Item hunt is still atrociously bad

Doubling drop rates so the 'good' items drop twice as often. And suddenly the 'good' items are the boring items that you don't want because they aren't upgrades, and a thread will start saying "the item hunt is still atrociously bad" with the post being about how he can't find any upgrade to his gear.


You can't just shift the power level curve like that, windmills do not work that way

Some of my findings playing almost only solo self-found. Throw in another divine orb, a tabula, several death's harp and some other stuff.

This league's been a loot-fest if you ask me

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Real_Wolf wrote:

Doubling drop rates so the 'good' items drop twice as often. And suddenly the 'good' items are the boring items that you don't want because they aren't upgrades, and a thread will start saying "the item hunt is still atrociously bad" with the post being about how he can't find any upgrade to his gear.


You can't just shift the power level curve like that, windmills do not work that way

Doubling drop rates does more harm if anything.
The problem lies in the fact that mod brackets arent spaced out enough.
Ill just give you one example to explain what i mean by this.

Take the prefix "robust".
It is a level 30 prefix that grants 50-59 life.
Already at level 30 (which is less than a third of the level cap 100), you can have an item that hits 60 life, which is about 80% of the maximum value possible on most items (only chests can have more than 100, but even then 60 life would still equal to more than 50% of the maximum value)
See the discrepancy here? Less than 30% of the levelcap to already reach 80% of the modcap.
If you hit such a mod so early on, you will most probably not find an upgrade for that particular item slot for quite some time, probably not until you are already well into the map system (level 85+). Is this smooth item progression? No it is not. One good drop early on will make it so that you will not find anything useful for quite some time, thus making the item hunt look atrocious.

Now lets see what this example would look like if the mod brackets were spaced out more.
Imagine the "robust" prefix granting up to 60-69 life, while still being a level 30 mod, and the "vigorous" prefix granting 200-209 life instead of the current 100-109 (the vigorous mod is a level 73 prefix, and for this example we will assume that this is the highest life prefix you can roll).

Now, if you get lucky on level 30 and hit the highest life mod possible (60-69), you will be at 30% of the levelcap (level 30 character), and you will also be at about roughly 30% of the modcap regarding life. See the difference here? You find the best mod for that level 30 item, but it is nowhere close to good in the greater picture. This is currently not the case.
What this essentially does, is to effectively smoothen out the item progression.
You will have a lot more possibilities to find upgrades while leveling up, because even if your level 50 item rolls for a bad life roll, it might still be a better roll than the level 30 prefix.

In order to make people feel that the item hunt is NOT atrocious, you have to continuously throw them a small upgrade, because that way they wont feel as if everything that drops was just garbage.
You cannot drop someone a small upgrade continuously if he already gets very close to a very good item at level 30.


By spacing the modbrackets out further you introduce more room for improvement on a particular item, thus you can have more incremental upgrades on gear during the leveling up phase.


I will take your windmill reference, and change it to a clock reference instead to explain something here.
Lets say the item progression is a clock that starts at hour 0 and ends at hour 24.
At the same time, we have a level progression clock that also starts at hour 0 and ends at 24.
The closer you get to level 100, the closer the level-clock gets to hour 24.
The better items you get, the closer the item-clock gets to hour 24.
In poe, the level-clock can show hour 8 on the clock, while the item-clock already shows something between 20 and 21. This means that, while you still might have a lot of leveling to do, the amount of item upgrades that you will come across are close to zero since you are already so close to hour 24 on the item-clock.

On hour 3 of the level-clock, you should only be able to find items up to hour 3 on the item-clock. That way you ensure that the players have a lot of room for small incremental upgrades until they reach a level that is closer to the levelcap.

Doubling item droprates only accomplishes that the item-clock spins even faster, thus getting close to hour 24 even faster than before, while the level-clock still lags behind.
This is what happened with diablo 3 vanilla. Blizzard listened to their playerbase and increased droprates. You got good gear even faster, but since you already got so close to maximum, there isnt much room left for improvement afterwards, thus, even the most minuscule improvements on a particular item over another, already made it 50 times more expensive.

In order to make the item hunt feel good, you have to slow down the item-clock to spin at the same pace as the level-clock during hours 0-23.
The only hour at which the item hunt feels good in PoE, is the 23-24 hour period.
Why? Because the level-clock catches up and even surpasses the item-clock during that segment.
That segment refers to level 90-100. While it still takes a considerable amount of time to level from 90-100, it takes a lot longer to go from a 90% perfect item to a 100% perfect item.

changing prefix's to be more 'open' doesn't necessarily fix it either. The issue comes down to how easy it is to say the power of the item.

If an item is at power level 10, anything above that is an upgrade. That means that if power level 10 is the 50-59 life or the 60-69 life, anything above that power level is an upgrade. So if something can roll up to 80 life, or up to 200 life, it is an upgrade regardless of the prefixs.

This gets down to be a case of "The time it takes before finding an item that is better", or as I like to call it "tTiTBFaITiB"

When you make the change above, sure, instantly it drops the tTiTBFaITiB. But at a certain point the tTiTBFaITiB is once more at the same level, and you get the same "items that are an upgrade just do not drop"

The only way to change that is offering alternatives to drop, ala crafting which DOES help immensely by turning items that are 1 affix away from useful into useful items, or to change the item affixes themselves so it is less clear what is 'better' and what is 'worse' (at the moment incredibly easy)

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Real_Wolf wrote:

If an item is at power level 10, anything above that is an upgrade. That means that if power level 10 is the 50-59 life or the 60-69 life, anything above that power level is an upgrade. So if something can roll up to 80 life, or up to 200 life, it is an upgrade regardless of the prefixs.

