Rare items should be good, and rare.

These are the drops from a tier 3 chaos boss encounter in the Lake of Kalandra, at difficulty 11. All of these items are ilvl 85. Of course, they aren't worth picking up. Why would they be?

It's as if you took 16 random Rare items and threw a Chaos Orb on each of them. Chaos spamming is about the least effective method of crafting there is.

GGG wants Rare items to be something worth picking up, and so their solution is to throw them at us constantly. But I think there's a better way Rares can be made more loot-worthy: Unidentified items (magic and rare) are always "Well-rolled" but are much more rare.

To achieve this effect, the following must occur:

1. Rebalance all sources of Rarity in the game. Too many unique items, too many modifiers on things like Strongboxes, too many modifiers on equipment, too many map modifiers, etc, give Rarity of Items Found to the player, and after this change any source of Rarity would be desired by the player to enhance their ability to find good items (although I think magic-find equipment should be phased out, personally).

2. Remove/alter methods of getting guaranteed Rare items, such as the "Contains 3 additional Rare items" Strongbox modifier, or the 5-to-1 vendor recipe.

3. Make Alchemy Orbs significantly more common, such that a player does not feel bad for using them in Acts when Rare items are less common (or feel bad about using them to make all the random Normal items on the ground into Rare items). Additionally, make Rare items somewhat more common in Acts after implementing this system.

4. Make Scrolls of Wisdom significantly more rare, since they would be used far less often after this change. Normal items now vendor for Transmutation Shards.

5. Where an enemy (such as a boss) would currently drop many Rare items, it would after these changes have a higher chance to drop things that are more immediately beneficial, such as currency.

6. Stop considering Unique items "better than Rare items" in the code if you want Rare items to be the best items in the game. Unique items are (or should be) build-enabling, but perfect Rare items are the most expensive items in the game, more expensive than any unique could ever be. In other words, the drop-rate of Unique items should remain unchanged by the design implied in this post.

Some fun ideas to consider:

Fractured items would drop Normal, and will Fracture a random modifier whenever you give the item modifiers for the first time. In other words, if I use an Alchemy Orb on a fractured weapon, it would then immediately Fracture a random modifier from that list of modifiers. Would open up some fun possibilities with Essences and Fossils.

Rare unidentified maps should have a much more significant quantity bonus (since there isn't really a way to make maps "well-rolled"). Remove the corruption outcome that makes maps unidentified. Unique unidentified maps would retain the current quantity bonus (since they're much easier to find).

And a small note: The only way to get this "well-rolled" effect is to pick up an unidentified Rare item off the ground and use a Scroll of Wisdom.

Schrodinger's Alteration Shards.

Do you pick them up an id them to determine if they are good or leave them there and save yourself the clicking?

Also... identify scrolls exist ONLY to increase the amount of clicking in the game.

The psychology always worked with me. I loved iding stuff.

The solution to making rares feel good again is to make the best bases actually rare. Any system where you are tying your "rares" to literally hundreds of different item types, each with 6 affixes to fill with hundreds of available in the pool, and each of those in turn with ranks 1-9, will never work. It's why the reflecting mist is basically worthless in Lakes. There's far too much variation and complexity for any of these random rolls to be any good. If better bases were available to drop but much rarer, then we could actually get excited about finding them.

I suspect Fractured rare drops was GGG's way of providing us with "bases" we could be excited about, but they've only removed one layer of variability among many and 99% of those fractures aren't going to be worth even looking at.

I was thinking of a mechanic with new crafting bench (probably bench in map) with which you could have powerfull crafting options however with 50% chance of voiding that item (like in the temple with double corruption). But there would be second part to it, if item is voided then there would be another roll- 50% chance that item is voided for good and other 50% chance after voiding that specific item can now drop for any player in some void world.

Not sure on balance, but it could be fun finding half crafted good items.

GGG: So what you are saying is that there is too much loot... got it.

GGG: Problem - too much loot
GGG: Solution - rare items no longer drop

Jokes aside, identifying items is a waste of time. If items dropped in identified state, filters could be applied to those items to scan for high tier mods. Maybe then rares would be worth picking up...

i made a thread a while back stating that higher item-level should null low tier rolls

so like a i lvl 86 platebody would not EVER roll t4 and below rolls for example..

the problem is, that even though that makes them better, it makes them more common, still making them kinda worthless :S

Now imagine what that screen looks like without the loot filter. GGG is trying to fix a problem brought on by the existence of trade. The player base relies to heavily on trade for upgrades, but players are forced into that situation by design.

Trade allows players to pool drops into one collective whole. This funnels orbs up into the hands of players who get the mandatory build enabling items not needed by other players. they can then farm and populate the trade house. However this time GGG fubared loot generation and under cut the trade system.

Trade is very bad for the health of this game.

tbh, I've always felt like keeping this particular piece of D2's system was the one big mistake in PoE's itemization. It did give them a solid basis for designing the general structure of rewards, but having more granular rarity tiers like Borderlands or similar is much less of a hassle and could make it easier to trade either less or more, whichever you like better. It could also be an opportunity to fix the weird vocabulary problem where "unique" items aren't, but their modifiers are. The idea has lots of potential in PoE in particular because you could make lower tier items still worth picking up sometimes by adding some vendor recipes or crafting options that need them.

"

Tombstoner wrote:

Trade is very bad for the health of this game.

trade is why I still play it