Why i will not be returning to path of exile ever again. (I assume this is feed back GGG wants?)

Saw Shagsbeard's post on the first page, he's right.

Preface:
I am a person that usually finds items/orbs a little too far on the "hard to get" side of things. But only a little. However, I know Chris said they plan on making the common and uncommon uniques drop like 20% more often or something, which I think is a very welcome change. I have played since... either the end of closed beta or the very start of open beta. I only have a couple pages of uniques, and they're almost all crown of thorns and kaom's sign kind of stuff. I have a Searing Touch in my Hardcore stash but I don't know if I bought it or found it.

I think orb drops are a little too low, but who doesn't? GCPs don't drop nearly enough for my tastes.
I've often seen that people deride the opinions of those with no high level character, so for what it's worth my highest character is 82. I think that's decent.

Meat of post:
All that being said, the thing about ARPGs is maintaining a balance between dark times and bright times. There can be no light without shadows. The randomness makes the game what it is. Periods of time (hopefully not too long, I think D3's timer idea isn't the worst thing) where you don't get shit for drops (dark times), and then, *ting* there's a orange item whose base type you don't immediately recognize from having found 5 of them already. What unique could this be? Maybe it's something cool, or at least has some demand! (hopefully these times happen after a tough fight where you fought hard so it feels extra good)

These are the bright times. The times where you feel happy and excited. But you couldn't feel that way if cool shit was always raining on your head.
This is what Diablo is now. There are no rare items that are cool. It's all orange legendaries that drop every few minutes. Some are shit, some are cool and have special mods. But it's all brightness and light. There's no contrast anymore.

While I do have D3, it is not something I play long term. It devolves too quickly into "get the next 0.6% better legendary!" Meanwhile the only thing that actually feels legendary are the damn potion drops. My only character to get one died.
The odds of getting the nice endgame Diablo legendaries is probably similar to finding the good uniques in PoE. Only D3 doesn't have orbs that drop that you can trade or try making items with. Trying to get something like a Wand of Woh in D3 would be like doing lots of high level maps in PoE but not picking up anything but uniques. In PoE you could find chance orbs to use, save up chaos orbs to buy the item from someone, use the vendor recipes to get more orbs, etc.

I still remember my heart pounding and IMMEDIATELY teleporting to town when I found a mirror in Nemesis league. I put it in my stash and stared at it to be sure it was real. I had never before worried that a sudden server crash and ensuing rollback might happen spontaneously.
My friend asked me what it sounded like when it dropped. I had no idea. I hadn't even registered the sound, the words just burned into my eyes.

MIRROR OF KALANDRA

"Go drop it on the coast or something and find out"
HAHAHAHA NO. It is never leaving my stash. Not until I sell it to buy sweet gear.

And I did, this is some of it:
The +5 ES is an exalt I used. :P It is eternaled though. That chest is the only time I ever used the high end orbs. It was fun.

But I have never had the mirror feeling in D3.

TL;DR: Read the sentence before this one as to why item scarcity/RNG is important to some players.
Sorry for the wall of text. Btw D3 is fine. Like I said, I play it. The combat is really nice except that as a Wizard two of my skills are just glorified passives. I just wanted to show why I feel drops are handled better here.

I used to play PoE with a friend who I thought was about the luckiest sonofabitch ever. Exalts dropped for him like scrolls drop when youre wearing a Perandus Signet. Well, not exactly, but it sure seemed that way when nary a chaos would drop for me. I was a bit jealous, sure. He could buy all the nice toys and do all the crazy builds. But I had nothing.

A couple days later his luck ran out and mine picked up a bit. Rather than exalts though I was accumulating uniques. That diarrhea laser beam would shoot down from the sky and leave me gifts. No Shavs or Soul Taker, but a large assortment of low and mid level uniques.

The point is this: RNG, being the fickle bitch she is, will kick you in the balls one day and rub them nicely the next.

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Dalnor73 wrote:

The point is this: RNG, being the fickle bitch she is, will kick you in the balls one day and rub them nicely the next.

RNG confirmed for crazy bipolar bitch.

Just one point about the OP's post (and subsequent posts), where he wants 'upgrades' to drop more often.