By spacing the brackets out further, you make it more likely for the upgrade to happen, given that you level up.

Here is a concrete example again utilizing the term power level to determinte the strength of an item.
This is a rough example of how it currently is in poe.
Just for simplicity sake, we will assume that each power level has an equal chance of dropping, meaning that on level 5, a power level 1 item will have a 50% chance of dropping and a power level 2 item will also have a 50% chance of dropping.
On level 10, a power level 3 item joins the group of possible drops, thus reducing the chance of any particular power level to occur down to 33%.

Power level | Level requirement
1 | level 1
2 | level 5
3 | level 10
4 | level 15
5 | level 20
6 | level 25
7 | level 30
8 | level 60
9 | level 80
10 | level 100

You can already find a powerlevel 7 item on level 30. The chance of finding such an item on level 30 is 1/7 according to the rules i set up above.
Lets say you found that item on level 30. You will not have a chance to find an upgrade over that item until level 60. At level 60, you will have a 1/8 chance to find an upgrade.
At level 80, a 2/9 chance. At level 100, a 3/10 chance.

Now lets space out the power level brackets.

Power level | Level Requirement
1 | Level 1
2 | Level 20
3 | Level 30
4 | Level 40
5 | Level 50
6 | Level 60
7 | Level 70
8 | Level 80
9 | Level 90
10 | Level 100


On level 30, you can only find a power level 3 item at most. The chance for that to happen is 1/3. Lets say you found such an item. At level 40, you can already find an upgrade for that item. The chance for that to happen is 1/4. 1/4 is greater than 1/7.
At level 50, the chance of finding an upgrade is 2/5, which is even greater than 1/4.
With each bracket that you pass, the chance of finding an upgrade again increases tremendously, thus giving you a small incremental ugprade, long before you reach high level.
Lets say you find the upgrade on level 50, a power level 5 item.
On level 60, you can find an upgrade with a chance of 1/6. That is still bigger than 1/7.
At level 70, you can find an upgrade with a chance of 2/7, which is a lot more than 1/7.

Summary?
Spacing out the mod brackets makes it a lot more likely to find upgrades during the leveling up phase, while it does close to nothing at high level.
The item progression is smoothened out during the leveling up phase, but is still kept largely the same at high level, where it is fine imo. Time invested leveling vs time invested finding an upgrade is roughly the same at high level, thus it is at a good spot already.
At low level, time invested leveling vs time invested finding an upgrade is not even close to being on the same page of the same book.

For the first levels like 1-30, I used transmutation orbs to make blue items from normal white items and use Orb of Augmentation to add one item property. That's what I used until I found better items. And then I used items with increased magic find chance...Very easy actually.

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Charan wrote:

You're still missing the most basic reason people hunt items.

If crafting as designed by GGG can help supplement that need, then it's utterly relevant.

This depends on the perspective. Its relevant purely from the stand point of someone just wanting to acquire decent gear in any way possible. Its not really relevant if someone is purely complaining about the drops specifically being bad in the game.

The OP could be one or the other. It sounds like he is criticising the drops only but he might just want to get decent gear by any means necessary so maybe pointing him to crafting would be relevant.

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iamstryker wrote:

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Charan wrote:

You're still missing the most basic reason people hunt items.

If crafting as designed by GGG can help supplement that need, then it's utterly relevant.

This depends on the perspective. Its relevant purely from the stand point of someone just wanting to acquire decent gear in any way possible. Its not really relevant if someone is purely complaining about the drops specifically being bad in the game.

The OP could be one or the other. It sounds like he is criticising the drops only but he might just want to get decent gear by any means necessary so maybe pointing him to crafting would be relevant.

Relevant does not mean it is the answer.

Merely saying that slayer's response was not derailing.

End of.

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Boloburn wrote:

Just hit level 65 in Rampage done both solo and group, only found 1 unique thus far leveling(Fencoil). I found a total of 1 solid upgrade from the end of normal until act 1 merciless, found literally nothing all at in cruel difficulty. The masters help somewhat but its still very very bad overall. I've cleared most of the corrupted areas I've come across, pretty crazy.

For a game about loot, it sure doesn't drop a whole lot. I'm not even expecting anything close to end game level, just something that gets me by so I can grind the endgame.

you dont find good loot in this game. there is nothing more to say, play the game for the game, not for the loot, since looting good items doesnt exist.

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danisonxtc wrote:

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Boloburn wrote:

Just hit level 65 in Rampage done both solo and group, only found 1 unique thus far leveling(Fencoil). I found a total of 1 solid upgrade from the end of normal until act 1 merciless, found literally nothing all at in cruel difficulty. The masters help somewhat but its still very very bad overall. I've cleared most of the corrupted areas I've come across, pretty crazy.

For a game about loot, it sure doesn't drop a whole lot. I'm not even expecting anything close to end game level, just something that gets me by so I can grind the endgame.

you dont find good loot in this game. there is nothing more to say, play the game for the game, not for the loot, since looting good items doesnt exist.

Sounds salty.

Drops are okay, you can't increase drop rates when you have trade and (finally) good crafting in the game. Just use every tool GGG gives you and you'll be fine.