A self-found purist's feedback [Long]

I play only self-found. Trading doesn't appeal to me at all and I find the game's multiplayer facilities abysmal. There's something much more satisfying about earning your own stuff instead of just farming chaos orbs and trading them for things other people found. However, it comes with a few tradeoffs, particularly when it comes to gear and build diversity. Maps and leveling used to be quite bad, but 1.0.0 has changed things somewhat. Feedback time, beta vs. release:

Leveling:
Much better. It used to be nearly impossible to get past the mid-70s, the exp simply slowed down so much that a day of heavy grinding got you maybe 20% of a level. Now it's a lot more reasonable and one can reach level 85ish in about 7 days /played. I can't really tell if it'll truly be possible to get to level 100 in Docks or whatever Chris promised, but leveling is certainly much more realistic than it used to be. Farming Piety for a couple of weeks will get you to 80+.

Maps:
Huge improvement. While it's still pretty difficult for a self-found player to build up any amount of 70+ maps, it's at least possible to get there and grab some ilvl 75ish items for yolo-alching. 66-69 maps are abundant to the point where I'm starting to consider converting my 66s and 67s into 68s with the vendor recipe, I have more low-level maps than I can possibly run. I average more than one map drop per map so they just perpetually pile up, and the pool keeps climbing until 69 where it sort of plateaus. Compared to mid-beta where self-found players were resigned to spending 90% of their time outside of maps because the drop rate was so low, it's a world of difference and a very nice change to be able to play exclusively in maps.

Gameplay:
This is a bit of a mixed bag. Survival has improved, mainly due to the buff to life, but the aura nerf has destroyed self-found build options. When you're pretty much entirely limited to two auras with maybe Clarity on top, you have very few builds to choose from. Anything ES-based is basically out of the question, for instance, since the absurd rarity of high-ES items and the inability to realistically run Discipline means you simply can't get enough ES to do CI. There's a disappointingly small pool of builds that are viable for self-found players unless the stars align and one finds extremely uncommon build-defining uniques like Shavronne's. Apropos...

Items:
Somewhat improved from beta, but it's still just way, way too hard to get gear without trading. The good affixes on items are so unbelievably rare that it's simply an exercise in futility -- for instance, I've spent 700 alterations on an item without getting an IPD roll above 100%. I've chaosed the same thicket bow over 50 times without getting a max dmg above 150. I've chanced hundreds of items without seeing a unique.

Serious crafting is completely out of the question as exalted orbs drop at a rate of like two per month and I've never found an eternal orb in my life. You will spend weeks farming currency and then watch it all go down the drain as the odds of rolling a good item are simply too low to be tenable without trading. As a result, upgrades quickly become a once a week phenomenon and most of your time ends up being completely wasted, which is very demoralizing. The reward scale is way off.

Uniques are more common but they're always low-level and/or garbage -- it's entirely typical to find ten uniques per day, all of them under level 30. I have four stash tabs of uniques in Domination and not one is a strong, build-defining one like Shavronne's, Kaom's, Marohi Erqi etc. It's all trash. On that note, the increasing trend of community-designed uniques is horrible for self-found players because it's clear that the game's build evolution is based on these uniques, yet they are effectively impossible for self-found players to get. It seems a conscious decision on GGG's part to let diamond supporter uniques serve as the game's dynamic element, but it's an element that effectively doesn't exist for us.

Addendum:

You've made the good uniques so rare that we can't expect to ever find one, but without them there's maybe ten viable builds in the game. You've centered everything around unique items that are too different from the norm and too powerful so that playing without them is like playing some kind of shareware demo where you only get to try the basics. Every time I find an interesting build on the forums, I look at the required items and sigh knowing that it's just never going to be available to me.

This is where self-found play really falters. PoE is way too stingy with the gear, much like early D3 where the only way to get anything remotely decent was to trade. Without uber-rare uniques and without crafting, it's effectively impossible to get, say, a 1h weapon with more than 250 top end damage or a chest armor with more than 500 ES. The odds are just so low that the statistical chance of finding a truly great item would take years on average. This is why we really need a self-found league where special rules can bridge the gap and make it so trading isn't completely mandatory for anyone who wants to scratch the surface of this game.

Well written.
I agree with the entirety of your post.

I'd like to see a HC Self-found league and have a sc self-found parent league.

A completely agree with what you have said, I am mostly self found, but many of my issues are mirrored here. I started playing this game after stopping for half a year, and started with a blood magic exile, and now I have pretty much hit a wall in progression because I can't run any auras and so my survivability is shit (having a grace/determination would do wonders for me)

I have come to the conclusion that PoE has become so reliant on the economy to progress in merciless + afterwards that its pretty safe to come to the conclusion that its not a typical ARPG where you can progress fine with self found gear. I mean you can, but its probably going to be the op FOTM builds rather than the more unique and fun stuff (which as you correctly pointed out, requires unique items to work a lot of the time)

Honestly PoE has 2 strong points, everything else is either mediocre (content) or terrible (element resist scaling, desync, etc etc)

Those 2 points are itemization and the passive tree.

