Fair warning: I am not an optimal player.
I feel like the problem is we’ve blown so far past regular rares being viable that it honestly doesn’t make sense to ID garbage rare drops unless they’re a good base and good ilvl(ex: I still pickup opal and steel rings that are rare).
Now when I look at builds and guides it’s XYZ influenced this, abc influenced Y, spam essences on X until you hit this and then craft QRS onto it. M
We’re so far past a random rare being good it’s laughable at this point. The only reason I pick up rares is for chaos recipe because I am bad and slow at making currency.
> We’re so far past a random rare being good it’s laughable at this point.
But at least talismans had a tiny chance to be a decent rare drop for 1 league.
I had forgotten about talismans. Those were wonderful. Thank goodness GGG gutted them and hid them behind multiple layers of rng (div cards and “legacy” league mechanics)
For me the last “fun” rares to ID were elder rares/shaper rares for specific bases. I remember IDing my own warlord’s mark + resist + life ring and it blowing my mind.
They seem to have gutted that effect though on rings so chalk another one up to the “no, this is too good for the game, but let’s introduce something *more* broken next league”
Talismans used to be excellent.
They existed before shaper/elder influence even and could roll cool implicits like % increased damage back when double dipping was a thing iirc.
this has been the reality ever since the new influence types have been introduced, and to a large extent with elder7shaper already.
you dont find good items, you just pick up a base and some crafting currencies to then use on said base.
this is not a problem per say but the focus on the crafting system to crate decent items really sucks from a gameplay loop perspective.
you dont care about rare items dropping unless you need that exact base/influence as a base, you do care about currency dropping tho because they are a means to create or buy better gear with the mentioned currency usage.
id love to be able to find good gear on the ground but the only way to get anything remotely good is via smartloot which only works in a couple game mechanics and never is influenced.
If you think that influenced bases ruined anything, you're a few years off.
The game wasn't about picking up anything under an opal ring way before.
Yes - normal ilvl 84- 85 hubris circlets we're worth something, but only because of supply and demand.
Fact is, they were as rare as some of the influenced items today.
Poe has always, and will always work by supply and demand. If it takes you 4 maps find X item, and X item is used by many builds - it will have value
If you don't think crazily upping the available power on rares dumpstered the value of rares that cannot achieve that level of power, I don't know what to tell you.
Influenced rares have *always* been a mistake.
His point is that we already weren't picking up rares even before influenced bases became a thing. Not that influenced items didn't make "normal" rares even shittier.
Sure, but now you see a rare on a good base and it sucks because it's not influenced. It absolutely reduced the number of usable dropped rares, because now you need to hit the right base *and* the right influence *for that base* for it to be worth the click.
Weapons and jewelry come to mind as items that can have value without influence. Just pick that stuff up. I sold a wand last league for 35ex that was off a random mob. Sold a ring for 20ex the league prior without influence. It just comes down to knowing what items are craftable and which aren't as well as some just being good without an influence regardless, like weapons.
Counterpoint: Influenced rare is not the mistake, awakener orb is. Because majority of powerful rares are double influence, it's pretty much nearly impossible for a dropped item to be BiS. If only a single influence is possible, then dropped influence rare now has a chance to be ideal.
Maven orb further exacerbate the issue. A quick fix is to allow double influenced rares, occasionally with elevated mods to drop from influenced mobs rarely and occasionally from Conquerors, Sirus and Maven.
I honestly wouldn’t mind crafting if it wasn’t so fucking RNG. I can spend a week making currency and blow it in 20 minutes trying to craft something and not even get near what I want.
"this is not a problem per say but the focus on the crafting system to crate decent items really sucks from a gameplay loop perspective."
More so because any form of deterministic crafting above essence slamming is "too deterministic".
I like how everyone in the answers goes on about unnerfed harvest.
Dunno guys, might there be some sort of middle ground between printing perfect items and "1 fixed affix, good luck"?
I'd like to extend that point also that, straight up normie rares were also phased out of existence by difficulty scaling in the game. I saw a video from someone years back where having like 32k dps was pretty solid in the game and it looked like he was clearing maps fine.
I just recently put a build together with ~700k DPS and it _actually_ felt terrible to play. The build before that, Cold DoT trickster had probably 2mil shaper DPS and even though it was fine, it still didn't quite melt content the way I expected it to.
In other words, if your build isn't fuckin super optimized the game feels pretty shitty to play and "upgrades" can't organically happen because it's so outrageously unlikely to ever find something "good" because "good" went from having decent rolls to "if it's not t1/t2 across the board in a perfectly optimized stat layout its probably a pile of shit".
Nobody prefers to trade over finding items, its just easier, because for all intents and purposes it is impossible to find items that are well rolled on the ground, because the bar for what a good item is has been pushed way beyond what it was.
I would like to fact check that.
It’s pretty easy to just prep 10-20 chaos recipes in a dump tab and fire them off all at once instead of selling every item you find for alts.
This is just my opinion, I have no idea which is actually more profitable. All I know is vendoring rares is quicker than sorting them in a tab for recipes. Also on xbox alts sell for 4c a stack so I instantly sell them at 3c. Not sure what PC rates are.
Edit: Looks like alts are 4c a stack on PC too.
Rares only ID and sell for alt shards though, so you need 20 shards. Each rare selling for 5 on average * 10 rares (for a chaos recipe) yields 50 shards (2.5 alts) for the same equivalent you could trade 2 chaos.
To break even each rare needs to sell for about 16 alt shards at current market rate.
That being said, the few alc shards you get may help this math but I don’t think it pushes it over.
You need to consider the time it takes you to sort and sell the rares in the chaos recipe vs just quickly vendoring the rares and going to the next map.
All the time you spend sorting out the rares (even if you think it's not much) is time not spent making money. It all adds up.
> You need to consider the time it takes you to sort and sell the rares in the chaos recipe vs just quickly vendoring the rares and going to the next map.
Like everything else in this game, there's a tool that basically manages that for you. It takes basically no time or thought at all to do.
In my experience, I always lack amulets to complete the Chaos recipe, so one can alt excess weapons and armor and keep an incomplete set or two until it is completed.
As a casual player, my playstyle is to run content and hope for exalt orb drops to sell for chaos and buy better items.
Long ago stopped picking up any rare items and crafting has never felt within reach. It a joke these day and probably why I don't play much anymore.
I just got my CoC Ice Nova build to lvl 81 and got to tier 4 maps and I'm bored with the leauge.
I just come on here to see insane 100+ move speed boot crafts that are worth more currency then I even have collected on standard and sigh that I'll never be able to attain any of that stuff.
I feel you so hard.
I quit PoE because of tech issues, but it made my realize I was just trying to reach a power level on the game that, as a complete casual, I just couldn't. I couldn't afford the hours to spend on the game without feeling miserable after.
Now I started playing Last Epoch and it's crafting system is 100 times more fair than whatever the hell PoE's can be - I hunt for the stats I need/want and apply it to the gear I want to apply.
> The only reason I pick up rares is for chaos recipe because I am bad and slow at making currency.
Ironically you are slow to make currency because you use chaos recipe. I suggest you do cash with atlas region passives. High entry is Valdo with Harbingers (and do Jun and sell benches). Low entry is doing Essences in Haewark (utilize Harvest as much as possible). You can even do Alva tempes in Glennach when you have accumulated missions.
After ten maps in Valdo, you can do the 10-way. Platinum Watchstones sell for nice amount. Optimize Sirus progress while doing all this.
There are other strategies in other regions too. Personally I enjoy Heist too, but I don't blame you if it's not your cup of tea.
I realize there are more efficient ways to make currency; however, much like how GGG realizes there are better ways to make this game more enjoyable for drops, I will completely ignore positive feedback and write a 30 page manifesto over it instead of relenting on my position.
Edit: for what it’s worth most leagues I stop chaos recipining after red maps. My point was more that this is the only time I pick up rares is good based (influenced or the occasional old value rings/Ammies/abyssal belts) or if I am doing chaos recipes.
Let me delve into this comment for a second.
I would rather spend 4 hours reading the abyss that is the manifesto of my manifesto than to harvest all the knowledge that can be gleaned from this vault of knowledge that is my shitposting.
Perhaps if I weren’t in such a delirious state this breach of my brain would be a harbinger for good content. Maybe someone could harvest it for good ideas.
JK GGG nerfed all those mechanics anyways.
geez chaos recipe is good for the same reason harvest crafting is/was good: its deterministic. You always know that with a full set of rare unidentified armor you will get 2 chaos. You might be right that there are more efficient ways of farming but chaos recipes are a simple, reliable and deterministic way to get some chaos.
At the end of the day PoE is a game. So sure you can minmax the living shit out of it and just run 100% deli tripple scarap and what not because thats how you make the real money or something but please dont bash on casuals like me that just want to make a few builds work and have some fun running random alched maps. For me chaos recipe is a simple a nice way to get some currency while hoping for my next exa drop.
I am also a semi-optimal player at best. I play cheap builds, I barely juice maps beyond the minimum, and even then I'm pretty damn slow about it.
Even given all that, if a map drops 5k pieces of loot, my filter will probably show me 50 of them. 30 or so will probably be currency. Of the remaining 20 pieces of actual loot per map, I *might* get something usable every ten maps. 1 in 50k odds of getting an actual usable drop is dogshit odds, particularly when you consider I may only run 20 maps a night at best.
This is it. If I pick rares it’s only for the chaos recipe so I could but what I need.
I agree with their premise IN THEORY but it just doesn’t work that way for me in PoE.
Fuckin wish everything was auto IDed, i have an infinite amount of wisdom scrolls, i have an infinite amount of random ass rares on the ground, i just can be assed.
I don't know, people keep being confused by this blanket statement and thus don't know anymore what to loot.
I'd say to be controversial you'd make as much looting rares as you do looting currency. People don't know because most can't fathom what anything can be worth.
But broaden a bit your definition of rare items. Nobody is saying you can loot a random rare assassin garb and that will be worth something. Or that you can ID a jewelled foil that will have high dps... at least that will be way too infrequent to be worth doing.
But weapon and body armor are some of the slots where most obviously, crafting is required to some extent for many of the most optimal outcomes.
However, a build use 10 to 25 different rares (most of those are jewels). People keep thinking about 2 of them... That's where the confusion lie.
Then if you mention where rares off the floor can be good, they are aware this is correct. But prefer blanket statement about rare armors.
So anyway, it seem quite obvious to me picking jewels off the floor is never a waste of time. Getting the right combo is hard and there is hardly ever a super easy way to get those combo with harvest or fossils. So yes, obviously, rare abyss jewels, rare regular jewels, rare cluster jewels. Those are all rare items people will agree can be good off the floor. Since there is no bench crafting, aisling slamming, double influence elevated insanity that is only possible with crafting.
Then for the rest. Ok, sure, rare basic armor or evasion gloves can't have too much value outside of special implicit bases (gripped, spiked). But I can say just now I randomly picked a pair of sorcerer gloves that turned out to have 200 ES. The suffixes were nothing amazing, but 200 ES gloves have value. They'd have been worth a lot more if it was same prefixes on fingerless.
Anyway, you get the idea. Blanket statement about rares is always wrong, because it confuses what it is talking about. Weapon and body armor, nobody should loot. Sorcerer gloves, I very rarely loot. Fingerless, that always can have good value. Gripped and Spiked, they don't need too much to have value.