The problem is a thing called a power curve. Every item that drops that is an upgrade, means the next item is less likely to be an upgrade. At a certain point in any game, finding an upgrade is harder and harder to the point it is unfeasible.

Even those mirror worthy uniques (well 99% of them) can have a better item drop than them. But what is the chances at that point?

Uniques with a perfect corruption are obviously an exception, because unlike rares they have much smaller rolls (since the stat is set just the amount)

There is nothing wrong with lucky drops.
But there is something seriously wrong with no alternate of progress being in the game. That's why this game functions as a trade-sim instead of a ARPG.

Proper craft options would balance the issue, the kind that is not a huge RNG.

There is a reason people make lotteries instead of buying fuses with their lottery reward. Because they just hate the crafting system.

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symban wrote:

There is nothing wrong with lucky drops.
But there is something seriously wrong with no alternate of progress being in the game. That's why this game functions as a trade-sim instead of a ARPG.

Proper craft options would balance the issue, the kind that is not a huge RNG.

There is a reason people make lotteries instead of buying fuses with their lottery reward. Because they just hate the crafting system.

Here's what I've come to realize. One can level up til maps without trading. For the most part. As long as your build doesn't require *specific* mods to function. Spell casters are close to a one and done to merc with the +1 mod, but that's a whole other can of worms. The physical % roll can get your *really* far as well.

Progression for the solo player could potentially slow down around the standard A3 merc. Which I think is fine. A small boost in crafting in that level area wouldn't bother me one bit. However, I'm completely against crafting that allows T3-1 mods. Those affixes are really strong.

Personally, I think that for most builds you should hit a wall *in maps*. Where your clear speed slows down, and you gotta either trade or start farming piety/dom til you can progress further. Which I don't find a problem with.

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symban wrote:

There is nothing wrong with lucky drops.
But there is something seriously wrong with no alternate of progress being in the game. That's why this game functions as a trade-sim instead of a ARPG.

Proper craft options would balance the issue, the kind that is not a huge RNG.

There is a reason people make lotteries instead of buying fuses with their lottery reward. Because they just hate the crafting system.

You can craft every item in the game, the recipe is usually x amount of chaos or x amount of exalts. And instead of an NPC vendor you use a PC one :)

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Nyraeus wrote:

But I have never had the mirror feeling in D3.

I have never had "mirror feeling" in PoE. Meh, I have virtually never had "top tier unique feeling" though I play here for more than 1,5 year and have numerous 80+ lvl chars.

I took longer break in April and May, returned in limited way in June to setup few builds and now, after last Chris podcast, I'm discouraged again. If you are old aRPG fan, who would like to progress solo self found from beginning to the end, nothing to look here, nothing will change in this MMOish trading simulator. Even D3 RoS is better in this regard, even considering it's all simplification.

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Xavderion wrote:

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symban wrote:

There is nothing wrong with lucky drops.
But there is something seriously wrong with no alternate of progress being in the game. That's why this game functions as a trade-sim instead of a ARPG.

Proper craft options would balance the issue, the kind that is not a huge RNG.

There is a reason people make lotteries instead of buying fuses with their lottery reward. Because they just hate the crafting system.

You can craft every item in the game, the recipe is usually x amount of chaos or x amount of exalts. And instead of an NPC vendor you use a PC one :)

Some people dont get the meaning of crafting..
Xav: I craft all day long at amazon.com !!

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symban wrote:

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Xavderion wrote:

"

symban wrote:

There is nothing wrong with lucky drops.
But there is something seriously wrong with no alternate of progress being in the game. That's why this game functions as a trade-sim instead of a ARPG.

Proper craft options would balance the issue, the kind that is not a huge RNG.

There is a reason people make lotteries instead of buying fuses with their lottery reward. Because they just hate the crafting system.

You can craft every item in the game, the recipe is usually x amount of chaos or x amount of exalts. And instead of an NPC vendor you use a PC one :)

Some people dont get the meaning of crafting..
Xav: I craft all day long at amazon.com !!

I wasn't 100% serious, but think about it, it's basically the same process. You get the ressources then you click on a button and you have the item you wanted. Trading is basically crafting with player interaction instead of interacting with NPCs or clicking on recipes in a recipe book. The only difference is that with trading, the amount of ressources you need to 'craft' the item might fluctuate, but that makes the 'crafting' more fun imo.