The thing with itemization is, that the pool is becoming so large, and the amount of uniques that flood the market means that naturally, the odds of getting what you need as a self found has slowly been degrading over time. The metagame of PoE has turned into a trading one if you actually want to do endgame content. It is not optional to trade, you actually do have to trade. And funnily enough, there is more of an argument for an AH system (or a weaker version of it) in PoE than it is in D3, as more and more and more uniques and items start flooding the market and the pool becomes larger and larger (and hence the odds of what you are finding becomes lower and lower)

Unless GGG implements a way to "skew" the drops for items with certain attributes and uniques (like you set some "goal" and if you put enough time into it, you get that goal), the case for an AH system starts becoming stronger and stronger regardless of how much people want to deny it. Either that, or simply put, players have to accept that PoE is not that self found, non economy reliant aRPG that people were expecting, which is what D2/TQ/TL and all of those other types of aRPGS were

D3 obviously failed with the AH, but then again, D3 had absolutely terrible itemization, where upgrading items was almost always just getting items with more +stats.

Also note, and paraphrasing what GGG's Chris said, Chris envisaged GGG to be a game where trading was limited, and if it was done, it was done with a bartering system

The problem is, that neither of this is really happening. Trading is not limited, in fact it becomes mandatory when you start hitting merciless (need to get those res rings bro!). The more and more that people trade, the more and more orbs are used as a currency (instead of a crafting mechanic) and the less and less bartering ends up happening, because people as they start trading, become much more knowledgable about what stuff is worth, and gets to the point where orbs pretty much function as gold, and if someone needs something, they farm the currency and they trade it by using a poe indexer (poe.xyz.is)

GGG's idea of trading for PoE is only fullfilled if trading becomes less mandatory, and the only way to do that is to greatly improve the acquisition of self found gear. This doesn't mean make it "easier" per say, what it does mean is giving mechanics that allow players to acquire specifically the gear that they need, rather than having to resort to GGG's shitty trade system all the time

A couple of excellent posts here, both by OP and Deteego!

I completely agree with what's being said here.

I'm mostly playing self-found myself and it's becoming harder and harder to motivate myself doing so. I'm really enjoying the game, but gearing past level 60 or so is a real pain. It doesn't help that the difficulty of the game is nearly all gear checks. Once you reach a certain gear threshold, nothing is difficult and you can faceroll anything. That's not how a difficult game should look like, I think. It smells pre-nerf Inferno from Diablo 3, and I don't like it.

Agree with OP.
What happened in D3 is also happening here: After you hit Inferno (Merciless) you just play the AH (trade) and farm the same content over and over in hope for a good drop that will allow you to progress and that will never drop. So check AH (trade) -> nothing good ->exit game.
That's how the game looks to me now and like D3 died, PoE will die too.

I just want to support the OP. My first 2 characters in Nemesis were failures. My most recent one is doing amazing. The biggest difference: I traded for much of my gear on this character.

I think the worst part is the changes to drops. I don't know if it's just misremembering things, but it felt like in beta drops were better. Now it feels like IIR is absolutely necessary to get any usable rares.

The problem is getting the IIR necessary on gear to keep finding loot that helps you progress is EXTREMELY difficult when playing self found.

Most of the uniques in this game are useless trash. It's really starting to resemble early D3 that way, and it's so stupid when you find a unique that might as well not exist. I don't know who's designing all these terrible items, but I really think diamond supporter uniques are getting out of hand. It seems everyone wants to make either something grotesquely overpowered that would make their own character stronger, or something pretentiously obscure that doesn't fit in anywhere. It's like a competition to see who can make the most radical item, and the result is that the unique pool is getting completely diluted with trash that nobody is ever going to use. It makes the good ones too rare and tarnishes the thrill of getting a unique drop.

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engqvist85 wrote:

Most of the uniques in this game are useless trash. It's really starting to resemble early D3 that way, and it's so stupid when you find a unique that might as well not exist. I don't know who's designing all these terrible items, but I really think diamond supporter uniques are getting out of hand. It seems everyone wants to make either something grotesquely overpowered that would make their own character stronger, or something pretentiously obscure that doesn't fit in anywhere. It's like a competition to see who can make the most radical item, and the result is that the unique pool is getting completely diluted with trash that nobody is ever going to use. It makes the good ones too rare and tarnishes the thrill of getting a unique drop.

The game is not balanced around neither standard, Hardcore or Domination. It is balanced around nemesis. Things you see like "trash" actually have a higher value in that league.

Of course one could dream that things were different, but thing are like they are. Party Play + Trading + Nemesis = what the game is balanced around.

A lot of what the OP wrote here is arguments used for why people want a Self Found League. So that drops aren't based around trading.

Too many people say well why don't you just play self found right now. Well just like the OP here the game isn't much fun self found. You can't even begin to hope that you will find any decent uniques without playing 5 thousand hours and even then who knows if you will get anything you need.