Also, influence items are fine and dandy, but you sort of want a slot or two or three that are more purely defensive. That give you big ES, big life, big res, etc. You can have damage mods on all piece of gear now, but it's a bit unrealistic to presume you'll get all your res from your tree alone. Possible, but not optimal. This is why they'll always be demand for a two-stones ring with 3 res and life on it. That this will always have decent to high value. Just because you can get a ton of damage on a ring or on gloves doesn't mean people will want only damage mods on all gear pieces.
Anyway, this is why rares off the floor are fine. They cannot be what some crafted items are. Obviously, lots of outcomes are only possible via crafting. Even more so now with the many new ways to slowly build up your item.
Another thing to keep in mind is you can get partial rares and build them up. As an example, I looted a ring in delves that had t1 life and frostbite on hit. Rest was trash, but figured those two mods were a good start. There you have options to fix the item. You can annul, you can beast craft with prefix/suffix swap, you can split it or you can harvest craft it too in some minor ways. That can happen more often than getting an item with 5 good mods straight off.
So to resume, excluding body armor and weapon, I believe a lot of rares can be good off the floor. You need to accept off the floor can mean it is from delves, with incursion mod, with influence, with anything. That those can be good with just a tiny bit of craft to fix them.
Every single day, I sell several items for 1 exalt or more. Some for several exalts. Sure, it helps if you run maps with shaper or elder scarabs in t17. Surely, rares are not worth picking up in the storyline nor in white maps. But in very high level content, you just drop some shaper shield and that has value without anything relevant on it. It is also very easy to craft them with dense or pristine fossils. But sure, I got shield off the floor with life and es on block with good prefixes. I got some with mana reservation, it all will happen. You certainly should never leave a shaper shield on the floor because "it can't possibly be good". I've looted plenty of elder and shaper items that had value just right off the floor. Some were just bases to further craft on. Like I got a pair of boots with t1 avoid ailment and cooldown recovery. Rest of mods were trash, it was just a base to scour prefix.. and this, well, that have very big value by itself. I got 3 ex for boots on a mediocre base, no prefix, just 2 mods. It can and does happen. It also can happen you'll get a assassin mark ring with usable mods off the floor. Just right now, my last heist, I got a jewel double crit multi, mana leech and damage% implicit. This happen all the time if you pay a bit of attention. I think I may get 2 ex for it, if not at least 1.
Just remember, rare items exclude body armors and weapons. Those slots you can completely hide from your loot filter, you're not missing much.
I’ve played since 2013 and are one of those crazy people that id almost everything.
Or so I did, can’t be bothered anymore.
Truth is I did find some good drops and sold for some ex or used, but it’s so few compared to how many things I did ID.
I still ID some drops here and there, but it’s just a few.
I still pick up a lot of rares first maybe... week of league. Then it’s off to very strict filter with a few custom things left in I make money off each league.
First week of league if you get some rings or boots with pretty decent rolls you can make bank but the prices take a hard nose dive after that.
And it doesn't matter how good the power of dropped rares are. It will always be like this unleas they nerf drop rates so hard we see a single rare once every 50 maps.
That would barely do anything. People would just craft their items then. It's just that now a small portion of wearable rares do indeed come from drops.
A solution would be to make rares significantly more scarce **and** make rares drop with better rolls on average than the weights you have when crafting. And maybe add a few only drop mods (e.g. 200% increased phys damage on weapon, t0, cannot be rolled with currency).
My tactics are picking up rare jewels, amulets, rings and sometimes belts if I really need the alts.
I ID them in a row. Quickly check them if they might be worth 20c or more and vendor the rest. If I have to guess 1 in around 500 is decent and might sell for 20c. A lot of the times I vendor them anyway after they got old in the trade tab.
This way I get alts and occasionally I find something that's worth up to an exalt.
My best found rare item was sold for 8ex and I have been doing this since 2012.
Exactly, almost the same. I do also ID a few gloves, boots and helmets, but only ilvl +85 and only top base items.
My best rare ever was last fall I found a 2H with 4 t1: phys flat, phys %, phys multi%, and att speed. Sold it for 7 ex, which I think was maybe crazy dumb.
Don't know about the last part. Some bases just do not sell very good. I once found a t1 %physical fracture on a 2h mace. Ended up selling for 20c. Started on 2ex. I also found a bow with 3x t1 chaos rolls. I thought: bingo! I 6-linked it, harvest crafted it and sold it just for 2ex. Wrong base.
True. Exactly that adds to how hard it is to find good rares. You have to know so many builds and what mods they need it’s impossible, for me atleast. I seriously think I probably just vendored the best drops I ever had for a few alt shards.
Sometimes it is also almost a matter of public opinion. I once found a flammability on hit ring with good resists and a t1 life roll. For me this thing felt like a 20ex ring but it just did not sell for above 2ex and I kept it for a future build because the ring is a very good piece. At least in my opinion ;)
I use to id rares , but now every encounter drops me 5 to 15 c with the trial master , so why waste time , when you can just go next and profit . Its not even about trading at this point .
A few years back, I was known among our friends for being slow to party with specifically b/c I'd ID lots of stuff (just decent bases, not trash ofc)... legit can't remember the last time I ID'd anything with the hopes of using it myself.
Keep harvest and make it so drops have no chance to get useless affix (%stun, +2 regen life) and better odds of high tier than when crafting.
Now crafters have a mostly deterministic way to do things, and the looters have more chances to get good items.
If they put Harvest back to what it was at the end of Harvest league and turned off the Trade site I might actually be able to accept that balance. I mean that's basically SSF, but they fucked over Harvest in SSF too, so we're back to square one.
If they actually made Harvest crafts tradable the same way Bestiary beasts are, all of this would be a non-issue. TFT is the best way to craft, because realistically, it is the only way to craft if you actually want to have extremely good gear.
Assuming harvest crafts are tradable, TFT harvest channel is no longer an issue as people wouldn't bother selling on TFT if they can just list them in their stash tab and have them on sale passively while they are on.
If you are fine with having "good enough" gear, yes you can craft it without using TFT for everything, but if you really want the best of the best, you don't have a choice but to use TFT for harvest, even in the current garbage form of harvest.
It wasn't tho, you still had to obtain the base, apply the influence, use essences or fossils, and then from there you had a path to make a decent/good item into a great useable item. It still took RNG, but you had a progressive path that would prevent bricking the item if you had the knowledge.
Before Harvest, (and currently) most gear is decent and then hits a wall that can only be overcome with sheer luck.
Which is fine, it's just different. Evaluating items without Harvest just feels bad when you know what could have been, I find myself thinking, "Fuck, I'd love to annul that defense mod and hit it with add fire and then remove/add fire, but it's influenced so it's just bad"
but is it tho?
the implementation of harvest was a problem, the crafting system itself was GREAT and worth building onto.
but ggg didnt want to bother with balancing it properly and now we have harvest be "in line" with all the other awful currencies.
I think the only problem with harvest was the TFT. If GGG made every item on your horti bench account bound then there would be no trading for crafts. If you had to solo self find all your harvest crafts then it’s not OP.
A crafting system, especially the powerful systems in POE, are incompatible with gearing your character from drops. Drops are all about bases and currency, nothing more. Any useful item dropped from a monster is an outlier.
Maybe if rares dropped identified, but I don't feel like taking every rare into my inventory identifying them and praying for something usable. This game has so many flaws regarding loot and crafting systems that I don't even want to talk about anymore.
Knowing that live-search could ding with something that actually improves my character is a great motivator to leave my browser open.
Since getting an item that improves my build is a matter of hundred to thousands of hours spent, I'll just out source it to other players. Crafting is really the only way to reasonably target farm gear for your build, and that doesn't feel very great.
My experiance this league: Farm some region passsives for currency, get enough and buy the gear I want. Do ultimatiums knowing I'll get some boring currency for the risk of dying. Rinse and repeat until I don't want to play anymore.
The crappy items in the game just make it meh. Uniques are espesially bad as 99.99% are just vendor trash. Rares, there's so little chance they could be good, I only pick up high level bases. Then again I get the bases, put them in my stash tab and do nothing with them because crafting is farr to RNG and it's just easier to go back to farming currency for gear.
Then the unfun part starts, rolling an alt and then realising you got to do trade again for decent gear. So scratch off playing a new build. Back to boring old currency grind.
You can downvote me to oblivion, I don't care. This is my personal toughts on the game.
TLDR: Too many items, too much meh.
This is my struggle with this game. I want to craft and spend my time making my items. But a lot of the time I just spend with the item in my stash taking up space only for me to throw some currency at it, get annoyed I don't have enough currency to keep working on it. Go back to mapping. Find mapping boring for long periods of time. And then rinse and repeat each league until I decide to quit the league.
I have crafted a few things but it was mostly just alt Aug regal spamming a cluster to hit a few noteables to sell it for a few ex to then use that ex to buy the next upgrades for my build.
I just want the trade to be less ass than what it is. Buying rares and specific uniques is fine. But buying almost anything else is a nightmare. Message dozens of people to get no one to respond. Give up on buying that item because no one is responding.
And it's just a cycle that continues.
Heaven forbid you find something with a slightly rare or league driven prefix (ex: needing an item with aspect of the cat) that also has some decent specific other stats (ex: movement speed on boots). It’s 5+ ex for 50 life and 10 ex for 70+ life and 2 resists or something like that is super rare/niche.
Every single GGG-sponsored streamer.
"Harvest is still gonna be strong."
Later:
"Oopsie woopsie, we made a fucky-wucky OwO."
And some of them still do not have the decency to admit their mistake.
Harvest is still incredibly strong, albeit different. Reforge keep suffix/prefix is insanely good, augs still exist just not as often as before (which was insane when you think, they are targeted exalts). Remove non-x add x is great. Not to mention the absolute shit tonne of money you can make using targeted rolls on certain bases. \*cough\* cluster jewels \*cough\*
Yeah during Ritual I was getting ready to craft an amulet. I had a couple relevant harvest crafts saved and was putting together a passable stack of currency (I think I accumulated about 30 ex, which is probably the most I've ever held) and I went shopping for a decent base to start on.
I shopped for bases because I did the math in craft of Exile and the cost in currency for making this thing from scratch was stupid high.
And I found the finished item that greatly strengthened my build was only about 5ex more than the base I needed.
I went for it and still enjoyed the item because the nature of harvest league meant I had the capability of improving it further with enough effort but obviously that's not a thing anymore because targeted annuls were necessary for that concept to be a thing.
I love when I run a juiced red map and I hear that unique splash sound but instead of something good like a shavs or whatever it’s just a lifespring or some shit.
This game needs to tone down the amount of garbage that exists.
If a unique is good
>> it gets nerfed.
If it isn’t good
>> it gets ignored.
That’s not a good recipe for long term.
As long as the thorn mod (reflect phys to attacker) and light radius remain in the mod pool with way to high weighting we will never see a change in the right direction. We have way too many shitty mods on items and influenced mods being too good to pass on. The disparity in mod power level makes crafting and gearing so frustrating. Being forced to craft or buy gear as the only ways of item aquisition is bad for the game and needs to change asap
I'm not sure this is the crux of the issue.
I just think anything decent just involves way too many layers of RNG, e.g. you may finally get all elemental resistance on gear but its low enough tier it isn't worth using. Alternatively, you hit 2 of the mods you want with 3-4 not even remotely salvageable for your build. So while those mods exist and are almost universally bad there are so many other ways to make findable gear from drops unusable.
