Making the PoE Leveling Process Even Better: Tier System for Orbs

A universal opinion amongst the forums is that race events are pretty sweet. A big reason for this is it incentivizes people to be liberal with their orbs in the early stages, enabling interesting strategic decisions right at the onset. In the normal leveling process for PoE, the optimal strategy for dropped orbs is to hoard them until later levels. Using an Alchemy Orb and some Chaos Orbs on a level 30 quad-link chest item with the perfect socket colors for your build would be considered a criminal waste of resources. Using an Exalted Orb on an amazing level 15 bow you just found that already had ridiculously good stats is plain silly when you could buy 50 better bows with that one orb. If these kinds of things weren't so discouraged I believe it would make the leveling process infinitely more fun. It's counter-intuitive that such a fun and interesting element of Path of Exile should be pushed aside until late game.

My suggested solution is a tier system for orbs which acts as a cap for what level items they can modify. If you're leveling a character in a level 25 zone for example, all the orbs that drop for you would only work on items with an item level of 30 or lower. These low tier orbs would be useless to you in the later stages, so you're incentivized to use them sooner rather than later.

There could be 7 different tiers of orbs: orbs that only work on items with an ilevel of 10 or less, then 20 or less, 30, 40, 50, 60, and the last tier would work on all items. There could also be prefixes to designate the tier of the orb, like with potions (EX: "small" "greater" "hallowed")

While I think this idea has the potential to be hugely beneficial, there are some consequences that need to be considered:

-As a result of people using orbs on early level gear, early game content becomes easier. I think an increase in mob health and damage for pre-50 content would be necessary to keep the games difficulty intact.

-As a result of not having as many orbs for late-game gear (because you no longer accumulate them as you level), late-game content becomes harder than it is currently. One fix could be to increase the drop rate of top tier orbs, but that might create different problems later on. A better fix in my opinion would be to have an enormous reward of orbs upon beating Merciless difficulty. Players could select which orbs they want to be rewarded with from a list (but the orbs are weighted appropriately, so 1 GCP would be worth the same as 3 Chaos Orbs etc). This would create yet another layer of complexity to the game, where the players with intelligent orb choices through good planning are rewarded.

-Stash problems. 7 different kinds of every orb could get crazy, especially if you still decide to hoard them for other characters. Increasing stacking limits on orbs would help, or increasing the amount of allotted free stash space.

-If you need trade for orbs on marketplace as you're leveling early game content, you're going to have a harder time trading for the orbs you need. The supply of orbs that can effect your low level gear is still there, the problem is that all the low tier orbs you're collecting will have much less value than they used to because they aren't usable late game. This problem will fix itself once the game enters open beta because there will be a lot more players around your level to trade with. Your lowbie orbs will have value to the other lowbies out there and vice versa, so you can trade amongst eachother.

-It might be tempting to implement a recipe along side this system so you could "trade up" lower tier orbs, but I suggest to be very careful with that. The recipe would have to be a complete rip off in order to be feasible because otherwise it would still be optimal to hoard your orbs which would defeat the purpose of the change.

Hopefully this thread sparks some interest and discussion, I obviously really want to make this change happen because I'm rooting for PoE and I think if this were implemented properly it would mean good things for the game. The early stages of a game are hugely important, especially with a free-to-play business model. Encouraging new players to play around with PoE's intricate item progression system (one of it's biggest assets) right from the start, rather than encouraging hoarding, could make all the difference.

Terrible idea, instead of having to make a conscious choice you want the game to say "Well you're level 30 now, too bad you have a bunch of level 10 chaos orbs and divines and exalteds because you can't use them now!"

I can say personally that I use alchemy and chaos on low level items quite frequently, in most cases when I level a new character I end up using more alchs and chaos on them than I do high-level characters and gear, because their gear changes much more often. I make the conscious choice to do that, whether it's a "good" idea or not.

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Duskbane wrote:

Terrible idea, instead of having to make a conscious choice you want the game to say "Well you're level 30 now, too bad you have a bunch of level 10 chaos orbs and divines and exalteds because you can't use them now!"

I can say personally that I use alchemy and chaos on low level items quite frequently, in most cases when I level a new character I end up using more alchs and chaos on them than I do high-level characters and gear, because their gear changes much more often. I make the conscious choice to do that, whether it's a "good" idea or not.

If you had a bunch of low tier Chaos/Divine/Exalted Orbs, firstly I'd say hot diggity damn you have some good luck, and secondly if you're level 30 and you didn't intentionally save them for another character I'd wonder why on earth you didn't use them already. You're looking at a low tier Exalted Orb and expecting it to present the same value as an Exalted Orb does now, but it wouldn't, it's an entirely different dynamic.

Also I think it's pretty common to use a couple of Alchs as you're leveling, but I don't think many people are using their Chaos Orbs early on - what level do you use them, and why? Do you use the orbs just for the hell of it or because you genuinely need the gear upgrade?

There comes a point in development where too much complication is just that, too much. This would be more of a frustration than it would be a significant fun addition to the game.

You would simply force shitty currency for new players. Those currencies would end up being worthless but still extremely rare.

Overall, bad idea.

Good on paper. But it would be painful to live out. New players would be totally separate from the economy, and have no real way to earn a profit until higher levels.

I've a level 70 character and some others and had never seen what an Exalted Orb nor a divine orb look like expect on the forums.

Something fucked up really.

Ofcourse its gonna be hard to justify rolling alchs and chaos orbs on low level equipment but thats whats making this game interesting MAKING HARD CHOICES I dont understand why everyone wants the game to make all decisions for you.

Learning to accept loosing currency orbs is the problem here and I think people need to stop hoarding everything.

This goes against the philosophy of the currency drop. Anyone have a shot at getting a currency item with high value. Whether you're lvl 1 or 80. If the philosophy is not preserved, nobody will want to lvl a new character the second time since their time spend holds no value. And we come to the problem of D3 again.

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TeeloBrown wrote:

In the normal leveling process for PoE, the optimal strategy for dropped orbs is to hoard them until later levels.

This assumption is incorrect, and it blows away the rest of the post.

Using an alch orb (or a handful of chromatics, or a fusing or two, or some alterations) to get better gear that lets you kill more stuff faster and survive longer will net positive on returns throughout the game.