Farming Uber Elder / Guardian maps not rewarding

We all know that farming an elder orb'd white map with full influence / sextants / prophecies / etc is the most rewarding (economically speaking) way to play the game. I don't know whether that's good design, but I'm not even really mad that it is. If I could do something 10-20% less rewarding, but that isn't as monotonous, I'm game.

Unfortunately there's no such thing. The game finds various ways to punish you for not doing the elder blob on an elder orb'd white map thing. For this post I'll focus on Uber Elder farming, because it was my choice of farm for betrayal. I farmed uber elder almost exclusively, leveling from 92 to 98 on the exp gained mostly from T16 guardian maps. I got and sold some decent watcher's eyes, but made far more money off selling regular drops and maps than off uber elder. This wasn't a surprise to me, but it is a fact worth noting.

Uber elder is the biggest bad in the game, the most dangerous fight in the game, and by the logic of any normal game would therefor be the most rewarding thing to farm, if you were able to build a character that could do so safely and efficiently. Unfortunately that's not even remotely close to true.

You are punished for farming guardian maps and uber elder in the following ways:

1) you can't sextant. Not really, anyway. You can sextant one corner out of the 4 corners you have to do, but since swapping the influence between elder and shaper requires you to one-at-a-time the maps, not run 3 at once, you can't get value out of sextants. Also a sextant active on a guardian map shuts itself off when an elder guardian spawns there for some reason.

2) you don't get influenced items. For some unknown reason, elder/shaper influenced guardian maps don't drop elder/shaper influenced items. The guardian itself has a chance to drop influenced items, but you won't get any from clearing the map (the map device will happily eat elder and shaper scarabs, though).

3) dramatically less map drops. Fortunately this league maintaining map pool is pretty easy, but selling maps is still a very profitable thing to do if you farm elder t16s. Not so much if you farm actual T16s. You can sustain, but you're not going to get the heaps of maps you get from elder orb'd maps.

4) dramatically less loot. Pretty much same as 3, less monsters / bad layouts / inability to sextant, all adds up to way less good stuff dropping.

5) less experience. Again related to there being less monsters in guardian maps.

6) 1/3 of your prophecies will be wasted. Prophecies pop when you zone into elder guardian arenas. No idea why, they don't actually do anything. When they fixed it with deadly twins they just forgot to fix all the other prophecies. 1/3 because you do 12 "zones" every 8 maps, and they eat your prophecies.

7) more dangerous. Now, I don't think the increased danger is actually a bad thing, but it should be rewarded with better loot and xp, not less loot and worse xp.

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So those are the down sides, what about the up sides?

1) You get to do 4 different maps and 10 different bosses, instead of 1 This isn't a material reward, just helps preserve player sanity. Every 8 maps you take a break from mapping, and do a couple big bosses (1 uber elder, 1 shaper, since you get 2 sets of fragments).

2) Boss loot. This is presumably meant to be the big reward for all the extra difficulty and shit loot and exp. Except it isn't much reward. One rare shaper drop is worth a little (1 ex for dying sun). None of the uber elder drops are worth anything, except watcher's eyes if you get really lucky. Early league it is a bit better as people still have demand for mark of the shaper and there isn't yet much supply, but the value drops off fast.

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Unfortunately the rewards don't even come close to balancing out the ways you're punished, as compared to elder blobbing. Per map you're looking at maybe 2/3 the rewards. Per unit time, probably less than half.

So, how should this be fixed? I don't actually think we need to buff shaper and uber elder drops. Of course I'd be delighted if that happened, but that kind of thing is too meta dependent, so not a real, permanent solution.

No, the solution is to remove at least some of the ways you get punished for doing uber elder farming.

1) Sextants are fucked. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to fix this without a major overhaul of the atlas mechanics. So probably this one we just have to live with.

2) No influenced items. Easy fix, put them on the drop tables.

3-5) Shit layouts / too few monsters. Sort of medium difficulty fix I guess. They'd have to re-do the maps, so not something that could be done mid-league, but certainly a possible consideration for the next time they change up maps.