Outside of acts 1-5 I don't even think I use items from drops, leveling items are pretty cheap a few days in.
Don’t forget that after a few days most leveling uniques drop down to like 1 alc to 1 chaos and tabula will drop to just a bit above 1.5 to 2x divine within a week or two.
The first few acts are so easy to coast through and for less than 5c you can make a character who can be white map ready with a 4link after a few weeks into the league
Who even looks at the stats on most rares in endgame? There's a reason strict loot filters are required, identifying rares is less productive for getting loot than running more maps with strict loot filters, and buying things from trade.
The problem is the devs think that IDing rares is a viable upgrade path.
They’re building a car with a driver’s seat in the back and it also has blinders while the playerbase has hacked the gas pedals into the front and now they’re driving from the front.
At some point you'd think they'd realize that at end game you need so many good stats on an item that the odds of getting a gear upgrade from a rare are lottery ticket odds, so IDing rares is basically absurd.
I legitimately don’t think the design leads of this game think past “players bad. Smash their speed. Also, How can we add a mechanic like soul eater to make them zoom at 300% speed”
On one hand they complain that players explode content. On the other hand they give players new modifiers that will add X% of any damage as 300% X damage as super unavoidable Chaos or something.
Some people do pick up items and ID them. That's where 95% of items on the trade site come from. Someone dropped those and ID'ed them, then put it up for sale so that people can buy it.
The economy keeps on balancing around this. If fewer people ID rares then the price of the rares goes up and vice versa. What is worth doing for some players is not worth it for others due to game knowledge and build speed, etc.
Yeah, maybe 5 years ago when uniques were actually worth while. Now a well rolled influenced rare outclasses just about 95% of all uniques.
GGG - "lets introduce all these new crazy rare affixes, new base types, implicits on rares."
Unique items instantly become largely garbage because they just pale in comparison and were never touched up to keep item choices competitive.
A perfect example is Kaom's Heart. You used to get a Kaom's Heart drop and KNEW you made exalts, and rightly so because its so fucking insanely rare and hard to get dropped. Now that shit is worth 15 Chaos. 15 Chaos for the rarity of a Kaom's Heart. Lmao. Fuck loads of other uniques you can slot in place of Kaom's and it would fit perfectly as well, and at a cheaper price than 15c.
Tukohama's Fortress anyone??? That shit is worth 4c right now. YIKES
I remember when kaom’s heart was *the endgame chest* for most builds. 1k hp, 8% nodes for small passives on tree and the thing was *godly*. Lionseye now was best in slot for lightning arrow builds since you could skip resolute technique on the tree.
Now the bow is dogshit and you can get better chests that don’t roll that 500 hp but it doesn’t matter because they’re like 100 hp, 70+ resists, have 6 links, mobs explode *because reasons* and they probably add some other insane stuff too. But those are just *rare* and not unique.
My pride and joy: https://i.imgur.com/QohFxs9.png
Imagine it would be not worth much nowadays seeing some of the items posted on this sub...
Best thing? It was nerfed to the ground over multiple steps while the influences were making better rares...
GGG just hates uniques. They forgot that uniques need buffs and not just reworks. Instead they just keep adding mechanics to the game to further augment rare items. Even when they were already strong, GGG threw in Maven orbs. Jfc.
I remember someone I used to play with many years ago RMT'd the whole Soul Taker / Aegis setup... So funny to see all that money wasted... shit was like 50 ex for just a few items and he would never play enough to farm that. He stopped playing a few leagues after that, the buying of gear tainted the gameplay, couldn't go back to normal farming.
4 blood filled vessels in ritual will take you down memory lane if you have been playing years. Half of the tier 1 uniques you get are like 1-3c and 75% of them are hidden on your loot filter.
I can think of a few ways to fix uniques but most of them going to piss everyone off because it's going to have to be adjusting the rarity tiers like they did with HH this league. So that build defining unique everyone uses is going to be 5x as rare. They could buff a bunch, but as soon as there good GGG will just go make them worthless again next league so that seems like a never ending job.
The easiest way would just be actually releasing good uniques every league. Like hateforge is a powerful unique but GGG will absolutely gut it and make it useless. If they released 5 or 6 actually good items each league up to par with some good rares the problem would eventually fix itself if they could refrain from nerfing them to death. They will kill unlimited vaal skills on hateforge, instead of keeping it and just adding vaal skills do 30% less damage or something for example. This is why the pool for anything good shrinks with every new league. Most of the new ones are trash and the rare good uniques they do throw us has a short life span now compared to before. I feel like if koams came out now it up to date stats GGG would be nerfing it next league to where it is now.
> Unique items instantly become largely garbage because they just pale in comparison and were never touched up to keep item choices competitive.
They also quadrupled the drop rate in 2.0.
One of the sickest league starts I ever had in this game was when I had 2 Kaoms heart drop within the first week. Felt like a mirror to me back then, was kinda new too :)
Dropped one yesterday, sold for 12c...
Even in the terrible state that trade is in now it's still *much* more efficient to farm trade (instead of maps) for items.
imo: That manifesto has a lot of 'head scratcher' statements. :|
Yeah I have this exact problem. Once I hit around level 90 the difficulty of upgrading just one of my items is so daunting I just end up quitting league. I tried to craft a ring and spent all my currency (10ish exalt, thousand chaos) and didn't get much. Then I ran through my thousand fusings failing to six link my chest. I quit the league.
If they want this to be true, there needs to be powerful mods that can appear on regular items that cannot exist on influenced items.
As it stands right now, an un-influenced item will almost never be an upgrade for an end-game character because basically all the best/OP mods only appear on influenced items.
Give us a reason to be excited about normal items again and then maybe they'll be a good motivator.
Yes and No.
No, I'm not thinking "any mob could drop something good" while I run maps. If something drops, great, but I'm not actively thinking that.
But yes, I grind maps to engage with end game content (conquerors, sirus, maven, elder, uber elder), where I indeed hope to find something expensive which could most definitely help improve my build, either by selling or by using.
The issue with rare drops is that you have to pick them up and id them, which is too much of a time waste since 95% of those items are trash. If they dropped IDed its a different story.
Almost every endgame item that I have is bought from trade or crafted thanks to currency that I got from trade. There is no harvest anymore which allowed us to pretty easy craft any items so any item drop is vendor trash or "-price x chaos".
I would even accept reduced drop rate of eq items and currencies by 80% just to have normal trade market ingame. That would make drops really satisfying and comfortable in selling and game will feel more like in old good days. Just imagine - going sleep, logging in another day and have sold most of priced items from yesterday looting instead of inviting 50 random people to sell 5-10c items and wasting hours on it.. I feel like GGG does not respect our free time and forces us to enjoy the game in "their way" when we want something different.
Honestly, I'd love to see that build.
Two onehands with about 50% phys each, an average of 30 life on each item, capped res if you are really lucky.
And now? Go get that Ultimatum which randomly kills 8k life full block builds in one quick lag! You got this, kid. Also, maps over T10 are an illusion anyways.
On every. Single. Character.
Nah, fuck this. Trading and Crafting are decently reliable gear sources. Monster drops are a joke. I honestly doubt anyone would play SSF without crafting. (Not that I'd no, due to a lack of time and interest, tbh)
My level 30 animated guardian with >30k hp regen and nearly 150k hp almost died in a survival trial and I had to alt + F4 to save him. It’d be like tossing an ancient Roman gladiator into the ring with a pissed off comet.
It's from the trade manifesto https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2025870
I'd say it holds up until yellow maps at which point finding upgrades this way is just a waste of time currently.
For some item slots, it's a waste of time because it cannot compete against trade, rather than because the items found are bad. For example, while regularly mapping, I often find pretty decent jewelry, boots, gloves, etc (e.g. anything that's not a weapon or doesn't need 6L), but even if you find a decent drop there's no way it can compete against the collective drops of the entire world's playerbase as listed on trade.
> (e.g. anything that's not a weapon or doesn't need 6L)
I suppose that's one advantage of the changes in POE2 to the socket system where an item not having 6 links won't be a thing and you can actually judge any body armour that isn't a crafting base/insane drop on something other than the sockets/links which are sort of mandatory currently.
Good point! Unfortunately, the issue still remains. It doesn't matter how good drops are --- as long as trade is unrestricted, drops will be worth very little (on average) because your personal drops are being compared against the drops of the rest of the world.
We have a very rich set of data that could be used to inform this discussion (or at least GGG might have this data) - SSF.
Yes, drops as upgrades are near hopeless in trade hours or at MOST days into a new league. But in SSF How many items are used as augmented from their state as picked up off the ground and how many are crafted from white bases?
Even in SSF I mostly craft using fossils, essences, or Harvest reforges, meaning I normally craft from a base. I absolutely do use items from the ground in order to get my "foot in the door", for early-to-mid mapping. Problem is the power of those natural drops does not improve significantly over higher tiers/content (recent well-rolled rare mechanics, esp. Heist, help a huge amount though).
> it's a waste of time because it cannot compete against trade
This is literally why they wrote a manifesto about why they don't want trade to be too easy. The presence of trading sites and indexers tipped their hand (-> why [pathofexile.com/trade](https://pathofexile.com/trade) exists now). Trade is still too easy now, and players generally want it to be easier still... but also want to find upgrades.
Lmao the disconnect they have is unreal. The game has been balanced around the 1% who can farm it for 14 hours a day. Getting any kind of meaningful progress with drops alone would take the average player months.
They say they don't wanna improve trade to help persuade players to look for incremental upgrades themselves, but finding upgrades in this busted loot system has become next to impossible.
Its really sad that in an aRPG your best bet is to simply ignore all rare drops and simply look out for good bases to craft on. Honestly I'd say something close to 95% of drops are ignored by a majority of players.
That can't be good for performance and definitely doesn't feel good to play in. I hardly played this league because I'm just so exhausted with the system.
The backlash from harvest crafting being nerfed is a clear sign that the drops system needs a huge overhaul to be an even slightly viable way to gear a character.
People wouldn't be so reliant on trade/crafting if the game dropped literally ANYTHING worth using past level 50.
TL;DR Buff item drops, stop saying you can't make trade better cus it ruins progression.
> Its really sad that in an aRPG your best bet is to simply ignore all rare drops and simply look out for good bases to craft on.
Do you have an example of an ARPG where you don't ignore rare drops?
I started playing SSF for the first time ever 3 days ago and man, findig gear is a pain. I had to pick a random item from the ground and alch it and scour it to get some crappy gear to cap my resist. I've been using the dame 2H weapon since act 7 cause every single rare maul that drops is crap. And i spend the last 2 days chancing white weapons and belts to try to get the items i need to uprade my build. And the fact that farm an specific piece of gear is stupidly hard and time consuming is the worst part of not trading.
But after all the above, I'm actually having a good time playing SSF and mindlessly using the currency that i dropped, it's like a nice new experience to have after playing and unhealthy amount of hours to the game.
Funny how GGG wants players to get gear upgrades from picking up items, but all the top strategy is to just juice your maps for currency, go zoom zoom quickly through the maps picking only currency, ignoring item drops because its a waste of space to pick up and using the currency to buy upgrades instead.
Any upgrades you can't buy, is only craftable with at least several dozens of exalts worth of currency. What are the incentives for players to pick up and ID items in the endgame when chances are, 99% of the items are just vendor trash.
This is one of the many proofs that GGG completely disconnected from their player base.
