grim Dawn and Diablo IV skip the numbered ladder and put randomness somewhere else. Grim Dawn’s wiki describes stat deviation: a stat “will have an intrinsic base value, which is then subject to a % deviation up or down”, so a base +100 with 30% deviation can land anywhere from +70 to +130. Diablo IV uses the Greater Affix instead — a “1.5x more powerful version of normal affixes” that appears only on Ancestral Legendary and Unique items, and that “you cannot Enchant an affix into.”

Locked and injected modifiers

Once you know the tier ladder, the next question is what has been done to the item that cannot be undone. This is where the four vocabularies diverge most.

TermGameWhat it locks or injects
FracturedPoE 1at least one affix “permanently fixed on the item”; cannot be removed or re-rolled
SynthesisedPoE 1up to three Synthesis implicits replacing the base implicits
DesecratedPoE 2special modifiers from preserved bones, obscured until revealed at the Well of Souls
SealedLast Epochan affix frozen in its own slot by a Glyph of Despair
Greater AffixDiablo IVa 1.5× affix, drop-only on Ancestral gear

PoE 1’s fractured items are the original example: the wiki says the fixed affix “cannot be removed (by Orb of Annulment or Orb of Scouring, etc.) or have its values changed by Divine Orb”, and the mod text is gold. A Fracturing Orb requires a rare item “with at least 4 modifiers” and locks a random one in place. Historically you could carry more than one — “up to three” in Synthesis and “up to six” in Necropolis — but “currently, all sources of fractured items, dropped or crafted, can only have one fractured modifier.” Synthesised items are the mirror image: they replace base implicits with “up to three Synthesis implicit modifiers” and cannot themselves be fractured or influenced.

Last Epoch’s sealed affix is a slot trick rather than a lock. The Glyph of Despair “has a chance to seal an affix instead of upgrading it”, the sealed affix “cannot be modified further and an item can only have one sealed affix”, and the old slot reopens — which is how a four-affix item becomes a five-affix one. The Rune of Evolution goes further and “evolves an exalted item into a Primordial exalted item, upgrading a random tier 7 affix on the item into a tier 8 affix” in its own second sealed slot. If you have read the build-crafting comparison across these games, this is the mechanism behind its “ceiling” claims.

Crafting benches, forges and gamblers

The last vocabulary cluster is the one that decides whether a craft is a decision or a dice roll.

  • Path of Exile 1 has an actual bench. Its wiki lists “Crafted” as a modifier domain: “the mod is generated by crafting bench through bench crafting, including unlocked veiled modifier” — a deterministic add, separate from currency orbs.
  • Path of Exile 2 moved the guaranteed roll into Essences. The PoE2DB entry for essences describes the pattern: a Lesser Essence “upgrades a Magic item to a Rare item, adding a guaranteed modifier”, with the guaranteed stat and its range printed on the item, and a Perfect Essence that “removes a random modifier and augments a Rare item with a new guaranteed modifier.”
  • Last Epoch puts the whole thing behind the Forge, opened with the F key anywhere, with every craft spending Forging Potential. The developer blog for the 0.8.4 crafting rework describes the cost as “a random amount of Forging Potential, normally around 1 to 15”, and notes that “rare items start with more forging potential than magic items.” Vendors are the recycling outlet rather than a gambler: the wiki records that every vendor stocks Rune of Shattering, which converts an item into shards of its affixes.
  • Grim Dawn splits the roles. The Blacksmith crafts from Blueprints — permanent, account-wide recipes, with each smith imbuing crafted gear differently: Angrim’s martial work adds one of “3-7% Pierce Resistance / Increases Armor by 3-7% / +3-7% Physical Damage”, while Duncan’s arcane forging adds one of “Increases Energy Regeneration by 5-11% / 3-5% Elemental Resistance / +3-7% Elemental Damage”. The gamble is the Enchanted recipe, which the official guide calls “the equivalent of Grim Dawn’s gambling system” and which “can create anything from a single affix Magical item to a double Rare affix item.”
  • Diablo IV separates the bench from the re-roll. Blacksmith Tempering adds a chosen affix — “you can now select which specific affix you want to apply to your item from a Tempering Recipe”, per the Season 11 notes, with “one tempered affix” per item. Masterworking is the prestige layer, and its shape has changed twice: in Season 4 it raised affix values with a bigger boost “at every 4th tier”, while in Season 11 it “no longer increases your item’s affix values” and instead raises Quality toward a maximum of 20, where a Capstone bonus “upgrades a random non-greater affix on your item into a Greater Affix.”

Read together, the four systems are answering one question in four accents: how much of the finished item should be your decision and how much should be the roll. PoE 1’s bench, Last Epoch’s shards and Diablo IV’s Season 11 Tempering all push toward the decision; PoE 2’s unidentified tiers, Grim Dawn’s double rares and Diablo IV’s Greater Affixes push back toward the roll. The words are the same. The dial is not.

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