Lvl 88 SSF player here, and I’m tired…

…Of every progression system in this game being heavily weighted against players playing it without overgearing via trade. Just some personal stats to illustrate it:

1. Never dropped a single Perfect Jeweler’s Orb, and only got 3 greaters. But at the same time, I have 40 lessers still remaining.
2. Dropped a single Orb of Nullification
3. Dropped 3 Divine orbs in total.
4. Dropped 5 omens in total. Haven’t even started seeing any of these before I started doing T14 ritual maps
5. Never dropped, bought, or crafted a single weapon with higher than tier 6 physical attack mod. Average would probably be T2
6. Never even seen anything above Tier 2 drop until I started stacking +100% item rarity via gear.
7. Failed every single of my Chance orbs. Probably close to 10 so far.
8. Clearing T10-T12 maps gives me a whooping 0.5%-3% of exp. One death to lose 10%.
9. Had just one weapon with all the prefixes and suffixes I wanted, but most of them T2. Guess what, Vaal didn’t help it.
10. Spent millions of gold on gambling for gear on an NPC daily. Nothing to show for it.
11. Quantity of drops is not the issue. I ported to town 3-4 times to unload all the rares I drop when I still cared. I keep maybe 1 in 50, since the rest is just regal shard fodder.
12. Never got my final set of ascendancy points. Even with min lvl coin, 100% honor resistance, +100% defence via relics, maxed out resistances, an entire warehouse of boons from the merchant and I still just died in a second after the last boss went “random bullshit go” mode.

I could go on. But you get the point. Progression isn’t great unless you’re already overgeared. Because for whatever reason a lot of the ‘good’ stuff like omens that are supposed to make crafting more predictable don’t start dropping until you’re already grinding the highest tier maps. Most still remain myths I’ve only heard of in the trade league.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware a lot of this comes down to my choice of playing in SSF. But I do so not because I’m into BDSM, but because I want to overcome the challenges myself. But when instead of providing rewarding drop and deterministic crafting outcomes you just slap that gacha machine on the back and smile, I gotta say. GGG. This. Is. Not. Okay.

Just my 2 cents before I go hibernate before I return to the unrewarding grind tomorrow…

Good feedback. That's the kind of feedback that is worth something. Not a rant, just an explicit sharing of your experience.

Even though you wrote all this for endgame, I think most of those points are also counting for campaign play. Gear progression just doesn't feel right. I created 4 characters, one reached endgame, the other 3 are still in campaign (I generally play very slow). At the start of cruel I end up still having some magic gear equipment, which doesn't even have good modifiers. The only useful gear is usually bought from vendor, kinda making the drops from monster obsolete. Until the start of cruel I didn't even found one amulet (yes, the amulet slot was empty). Ofc I had some in stash, but I also try to mostly play SSF, at least until I'm getting tired of not finding anything useful, then I grab something from my stash or just simply buy it, which happens sooner then later in PoE2.

It's kinda strange I guess. I'm not entirely sure what kind of direction GGG plans for PoE2, but my guess is, that PoE2 is supposed to be more challenging and slower then PoE1, which is okay. Since they also introduced rutheless and SSF in PoE1 and also SSF in PoE2, I guess that's how GGG imagines their vision of an ARPG. This is fine, but I think a PVE game that is mainly focused on single-player should provide the necessary ressources to completely finish the game by yourself. That means: Gear, Orbs, Maps. Right now, you get the stuff when you almost not need it anymore. Like I said before, very often I got the good stuff from vendor and 10 levels later I found something equivalent from drops. But at that point, it's just good for regal shard / selling.

I think orbs in general, not just exalted orbs, should be way more common (which includes divines) and players need more crafting control. The game should motivate me to craft instead of just buying stuff. If I have 10 transmutations, 10 augmentations, 10 regals and 20 exalted, how likely is it, that I get something good out of this when crafting a gear from normal to rare with full modifiers? Not so high I guess, maybe one useful piece that is okay-ish. But how much good equipment could I buy from that directly from another player? Alot! Most good pieces with solid modifiers are sold for 1ex. That means, 20 ex can easily carry me through the whole campaign, probably further, if I just use trade. So crafting is not in a good position, since orb drops are to rare and crafting is to much RNG based.

