Recombinators gone - The "you'll reap what u saw"-Thread

So, for everyone who didn't notice: 3.18 Sentinel league will not go into the core game. In this thread I wanna talk about what this means for different levels of players, the game in general and why I think this was the famous boomerang you throw at yourselves, a decision forced by the forum- and reddit-mop due to their behaviour during the harvest nerf.

What no recombinators mean for

0.5% players: quite a bit:the maximum power gets lowered with this decision as some recombinator-mods were extremely powerful and due to recombs it was possible to create even stronger items. The overall-powerloss is negligent though.

5% players
The player-group that will most likely feel the nerf the most - farming a few hundred ex a league, but never fully minmax builds to its very endpoint. For this group, recombinators were a blessing as they lowered the ceiling to minmaxed crafts. Now they are back to mirroring maybe 1 item or getting that Mageblood and that's it.

The bulk of forum and reddit
Based on the last interview with chris wilson the truly average player doesn't reach maps, so there is the need for a different tier before we talk about the impact for casuals: For the bulk of people in this tier, it's no difference at all: Let's be real here, many used the sentinels to farm recombinators but barely used them, u sold them for profit. We all saw the posts about how bad recombinators are - this group used like 5 of them, then judged and sold to people with more knowledge. Why is this not a nerf then? Because every single league there's something introduced u can farm, so for people in this bracket there will be a replacement in 3.19, while the aforementioned groups are left empty handed.

The casual joe
Basically no impact, doesn't reach maps in significant amounts.

This also proves - once more I might add - that GGG is not balancing FOR, rather around the top 1%.

So, let's talk about the second part, why recombinators had to leave though they held advantages for most player tiers.
The answer to that is: because of the community. Just as a friendly reminder, remember the pure outrage once harvest got nerfed. For everything commenting with "GG, Fun nerfed again":U people showed GGG they are better off nerfing or deleting things rather than giving you future access to it, because u can't handle necessary nerfs. Recombinators are very close to 3.14 harvest, as they are an overtowering crafting tool in not all stages ike harvest, but many, MANY stages of the crafting process. In order to keep options for future development open as well as keeping essences, fossils and many other crafting approaches relevant Recombinators in their current form had to go.

GGG COULD have introduced them slightly nerfed, but behold, if they ever would have touched them again afterwards the shitstorm would have been inevitable. So thank you, for behaving like 5 year olds, this is the boomerang you threw upon yourselves a year ago finally coming back.

We could go with your hypothesis for sure.. Or we could go with the more likely explanation: they don’t have time to rebalance recombinators for 3.19.

Something that people never really seem to get is that the top players that you see creating mirror items is not even close to 0.5%, 0.1%, whatever - it's the very top, 0.0001% of players. The top 5% of players are not farming hundreds of exalts a league - the 5th percentile players are getting to red maps.

You and I, who have 38 challenges and expensive uniques, are likely within the top 0.01%, 0.005%, or even lower, of the player base. There is a huge selection bias with poe.ninja, the people who stream and make content, the people that post on reddit, etc.

Personally, I do feel like recombinators are too strong, but that is offset with lots of RNG. I think that they were a great item sink, which we have never had before. But like Harvest before it, it was deemed too strong by GGG. It took them a league to rework Harvest - maybe it takes a league to find a good way to rebalance recombinators. Or maybe they think they're just too powerful. Hard to say.

I made to T16 maps and saw exactly 3 Recombinators.
Needless to say, I won't miss them.

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DoubleU wrote:

I made to T16 maps and saw exactly 3 Recombinators.
Needless to say, I won't miss them.

Geez what did you do pop the sentinel one time? They drop like candy.