What Happened with Items

So in short, enjoy the lack of loot drops. Fewer unique items drop = fewer available for acquisition through trade at reasonable prices.

Confirmed, archnem has 100% polluted the entire ecosystem and all loot is now tied this this horrific set of monster modifiers and combinations. Now it's find the 4 rare packs in a map, nuke and leave. Nothing else drops anything. How exactly does this create more incentive to slay all monsters / engage in all content? If you don't get the vaunted AN combo's you get nothing for loot, great experience, no, wait, it's not.

Tainted currency is you carrot? That's beyond laughable when the tainted currency is on par with or worse than the normal currency. So basically, Beyond is a 100% skip as the rewards are less than worthless.

No mention of Harvest and the decimation of that mechanic. At this point it's nothing more than an alternative chaos orb. Still not seeing much currency dropping in T16 Harvest either and there are still plots that drop no currency. Terrible mechanic all around, hardly rewarding, and definitely a full skip at this point.

The lake? Still terrible reward wise, at least from the league monster encounters. Chests? Hit or miss, mostly miss, which I expect. It's basically like opening a clay jar in Vaults of Atziri, nothing 99.2$ of the time, but I guess this is what you are going for.

No thanks, not interested, my time is better served picking lint out of my belly button.

Rarity and Quantity...

So you want rarity and quantity to have more of an effect, not a problem in principle. How do I as a solo player apply this to my gear whilst still being able to run difficult content? I need to sacrifice defence for rarity? Have you actually fought some of the Archnem monsters? They one shot some seriously tanky builds. This sounds great on paper but it just isn't the game you have made.



Rare Monsters are more dangerous and rewarding...

Sounds great, but the difficulty to reward isn't there unless you happen to get a lucky RNG and hit a particular rewarding Archnem combo, and now pray it doesn't disable your build or one shot you. Sounds great in theory but it isn't the game you have made.



League content should be harder and more rewarding...

Agreed, but it's not. We are finding occassionaly 1 splinter in a breach, so again we need to go full MF'er to make this content worth running? Sounds great in principle but again this isn't the game we are all playing right now.



Lake of Kalandra...

Sure it is giving some reward now, but at the higher level difficulties the reward is absent or laughable, again sounds great what you want to do, but that isn't what is in the game currently.



What went wrong...!!!

"There was not sufficient time to playtest the change properly for feeling. It is unacceptable that I allowed a change like that to make it into the patch without a big chunk of time allocated to making sure the game still feels great afterwards."

So when people ask did anybody actually playtest this the answer is no? Not sufficient time to test? Hire Tytykiller, he will have killed all the bosses in a few hours and easily tell you how it feels. He would actually do it for free likely.

GhazzyTV brought up the concern with minions prior to League launch. What was he told again? Did he like it? No, no he did not.



"Players have been saying we reduced drops by 90% but in reality, that type of difference could only be true in the most extreme situations involving Beyond, Delirium and Incursion stacked with party quantity, rarity, sextants and scarabs and a dedicated MF culler (peak efficiency of every juice mechanism that exists)."

The players saying this where the ones running it as you described, so yes, they were right.



"Every other player is unaffected on average. For example when playing Breach, the reduction in currency items found is around 7% (when comparing 3.19.0d to 3.18.1f). In 100% Delirium maps, the difference hits 17%. In Incursion and regular non-league content, you'll find 25% more."

The larger base of players are telling you, no this not what it feels like at all. Unaffected on average? So the players affected can just suffer on average? Where is the balance here? Where is the consistency? Where is the fun?



"In addition, Lake of Kalandra is an out-of-area league. Its rewards entirely come from the Lake itself, rather than from your maps. This is in stark contrast to Sentinel, our last league, which not only dropped rewards in your maps, but was honestly tuned higher than average in terms of league rewards. Players went from receiving masses of league rewards as they clear maps to receiving absolutely nothing from the league until they travel to the Lake. This is unfortunate timing and exacerbated the perception of drop reduction.

The Lake itself was also relatively unrewarding on release and this has since been massively increased since then."

