Divination Cards -- Balance Lost.

Yea. I'm annoyed as hell my card isn't farmable. The drop rate seems to be for a time when mjolnir was still worth north of 40ex. /rant

the problem is that in peoples minds', 'realistically farming' time is not enough for rare items to drop. so, for some reason, people expected to find some good shit in less time. cards are tied to drop rate. Ive found one shavs in 3 years of a lot of playtime. if I expect to farm an area for a shavs (hypothetically), I should expect to receive a full set on average around that rate, not around a 'reasonable' rate. This is purely logical and fair.

As usually, people just want moar drops now and once they figured effective drop rates are the same, they got sad. Why ?

Cards were designed to 1)appease that sector of game with some partial value of owning an item. as in, its not binary, either you drop it or you dont, but a partial value so you can trade for the rest or have some value on your hands at least

2)crutch for SSF to (if they want) farm one area a lot and eventually get it. whether or not said SSF wants to farm such an area is irrelevant. such an alternative now exist to minimize end of curve situations where you play for 50k hours self-found and one unique youve always wanted for your build just doesnt drop for ya.

now, some of the mid-tier items that were once rare but now are not, were not changed in div card rarity, so yeah thats a problem at least in context of temp leagues. but then you need to remember that buying something will always, always be more efficient than farming for it. it's how economy where anything is tradeable works.

Divination cards were never meant to be explicitly farmed for, GGG said they were something you were meant to find over time and then one day you notice you have a full set, and you can turn it in for a reward. Do you honestly think you should get a Volls Devotion in like a hundred runs ?

Cards are completely broken if you ask me, i dont like them at all because they take alot away from the game, especially the 6 link ones, or the future proof cards. The ones that matter are far too easy to get too, for example Dapper Prodigy.

OP, let me remind you that GGG stands for GRINDING gear games.

In most of the games Ive played "grinding" was the ugly cousin of "farming" or "looting". But this is not true for this game. Here "grinding" is the norm and "farming" is only possible for lesser currency.

Your question/rant can be broke down to: "How rare should rare drops be." or "How much time equivalent should an item have." Do not even compare your sense of time value to those, at whom this game is originally targeted. Grindig 10k hours average to gain the rarest of items is to be expected. Perhaps even more.

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Gaza wrote:

Several builds can kill Voll easily within 1 minute and port back to town. 1200 minutes = 20 hours of farming to get an item worth 2-3 ex (if you are saying 1 card on average) doesn't actually seem unfair. You are talking about an item that is league specific and is meant to be very rare at that. You're then talking about 160 hours for an item guaranteed to be worth >16ex... Tell me where else you can find currency at that pace guaranteed?

such bullshit, like average in this game mean anything lol. We know people spend 5k fusings on 6l when average supposed to be around thousands.

SOme people will make 2k voll and never drop the card, how fair?
Then there is the 20h argument.

First 20h of farming your brain for 1-2ex result is pretty stupid and retarded, then 20h is not easy to do unless you are a teen having school holidays. This game was made for 30 year old people who played d2...

where do those guys get 20h of farming time?

did someone here actually suggest that rate of 1 ex per 10h is best guranteed income you can get?

holy shit dude

you can spam dried lake or low tier maps for 160h and find enough currency to buy 5 volls devotions by just picking up tier 1 currency(alch and above)

add some unid'd chaos recipe and and you can get extra 2 devotions in that time

i'm not saying the cards should be farmable but to suggest that rate of 1 ex per 10 hours is retardedly low, efficient player will get AT LEAST half an ex per hour just from sheer currency drops, add to that offerings you find in trials, occasional div card that sells for 5c+, leveled gems you sell and the rate gets to 1 ex per hour easy by literally just mapping in mid/low tier maps

this doesn't take into account ocassional exalt drops or t1 uniques that will happen over longer period of time(like 160h lol) and will boost that per hour rate even further

there are other means that can increase your income but this is something a trained monkey or a bot can achieve

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Jerle wrote:

Yea. I'm annoyed as hell my card isn't farmable. The drop rate seems to be for a time when mjolnir was still worth north of 40ex. /rant

Chris said they'd update some droprates in 2.4, but do you have any suggestions as to how to reliably and accurately adjust them? Basing it on market prices makes sense, but has a set of pitfalls that go along with it. Update droprate as infrequently as they do now, and it's FeelsBadMan. Too often and they're at the whim of market manipulation and an overnight meta build sensation.