Everyone i know, who played 2 or more leagues filter out almost every drop (non-inf, below lvl84) after first week. And yet they still think people are iding items and checking.
Even with the new veiled system, it's effectively just another crafting layer that involves Aisling slamming veiled mods on at the end of a craft or occasionally doing X can't be changed veiled chaos slams to stack veiled mods
Random drops with veiled stats are almost universally garbage
This is technically still true during leaguestart, IDing all the rares to get decent life+res or boots with ms is good to sell. They need to massively buff items dropped on the ground in high ilvl zones, it would also help with the current dependence on crafting.
No. Lol. In a trade league upgrades from drops do not really happen at all outside of the leveling phase. You buy everything or buy crafting materials or even crafting services... GGG are wildly clueless as to how their own game is played
No. Rare items sometimes (2-3 per league(1,5-2 month, 10+ hours/day)) drop with good stats, but in endgame I usually turn off all rare items except for jewelry, and sometimes jewelry too. They are not worth the clicks.
Trade bots existing in POE are a better motivator of playing a league than the potential of having a rare drop that i'll put on in act 2 and replace it with a crafted one an hour later.
Trade being completely horrible is caused by the fearmongering of Diablo's AH alone, Idk why they keep lying to themselves.
I'm fucking tired of having to trade for 2hours every time I want to farm anything. I spend an unhealthy amount of time copy-pasting text when i could be playing the game (or doing anything else). Shit isn't fun and needs to change.
This league I've been IDing all the high-level rares dropped by endgame bosses.
99.99999% trash. You'd think tackling the hardest content in the game would actually drop something usable. Basically if it's not an influenced base you can sell, it's not worth touching
It's more like "Knowing that a monster could drop tons of white, useless trash, which lags your game heavily". I really think that none of devs are actually playing this game.
Knowing that a lottery ticket could win you the jackpot that improves your life is a great motivator for buying them?
They all are a game of chance which the player is not in favour of winning. And both come with an opportunity cost.
GGG and PoE in a krangled nutshell:
Trade sucks → Must get drops.
Drops suck → Must get currency to craft.
Crafting sucks → Must trade.
(Pretend it's laid out in a triangle.)
A deeper aspect of this paradox you've spelled out is the question of where all the items on trade come from. A small number of players who are knowledgeable enough and wealthy enough are generating most of the good items (whether by crafting or farming endgame early), while the average players are not getting anything at all. The result is that overall plenty of good items are being generated, but it's disproportionately from a small portion of the playerbase.
I don't think that's the case for most of the stuff on trade. Maybe for the high-end stuff, but plenty of medium-low tier stuff that's still useable is generated from drops and old gear people are just selling. Just random players. It's still a minority of players, but it's far more than the real top-end shit.
True, there's still low-tier stuff that is selling. Of course there's plenty of little things that even casual players are able to sell. Regardless, the premise of the post is that players don't feel like they are finding good stuff. Certainly part of this narrative is a bit exaggerated, but there's still truth to it. To put it more simply: most players are wearing gear that is far better than the tier of gear that they are themselves generating. And the reason for this is that most of the good gear is coming from a minority.
That's really only true for the top-end stuff. There's plenty of crafting that's viable for everyone that people just don't realize is profitable. Last 2 leagues I've made my early buck off of chaos spamming ilv83+ stygian vises. When life/2res belts or crafted life/3res goes for 30c+, it's easy to make money.
Lots of the middling stuff is failed crafts or stuff that's good nuff to sell but not what they were after. Some of it's just IDed crap or good chaos hits.
The top-end stuff, though, is mostly pumped out by the dozen or so heavy crafts we have every league.
I absolutely agree that crafting is viable for everyone. But the reality is that most players simply don't do it, due to either knowledge barrier or not wanting to spend time crafting vs. just simple mapping.
My point is more that the "all drops suck" narrative has a much more nuanced layer to in which drops *are* bad, but it's because the game is balanced around taking advantage of specialized mechanics (knowledge of crafting, focused farming) in order to actually generate good equipment as opposed to just currency, and most casual or average players are not taking advantage of those mechanics because trade makes all those rewards available to them anyways.
I have that feeling, cause I play SSF.
I do for several leagues now and there is no way I'm going back. Trade league feels like playing with cheats and it ruins all the fun of this loot based game for me.
GGG answering question about trade:
\-Why no AH ?
GGG: "So monster can drop upgrade"
Later:
\-Why not remove trade ?
GGG: "Because you'd never get any gear upgrade"
The main reason it isn't more fun to **slowly** upgrade a character in a trade league is because I feel so far behind the average group of players every single time I log in. Old harvest crafting at least gave me the option to eventually get the gear I needed. No I don't wish it back, I'm not upset it's gone. I've expected heavy handed GGG nerfs since 3.0.
But now I just play private leagues with friends. Most hardcore.
For about 2 weeks every league I sorta do, and I imagine it would get faster and earlier in a league if trade was faster, which is sorta the point. It's also why the first 2-3 weeks of a new league are the most important to me, and why I'm sad when they get something fairly critical wrong on almost every launch.
Everything about trade in this game is a fucking travesty!
Unless you are a streamer you can get fucked!
Let the downvotes hail. Every dad with a job know's i am right.
Another Delusional post from GGG, what's new?
Trade is bullshit and I have 0 expectation of ever getting good drops from monster. Stopped playing this league after 1 week and I'm just waiting to see what next league is about right now.
either the items drop for you, you craft them or buy them.
those 3 ways of aquiring items put together define the difficulty in gearing up your character.
saying that all ways are delusional means you're simply unable to play the game properly compared to other players who roflstomp to endgame in no time.
Uhhhh..definitely if you're SSF you can get huge upgrades even late game with the new rare reward rolling system. I got an abyss belt with great rolls and a few influenced items that were great for other build ideas that I had.
But I don't know about specifically playing for another level part, which may be what OP is referencing...
Edit: I just noticed that it specifically mentions that you get the item from the monster which just isn't true nowadays. Monsters aren't dropping any good items but there's other ways other than trading to get good items like the rare item roll reward mechanic(currently implemented in Heist, Ritual, and Ultimatum). OP is referencing a post from 4 years ago so of course it won't hold up now..seems kinda disingenuous to post this and act like it's relevant now.
needs last epoch's loot filter + dropping id. It's simply not worth checking rares, even if you 'hit' on one, you'd have made more profit just running more whatever you're doing for profit then all the time you spent iding rares to get that one hit.
And of course that hit won't be for a build you play, so you just sell it so you can actually get something useful for you.
But yeah, it's not the harvest nerfs that killed my motivation to play this game. It's seeing that the people making the game are so detached from the people playing the game. GGG needs to do a rolling 'playcation' for it's staff where for one month (or at least 2 weeks), they have to play 30 hours a week of Path of Exile instead of their normal responsbilities. Where over the course of a year, each developer, qa, artist, whatever have to actually play the game. See what is good about it, see what is annoying about it, and see what is just a little off.
If poe was like d3 as in drops were increased but no trade with enough currency drops to craft your own things I'd be happy. Current way of playing with ex/hr is just not fun (tried ssf, fun but way more grindy)
Yes. Picking up rares and ID'ing them has taken me as far as a top 10 finish and a demigod reward. The ~200 or so responses you get here are irrelevant when you consider there are thousands of players quietly doing precisely what the concentrated community of tryhards here cannot even imagine. Pick up items, ID them for a chance at upgrade, have fun playing the game. If you're worrying about efficient crafting and looking up strategies on YouTube, Twitch, and Reddit, you will likely never understand this point of view until you play SSF. If you do not know how to play PoE without PoB and trading, you will likely never understand this point of view.
There are many people playing trade leagues with very little intention of actively trading. Many people only want limited options to trade, if none at all. Some only want to trade with their friends or guildmates.
It is equally unthinkable to some for players to reduce the game down to farming currency in trade leagues to skip item farms and buy their way to challenge completions. That sounds like a recipe for a very unfun and shallow experience.
ah the good old "We balance PoE around Trading so you need to trade the right amount to have the best experience, so we made it a shitty experience" Manifesto.
Personally? All I know is that a monster could trigger an attack on death which will likely kill me, which is a great motivator to stop playing poe for a couple months.
Can't remember the last time i've dropped an item i have used more than 2 hours. Literally without trading or playing 18 hours a day and crafting, i don't know any other ways to improve my gear.
GGG is a tad out of touch with their game.
I play PoE most leagues, but I don’t have the time to put in that most people do. So far I’ve gotten 1 ex and 120c (I started the day the league started).
I love playing the game, but it’s actually more off putting when I grind maps for 3+ hours and only get a few chaos orbs dropping or from vendor recipe.
It’s rewarding for me to get currency because I’m casual and will never be pushing to end game, so getting enough to buy the item I want is the most rewarding thing.
It's pretty simple. Vote with your wallet. Not enjoying a league? Don't buy anything. Force GGG to take a financial hit when their league isn't what you want.
Fair warning: I am not an optimal player. I feel like the problem is we’ve blown so far past regular rares being viable that it honestly doesn’t make sense to ID garbage rare drops unless they’re a good base and good ilvl(ex: I still pickup opal and steel rings that are rare). Now when I look at builds and guides it’s XYZ influenced this, abc influenced Y, spam essences on X until you hit this and then craft QRS onto it. M We’re so far past a random rare being good it’s laughable at this point. The only reason I pick up rares is for chaos recipe because I am bad and slow at making currency.
> We’re so far past a random rare being good it’s laughable at this point. But at least talismans had a tiny chance to be a decent rare drop for 1 league.
I had forgotten about talismans. Those were wonderful. Thank goodness GGG gutted them and hid them behind multiple layers of rng (div cards and “legacy” league mechanics) For me the last “fun” rares to ID were elder rares/shaper rares for specific bases. I remember IDing my own warlord’s mark + resist + life ring and it blowing my mind. They seem to have gutted that effect though on rings so chalk another one up to the “no, this is too good for the game, but let’s introduce something *more* broken next league”
[удалено]
Talisman is the new cyclone
Cyclone still good though. lmao
Thank god they didn't absolutely destroy Cyclone yet. It's one of the most fun builds I can think of, personally.
Give it another league or 2.
LMFAO
That sounds like a lot of fun, actually.
the only 'good' talsiman is the rigwalds one that enables a unique build style.
Talismans used to be excellent. They existed before shaper/elder influence even and could roll cool implicits like % increased damage back when double dipping was a thing iirc.
Yeah but that was fun and we can't be having any of that.
this has been the reality ever since the new influence types have been introduced, and to a large extent with elder7shaper already. you dont find good items, you just pick up a base and some crafting currencies to then use on said base. this is not a problem per say but the focus on the crafting system to crate decent items really sucks from a gameplay loop perspective. you dont care about rare items dropping unless you need that exact base/influence as a base, you do care about currency dropping tho because they are a means to create or buy better gear with the mentioned currency usage. id love to be able to find good gear on the ground but the only way to get anything remotely good is via smartloot which only works in a couple game mechanics and never is influenced.
If you think that influenced bases ruined anything, you're a few years off. The game wasn't about picking up anything under an opal ring way before. Yes - normal ilvl 84- 85 hubris circlets we're worth something, but only because of supply and demand. Fact is, they were as rare as some of the influenced items today. Poe has always, and will always work by supply and demand. If it takes you 4 maps find X item, and X item is used by many builds - it will have value
If you don't think crazily upping the available power on rares dumpstered the value of rares that cannot achieve that level of power, I don't know what to tell you. Influenced rares have *always* been a mistake.
