POE loot vs Diablo 2 loot

I agree that D2 loot is far superior to obtain fun-wise. But my point of view is different. I know theyre going to add useful uniques and (hopefully) more interesting/various item modifiers (I want to proc that lvl 8 Ice Nova off my attacks...even if its just 2% chance xD). Also the drop rate is a matter of balancing it. So I leave all that out for now.

For me the problem lies in the fact that 99% of useful items found (from a higher level players point of view - where we all will spend most of the time) are either currency items or plain base items with good sockets - because decent items need to have good sockets AND good stats...which you almost literally never see dropping. Neither socketed base items or orbs are any random at all and theyre almost 100% predictable (given some time spent playing), thus a lot of fun and surprise factor is taken out of the loot system. Ofcourse, you will create random items out of those plain bases and orbs (still not so much randomness since youve already determined the base type of item created)...but for me that doesn't come close to what D2 loot was about.

Been thinking of this quite a lot lately, since thats the only bad feeling I have about PoE atm, that as far as I know isn't going to get improved soon(ish).

I'll try to make a write-up with my suggestions how to improve loot system (from my point of view) when I feel like it.

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PoERickety wrote:

For me the biggest issue is not being able to 'sell' items that are of no use to you. One of the funnest part of D2 was knowing that if I couldn't use an item I could at least sell them.

It is a big issue and not fun that you can't sell loot for gold like in D2? Yet in other threads people are harping on about how useless gold is in D2.

In PoE we might be able to sell for currency items but, what is the difference between that and just having more currency items drop in the first place.

I really don't want to have to keep picking up drops, shuffling round my inventory and making frequent trips back to town to sell junk to vendors. I don't want to break down junk into materials like some other games but it is less hassle than selling. I would be happy to keep something I think I could use or trade and leave the rest to rot on the floor.

As for the state of drops currently in the beta I think there are big issues. Normal monsters drop almost nothing, kill a pack of Champions (blue) and you can hardly see the floor for items. Bosses (yellow) don't seem to drop much better than champions. Currency item drops do seem to have increased (although apparently not scaled with number of players)

Since the last patch rares dropping seem mostly meh - there was a nerf on what mods can spawn on what but it seems worse than that.

At high levels you are always on the lookout for good sockets and combinations but half of them spawn on low level items which makes them junk. I posted elsewhere it is silly that low level items with high socket numbers that are usable in normal can only drop in Merciless. Less low level items should drop in high level areas and the mods and sockets they can spawn should be based more on the level requirement of the base item not the level of the area in which they dropped.

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Laee wrote:

I think there is too less items that could possibly be useful.
95% of the items are white, 4,9% are blue, 0,1% is rare, its a bit low.

Fun in ARPGs is not just gameplay, it's mostly cuz of loot. Your brain needs something enjoyable to do while playing, and that's why constant possibly nice loot items are required.

If you play PoE, you don't find useful stuff at all in the early game. You upgrade your equipment from one white to the next tier white item, which is ok, but not nearly as enjoyable as having choice between this rare/magic and this new magic/rare.

I think it's a problem in the early game, because you don't want to use your orbs yet (because these items are worthless after you used them for 4-5 level and the orb is gone.) and you don't have any magicfind/more loot find yet.

I saw in the patchlogs that the droprate was lowered, i can't understand that at all.

A possible solution would be to enhance the default magic find rate significantly. To avoid most powerful items to spawn to often there is an easy fix: The best stat modifiers (like %enhanced damage) can be rolled up to 2x per item, so that you need incredible luck to get 2x the desired stat (%enhanced damage) with both as high as possible added up on one item.

I disagree with some things that have been said as facts, and other things which have been said as opinions.

Personally I find this game has a higher rare (and maybe magic) rate than diablo 2 has. The difference is that I think diablo 2 had better rares, but I can't really remember (maybe it was just that they were less common).

I don't agree with the difficulty of finding good items at low level at all. I do agree with the fact you don't want to waste much on low level gear, but that's fine because it's not too hard to get good gear, and the gameplay is easy and fast at low levels anyway so you don't really need the great items.