6) prophecies get wasted. Easy fix, no zone-prophecies should pop in elder guardian arenas. This is just dumb.

7) Difficulty. It is supposed to be difficult, so keep that, as long as you actually get rewarded for it.

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TL;DR: Please make farming guardians / uber elder less shit, thanks.

Lol, one would indeed think that doing something hard would yield greater rewards. But that's not how RNGesus grants his blessings.

The core of uber elder farming is basic which is the jewel your basically gambling to the very core.

And yes uber elder drops are dog shit most of the time however every uber elder farmer knows this we just shrug it off and go yeah next.

Next x 5600000 times praying for a good jewel to drop.

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The core of uber elder farming is basic which is the jewel your basically gambling to the very core.

And yes uber elder drops are dog shit most of the time however every uber elder farmer knows this we just shrug it off and go yeah next.

Next x 5600000 times praying for a good jewel to drop.

I understand that, but that doesn't mean guardian maps need to be dogshit in so many ways.

Yeah I know we're use to it.

Maybe sextants could affect all four guardian maps like elder influence works when spreading it one map after the other on the four guardian maps despite them having no connection.

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kompaniet wrote:

Maybe sextants could affect all four guardian maps like elder influence works when spreading it one map after the other on the four guardian maps despite them having no connection.

Seems a little clunky. In any case it isn't necessary to fix ALL of the disadvantages of guardian maps, because you do get the shaper frags. If they were still screwed on sextants, but all the other issues were fixed, that would be sufficient.

Incidetnally, shaper frags are worth far more than the expected value of shaper loot, for some reason. Dying sun is worth 1 ex, all the other shaper loot is worth nothing. Yet for some reason a full shaper set is still valued at like ~36 chaos. I don't know what's propping the value of them up (people failing uber elder and doing multiple tries?) but currently it is far more profitable to sell your excess shaper sets than to run shaper with them (and of course much more time efficient as well).

Well, at least one of these things is getting addressed in 3.5.2:

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Fixed a bug where various prophecies were able to trigger when entering Elder and Elder Guardians' arenas, but would not spawn anything.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2314425

Uber elder carry service is...pretty profitable (50c per fights)

Instead of farming watcher's eye from uber elder. You can actually farm watcher's eye in yellow and red tier elder. (40c - 150ex profits)

Farming guardian maps is also very profitable, and you would always get a return from each runs (20c-60c profits)

I'm gonna just assume that you're playing SSF and doesn't trade...so... yeah...

I used to think "Oh yeah, guardian and uber elder is not profitable! Let's not do them!~" Until I decided to do some research, watch some youtube video and try them out myself...and then boom "Monkas flowing into my currency stash"

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Aseki2013 wrote:

Uber elder carry service is...pretty profitable (50c per fights)

Instead of farming watcher's eye from uber elder. You can actually farm watcher's eye in yellow and red tier elder. (40c - 150ex profits)

Farming guardian maps is also very profitable, and you would always get a return from each runs (20c-60c profits)

I'm gonna just assume that you're playing SSF and doesn't trade...so... yeah...

I used to think "Oh yeah, guardian and uber elder is not profitable! Let's not do them!~" Until I decided to do some research, watch some youtube video and try them out myself...and then boom "Monkas flowing into my currency stash"

Seems like you probably should have read the post instead of just replying to the title. I admit it is a pretty long post, but there's not really much point replying at all otherwise.

As I said, I leveled from 92 to 98 almost purely off uber elder farming. That's quite a bit of uber elder. I made ~100 ex profit doing so.

But you'll make a profit no matter what you choose to farm in this game, so making a profit is not a useful barometer. I'd easily have made twice as much in the same amount of /played if I had done elder orbed, elder blobbed underground sea (or city square, or whatever).

The most difficult content in the game should also be the most rewarding. Or at least on par with being the most rewarding. But it isn't, it is dramatically less rewarding than the easier (and much more boring) farming of an elder blobbed/orbed white map.