Can we talk about the map drop rate?

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Hyskoa wrote:

Here, you're forced to spend a demented amount of hours to reach lvl 100.

Simply false. With one of the best builds in the game at the moment it took 99 hours and that's with 3 deaths at level 99 and 1 death at level 98. That set me back maybe 7 hours of mapping but it is doable to do in a reasonable amount of time. Unless you think that's demented?

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taosk8r wrote:

Ok, I was just talking in theory. In actuality, I haven't gotten a map above t10, so I don't know where I'm at (but t10 didn't seem extremely difficult). I think most of my gear is top of the line, but my Voltaxic is only 5s/4L and my chest is a tabula, plus my chaos resist is pretty bad.

Maybe I have the wrong idea here, but my assumption is that the higher tier the map, the better the drops. No?

Good point about the lower tier maps. I hadn't been thinking about that (collecting them). Also, I would still rather they be same tier or above, ofc, and its just more needless busywork (which I guess I will bother with).

Which T10 map did you try? Most of them have extremely easy bosses. Hardest one would probably be volcano.

Try T11 crematorium. Boss fight that has pretty huge AOE damage, requiring constant movement and dodging. T12 has village ruin, though the rest of T12 is kinda easy. T13 courtyard is a tough fight for most builds, 3 bosses including a spark totem mage. T13 excavation will absolutely kill you if you're not prepared (no spoilers). T14 has lunaris piety and dominus, which hurt real bad. T15 has daresso, who will likely destroy you, kaom, who will likely destroy you, and malachai, who will definitely destroy you.

Also no, map tier has zero effect on drop rates. The ONLY thing that affects drop rates is IQ and IR. Higher tier maps "have better drop rates" because we spend more currency on giving them good IQ and IR. There's the argument for farming certain maps for certain divination card drops, but even then no reason to go T13 and beyond unless you're trying to get the div card for a corrupted headhunter I think.

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StDrakeX wrote:

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Hyskoa wrote:

Here, you're forced to spend a demented amount of hours to reach lvl 100.

Simply false. With one of the best builds in the game at the moment it took 99 hours and that's with 3 deaths at level 99 and 1 death at level 98. That set me back maybe 7 hours of mapping but it is doable to do in a reasonable amount of time. Unless you think that's demented?

Yes, yes it is. Calculate the average, not the "about to be nerfed" flavour of the month build.
99 hours for anything means you're playing an MMORPG, not an ARPG. If I wanted to play an MMORPG, I'd play Everquest or World of Warcraft, since there's much more fun things to do.

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taosk8r wrote:

I think most of my gear is top of the line, but my Voltaxic is only 5s/4L and my chest is a tabula, plus my chaos resist is pretty bad.

both those items together cost less than 1 exalt, I wouldnt rly call that top of the line tbh, maybe if we add another 150 exalts to your budget we could get close top of the line for what a temp league has to offer.


Ive played this game for over 10,000 hours, I have 1000s of exalts worth of gear, I chisel, alch, chaos spam for high pack size + iiq and put zana mods on most of my very high maps and I cant sustain red tier maps on my own from a map base that is over 3 years old. I look at your characters and see one in the 50s and one thats lvl85 wearing maybe 2 exalts worth of gear, so maybe your expectations are a bit too high.

Youre lvl85, I could probably hit that level self found in 4 days, I wouldnt expect to have a better map pool in those 4 days than Ive managed to build up in 3 years of playing this game non stop. If I was playing that char from my map base at lvl85 I would be playing t8 maps despite having an abundance of higher maps, I wouldnt even think about loading up a red map at all until I was into the 90s. Chaining t15 maps? Ive had one t15 map drop for me since they were added, I dont even chain t14s on lvl95 characters wearing gear that costs literally 800x more than what you are wearing, characters with over 1000 hours /played on their individual clocks.