About the last part:
It's sort-of like that already. In a weapon there are 4 VERY desirable mods currently:
• x% increased physical damage (max is 100%, which like most mods, only appears on x level gear, maybe 50+, not sure)
• x% increased physical damage and +accuracy (max 50% damage, unsure about accuracy, maybe around 200)
• x-y added physical damage (I think it's about 17-34 max, could be a bit higher)
• x% increased attack speed (max 30%)

So just to get max increased damage (which really isn't even as good as high increased damage combined with medium added physical damage) you need to roll twice, but to get a great/godly item, you need to roll 4 times technically.

On a max level item, it can still spawn really low mods. I think this is why rares in this game were a bit worse than diablo 2's. I think in diablo 2, there was a guaranteed minimum that also increased with item level on MOST (not all) of the mods? Many lower value mods couldn't be rolled past a certain item level, I quite fondly remember that.

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Fluffy wrote:

At high levels you are always on the lookout for good sockets and combinations but half of them spawn on low level items which makes them junk. I posted elsewhere it is silly that low level items with high socket numbers that are usable in normal can only drop in Merciless. Less low level items should drop in high level areas and the mods and sockets they can spawn should be based more on the level requirement of the base item not the level of the area in which they dropped.

I agree with this a lot as well. One reason why I agree with what you said you did not mention:
Because the items were dropped from high level monsters, they have high item levels. While a high item level item with low requirement level has low requirements when they're white, as soon as you put an alchemy orb (or transmutation/chance) on it, that item's requirement could all of a sudden jump to like lvl 48, making it useless for a lower level character(and rather useless even to a level 48, aside from possibly the sockets).

For me, I don't even pick up rares which aren't for my class if they have bad sockets. Part of it is that I don't feel like my beta characters are permanent, so I am less attached to the process. Still, I do feel like sockets basically make the item, and so I ignore a lot of items just because they spawn with unsuitable slots.

I am not sure if it is a bad thing. They may want to, at least, force rare and uniques to have better slot roles. Otherwise, they could retool jewelry orb so we have some control over the slots an item gets.

Personally, I preferred Titan Quest loot to Diablo 2.
Why?

1) Initial loot was higher for bosses/chests, while repeat (farming) yielded weaker results.

2) Partially due to #1, quality loot was common enough while leveling up that you usually had 1-2 "current" rare or unique quality items after clearing the first difficulty. Prior to that, rare/unique (green/blue) just didn't quite drop often enough relative to how fast you leveled.

3) Uniques were typically better than magical, but worse than a good rare. However, they had really good stat synergy, even if the "power by stat value" was lower, which made them very useful for specific builds.


Now, what I like about Path of Exile so far is that white items matter. I have them automatically filtered out to avoid screen clutter while fighting, but tap Alt for a bit and scan the socket icons looking for links. There are far fewer truly trash items. In Diablo and Titan Quest, once you got past level 10 or so, you didn't ever touch anything that wasn't magic. Ever again.

