The Larger Issue with Crafting and the Current State of Items in the Game

Quote from one of the many Harvest nerf threads on these forums -

"

They removed the intuitive crafts and made the remainder unusable on the only items that matter in the game.

See that bolded part? That's the real problem. Reddit thread on that issue -

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/mk9j0n/influenced_mods_were_a_mistake_they_are_the/

"

Influenced mods were a mistake: They are the reason why so many unique items feel bad. They copied “unique mods” that usually came with a drawback and gave them to rare items without drawbacks and even allowed them to have multiple of those Unique mods at once.

Power creepers might think otherwise because it’s more and easy power but it’s an overall net Negative for the game itemization as a whole

Before influence you had to make a choice between multiple uniques and which special mod you prefered over others, now you have them all in one or 2 items

Some other excerpts -

"

What about some more ascendancy classes on rare gear?

"

Uniques were supposed to be worse than well rolled rares, but now uniques are worse than decent rolled influence rares. In some slots, uniques (i.e. weapon) they are quite bad.

I'd wear a decent influenced chest over legacy kaoms with a perfect tailoring orb. I'd wear an explody chest over everything except if I was a summoner or low life.

"

They also make normal rares feel bad. If there is a build enabling influence mod in a slot (chest explode for example) any item without that mod is worthless. How good would a non-influenced chest have to be to compete with an influenced one? I don’t think 5 t1 mods would even do it for life chests. This means that life chest drops might as well be disabled in most scenarios.

"

It's not only unique items that become obsolete, all non-influenced gear quickly becomes obsolete because crafting is king. And there is no reason to waste vast amount of crafting materials on "subpar" items, you will only invest when you already have the right base (basically a ilvl 86 influenced base) since the costs are the same.

This by itself makes so 99,99% of the non-influenced rares worthless to ever pickup. For a loot-based game the fact that you have literally 0,0% chance of dropping a BiS piece of gear(since those can only be obtained through crafting), makes losing your time identifying random rares even worse.

The best solution would be probably just removing influenced items from the game (keeping the affixes) and making so influenced affixes can only roll on natural drops (so you can't roll influenced affixes when crafting, unless you use the conq orbs).

This would make picking up random rares exciting again, and move a little the game out of the "collect currency ignore all else" situation, which would also help slowing down the game

Yes, you put the finger on the sorepoint.

The sad thing is that players themselves asked for more unique modifiers on rare items.

Came in here pitchfork at the ready, but instead I completely agree, and have for awhile that influenced items and their mods are bad for the game overall in their current implementation.

Explody is broke. Rest ok.

Basically everyone goes explody because clear and survival (porcupines, detonate dead, etc) and it lets a half ass toon do 600 lvl mines where 300 starts to be troublesome ordinarily.

I forgot Deli, Another one where explody shines big because it gains power as mobs get more HP. Ridiculous.

I cant do delis without this


But can just fine without these, etc

"

Aim_Deep wrote:

Explody is broke. Rest ok.

Basically everyone goes explody because clear and survival (porcupines, detonate dead, etc) and it lets a half ass toon do 600 lvl mines where 300 starts to be troublesome ordinarily.

I forgot Deli, Another one where explody shines big because it gains power as mobs get more HP. Ridiculous.

Small tale from like, 3 hours ago: was chatting with 2 other players on global20 about the Harvest issue, and someone brought up the explody survivability angle. I was literally doing a map with porcupines, with a gladiator that detonates enemies who die bleeding. Basically the same moment he talked about explody's safety, I almost died to porcupines.

I ran some experiments and realized that when a big enough group was gathered, some porcupines were being killed by my explosions instead of my bleed, so that made sense...

It was then that it hit me just how fucking broken Explode-chains were. No threat, no chance, no drawback, attack 1 guy once, an entire map could get wiped out without offering you any challenge.

Maybe deleting chain explosions altogether would turn the mod from BIS to worthless, and that isn't how balancing should be done, but I think there should be some chance involved. Maybe it could be tied to distance from character, so that enemies who are at the edge of your screen don't vaporize or something, infinite chains are just crazy.

A dropped rare must be able to compete with a 2 affix awakener orbed item or it will always be useless outside of the first 3 days of a league.

Lots of ways to do it. Hopefully we see something good in 3.14.

"

DiabloImmoral wrote:

A dropped rare must be able to compete with a 2 affix awakener orbed item or it will always be useless outside of the first 3 days of a league.

Lots of ways to do it. Hopefully we see something good in 3.14.

An elegant solution would be that sirus can drop double influenced rare well rolled with the new system.
Same with maven for elevated mod.
And maybe in some other places. that would be dope

"

Exile009 wrote:

Quote from one of the many Harvest nerf threads on these forums -

"

They removed the intuitive crafts and made the remainder unusable on the only items that matter in the game.

See that bolded part? That's the real problem.

i think the real problem is the mentality of the player base. this sums it up as well

"

the only items that matter in the game

you know what that is saying? its saying that the only things that matter is whats the strongest. literally everything else is GARBAGE and unusable.

the same goes for skills, ascendancies, maps, farming options and the like. majority of this community has this ingrained into their brains that the only thing worth a damn is exactly the most powerful option.

explodey chest exists? i can't have any other chest in the game because its useless. i can't do anything in the game including yellow tier maps because i don't have an explodey chest!

its ridiculous, but there ya go

While i agree completely with the overall sentiment, poe has a kinda of exponential graph problem going on.

Getting gear to "complete" all the game with a meta skill is indeed easy. Getting gear to "complete" all the game with a shit skill is indeed hard.
Most builds are in the middle term of that thou.

In Poe every upgrade doesn't raise your power linearly as it should be in a perfect world, in most cases it raises your power exponentially. So of course people will want more and more "scaling" mechanics, and most of those scaling mechanics are behind the influenced affixes/unique items.

But the biggest "problem" is the perception between the theoretical possible and the "impossible". Harvest turned a lot of the "impossible"(good double influenced rares) into the possible, while maven introduced new "impossible" goals(triple+ elevated items). But in the end all harvest did was giving players one extra layer of progression.

If before you would stop gearing at life+res, now you take an extra step to include an influenced affix into the mix. It's just one extra layer of itemization, but one extra layer of itemization is already big for the feeling of progressing your character, and can keep players entertained for an extra day, week or month(based on playtime).

The fact remains thou, that items that drop are boring, and you have to craft(or trade) to get great items since they can't even drop. Something that ideally should be an option and a tool(crafting and trade), is the whole process of improving a character.

That's why, in my personal opinion, giving more power to dropped loot (giving it the potential to be exciting) and removing power from crafting would be healthy for the game. Everyone laughs at diablo 3 itemization, but remove the influenced affixes and PoE rares in most slots are mostly just life+resistances, which starts to get boring for people that have been playing this game for almost a decade already.

Also chain explosions is an inherently bad mechanic that should not even exist in the game, but that's not what this post is about lol.

Man as an ssf player I swear I'm playing a completely different game.

The game feels great. Every item means something.

I dunno. I came to terms with POE long time ago. I can't change the game, but I can change the way i play it. :)

Best decision i've ever made in POE lol (bar some lucky exalt slams).