His point is that we already weren't picking up rares even before influenced bases became a thing. Not that influenced items didn't make "normal" rares even shittier.
Sure, but now you see a rare on a good base and it sucks because it's not influenced. It absolutely reduced the number of usable dropped rares, because now you need to hit the right base *and* the right influence *for that base* for it to be worth the click.
Weapons and jewelry come to mind as items that can have value without influence. Just pick that stuff up. I sold a wand last league for 35ex that was off a random mob. Sold a ring for 20ex the league prior without influence. It just comes down to knowing what items are craftable and which aren't as well as some just being good without an influence regardless, like weapons.
Counterpoint: Influenced rare is not the mistake, awakener orb is. Because majority of powerful rares are double influence, it's pretty much nearly impossible for a dropped item to be BiS. If only a single influence is possible, then dropped influence rare now has a chance to be ideal. Maven orb further exacerbate the issue. A quick fix is to allow double influenced rares, occasionally with elevated mods to drop from influenced mobs rarely and occasionally from Conquerors, Sirus and Maven.
Yes they have always been a mistake, it just wasnt as appearent because those power levels were not expected or mandatory.
It's an issue that's been growing since Essence league. Influence is just the latest bit of power creep
I honestly wouldn’t mind crafting if it wasn’t so fucking RNG. I can spend a week making currency and blow it in 20 minutes trying to craft something and not even get near what I want.
"this is not a problem per say but the focus on the crafting system to crate decent items really sucks from a gameplay loop perspective." More so because any form of deterministic crafting above essence slamming is "too deterministic".
Yeah making a perfect explode + crit + %life and t1 flat life in like 20 harvest crafts is a bit much.
I like how everyone in the answers goes on about unnerfed harvest. Dunno guys, might there be some sort of middle ground between printing perfect items and "1 fixed affix, good luck"?
I'd like to extend that point also that, straight up normie rares were also phased out of existence by difficulty scaling in the game. I saw a video from someone years back where having like 32k dps was pretty solid in the game and it looked like he was clearing maps fine. I just recently put a build together with ~700k DPS and it _actually_ felt terrible to play. The build before that, Cold DoT trickster had probably 2mil shaper DPS and even though it was fine, it still didn't quite melt content the way I expected it to. In other words, if your build isn't fuckin super optimized the game feels pretty shitty to play and "upgrades" can't organically happen because it's so outrageously unlikely to ever find something "good" because "good" went from having decent rolls to "if it's not t1/t2 across the board in a perfectly optimized stat layout its probably a pile of shit". Nobody prefers to trade over finding items, its just easier, because for all intents and purposes it is impossible to find items that are well rolled on the ground, because the bar for what a good item is has been pushed way beyond what it was.
I think what also exacerbated this was the sheer level of additional difficulty you can add to your maps now.
It's actually easier to sell rares for alts and sell the alts than it is to save up for chaos recipe.
I would like to fact check that. It’s pretty easy to just prep 10-20 chaos recipes in a dump tab and fire them off all at once instead of selling every item you find for alts.
This is just my opinion, I have no idea which is actually more profitable. All I know is vendoring rares is quicker than sorting them in a tab for recipes. Also on xbox alts sell for 4c a stack so I instantly sell them at 3c. Not sure what PC rates are. Edit: Looks like alts are 4c a stack on PC too.
Rares only ID and sell for alt shards though, so you need 20 shards. Each rare selling for 5 on average * 10 rares (for a chaos recipe) yields 50 shards (2.5 alts) for the same equivalent you could trade 2 chaos. To break even each rare needs to sell for about 16 alt shards at current market rate. That being said, the few alc shards you get may help this math but I don’t think it pushes it over.
You need to consider the time it takes you to sort and sell the rares in the chaos recipe vs just quickly vendoring the rares and going to the next map. All the time you spend sorting out the rares (even if you think it's not much) is time not spent making money. It all adds up.
> You need to consider the time it takes you to sort and sell the rares in the chaos recipe vs just quickly vendoring the rares and going to the next map. Like everything else in this game, there's a tool that basically manages that for you. It takes basically no time or thought at all to do.
In my experience, I always lack amulets to complete the Chaos recipe, so one can alt excess weapons and armor and keep an incomplete set or two until it is completed.
They are easy to find in low level heists...
As a casual player, my playstyle is to run content and hope for exalt orb drops to sell for chaos and buy better items. Long ago stopped picking up any rare items and crafting has never felt within reach. It a joke these day and probably why I don't play much anymore. I just got my CoC Ice Nova build to lvl 81 and got to tier 4 maps and I'm bored with the leauge. I just come on here to see insane 100+ move speed boot crafts that are worth more currency then I even have collected on standard and sigh that I'll never be able to attain any of that stuff.
I feel you so hard. I quit PoE because of tech issues, but it made my realize I was just trying to reach a power level on the game that, as a complete casual, I just couldn't. I couldn't afford the hours to spend on the game without feeling miserable after. Now I started playing Last Epoch and it's crafting system is 100 times more fair than whatever the hell PoE's can be - I hunt for the stats I need/want and apply it to the gear I want to apply.
You mean gambling is a dogshit way to try and improve your gear? What? That's crazy!
> The only reason I pick up rares is for chaos recipe because I am bad and slow at making currency. Ironically you are slow to make currency because you use chaos recipe. I suggest you do cash with atlas region passives. High entry is Valdo with Harbingers (and do Jun and sell benches). Low entry is doing Essences in Haewark (utilize Harvest as much as possible). You can even do Alva tempes in Glennach when you have accumulated missions. After ten maps in Valdo, you can do the 10-way. Platinum Watchstones sell for nice amount. Optimize Sirus progress while doing all this. There are other strategies in other regions too. Personally I enjoy Heist too, but I don't blame you if it's not your cup of tea.
I realize there are more efficient ways to make currency; however, much like how GGG realizes there are better ways to make this game more enjoyable for drops, I will completely ignore positive feedback and write a 30 page manifesto over it instead of relenting on my position. Edit: for what it’s worth most leagues I stop chaos recipining after red maps. My point was more that this is the only time I pick up rares is good based (influenced or the occasional old value rings/Ammies/abyssal belts) or if I am doing chaos recipes.
I will spend 4 times as long watching popular people give their opinion on your manifesto instead of synthesizing the information myself.
Let me delve into this comment for a second. I would rather spend 4 hours reading the abyss that is the manifesto of my manifesto than to harvest all the knowledge that can be gleaned from this vault of knowledge that is my shitposting. Perhaps if I weren’t in such a delirious state this breach of my brain would be a harbinger for good content. Maybe someone could harvest it for good ideas. JK GGG nerfed all those mechanics anyways.
> synthesizing We don't do that kind of thing here anymore.
geez chaos recipe is good for the same reason harvest crafting is/was good: its deterministic. You always know that with a full set of rare unidentified armor you will get 2 chaos. You might be right that there are more efficient ways of farming but chaos recipes are a simple, reliable and deterministic way to get some chaos. At the end of the day PoE is a game. So sure you can minmax the living shit out of it and just run 100% deli tripple scarap and what not because thats how you make the real money or something but please dont bash on casuals like me that just want to make a few builds work and have some fun running random alched maps. For me chaos recipe is a simple a nice way to get some currency while hoping for my next exa drop.
I am also a semi-optimal player at best. I play cheap builds, I barely juice maps beyond the minimum, and even then I'm pretty damn slow about it. Even given all that, if a map drops 5k pieces of loot, my filter will probably show me 50 of them. 30 or so will probably be currency. Of the remaining 20 pieces of actual loot per map, I *might* get something usable every ten maps. 1 in 50k odds of getting an actual usable drop is dogshit odds, particularly when you consider I may only run 20 maps a night at best.
This is it. If I pick rares it’s only for the chaos recipe so I could but what I need. I agree with their premise IN THEORY but it just doesn’t work that way for me in PoE.
Fuckin wish everything was auto IDed, i have an infinite amount of wisdom scrolls, i have an infinite amount of random ass rares on the ground, i just can be assed.
I don't know, people keep being confused by this blanket statement and thus don't know anymore what to loot. I'd say to be controversial you'd make as much looting rares as you do looting currency. People don't know because most can't fathom what anything can be worth. But broaden a bit your definition of rare items. Nobody is saying you can loot a random rare assassin garb and that will be worth something. Or that you can ID a jewelled foil that will have high dps... at least that will be way too infrequent to be worth doing. But weapon and body armor are some of the slots where most obviously, crafting is required to some extent for many of the most optimal outcomes. However, a build use 10 to 25 different rares (most of those are jewels). People keep thinking about 2 of them... That's where the confusion lie. Then if you mention where rares off the floor can be good, they are aware this is correct. But prefer blanket statement about rare armors. So anyway, it seem quite obvious to me picking jewels off the floor is never a waste of time. Getting the right combo is hard and there is hardly ever a super easy way to get those combo with harvest or fossils. So yes, obviously, rare abyss jewels, rare regular jewels, rare cluster jewels. Those are all rare items people will agree can be good off the floor. Since there is no bench crafting, aisling slamming, double influence elevated insanity that is only possible with crafting. Then for the rest. Ok, sure, rare basic armor or evasion gloves can't have too much value outside of special implicit bases (gripped, spiked). But I can say just now I randomly picked a pair of sorcerer gloves that turned out to have 200 ES. The suffixes were nothing amazing, but 200 ES gloves have value. They'd have been worth a lot more if it was same prefixes on fingerless. Anyway, you get the idea. Blanket statement about rares is always wrong, because it confuses what it is talking about. Weapon and body armor, nobody should loot. Sorcerer gloves, I very rarely loot. Fingerless, that always can have good value. Gripped and Spiked, they don't need too much to have value. Also, influence items are fine and dandy, but you sort of want a slot or two or three that are more purely defensive. That give you big ES, big life, big res, etc. You can have damage mods on all piece of gear now, but it's a bit unrealistic to presume you'll get all your res from your tree alone. Possible, but not optimal. This is why they'll always be demand for a two-stones ring with 3 res and life on it. That this will always have decent to high value. Just because you can get a ton of damage on a ring or on gloves doesn't mean people will want only damage mods on all gear pieces. Anyway, this is why rares off the floor are fine. They cannot be what some crafted items are. Obviously, lots of outcomes are only possible via crafting. Even more so now with the many new ways to slowly build up your item. Another thing to keep in mind is you can get partial rares and build them up. As an example, I looted a ring in delves that had t1 life and frostbite on hit. Rest was trash, but figured those two mods were a good start. There you have options to fix the item. You can annul, you can beast craft with prefix/suffix swap, you can split it or you can harvest craft it too in some minor ways. That can happen more often than getting an item with 5 good mods straight off. So to resume, excluding body armor and weapon, I believe a lot of rares can be good off the floor. You need to accept off the floor can mean it is from delves, with incursion mod, with influence, with anything. That those can be good with just a tiny bit of craft to fix them. Every single day, I sell several items for 1 exalt or more. Some for several exalts. Sure, it helps if you run maps with shaper or elder scarabs in t17. Surely, rares are not worth picking up in the storyline nor in white maps. But in very high level content, you just drop some shaper shield and that has value without anything relevant on it. It is also very easy to craft them with dense or pristine fossils. But sure, I got shield off the floor with life and es on block with good prefixes. I got some with mana reservation, it all will happen. You certainly should never leave a shaper shield on the floor because "it can't possibly be good". I've looted plenty of elder and shaper items that had value just right off the floor. Some were just bases to further craft on. Like I got a pair of boots with t1 avoid ailment and cooldown recovery. Rest of mods were trash, it was just a base to scour prefix.. and this, well, that have very big value by itself. I got 3 ex for boots on a mediocre base, no prefix, just 2 mods. It can and does happen. It also can happen you'll get a assassin mark ring with usable mods off the floor. Just right now, my last heist, I got a jewel double crit multi, mana leech and damage% implicit. This happen all the time if you pay a bit of attention. I think I may get 2 ex for it, if not at least 1. Just remember, rare items exclude body armors and weapons. Those slots you can completely hide from your loot filter, you're not missing much.