Trust me when I say I wouldnt want to be chaining t15s with them. A few months into open beta I was on here complaining about maps, big time complaining, Ill describe the situation I was in. lvl89 with one of the best 6L life tri res glorious plates around on the server, and Id got to lvl89 mostly grinding lvl69 maps, thats tier 2 by the current labeling, and I was getting points where I had no maps at all. I would go to merciless docks, grind it for a few hours and not find a single map to start mapping again with. Trust me I complained a lot, for a long time, I absolutely know how frustrating maps can be and how essentially stopping players playing the game is just bad in every way.


but if you just grind the top tier of maps its boring as fuck, you may underestimate how boring that is seeing as ur highest lvl char is 85. Every hour youve played that char, multiply it by 10 and thats how long you are asking to be restricted to 3 different maps. Its fun to find that +2 amazing map, but ppl dont want to be stuck in Canyon maps at lvl90+ where they just faceroll the world in order to have tiers above that they can find. this is why they added red tier maps, they said ok you want to essentially sustain 77/78 maps because nothing below that is challenging for your op 600+ exalt build in the mid 90s, so we will give you that, but were going to add a few red tier maps on top to still give you something rare and unusually difficult to feel excited about when it drops, most ppl will no be able to sustain these, they are not designed to be sustained they are designed to make grinding the same handful of t10/t11 maps on repeat for months more fun by occasionally giving you something different that you look forward to. Thats why theyre red, to make that distinction.



I currently own about a tab of red maps. How? Well at the end of last league I had 4 in my standard stash, thats how many I naturally had from my 3 year old insanely invested in map base, I had 0 from talisman. Our guild stash merged, Im one of the only ones who plays standard so I took the half a tab of red maps now in guild stash. Everyones coming to an end with this league and ppl in my guild gave me about another half a tab of red maps they had left over, so now I have a tab full, 4 of which are actually from me grinding, I never buy maps.


So how did they get so many? by grinding, essentially. PPl on here talking about running 10 maps and not getting returns, so 5 min per map, 1 min downtime between for vendor, 10 maps, thats 1 hours play. Were playing 6 hours a day, 6 days a week for 3 months straight, and some of us who spend almost that entire time grinding the highest maps they have rolled to extremes ended up with "Im chaining red maps" style map bases, ppl who are hitting lvl98 to 100 and dont even have that kind of map supply until lvl96+. Im sure there were many individual hours of 0 returns in there, thats not at all unusual, its just insignificant in the time frames were talking about to build up a map pool like this.

highest maps I got to drop by myself this league were t11s. Consider I didnt roll maps, if they dropped blue/yellow I ran them that way, most of my maps were run white. I didnt get there by the time I was lvl85, at that point I was exactly where you are, and then when I hit lvl85 on my 5th or 6th character in that league thats where I was at. At some point I stopped running my maps and merged my base with the guild map bank and ran from guild stash, I started transmuting those maps, I had free access to an endless supply of every yellow tier of maps and I ran t8/t9/t10 maps because I wasnt in the 90s where I needed to run t11+. The tt1 maps were there, infinite supply, I didnt feel the need to actually play them with a lvl80something character. t15s? Well theres 5 cores in the guild map bank right now, someone will take them and play them, wont be me because Im leveling up my high lvl characters on standard league, not throwing them into a 10% to 20% xp loss trying to take down a novelty t15 malachai in an 8 mod nightmare core map. The day I stop caring about their xp bars Ill go full mathil and throw them into ubers/cores all day long for funs, thats what that content is there for, its not what you chain to get from lvl85 to lvl86 on your first mapping character.

The buffed maps and zana so much in this last update that honestly non of us should be complaining any more, the flood gates are pretty much open on mapping now, and thats a good thing, but its going to take a bit more effort than hitting lvl85 with an exalt or twos worth of gear on your back. Just dont lose faith and be beaten down by it. Do you want a game where 3 years from now you are still playing and still growing your wealth and capabilities? If yes then understand you cant have everything right now. If no, you want a game where you play it for a week and have everything, go play diablo 3, this is not the game for you and it will just drive you insane. If you dont love the pain and the struggle this isnt the right game to be playing.

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Hyskoa wrote:

99 hours for anything means you're playing an MMORPG, not an ARPG.

no, that doesnt fit with the history of arpgs, at all, dont know where you are getting these ideas from. How many lvl100 diablo 2 characters did you have?

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

The buffed maps and zana so much in this last update that honestly non of us should be complaining any more, the flood gates are pretty much open on mapping now, and thats a good thing, but its going to take a bit more effort than hitting lvl85 with an exalt or twos worth of gear on your back.

^

Don't really need to say more here really. I took a little break around October of last year before the Zana changes were implemented (and partially due to have a boring map pool among r/l things), then when I came back I had zero issue sustaining a decent map pool. It's kept me interested again.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

The buffed maps and zana so much in this last update that honestly non of us should be complaining any more, the flood gates are pretty much open on mapping now, and thats a good thing, but its going to take a bit more effort than hitting lvl85 with an exalt or twos worth of gear on your back.