Correct, don't be afraid to improve it further.



"I want to emphasise that our Quality Assurance team are not to blame for the issues that were not discovered before release. They work really hard and have a lot of limitations that are outside of their control. For the next upcoming release, I am specifically trying to integrate them more into development so that we get their feedback earlier during the development of features."

So you are going to let the QA actually do their job, well I guess it's about time we have all been saying to let them for Leagues and Leagues now. This is the most painful thing to read in the entire thread.



"For players who are juicing their content to extreme levels with six-person parties, dedicated MF cullers and stacked league mechanics, they no longer have Beyond to push things over the edge. But they still find ridiculous amounts of stuff. I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster."

Again MF groups that were pushing this content where not making profit from running this juiced content, so why bother doing it? Whats the incentive? Or should they just not play how they like playing anymore? How is that fun?

The ridiculous amount of stuff that is dropping is still 99% garbage that nobody will ever pick up. This sounds great but again is not the game you have made. Making multiple mirrors with mechanics that you haven't nerfed via chests etc. A archnem mob exploding into 50 divines+ is really rewarding, but in order to achieve this you need a full group, full MF'er and then run maps until you RNG into the exact Archnem you want. Where is the consistency and balance here?

Either you run the game like this and make big profit or you don't and just roll the dice. So when you get lucky and hit this mob 5-6 times one after another, game feels great. When you don't it feels horrible. Archnem is out of our ability to manipulate so how can it be balanced around reward? This puts reward in the hands of RNG.



"For regular players who are just alching their maps and adding difficulty where they feel they can handle it, we think that drops are in a pretty good place after this week's changes."

I have no issue with harder content, but when it's a chore to maintain alchemy orbs or scours or etc then it makes maps and map sustain problematic. This results in a downward spiral where it no longer becomes fun.



Lastly, as someone who owned my own business at one stage, if an employee/s did a change to this degree that had such an adverse effect on my product and cost me personally and financially, they wouldn't be there anymore. I do admire that you take all the flak on yourself even though these decisions don't seem to be yours.

You have introduced tainted currency in scourge league, good. You brought redemption for corrupted items. You killed it after the league, now you brought it back but nerf the way some currency works like the tainted fusing massively.
Just why?

Another point I am making is, why cant just let loot drop rates be more generous? I may not have been the best or maybe above average among the community but I have spent 1600+ hours in this game, never to have once gotten items like mageblood, headhunter or almost similar tier items. One can argue that I could have actually earn it if I continue playing on Standard but c'mon, we know that everyone plays League instead of standard, that's where majority of the people are.

I just couldn't understand why everytime when we were handed something great, only to have it removed or nerfed. Ultimatum league was one of the best content and I find it rewarding, and its removed. Tainted currency saved mostly useless corrupted equipments. its removed, then brought back but nerfed. Just some examples I am laying out here, there are of course more of these instances.

OK, wait, I understand this right. U want US to play magic find to find loot. U also make the game such harder with Archnemesis and so on, and exclusively focus on t16 mapping and Bossing to be rewarding. Magic find in a 1-man Party is almost impossible.

Also YOU: Pulling all the Magic Find gear out of the Game except some weak Unique Items (ok Ventors GAMBLE COULD be good - 1 in 500 000 000 Rolls yes).

Also YOU: You just killed divine orbs to roll our weak Magic find gear in early game and late game. Btw 160 Chaos now because economy dies, and it dies fast!

Also YOU: Removing almost ANY good Map in this league, so nothing can be "abused" with new Archnemesis Loot System, better remove everything to prevent good work before releasing patches, yes good attitude when u want to save money in development. But the problem is with deviations this big, you have to put more work afterwards with fixing the "problems" you caused. STRG +Z!!!

Also YOU: Remove "Filler" Crafts like Prefixes / Suffixes cannot be changed!!! to entirely kill the endgame Crafting and go back to Pre Harvest "crafting" where only 3 People in the entire world could have Mirror tier items and have the Monopol over the market. SOUNDS GOOD! - Shoutout to DemiGodKing lol

2 Things were great in Path of Exile - Crafting and Looting


I don't like it and I don't spend money anymore until you fix the core problems --> You lost a Whale! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->

Btw -thanks for 5,5 great years with ups and downs in general.
This was the Peak of the Iceberg.