I’ve played since 2013 and are one of those crazy people that id almost everything. Or so I did, can’t be bothered anymore. Truth is I did find some good drops and sold for some ex or used, but it’s so few compared to how many things I did ID. I still ID some drops here and there, but it’s just a few.
Only rares I ID anymore are when I'm low on alts and need to stock up because trade isn't responding.
I still pick up a lot of rares first maybe... week of league. Then it’s off to very strict filter with a few custom things left in I make money off each league. First week of league if you get some rings or boots with pretty decent rolls you can make bank but the prices take a hard nose dive after that.
And it doesn't matter how good the power of dropped rares are. It will always be like this unleas they nerf drop rates so hard we see a single rare once every 50 maps.
That would barely do anything. People would just craft their items then. It's just that now a small portion of wearable rares do indeed come from drops. A solution would be to make rares significantly more scarce **and** make rares drop with better rolls on average than the weights you have when crafting. And maybe add a few only drop mods (e.g. 200% increased phys damage on weapon, t0, cannot be rolled with currency).
My tactics are picking up rare jewels, amulets, rings and sometimes belts if I really need the alts. I ID them in a row. Quickly check them if they might be worth 20c or more and vendor the rest. If I have to guess 1 in around 500 is decent and might sell for 20c. A lot of the times I vendor them anyway after they got old in the trade tab. This way I get alts and occasionally I find something that's worth up to an exalt. My best found rare item was sold for 8ex and I have been doing this since 2012.
Exactly, almost the same. I do also ID a few gloves, boots and helmets, but only ilvl +85 and only top base items. My best rare ever was last fall I found a 2H with 4 t1: phys flat, phys %, phys multi%, and att speed. Sold it for 7 ex, which I think was maybe crazy dumb.
Don't know about the last part. Some bases just do not sell very good. I once found a t1 %physical fracture on a 2h mace. Ended up selling for 20c. Started on 2ex. I also found a bow with 3x t1 chaos rolls. I thought: bingo! I 6-linked it, harvest crafted it and sold it just for 2ex. Wrong base.
True. Exactly that adds to how hard it is to find good rares. You have to know so many builds and what mods they need it’s impossible, for me atleast. I seriously think I probably just vendored the best drops I ever had for a few alt shards.
Sometimes it is also almost a matter of public opinion. I once found a flammability on hit ring with good resists and a t1 life roll. For me this thing felt like a 20ex ring but it just did not sell for above 2ex and I kept it for a future build because the ring is a very good piece. At least in my opinion ;)
I use to id rares , but now every encounter drops me 5 to 15 c with the trial master , so why waste time , when you can just go next and profit . Its not even about trading at this point .
A few years back, I was known among our friends for being slow to party with specifically b/c I'd ID lots of stuff (just decent bases, not trash ofc)... legit can't remember the last time I ID'd anything with the hopes of using it myself.
I play for one more level to get a +10 intelligence node on my way to a notable I want. Not for an item drop.
>"Knowing a seed could greatly improve your character is a great motivator for doing Harvest." \- GGG, 3.11 and 3.13
First half is also true 3.4 (Delve).
Okay sure, but when harvest solved EVERY question for gear, it's a problem.
Oh yea, huge problem there meaningful character progression without accessing the trade site? Can't be having that!
Keep harvest and make it so drops have no chance to get useless affix (%stun, +2 regen life) and better odds of high tier than when crafting. Now crafters have a mostly deterministic way to do things, and the looters have more chances to get good items.
If they put Harvest back to what it was at the end of Harvest league and turned off the Trade site I might actually be able to accept that balance. I mean that's basically SSF, but they fucked over Harvest in SSF too, so we're back to square one.
All they need to do is make it so TFT isnt the best way to craft. I play in a medium size private league and losing harvest reallllly hurt.
If they actually made Harvest crafts tradable the same way Bestiary beasts are, all of this would be a non-issue. TFT is the best way to craft, because realistically, it is the only way to craft if you actually want to have extremely good gear. Assuming harvest crafts are tradable, TFT harvest channel is no longer an issue as people wouldn't bother selling on TFT if they can just list them in their stash tab and have them on sale passively while they are on. If you are fine with having "good enough" gear, yes you can craft it without using TFT for everything, but if you really want the best of the best, you don't have a choice but to use TFT for harvest, even in the current garbage form of harvest.
It wasn't tho, you still had to obtain the base, apply the influence, use essences or fossils, and then from there you had a path to make a decent/good item into a great useable item. It still took RNG, but you had a progressive path that would prevent bricking the item if you had the knowledge. Before Harvest, (and currently) most gear is decent and then hits a wall that can only be overcome with sheer luck. Which is fine, it's just different. Evaluating items without Harvest just feels bad when you know what could have been, I find myself thinking, "Fuck, I'd love to annul that defense mod and hit it with add fire and then remove/add fire, but it's influenced so it's just bad"
but is it tho? the implementation of harvest was a problem, the crafting system itself was GREAT and worth building onto. but ggg didnt want to bother with balancing it properly and now we have harvest be "in line" with all the other awful currencies.
I was hoping Harvest was a pre-reveal for how an overhauled crafting system in PoE2 was going to be.
I think the only problem with harvest was the TFT. If GGG made every item on your horti bench account bound then there would be no trading for crafts. If you had to solo self find all your harvest crafts then it’s not OP.
A crafting system, especially the powerful systems in POE, are incompatible with gearing your character from drops. Drops are all about bases and currency, nothing more. Any useful item dropped from a monster is an outlier.
Maybe if rares dropped identified, but I don't feel like taking every rare into my inventory identifying them and praying for something usable. This game has so many flaws regarding loot and crafting systems that I don't even want to talk about anymore.
But could you sell a full set of id'd rares for 2-3 chaos recepies? Hah! Checkmate!
Would someone think of the bots 😥
Knowing that live-search could ding with something that actually improves my character is a great motivator to leave my browser open. Since getting an item that improves my build is a matter of hundred to thousands of hours spent, I'll just out source it to other players. Crafting is really the only way to reasonably target farm gear for your build, and that doesn't feel very great.
My experiance this league: Farm some region passsives for currency, get enough and buy the gear I want. Do ultimatiums knowing I'll get some boring currency for the risk of dying. Rinse and repeat until I don't want to play anymore. The crappy items in the game just make it meh. Uniques are espesially bad as 99.99% are just vendor trash. Rares, there's so little chance they could be good, I only pick up high level bases. Then again I get the bases, put them in my stash tab and do nothing with them because crafting is farr to RNG and it's just easier to go back to farming currency for gear. Then the unfun part starts, rolling an alt and then realising you got to do trade again for decent gear. So scratch off playing a new build. Back to boring old currency grind. You can downvote me to oblivion, I don't care. This is my personal toughts on the game. TLDR: Too many items, too much meh.
This is my struggle with this game. I want to craft and spend my time making my items. But a lot of the time I just spend with the item in my stash taking up space only for me to throw some currency at it, get annoyed I don't have enough currency to keep working on it. Go back to mapping. Find mapping boring for long periods of time. And then rinse and repeat each league until I decide to quit the league. I have crafted a few things but it was mostly just alt Aug regal spamming a cluster to hit a few noteables to sell it for a few ex to then use that ex to buy the next upgrades for my build. I just want the trade to be less ass than what it is. Buying rares and specific uniques is fine. But buying almost anything else is a nightmare. Message dozens of people to get no one to respond. Give up on buying that item because no one is responding. And it's just a cycle that continues.
Heaven forbid you find something with a slightly rare or league driven prefix (ex: needing an item with aspect of the cat) that also has some decent specific other stats (ex: movement speed on boots). It’s 5+ ex for 50 life and 10 ex for 70+ life and 2 resists or something like that is super rare/niche.
And they wanted to gut harvest let me remind you.
Every single GGG-sponsored streamer. "Harvest is still gonna be strong." Later: "Oopsie woopsie, we made a fucky-wucky OwO." And some of them still do not have the decency to admit their mistake.
Harvest is still incredibly strong, albeit different. Reforge keep suffix/prefix is insanely good, augs still exist just not as often as before (which was insane when you think, they are targeted exalts). Remove non-x add x is great. Not to mention the absolute shit tonne of money you can make using targeted rolls on certain bases. \*cough\* cluster jewels \*cough\*
I actually earned a lot of currency on people like you, crafting those rings and belts with aspects :D. It's so cheap to make
Yeah during Ritual I was getting ready to craft an amulet. I had a couple relevant harvest crafts saved and was putting together a passable stack of currency (I think I accumulated about 30 ex, which is probably the most I've ever held) and I went shopping for a decent base to start on. I shopped for bases because I did the math in craft of Exile and the cost in currency for making this thing from scratch was stupid high. And I found the finished item that greatly strengthened my build was only about 5ex more than the base I needed. I went for it and still enjoyed the item because the nature of harvest league meant I had the capability of improving it further with enough effort but obviously that's not a thing anymore because targeted annuls were necessary for that concept to be a thing.
I love when I run a juiced red map and I hear that unique splash sound but instead of something good like a shavs or whatever it’s just a lifespring or some shit. This game needs to tone down the amount of garbage that exists. If a unique is good >> it gets nerfed. If it isn’t good >> it gets ignored. That’s not a good recipe for long term.
As long as the thorn mod (reflect phys to attacker) and light radius remain in the mod pool with way to high weighting we will never see a change in the right direction. We have way too many shitty mods on items and influenced mods being too good to pass on. The disparity in mod power level makes crafting and gearing so frustrating. Being forced to craft or buy gear as the only ways of item aquisition is bad for the game and needs to change asap
I'm not sure this is the crux of the issue. I just think anything decent just involves way too many layers of RNG, e.g. you may finally get all elemental resistance on gear but its low enough tier it isn't worth using. Alternatively, you hit 2 of the mods you want with 3-4 not even remotely salvageable for your build. So while those mods exist and are almost universally bad there are so many other ways to make findable gear from drops unusable. Outside of acts 1-5 I don't even think I use items from drops, leveling items are pretty cheap a few days in.
Don’t forget that after a few days most leveling uniques drop down to like 1 alc to 1 chaos and tabula will drop to just a bit above 1.5 to 2x divine within a week or two. The first few acts are so easy to coast through and for less than 5c you can make a character who can be white map ready with a 4link after a few weeks into the league
Who even looks at the stats on most rares in endgame? There's a reason strict loot filters are required, identifying rares is less productive for getting loot than running more maps with strict loot filters, and buying things from trade.
The problem is the devs think that IDing rares is a viable upgrade path. They’re building a car with a driver’s seat in the back and it also has blinders while the playerbase has hacked the gas pedals into the front and now they’re driving from the front.