What I *don't* like though:
Definitely not enough rare drops.
I've gotten a ton so far, so how can I say this? Well, in Titan Quest, you had 3 stats. In PoE, you have 3 stats. In Titan Quest you care more about caster stats or phsyical stats. Same in PoE. So where's the difference? Sockets and hybrid gear. Titan Quest had neither, which mean that about 1/6 of all rares you seen were at least usable by you. If you switch to Path of Exile, only 1/6 of gear has "your" stat spread on it. Then you have the same caster/physical split, taking it to 1/12th. Finally you hit sockets. Since there is no method to get Jeweler's Orbs besides farming (and farming makes you level), getting a rare with bad sockets is something you will only have 1-2 rerolls to fix. After that, you're shit outta luck. And typically, a 3-linked-socket blue (and you'll get plenty enough orbs to make the good whites you find magical) serves more purpose during the mid (20-40) levels than a 1 or 2 unlinked socket rare. By the time you get to the mid-30s, the odds of a dropped rare being usable as-is are next to nothing, unless it's a belt or jewelry.
End result of all this? Chances are that as you level from 1 to 40, you will find 1-2 rares TOTAL that you'll want to use as that character.
Solution for this problem: When a new rare is generated from a monster, weight it's sockets so that it's more likely to be viable. Get rid of 1 socket rare drops after level 12. Get rid of 2 socket rare drops after level 30. If people want to re-roll them, they can still get bad results, but at least they won't see 90+% of the rares be useless without modification.
Also, uselessly low level items drop in high leveled zones. Sure, if it's a white item you can use it without magic on an alt... But that's a crappy reason to fill 80% of the loot table with out-dated under-leveled gear. From personal experience, I haven't seen ridiculously low level base items drop as my rares, but if THAT is possible as well, the system gets even worse.
Next, basic magic items. The blues we see regularly. What's wrong with them? Again, the sockets. By the time you pass level 10 or so, you have better results getting a white item with good sockets and making it magical with good mods than you do getting a decent blue item and giving it useful sockets. Rolling good sockets on a level 30+ item will take 10-20 Jeweler's Orbs. Throwing a prefix and suffix onto a white item is 2 Orbs at most. And considering you're 10x as likely to see a white with good sockets as you are a blue...

Best case scenario:
1 in 6 chance for "your class" type of gear. Slightly worse odds if it's a weapon.
50% chance it has generally useful bonuses.
1% rare drop rate (only gunna have this if you have a ton of item rarity bonus)
5% chance it has "acceptable" socket layout.

In relationship to TQ's loot:
1 in 3 for "your class" stat gear.
50% chance of useful bonuses.
1% rare drop rate (likewise need magic find, but lets assume equality in the magic/rare rates)

What this means is that in TQ you were 40x as likely to see good loot drop.
Never mind the fact that TQ had way better loot rewards from bosses.

Which brings me to my next point. In an effort to prevent boss farming, GGG have left this game devoid of any decent chance at good gear until reaching endgame. You simply cannot see enough magic/rare drops while playing through the game, because all the loot has been balanced around end-game farmability.

Which is another spot TQ hit closer on - the increased rewards first time you killed a boss monster. Would go a long way towards improving loot while leveling, without affecting incentives to farm bosses.

Good feeback above. The loot definitely felt scarce the first time through. Upgrades were hard to come by and I used the same weapons for 15 levels for once stretch.

Then once I started farming endgame it feels like the amount of loot is totally fine.

Since i can twink every character after the first, I don't ever feel the scarcity again. But I can see the initial scarcity putting off new players.

The first time kill bonus seems like a great idea.

They've said they're changing Jeweler's, which will help with the "rares with crap sockets" problem. I've thrown away so many decent rares because they didn't pass the "worth spamming 30+ jewelers into" threshold.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Given that the need for sockets seems to be a big part of the issues, how much of an impact do people think it will have when support gem balance is changed so that linking lots and lots of supports to a single skill is less desirable, and people only want one or two supports per active skill?

It will get somewhat better. Maybe. I still wouldn't like the fact that by time I'd find a rare item I want Im able to create 20 of them via orbs. That just isn't the D2 feeling where you never know what you might find, which I think can keep your interest up much longer.

Edit: a system where currency items don't create items, but instead improve the existing ones would work much better in my opinion. Like gems/runes in D2, charms/relics in TQ etc.

I would like to see some form of Salvaging/Crafting.
It should go in a different direction as Crafting with ORBS.
One big space left blank in our random gaming experience is the lack of proccing stats as allready written in this thread.
Could we salvage those unneeded rares for getting essences to enhance items for procs?
Or we could add a offense and a defense slot where we put those essences as ammunition for proc-chances.
Or we could have one crafting charm in inventar/slot wich we can slowly build up with crafting recipes (may be one use drop) and salvaged materials.
Or...

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Given that the need for sockets seems to be a big part of the issues, how much of an impact do people think it will have when support gem balance is changed so that linking lots and lots of supports to a single skill is less desirable, and people only want one or two supports per active skill?

I really like to specialize my skills and am waiting for new support gems.
As you dont have a skill-system you need those linked slots to compensate.