An Early-Game "Orb Farming" Zone (D2 Countess-Inspired)

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TL;DR: I am proposing the addition of a location early in the game to target-farm orbs reliably. This would be similar to The Countess in Diablo II, who drops random low-tier runes (D2's currency) each time you defeat her. The goal is to aid early-league progression and self-found/hardcore players.
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My gear sucks. What are my options? If I've exhausted the shops:
I can either gamble, farm, or craft.

Gambling

Can produce great results. Sometimes. Usually not. There's a limit to how much you can gamble — and it's prohibitively expensive early on. It is not a reliable way to move towards the goal of improving my gear.

Farming

Farming for gear directly, at least in the early game, is not very fun. It's not rewarding to re-run areas in the campaign, in fact, it's downright punitive — killing monsters of any tier (elite, rare, unique) feels incredibly unrewarding considering how slow and tiresome it is when your character is new.

Crafting

In its current state is not too bad. The results are consistently bad (which is a different topic altogether), but using orbs on gear is not bad. It is fun. Rolling good stats is fun. Rolling bad stats sucks but is to be expected and can still be fun — because I get to craft more

That is, if I have the orbs to do so.

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[Edit 4/17: Loot is a current target for improvement by the devs. You say you want ground loot to be meaningful? It won't be until I can do something with the loot on the ground].

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What I want is reliable access to orbs so that I can craft.

Reliable access means having a clear path to obtain the orbs necessary for crafting and therefore progressing a new character freely.

The most satisfying progression comes when players are the ones driving their growth, rather than waiting for the game to decide when they can move forward.

To be clear: I tried to work with the current game.

I found a couple areas that seemed reasonable for farming and went on my way to hunt some orbs:





(Since creating this thread, I've been farming in Acts 3, 4, and 5, with up to 75% rarity - the drop rate of Exalt orbs is abysmal still in these areas. I actually find slightly more Vaal orbs than Exalts.).

Where are the orbs? How long until a player might reasonably expect to craft something that they are excited about? How can it be that a player has no clear way to govern when they get to upgrade their early game gear?

My Proposal: An Early-Game "Orb Farming" Zone (D2 Countess-Inspired)

Let me use Diablo II as an example.

In D2, runes are the closest equivalent to orbs in PoE2. There's an early-game miniboss (The Countess) who guarantees rune drops. It's not fast. It requires some commitment. The player must find the entrance on the overworld to an underground area that has 5 floors. But at the end it rewards the player's efforts with a small number of runes to potentially craft with.







A PoE2 equivalent would be:

- Early-game side area or sub-zone with an introductory quest

- Repeatable miniboss

- Drops basic orbs/shards/essence most of the time (transmute, augment, regal shards/essences)

- Occasionally drops higher orbs (regal, alchemy)

- Infrequently drops something nice (exalt, chaos)

- Very rarely drops other exotic orbs (vaal, divine)

Why This Would Help:

- Gives SSF / HC / League Start players a clear "path" for farming orbs

- Adds a lore-friendly introduction to crafting currency early on

- Prevents situations where players feel gear-locked purely due to RNG

- Lets players target-farm orbs without feeling forced to wait for random drops

This could easily be tied to a quest NPC:

"Deep in the [new zone], an ancient creature is said to hoard orbs of power, disrupting the balance of nature..." The one-time quest reward could be a regal and/or an exalt.

I'm not married to the idea of copying what D2 provided with The Countess, but it was simple, effective, and balanced for the amount of effort required. Up to the devs if this idea interests them to adapt it however seems right for PoE2.

Right now, the early game lacks any meaningful introduction to orbs or crafting currency. This would both fix that and offer new players a soft tutorial on how orbs interact with gear.

Really appreciate all the work that goes into PoE’s design — this is obviously a small idea in the grand scheme of things, but I think something like this could really improve the early-game experience for a lot of players, especially in SSF or fresh league starts. Thanks for reading. Credit to ChatGPT for making this post hopefully tolerable for the community.

Killing monsters and getting loot is 70 percent of the fun in an arpg , the vision for this game is coming from a blind person

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This would be a cool addition.

Possibly have a "bounty board" type thing posted in the middle of town with different rewards for different elite type rare monsters scattered through different zones.

I know this has been done a million times over on a bunch of different games but GGG can put their own twist on it.

Google POE1 Einhar.

And then check his reference in POE2's little sideboss, Crowbell.

These are the many reasons to believe "The Hunt" will be back in POE2 sooner or later.

appreciate the input. I'm trying not to be married to the idea of copying The Countess farming mechanic from D2. any method of target-farming orbs would be nice, since there's no way to do so yet that I've found.

from Jonathon's response in the recent interview it seems he does not want players to be able to get fully-affixed gear at any point in the campaign. I don't see why restricting players in such a way can be considered good game design.. it would be an optional time investment to get the OP gear, it would only really benefit the players on SSF/HC who need or want to spend the time to get solid gear early on.

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after a few days since this post I've seen that SSF and HC are not incredibly popular, so this feature likely doesn't appeal to any SC Trade players and might even sound like the ramblings of an idiot who has no experience with this game. that's partly true. though I still feel like this feature would greatly benefit SSF and HC because the former needs a way to get some good gear for maps early on and the latter has to replay the campaign quite a bit. it should also be a helpful addition for new leagues and give people a bit more excitement surrounding the fresh start, since they have somewhere to access orbs early on and not getting to maps feeling undergeared (if that is indeed how they feel, I've no idea, some builds of course do fine on what is found during regular campaign progression).

Thats not a bad idea. It does seem like the game is kind of rigidly structured around a linear progression through the campaign though. Having some spots to gain a couple levels and find some item drops along the way would help a lot with some of the stuff people are having problems with

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rhorains#6760 wrote:

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after a few days since this post I've seen that SSF and HC are not incredibly popular, so this feature likely doesn't appeal to any SC Trade players and might even sound like the ramblings of an idiot who has no experience with this game. that's partly true. though I still feel like this feature would greatly benefit SSF and HC because the former needs a way to get some good gear for maps early on and the latter has to replay the campaign quite a bit. it should also be a helpful addition for new leagues and give people a bit more excitement surrounding the fresh start, since they have somewhere to access orbs early on and not getting to maps feeling undergeared (if that is indeed how they feel, I've no idea, some builds of course do fine on what is found during regular campaign progression).

SSF is not popular on PoE2 for a reason , lack of drops, u can go entire acts w/o upgrading anything.

once u are into maps its even worse since its a loop of farming and left empty handed .