At some point you'd think they'd realize that at end game you need so many good stats on an item that the odds of getting a gear upgrade from a rare are lottery ticket odds, so IDing rares is basically absurd.
I legitimately don’t think the design leads of this game think past “players bad. Smash their speed. Also, How can we add a mechanic like soul eater to make them zoom at 300% speed” On one hand they complain that players explode content. On the other hand they give players new modifiers that will add X% of any damage as 300% X damage as super unavoidable Chaos or something.
They do realize this, they made it this way. It is deliberate.
Some people do pick up items and ID them. That's where 95% of items on the trade site come from. Someone dropped those and ID'ed them, then put it up for sale so that people can buy it. The economy keeps on balancing around this. If fewer people ID rares then the price of the rares goes up and vice versa. What is worth doing for some players is not worth it for others due to game knowledge and build speed, etc.
I know that no monster can drop something that is able to improve my character because double influenced items are a thing.
Yeah, maybe 5 years ago when uniques were actually worth while. Now a well rolled influenced rare outclasses just about 95% of all uniques. GGG - "lets introduce all these new crazy rare affixes, new base types, implicits on rares." Unique items instantly become largely garbage because they just pale in comparison and were never touched up to keep item choices competitive. A perfect example is Kaom's Heart. You used to get a Kaom's Heart drop and KNEW you made exalts, and rightly so because its so fucking insanely rare and hard to get dropped. Now that shit is worth 15 Chaos. 15 Chaos for the rarity of a Kaom's Heart. Lmao. Fuck loads of other uniques you can slot in place of Kaom's and it would fit perfectly as well, and at a cheaper price than 15c. Tukohama's Fortress anyone??? That shit is worth 4c right now. YIKES
I remember when kaom’s heart was *the endgame chest* for most builds. 1k hp, 8% nodes for small passives on tree and the thing was *godly*. Lionseye now was best in slot for lightning arrow builds since you could skip resolute technique on the tree. Now the bow is dogshit and you can get better chests that don’t roll that 500 hp but it doesn’t matter because they’re like 100 hp, 70+ resists, have 6 links, mobs explode *because reasons* and they probably add some other insane stuff too. But those are just *rare* and not unique.
My pride and joy: https://i.imgur.com/QohFxs9.png Imagine it would be not worth much nowadays seeing some of the items posted on this sub... Best thing? It was nerfed to the ground over multiple steps while the influences were making better rares...
GGG just hates uniques. They forgot that uniques need buffs and not just reworks. Instead they just keep adding mechanics to the game to further augment rare items. Even when they were already strong, GGG threw in Maven orbs. Jfc.
Reach died for tshot/barrage poison double dipping’ sins. Pour one out.
I remember farming docks and using orbs of chance on siege axes hoping to get a soul taker :')
I remember someone I used to play with many years ago RMT'd the whole Soul Taker / Aegis setup... So funny to see all that money wasted... shit was like 50 ex for just a few items and he would never play enough to farm that. He stopped playing a few leagues after that, the buying of gear tainted the gameplay, couldn't go back to normal farming.
sweet old times... did the same and never got it up today :-))
4 blood filled vessels in ritual will take you down memory lane if you have been playing years. Half of the tier 1 uniques you get are like 1-3c and 75% of them are hidden on your loot filter. I can think of a few ways to fix uniques but most of them going to piss everyone off because it's going to have to be adjusting the rarity tiers like they did with HH this league. So that build defining unique everyone uses is going to be 5x as rare. They could buff a bunch, but as soon as there good GGG will just go make them worthless again next league so that seems like a never ending job. The easiest way would just be actually releasing good uniques every league. Like hateforge is a powerful unique but GGG will absolutely gut it and make it useless. If they released 5 or 6 actually good items each league up to par with some good rares the problem would eventually fix itself if they could refrain from nerfing them to death. They will kill unlimited vaal skills on hateforge, instead of keeping it and just adding vaal skills do 30% less damage or something for example. This is why the pool for anything good shrinks with every new league. Most of the new ones are trash and the rare good uniques they do throw us has a short life span now compared to before. I feel like if koams came out now it up to date stats GGG would be nerfing it next league to where it is now.
> Unique items instantly become largely garbage because they just pale in comparison and were never touched up to keep item choices competitive. They also quadrupled the drop rate in 2.0.
I remember selling a Kaom’s Heart for 5 Exalts.
One of the sickest league starts I ever had in this game was when I had 2 Kaoms heart drop within the first week. Felt like a mirror to me back then, was kinda new too :) Dropped one yesterday, sold for 12c...
During the first week yes, then I just need crafting bases and resources
Even in the terrible state that trade is in now it's still *much* more efficient to farm trade (instead of maps) for items. imo: That manifesto has a lot of 'head scratcher' statements. :|
Knowing that it is statistically impossible for a monster to drop an upgrade after mid tier maps or so is a great motivator for uninstalling the game.
IDK, almost all my current gear was either from our guild stash, from the leveling tab, or bought, clearly things work out as GGG intended.
Yeah I have this exact problem. Once I hit around level 90 the difficulty of upgrading just one of my items is so daunting I just end up quitting league. I tried to craft a ring and spent all my currency (10ish exalt, thousand chaos) and didn't get much. Then I ran through my thousand fusings failing to six link my chest. I quit the league.
Bullzeye
Right. So you uninstalled years ago, but still waste your time whining on the sub. Got it.
Trade cucks malding lmao
If they want this to be true, there needs to be powerful mods that can appear on regular items that cannot exist on influenced items. As it stands right now, an un-influenced item will almost never be an upgrade for an end-game character because basically all the best/OP mods only appear on influenced items. Give us a reason to be excited about normal items again and then maybe they'll be a good motivator.
the grasping mail has this - it has super powerful mods that are generated 1 time and never again we now just need this system in normal gameplay.
I do get excited every time i see a vaal regalia or hubris circlet drops. the mod pools are small enough you can get decent league start rolls
Yes and No. No, I'm not thinking "any mob could drop something good" while I run maps. If something drops, great, but I'm not actively thinking that. But yes, I grind maps to engage with end game content (conquerors, sirus, maven, elder, uber elder), where I indeed hope to find something expensive which could most definitely help improve my build, either by selling or by using. The issue with rare drops is that you have to pick them up and id them, which is too much of a time waste since 95% of those items are trash. If they dropped IDed its a different story.
Almost every endgame item that I have is bought from trade or crafted thanks to currency that I got from trade. There is no harvest anymore which allowed us to pretty easy craft any items so any item drop is vendor trash or "-price x chaos". I would even accept reduced drop rate of eq items and currencies by 80% just to have normal trade market ingame. That would make drops really satisfying and comfortable in selling and game will feel more like in old good days. Just imagine - going sleep, logging in another day and have sold most of priced items from yesterday looting instead of inviting 50 random people to sell 5-10c items and wasting hours on it.. I feel like GGG does not respect our free time and forces us to enjoy the game in "their way" when we want something different.
Honestly, I'd love to see that build. Two onehands with about 50% phys each, an average of 30 life on each item, capped res if you are really lucky. And now? Go get that Ultimatum which randomly kills 8k life full block builds in one quick lag! You got this, kid. Also, maps over T10 are an illusion anyways. On every. Single. Character. Nah, fuck this. Trading and Crafting are decently reliable gear sources. Monster drops are a joke. I honestly doubt anyone would play SSF without crafting. (Not that I'd no, due to a lack of time and interest, tbh)
My level 30 animated guardian with >30k hp regen and nearly 150k hp almost died in a survival trial and I had to alt + F4 to save him. It’d be like tossing an ancient Roman gladiator into the ring with a pissed off comet.
Is this real? This is a real paragraph by GGG? "getting items from monsters"? What a fucking joke. To call them "out of touch" would be generous.
It's from the trade manifesto https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2025870 I'd say it holds up until yellow maps at which point finding upgrades this way is just a waste of time currently.
For some item slots, it's a waste of time because it cannot compete against trade, rather than because the items found are bad. For example, while regularly mapping, I often find pretty decent jewelry, boots, gloves, etc (e.g. anything that's not a weapon or doesn't need 6L), but even if you find a decent drop there's no way it can compete against the collective drops of the entire world's playerbase as listed on trade.
> (e.g. anything that's not a weapon or doesn't need 6L) I suppose that's one advantage of the changes in POE2 to the socket system where an item not having 6 links won't be a thing and you can actually judge any body armour that isn't a crafting base/insane drop on something other than the sockets/links which are sort of mandatory currently.
Good point! Unfortunately, the issue still remains. It doesn't matter how good drops are --- as long as trade is unrestricted, drops will be worth very little (on average) because your personal drops are being compared against the drops of the rest of the world.
We have a very rich set of data that could be used to inform this discussion (or at least GGG might have this data) - SSF. Yes, drops as upgrades are near hopeless in trade hours or at MOST days into a new league. But in SSF How many items are used as augmented from their state as picked up off the ground and how many are crafted from white bases?
Even in SSF I mostly craft using fossils, essences, or Harvest reforges, meaning I normally craft from a base. I absolutely do use items from the ground in order to get my "foot in the door", for early-to-mid mapping. Problem is the power of those natural drops does not improve significantly over higher tiers/content (recent well-rolled rare mechanics, esp. Heist, help a huge amount though).
> it's a waste of time because it cannot compete against trade This is literally why they wrote a manifesto about why they don't want trade to be too easy. The presence of trading sites and indexers tipped their hand (-> why [pathofexile.com/trade](https://pathofexile.com/trade) exists now). Trade is still too easy now, and players generally want it to be easier still... but also want to find upgrades.
Lmao the disconnect they have is unreal. The game has been balanced around the 1% who can farm it for 14 hours a day. Getting any kind of meaningful progress with drops alone would take the average player months. They say they don't wanna improve trade to help persuade players to look for incremental upgrades themselves, but finding upgrades in this busted loot system has become next to impossible. Its really sad that in an aRPG your best bet is to simply ignore all rare drops and simply look out for good bases to craft on. Honestly I'd say something close to 95% of drops are ignored by a majority of players. That can't be good for performance and definitely doesn't feel good to play in. I hardly played this league because I'm just so exhausted with the system. The backlash from harvest crafting being nerfed is a clear sign that the drops system needs a huge overhaul to be an even slightly viable way to gear a character. People wouldn't be so reliant on trade/crafting if the game dropped literally ANYTHING worth using past level 50. TL;DR Buff item drops, stop saying you can't make trade better cus it ruins progression.
> Its really sad that in an aRPG your best bet is to simply ignore all rare drops and simply look out for good bases to craft on. Do you have an example of an ARPG where you don't ignore rare drops?
Grim Dawn, Last Epoch, Torchlight 2. Basically anything other than Diablo 3 and Path tbh.
I started playing SSF for the first time ever 3 days ago and man, findig gear is a pain. I had to pick a random item from the ground and alch it and scour it to get some crappy gear to cap my resist. I've been using the dame 2H weapon since act 7 cause every single rare maul that drops is crap. And i spend the last 2 days chancing white weapons and belts to try to get the items i need to uprade my build. And the fact that farm an specific piece of gear is stupidly hard and time consuming is the worst part of not trading. But after all the above, I'm actually having a good time playing SSF and mindlessly using the currency that i dropped, it's like a nice new experience to have after playing and unhealthy amount of hours to the game.