For me, it would be perfect if trade would only be attractive for people who don't want to craft at all. For the rest, crafting should be more attractive then actually buying from others. But as long as orbs like divines just drop so rarely, players won't bother with crafting right now, except for some SSF players.

Making orbs more common won't help, they need to go look at the statistical chance of producing an item anyone would use then change it to a value not equivalent to a lottery win.

I was under the impression that they implemented the well rolled system compounded with reducing the quantity of the drops however this has proven to be a huge assumption on my part. They have infact just cut the loot down to 5% of PoE1 then called it a day.

We have less mods in the pool, but simultaneously the weights have clearly been adjusted to very heavily skew towards garbage.

Worse we can't even use the bench to produce decent partial items when a few of the right rolls assemble on an item - in PoE1 terms this is like finding a weapon with dictators on it then having to slam another decent phys roll. It just doesn't happen, good mid tier weapons are entirely hinged on fractured/essence/benchcraft you cannot produce good results without one of those short of 1/200000 type odds.

Which would require 200000 bases in PoE2 ^^

Edit: Also the mod pool is heavily gimped so you can't get a really strong fire crossbow for example, every weapon is phys or bust. Honestly just writing this is annoying me again at how fucking backwards the design is on some specific elements come on GGG you didn't make this mistake when PoE1 was in beta ffs. How can you take the most experience in the market and use it to produce a mod system a first game indie studio would turn down for being dumb.

Phew gonna turn my brain off and go back to just playing again, its way more fun then just don't loot! Woooooooooooo

Adding this here because I think its relevant and highlights the problem with the tier weights. I am sitting at over 300 hours played as a storm weaver sorceress. I have NEVER looted a 35% movement speed boots. Not once, ever. Not a good pair of 35% movement speed boots mind you, just seeing this damn mod on an identified pair, even a blue one.

I'm a 89 skeleton witch and 86 ice monk.
For all this time I have dropped only 1 div and it was at the beginning (level 15-20) where devs was experimenting with drops.

I have done 4th ascendancy with witch, not with glass-cannon-ice-monk...

I have no motivation to play maps. They give me nothing than 1-3 ex (what I should do with them?). I farmed ex for 6 divs to buy some gear for better mapping and thats all...

It's a game about craft or about siting on trade site?
If the second than we have poe1...

I want some motivation to play endgame, to craft some interesting gears.
There is no fun to farm maps for collecting ex to change them on divs to change them on gears...

You forgot greater essences :D At least I am speccing in them and in 6 days of character playtime I dropped 1 :D Not SSF tho. But still - does this sounds normal? Nah, needs tinkering with drop rates. For SSF those drops are insane.

TLDR: ggg always balances around trade league, get used to horrible drop rates in ssf



For some reason GGG believes the game needs to be balanced around a sandboxmode that has essentially infinite access to every item in the game. In my opinion its wasted effort since people will always find ways to break the game with OP gear that is not obtainable normally.

In Poe1 some boss uniques have like a 1% drop chance, but you also have to farm out the boss fragments which can take one or multiple days - you'll basically never get these in ssf unless you are lucky, they might aswell not exist.

Then there is uniques that you can target farm like paradoxica, you can farm a whole week, multiple hours a day,and not get one.. then you look at trade league and it costs 1 chaos orb, which you have hundreds in your stash.

"

Sandcubicle#5745 schrieb:

1. Never dropped a single Perfect Jeweler’s Orb, and only got 3 greaters. But at the same time, I have 40 lessers still remaining.

You are lucky, lol.
lvl 88 here + another char through the campaign. One singular greater jewelers Orb, zero perfects obv...

76 Mercenary.
Drop 0 divine, 1 orb of annulment, 0 Greater Jeweller’s Orb.
This game just an GPU-hungry musical plug-in for POE Trade site, nothing more.
All locations and maps in late game are just for grinding orbs to buy something on POE trade to progress further.
I understand that raising drop chance will destroy prices, all balanced around trading.
My hope is GGG will give us SSF mode with decent drop rates. WITH RARITY ON GEAR.

Dropped POE1 due to drop rate in SSF and imposed need to trade and constantly hang out on the POE trade site.

It looks like this "game" will follow the same path. Directly to trash.

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Peccopa#6108 schrieb:

This game just an GPU-hungry musical plug-in for POE Trade site

Good one :D