^

Don't really need to say more here really. I took a little break around October of last year before the Zana changes were implemented (and partially due to have a boring map pool among r/l things), then when I came back I had zero issue sustaining a decent map pool. It's kept me interested again.

The changes to Zana were highly welcome and have made mapping substantially more enjoyable, at least for me.

Zana works well for me, though, because I only run a handful of maps per day. So, her daily and her maps on sale are very helpful for keeping a decent supply of maps available. I can see why those who like to run a lot of maps in a given day might find that RNG is still a potential hindrance to enjoying the game.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

I look at your characters and see one in the 50s and one thats lvl85 wearing maybe 2 exalts worth of gear, so maybe your expectations are a bit too high.

Snorkle should get a MVP white border for taking the time to explain this so thoroughly. Though I'd be surprised if OP actually let this change his mind. I mean he has "Path of Nerfs" in his sig...

I didn't mean to imply my gear was top of the line for the game, just mostly top of the line for my build, or I guess.. Pretty much as close as I'm realistically going to get except for 2 6Ls.

And yeah, I guess I'm less with the whole pain and struggle thing. I really have a hard time imagining this is going to keep me interested past getting a handful more of exalts worth of gear, since the only endgame is mapping to save more money to buy better gear, really. I think that only carries a person so far.

As I mentioned I quit the other game because of the sort of expectation that people will be satisfied farming like zombies endlessly. I get through a few more builds, and I'm probably pretty close to done, especially with no Candiro to help with levelling (Next league).

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MatrixFactor wrote:

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

I look at your characters and see one in the 50s and one thats lvl85 wearing maybe 2 exalts worth of gear, so maybe your expectations are a bit too high.

Snorkle should get a MVP white border for taking the time to explain this so thoroughly. Though I'd be surprised if OP actually let this change his mind. I mean he has "Path of Nerfs" in his sig...

+1 to the vote for MVP

I wish I could type a more detailed response but I get to 3 or 4 words and just can't be bothered. Most people on these forums don't even come here for actual advice anymore just to reconfirm their biased points of view on the state of the game. Also helps that I don't even go to here on my computer (but mostly my phone during work) cause if I was at my PC, I'd be playing the game. That's what's needed simply put. Play the fucking game.

If you want to see how maps in this game works then go to Standard and buy 100 x Precincts at 5c each, chisel + alch, chaos a single pack size with mods you can do without dying and go. You'll see if maps drop rates will need any "buffing" and the answer is no... People just need to learn how to get that base either building it by themselves or just buying it. I see this whinging by a lot of people but if you're a challenge player with a whole lot of currency lying around in the "dumpster" economy of Standard just do this and I hope you'll change your mind.

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taosk8r wrote:

I didn't mean to imply my gear was top of the line for the game, just mostly top of the line for my build, or I guess.. Pretty much as close as I'm realistically going to get except for 2 6Ls.

And yeah, I guess I'm less with the whole pain and struggle thing. I really have a hard time imagining this is going to keep me interested past getting a handful more of exalts worth of gear, since the only endgame is mapping to save more money to buy better gear, really. I think that only carries a person so far.

As I mentioned I quit the other game because of the sort of expectation that people will be satisfied farming like zombies endlessly. I get through a few more builds, and I'm probably pretty close to done, especially with no Candiro to help with levelling (Next league).

Assuming your the character you're talking about is your lvl86 champion voltaix sparker, your gear is kinda bad. Your rings have life rolls of 0 and 15, which is bad, they should be 70+. Your belt has 46, should be 70+. Especially since you're running so many uniques on your build, which have low life. You have no taste of hate, which would boost your survivability greatly since you have no armor. Since you're running spark you would greatly benefit from a 21/20 corrupted 20Q spark, not to mention 21/20 corrupted 20Q support gems. Lots of room for improvement.

Maybe it's time to ask yourself why you play POE. Do you enjoy levelling and trying out many new builds? Do you just want to sit in endgame and farm currency to hoard? Do you want to farm currency to afford a build that you've always wanted to try (best option in perandus)? Do you just want to get your 36(37) challenges and money portal and not touch the game until the next league? Look at what you want you want from the game and adjust your playstyles and expectations accordingly, I would say.