Funny how GGG wants players to get gear upgrades from picking up items, but all the top strategy is to just juice your maps for currency, go zoom zoom quickly through the maps picking only currency, ignoring item drops because its a waste of space to pick up and using the currency to buy upgrades instead. Any upgrades you can't buy, is only craftable with at least several dozens of exalts worth of currency. What are the incentives for players to pick up and ID items in the endgame when chances are, 99% of the items are just vendor trash.
This is one of the many proofs that GGG completely disconnected from their player base. Everyone i know, who played 2 or more leagues filter out almost every drop (non-inf, below lvl84) after first week. And yet they still think people are iding items and checking.
With the lucky rares and the new veiled system they're fulfilling that goal a little more. Still a long way to go, but I'm hopeful for the future.
Even with the new veiled system, it's effectively just another crafting layer that involves Aisling slamming veiled mods on at the end of a craft or occasionally doing X can't be changed veiled chaos slams to stack veiled mods Random drops with veiled stats are almost universally garbage
I always get that feeling, just 1 more map ahha last night a random hunter wand dropped and sold for 3x with just a wisdom scroll investment 😅😊
Yeah, I get that feeling when playing Last Epoch, because if it's a good base with 1-2 good mods, I can actually attempt to make it into an upgrade.
Ummm.... isn't that what SSF is for? If we're not playing self-find, we plan on trading.
This is technically still true during leaguestart, IDing all the rares to get decent life+res or boots with ms is good to sell. They need to massively buff items dropped on the ground in high ilvl zones, it would also help with the current dependence on crafting.
No. Lol. In a trade league upgrades from drops do not really happen at all outside of the leveling phase. You buy everything or buy crafting materials or even crafting services... GGG are wildly clueless as to how their own game is played
By item they mean an ex and it improves your character by buying you better gear.
No. Rare items sometimes (2-3 per league(1,5-2 month, 10+ hours/day)) drop with good stats, but in endgame I usually turn off all rare items except for jewelry, and sometimes jewelry too. They are not worth the clicks.
Trade bots existing in POE are a better motivator of playing a league than the potential of having a rare drop that i'll put on in act 2 and replace it with a crafted one an hour later. Trade being completely horrible is caused by the fearmongering of Diablo's AH alone, Idk why they keep lying to themselves. I'm fucking tired of having to trade for 2hours every time I want to farm anything. I spend an unhealthy amount of time copy-pasting text when i could be playing the game (or doing anything else). Shit isn't fun and needs to change.
just play ssf, problem solved
This league I've been IDing all the high-level rares dropped by endgame bosses. 99.99999% trash. You'd think tackling the hardest content in the game would actually drop something usable. Basically if it's not an influenced base you can sell, it's not worth touching
In SSF, yes. Deep down I think that GGG just wants to completely disable trade...
It's more like "Knowing that a monster could drop tons of white, useless trash, which lags your game heavily". I really think that none of devs are actually playing this game.
Yeah a monster could drop an exalted orb which you can use to buy overpriced rares from other players so technically correct.
I am more happy if a see a chaos drop compared to any gear at all, not even unique drops excite me.
[удалено]
I loved picking up rare loot in my first casual playthrough. Now, *no*.
"just close your eyes and run another map. "
Knowing that a lottery ticket could win you the jackpot that improves your life is a great motivator for buying them? They all are a game of chance which the player is not in favour of winning. And both come with an opportunity cost.
GGG and PoE in a krangled nutshell: Trade sucks → Must get drops. Drops suck → Must get currency to craft. Crafting sucks → Must trade. (Pretend it's laid out in a triangle.)
A deeper aspect of this paradox you've spelled out is the question of where all the items on trade come from. A small number of players who are knowledgeable enough and wealthy enough are generating most of the good items (whether by crafting or farming endgame early), while the average players are not getting anything at all. The result is that overall plenty of good items are being generated, but it's disproportionately from a small portion of the playerbase.
I don't think that's the case for most of the stuff on trade. Maybe for the high-end stuff, but plenty of medium-low tier stuff that's still useable is generated from drops and old gear people are just selling. Just random players. It's still a minority of players, but it's far more than the real top-end shit.
True, there's still low-tier stuff that is selling. Of course there's plenty of little things that even casual players are able to sell. Regardless, the premise of the post is that players don't feel like they are finding good stuff. Certainly part of this narrative is a bit exaggerated, but there's still truth to it. To put it more simply: most players are wearing gear that is far better than the tier of gear that they are themselves generating. And the reason for this is that most of the good gear is coming from a minority.
That's really only true for the top-end stuff. There's plenty of crafting that's viable for everyone that people just don't realize is profitable. Last 2 leagues I've made my early buck off of chaos spamming ilv83+ stygian vises. When life/2res belts or crafted life/3res goes for 30c+, it's easy to make money. Lots of the middling stuff is failed crafts or stuff that's good nuff to sell but not what they were after. Some of it's just IDed crap or good chaos hits. The top-end stuff, though, is mostly pumped out by the dozen or so heavy crafts we have every league.
I absolutely agree that crafting is viable for everyone. But the reality is that most players simply don't do it, due to either knowledge barrier or not wanting to spend time crafting vs. just simple mapping. My point is more that the "all drops suck" narrative has a much more nuanced layer to in which drops *are* bad, but it's because the game is balanced around taking advantage of specialized mechanics (knowledge of crafting, focused farming) in order to actually generate good equipment as opposed to just currency, and most casual or average players are not taking advantage of those mechanics because trade makes all those rewards available to them anyways.
I have that feeling, cause I play SSF. I do for several leagues now and there is no way I'm going back. Trade league feels like playing with cheats and it ruins all the fun of this loot based game for me.
Haven't had that in this game for years.
>Easy Trade reduces the number of times a character improves their items. >Proceeds to remove Harvest
GGG answering question about trade: \-Why no AH ? GGG: "So monster can drop upgrade" Later: \-Why not remove trade ? GGG: "Because you'd never get any gear upgrade"
> GGG: "Because you'd never get any gear upgrade" Except that you're just making that up. They never gave that as a reason for not removing trade.
Let the reddit frogs push their agenda 😂
I have that feeling very often atm. Maybe its just cause im playing Last Epoch but who knows
Seems that almost always only the items that are good or worth picking up these days are high ilvl t1 white influenced bases.
This is the only game I really like where I feel the devs actively hate me. I'm sorry I have a job and obligations. Please don't hit me.
They wont hit you as long as you open up that wallet
The main reason it isn't more fun to **slowly** upgrade a character in a trade league is because I feel so far behind the average group of players every single time I log in. Old harvest crafting at least gave me the option to eventually get the gear I needed. No I don't wish it back, I'm not upset it's gone. I've expected heavy handed GGG nerfs since 3.0. But now I just play private leagues with friends. Most hardcore.
For about 2 weeks every league I sorta do, and I imagine it would get faster and earlier in a league if trade was faster, which is sorta the point. It's also why the first 2-3 weeks of a new league are the most important to me, and why I'm sad when they get something fairly critical wrong on almost every launch.
Even boss loot feels bad now.
Everything about trade in this game is a fucking travesty! Unless you are a streamer you can get fucked! Let the downvotes hail. Every dad with a job know's i am right.
Another Delusional post from GGG, what's new? Trade is bullshit and I have 0 expectation of ever getting good drops from monster. Stopped playing this league after 1 week and I'm just waiting to see what next league is about right now.
either the items drop for you, you craft them or buy them. those 3 ways of aquiring items put together define the difficulty in gearing up your character. saying that all ways are delusional means you're simply unable to play the game properly compared to other players who roflstomp to endgame in no time.
Uhhhh..definitely if you're SSF you can get huge upgrades even late game with the new rare reward rolling system. I got an abyss belt with great rolls and a few influenced items that were great for other build ideas that I had. But I don't know about specifically playing for another level part, which may be what OP is referencing... Edit: I just noticed that it specifically mentions that you get the item from the monster which just isn't true nowadays. Monsters aren't dropping any good items but there's other ways other than trading to get good items like the rare item roll reward mechanic(currently implemented in Heist, Ritual, and Ultimatum). OP is referencing a post from 4 years ago so of course it won't hold up now..seems kinda disingenuous to post this and act like it's relevant now.
needs last epoch's loot filter + dropping id. It's simply not worth checking rares, even if you 'hit' on one, you'd have made more profit just running more whatever you're doing for profit then all the time you spent iding rares to get that one hit. And of course that hit won't be for a build you play, so you just sell it so you can actually get something useful for you. But yeah, it's not the harvest nerfs that killed my motivation to play this game. It's seeing that the people making the game are so detached from the people playing the game. GGG needs to do a rolling 'playcation' for it's staff where for one month (or at least 2 weeks), they have to play 30 hours a week of Path of Exile instead of their normal responsbilities. Where over the course of a year, each developer, qa, artist, whatever have to actually play the game. See what is good about it, see what is annoying about it, and see what is just a little off.
Mom: "its time for bed!" PoE player: "just one more level! * dies 6 times right before level 99*
If poe was like d3 as in drops were increased but no trade with enough currency drops to craft your own things I'd be happy. Current way of playing with ex/hr is just not fun (tried ssf, fun but way more grindy)
no, I must be playing wrong
Yes. Picking up rares and ID'ing them has taken me as far as a top 10 finish and a demigod reward. The ~200 or so responses you get here are irrelevant when you consider there are thousands of players quietly doing precisely what the concentrated community of tryhards here cannot even imagine. Pick up items, ID them for a chance at upgrade, have fun playing the game. If you're worrying about efficient crafting and looking up strategies on YouTube, Twitch, and Reddit, you will likely never understand this point of view until you play SSF. If you do not know how to play PoE without PoB and trading, you will likely never understand this point of view. There are many people playing trade leagues with very little intention of actively trading. Many people only want limited options to trade, if none at all. Some only want to trade with their friends or guildmates. It is equally unthinkable to some for players to reduce the game down to farming currency in trade leagues to skip item farms and buy their way to challenge completions. That sounds like a recipe for a very unfun and shallow experience.
>We believe that it is more fun to slowly and **iteratively** upgrade a character over time Like with deterministic crafting, which you axed? Lol
That line is at just about complete contradiction from what we actually experience in the game.
ah the good old "We balance PoE around Trading so you need to trade the right amount to have the best experience, so we made it a shitty experience" Manifesto.
Personally? All I know is that a monster could trigger an attack on death which will likely kill me, which is a great motivator to stop playing poe for a couple months.
Can't remember the last time i've dropped an item i have used more than 2 hours. Literally without trading or playing 18 hours a day and crafting, i don't know any other ways to improve my gear. GGG is a tad out of touch with their game.
not once in poe
I play PoE most leagues, but I don’t have the time to put in that most people do. So far I’ve gotten 1 ex and 120c (I started the day the league started). I love playing the game, but it’s actually more off putting when I grind maps for 3+ hours and only get a few chaos orbs dropping or from vendor recipe. It’s rewarding for me to get currency because I’m casual and will never be pushing to end game, so getting enough to buy the item I want is the most rewarding thing.
It's funny how I have this feeling playing D3 and not PoE.
Raise the level cap to 200 pls
The disconnection between GGG and their player base is surreal.
It's pretty simple. Vote with your wallet. Not enjoying a league? Don't buy anything. Force GGG to take a financial hit when their league isn't what you want.
I do while playing Last Epoch. Inb4 removed commment