Improvements to Item Drops

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SageArts wrote:

Too many ppl here are crybabies about the whole fiasco.
Here's some food for thought:


First of all it is ok for GGG to nerf progression speed by nerfing drops. Maybe it was too much but there are obvious balancing issues with how it was before. Just adding quant to every league mechanic mob makes juicing way too one dimensional: Pick all mechanics possible to clear in the shortest amount of time with the most amount of monster density and ease of completion. Everything else would be shit and any attemt on balancing around difficulty or time investment would be undermined from the start. Rewards should scale from those things instead of stacking the screen full of as many white or blue things as you can oneshot as possible, which is the exact opposite of what was happening.
This also had two significant side effects: The game became a lot easier but the discrepancy between a newer player and a veteran became bigger and bigger. This may sound counter intuitive but lets consider both perspectives:
The Vet: IF you knew what you doing farming became easier with every mechanic you could stack. I would accumulate currency faster in the most recent leagues than ever before. The game would accelerate every league, for vets it would become relatively braindead to farm their fully decked characters in a couple weeks, leading to earlier quits.
The newer player: To stack all those mechanics you need to know how to clear them effectively, meaning higher burden of knowledge which is a big problem with the game already. Even if you follow a guide for a build, if you don't know how to farm you'll get nowhere as the game had to release content for the "good" players. If you do hard content unoptimally you get punished hard so you have to follow not one guide for the build but multiple for every strategy you'd try to employ - possibly at the same time.

Second: There were dropping way too many items. Way too many blues & rares. As someone who plays on default filter on league start (I change it later, dont worry) I really realized this especially in the last leagues I played.
What GGG wants here is a good thing: Less but more significant drops. Balancing time investment of different leagues and playstyles against each other. Create difficult encounters that are actually rewarding. Did they go too far in one direction? Yea sure. Reverting the changes? Hell no.

What I suspect is that archnem mods now use a tree structure for their quant bonuses to accommodate for their exponential difficulty increase. So that 6 mod red beast you took 5 minutes to kill will hopfully have that 20'000% increased quantity now. And I'm pretty confident in betting that they will add more weigth to itemlevel in regards to what mod tier a Item will roll to further double down on hard content = better item.

Ok now for the things that I can only partially agree with:

Ex => Divine changes: Well I understand where you are coming from but this was the wrong way. I agree with changing the crafting recipes costs, yes please so much I was advocating for this for so long. Exalts were more expensive every league, devaluing chaos, making variance much more imporant at league start. I kinda agree with removing the divine 6L recipe. Yes make divine effect a bit rarer and 6L's cheaper with the possibility of making them easier to get, sure. Both, and change all crafting costs to divine? EEEEHHHM.
Here is what you shouldve done:
remove div recipe [x]

Crafting:
Lock Prefix - 2 div
Lock suffix - 2 ex
Cannot roll caster - 2 annul
Cannot roll attack - 2 annul
3 crafted mods - 2 ex

Leave some value in ex while shifting a bit to the newly valued divine but also to annulments - which are about as rare and usefull. Divining an item will and should not be worth 200 chaos. There are way too many items and rolls balanced around divines being relatively cheap. Make it more expensive sure, but not that expensive.

Harvest:
Well, I'm ok with the rework and nerfing it a bit but make it tradeble. Harvest and TFT showed that even if you don't want something to be tradeable, your players WILL find a way to make money off it. Better make it more convenient and nerf the amount one gets OK. What I can't agree with is the removal of certain mods. Reroll prefix / suffix is fucking mandatory in crafting. You literally cant craft any influenced gear without that, and some influenced gear is really build enabling so I hate this already. It also makes the things that are notoriously bad to craft (weapons and jewellery, because of large mod pools where you want only a few specific things), so so much worse to craft since they don't have influenced currency. Id just make them as expensive as the Add craft or a tier between them and the one before them.
Removing the divine orb craft was also a omega dick move. At least leave in some source of diving if you make divs more expensive, the effect isn't that good. Can't even div uniques no more. Just remove lucky and up tier it so its expensive.


TL;DR: "JUICING" was in a dumb and sorry state, you're not getting that shit back. Currency changes and Harvest changes weren't thought through enough.

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PhoebePOE wrote:

Almost everyone seems to be missing the fact that GGG (Tencent) has had Path of Exile Mobile on the roadmap for a long time now.

When something like that is on your roadmap, as a studio, you typically have to start thinking about how to maximise profits from it in order for development resources to have been worth it.

On mobile, it is virtually impossible to have as many monsters and loot as has been historically available on PC

PoE as we know it would just brick any phone, so it would have to be a game with massively reduced monsters on the screen, and massively reduced loot.

This means that if as a studio you release a game on mobile, and it has way less monsters, action and loot drops associated with the game, you provide almost no incentive to your pre-existing fanbase or anyone that has played your PC version to really invest into your mobile game and start spending on microtransactions.

They had to do something to provide that incentive, and because as a PC user you are no longer the target audience -> they opted to simply "nerf" Path of Exile down to the ground to be more in line with their upcoming Mobile release.

That means:

Less loot, less mobs, way simpler league mechanics that mostly just recycle previous content dressed up.