Thanks for reading.

bye

ok so there is nothing wrong currently. long time player here and I'm having fun. your just upset because things went a little wonky here and there. I had a bunch of issues but every time I logged on the next day they were fixed. so minion people and harvest people, hold on and those will be remedied too.

How in the world can you say loot is fine now when even somebody who's semi-casual like me knows how much I was doing per day in the previous leagues and I can see I'm doing less than half now?

3 chances is enough. More double down, AN still sucks and ruins the game, and harvest is just incredibly sad. No supporter pack from me this league I'm afraid, and if this doesn't change I'm just done with the game, for as much as I love it this is just NOT FUN MY DUDE.

I do agree that the old mobs needed a up date but when u have to nerf Arch nem mobs 7x times ( and they still kill you is 1 to 2 hits) its not fun and now that you tied (the big loot) to 4 modded AN that u might see 1 every 50 or so maps still dose not change the fact that even though u invest in the defense thay take 90% reduced damage from you so your fighting them for 5 plus mins its faster to just move on to the next map ( or die trying to run away )

I can understand the adjustment you made and I can even understand how, as director, this change could have gotten missed with all the other changes. All I notice is that it feels that some of the rewards for 3 passive AN mobs is a little weird, magic support flasks and whetstones? It feels a little silly as rewards.

Personally, for loot, I don't see why all 3 Primordial jewels are at such drastically different rarities when you need at least one of all three to really move forward with the build. If they were all say a bit more rarer than Primordial Harmony is now but at an equal level I'd think it be better for the playstyle.

Finally, now that the loot kerfuffal has an official address, please look into minion survivability. It feels bad right now at every level of investment. I understand using player gearing more to scale the offensive power of minions, but defensively as well needs help, especially Animate Guardian. You can invest a second build's worth of currency into an Animate Guardian to support your other minions but when it dies, you lose everything. No other class has that issue, that cost. In current PoE, do AG's really need to lose their items or as an alternate to "feel the weight" adding in a long (like minutes or re-zone cost) cooldown to "revive" the fallen AG? The items given to the AG are already lost forever.

Thanks for the Information.

So - do I understand this correctly? You say that this was a big change to PoE which wasn't communicated and tested properly before release of 3.19 Kalandra League. And now - after some patches - the majority of the community still doesn't like the current state of the game, quits, leaves negativ reviews on steam, etc... And you say "(...) we think that drops are in a pretty good place." ... WoW.

Seems like the game at a whole is in a pretty not so good place at the moment.

I mean I liked the idea of AN Mobs dropping more rewards the higher the difficulty. It makes sense. But it feels terrible. There is no consistency. There are some very very rare AN mobs dropping 3+ divines. Mostly the rare mob drops nothing and if it does the reward is "rare items" , "blacksmith orbsis" , "flasks" ... There is no in between. There is just this rare instance where AN mobs are really big fat rewarding. Or not. This feels awkward.

Rewards should be set appropriately for the increased difficulty of these rare monsters.

How are u going to balance this? I mean with build diversity every combination of mobs effects different builds. Does harder mean "the more AN modifier are stacked" or does harder mean "the AN modifier which counter my build". And - if I invest 200ex in my build probably no AN mob will be "hard". But if I'm stuck in yellow tier maps every mob feels kinda "hard". Do I get better rewards because the fight was in fact hard for me. No. I doubt that. Do I get less rewards after I invested 200ex and the fight was damn easy. I really doubt that too.

You see the problem? "Hard" or "increased difficulty" is really subjective. I think in the current state of the game this isn't working. The game feels awkward and not as intended "more rewarding for having increased difficult" with a lack of consistency.

Thanks for the update. I do appreciate the time it takes to get thoughts written out cleary for people to read and understand.

Communication is key.

I'm personally enjoying this league more than the last. I've already put more hours in than in Sentinel league.

Keep it up :)