I agree with the OP, card drop rates are terrible.

I recently did some card farming for the challenge, and found virtually none. I ended up buying nearly all of them for 6-8 chaos each via poe.trade.

First, I decided to try "Humility", which drops in Channel maps. I had some channel maps stacked up. I decided to alch them and run them with 24 IIQ on gear (the unique gloves+belt). I did 5 or 6 of those. Then, because I didn't get a single card by that point, I decided to ramp things up, and I chiseled the next maps before alching, and added zana bloodlines. Ran 5-6 more of those, and in the last one, I got 2x Humility (one came out of a barrel, lol). That's 12 maps, all alched and ran with 24 IIQ on gear, half of them chiseled and bloodlined, to get only 2 cards from a set of 9.

I also alched and ran every Arcade map I got, did 10+ by now, without a single "Assassin's Favour".

I also alched and ran every Coves map I got, did 10+ by now, without a single "The Mercenary".

I also alched and ran every Graveyard map I got, did 15+ by now, without a single "Lysah's Respite".

What I did get is a ton of "Her Mask", "The Gambler" and "The Lover". In the end, I would have been better off running high level maps for currency, and buying the cards on the market. Farming them was a big failure, and I will never try it again. The rates are just too low.

I want to reply to a lot of you but don't want to quote each one so I'll break it down into concept.

Concept 1 -- increasing drop rates of some cards will "hurt" the economy.

So what? The economy is what it is. You seem to think that GGG actively cares what all the items trade for. They don't. The game changes and the economy reflects whats happening in the game. For example, average prices of items have dropped like crazy since public stash tabs (increased supply). If GGG cared about the price items they would have decreased the drop rate to keep your economy the same.

The economy will adjust, as it always does, and thats normal. The underlying issue is that the cards were intended to be a way to not rely on the economy. If you think GGG is looking at their impact on the economy as a reason they don't balance them better you don't understand the complaint. GGG said these would be farmable (not have to rely on the economy) but they aren't.

Concept 2 -- The rarest items should be hard to get/the "G" in GGG stands for Grinding.

Correct, and I agree. As I said in the OP I don't think all the cards should be easy to find. But that isn't the major complaint about why div cards aren't working. The issue is that the rarity of the cards is unbalanced to the point that most of them aren't farmable.

Concept 3 -- Divination Cards were not meant to be farmable.

If that is true than GGG did a poor job marketing them to the community because they were presented as a way to farm items.

Just looking quickly at stuff from the official sites: (you already have the quote in the OP)

"

Introducing Divination Cards:
Divination Cards are a new type of item that drop throughout Wraeclast. Each type of card is specific to different areas. They allow players to systematically work their way to the acquisition of desirable items, without having to rely on random chance alone.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1304441

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Many Divination Cards have been made more common. While they're still not a trivial shortcut to wealth acquisition, we now have the data we need to raise their drop rates in a safe way. They should be a lot more farmable now.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1414202

"

How Divination Cards Work

Divination Cards are a new type of item that drops from monsters you encounter while playing The Awakening. Sets of cards can be traded to the Act Four NPC Tasuni in exchange for the item referenced on the card. Each card type drops in specific areas of Wraeclast, so careful choice of where to play allows you to maximise your chances of obtaining the desired item.
http://www.pathofexile.com/shop/divination-cards

I'm sure if someone wanted to take the time to look through reddit, or the links to the different third party articles that were linked to by GGG in the lead up to the awakening you would see the same language.

They "sold" (marketed) the card system as a way to not have to rely on trading and to have a chance at farming an item. However, the cards are too rare and the huge majority are not realistically farmable. I love this game and think GGG does a generally good job of carrot/stick balance but the div card system isn't working as the community or maybe even GGG expected and it should be fixed.