Not worth to pick up ANY items

"

ZL0J wrote:

I'm talking about standard league. At least a quarter of players still play here (according to last statistics from GGG). That is a lot.

2 years ago it was awesome. You were sometimes finding some nice 1 ex worth items, sometimes bumping into something really good and sold it for 5-15 ex.

1 year ago it was not that good but tolerable. I don't want to research at which point exactly did they add item filters but they were good to filter out bad base items so you were still finding some decent stuff that was possible to sell for 1-5 ex. 6-links became really abundant so trading those stopped being profitable time-wise.

Now. Ran Shaped T15 Courtyard with 180% IIQ, ridiculous pack size, max sextants with twinned bosses prophecy. Bosses dropped around 300 rare items in total, filtered down to around 80. While I was sorting through this pile of loot I was thinking only about one thing: why am I even doing this? I can't recall when was the last time I identified a rare item that sold for more than 30 chaos. Probably more than a month ago. Most of really decent (for example 3-res + life gloves) items sell for 5-8 chaos and it's not like it sells immediately. Those are still as rare as they were 2 years ago.
Given the exalt price is at 120 chaos at the moment - one doesn't even need to make any calculations: it is not feasible to pick up any rare items anymore in standard. The time you spend on identifying items may as well just be used to run more maps: if your atlas is 100+ then you can sustain maps of T13+ indefinitely if you only run rare with a bit of pack size. Currency you loot from maps at this point as well as selling maps of T12-T13 outweights the time spent on identifying the rare loot. This point was probably reached much sooner than I am writing this post.

This makes me sad. This game is all about grinding, obviously. When rarity of top tier unique items was nerfed - it was tolerable. But now you can't even get excited about a random rare drop with great stats that will sell good.

Pretty sure it was not intended this way in the beginning. GGG, do something. Your initial base concept for this game has finally decayed and died in standard, which hosts a quarter of your player base.

"

Tarille wrote:

The way I see it, a variety of design choices have lead to this "No point picking up items" thing.

A major one is balance between different kinds of builds. Pretty much all top tier builds are ES and use Crit. Since, ES gets the most EHP, to absorb one shots and Crit is the best way to amplify your damage (Given that it also makes status effects also good). So this pushes the economy into a singular build. ES and Crit items are sought after to be sold, everything else is worth nothing. But this causes oversaturation and of course brings prices down.

Next up is unidentified recipes. Making it not worth actually seeing what items are, you just get your set and plonk it into the vendor and get your cash. The chances of finding an actual BiS item raw are so slim that there's really no drawback from unid recipes.

Then Uniques being trash. Like, 99% of uniques are crap. Hell, even as a SSF player, where any unique should in theory have merit, even if just for levelling, I'm vendoring the vast majority of uniques. All because, they intentionally designed Rares to be the best items in the game for stats, with uniques being only useful for some particularly useful mod (For example, Skyforth has garbage stats compared to a well rolled Rare. But it gives PCoC as a global effect. So it becomes godlike for Crit builds).
This means the rarer drops, that require rarer currencies to reroll in an attempt to get the best stats for the item, are worth LESS than just finding one of the top tier bases, throwing a bunch of alts on it, then a Regal and a Mastercraft. So yeah... Why bother picking up all these rares when you can just sit in town throwing hundreds of alts at a base and essentially "Pick up" hundreds of rares in 0 time flat?

This is apparently an intentional design too. I think I recall a loading screen tip that mentioned something along the lines of "Uniques aren't as powerful as endgame items, but they often have build defining effects". Which just boggles my mind, since it's intentionally making the easy to obtain crafted items worth more than the rare to find Uniques. I think the only exception is for Life Builds where Belly and Kaom's are BiS because of having more life stats than any Rare can achieve (But with both Kaom's items having the drawback of no sockets and few other stats...)

Uniques being awful also impacts the oversaturation of the economy. Since, instead of needing to go farm specific bosses for uniques, various tilesets and what not... You can literally just go Shaped Strand 24/7 and farm up BiS gear to sell because you get currency to then spam alts on common bases to craft BiS gear...

So yeah... I don't think that loot filters are the major issue (They mostly just helped with the oversaturation of the economy, by making it faster for people to tear through maps and only pick up the efficient stuff such as larger orbs and items that vendor for bunches of orbs), but instead, a number of design choices all collaborating towards this "Speed Meta" and very one dimensional economy.