Exalted Orbs are too iconic to devalue; keep them for Meta-mods while making Divines more rare!

I really like a lot of what GGG does. Their sound design is great, I enjoy the game a lot, the visuals and story are cool, the expansions are hype—but then there are decisions that I just don't understand.

I don't want to assume the worst (or, really, assume anything) about them. They're people too. They enjoy the game just like I do. They're just trying to improve the game, just like I am with this suggestion! But I'm concerned about this Exalted Orb/Divine Orb change. I can see their reasoning, but I feel like their solution brings up some significant problems, which is why they're receiving so much negative feedback. Same thing was true for the implementation of Archnemesis mods last league, which as Chris mentioned, they came to agree with the feedback and have now greatly improved its implementation. So I hope that through these discussions, we can come to a mutual understanding and a better solution.

This change brings about a main problem: devaluing Exalted Orbs and their associated Divination Cards. Exalted Orbs are what people really look forward to, in terms of drops. They're iconic. Frankly, they look much more cool than every other currency besides perhaps the Mirror of Kalandra. It's really exciting for one to drop, because it's used for the most powerful crafting options in the game: the metamods like "Prefixes/Suffixes cannot be Changed" which are so valuable for crafting high-end gear. It wasn't really the "add a modifier to a Rare item" that made Exalted Orbs valuable, but the meta-mod usage. That's why it became a big currency item, which is why everyone loves seeing them drop. That's why we have so many Divination Cards based around Exalted Orbs. That's why those card supporters are probably upset—the value of their card is no longer commensurate with its rarity and design, because Exalts have lost most of their value.

I understand the desire to make uniques more unique, so to speak, and to make Divine Orbs worth more. But this could have been done by simply making Divines more rare - removing the Divine vendor recipe would already greatly increase their market value, since that's the majority of where Divines enter the market from. But the team also decided to make them the Metamod material, making Exalts worth far, far less. Now, when an exalt drops or an exalt div card drops, many of us will just feel bitter. Something that used to excite us doesn't gain us much value anymore.

I feel like a more elegant solution would have been:

1. Make Divines more rare (via removing the recipe)
2. Change Exalts to be primarily Metamod focused, so they don't augment rare items anymore
3. Add a new currency or method, or rework another existing currency, for augmenting ("slamming") rare items with an additional mod.

This seems to achieve their goals: make uniques more unique and rare in their mod rolls, increase the rarity and scarcity of Divine Orbs, and increase the availability for augmenting rares via a "slam" currency, so to speak, since that is one of the big reasons for wishing to decouple Exalted Orbs from meta-mods. But this solution avoids the downside of devaluing Exalted Orbs, iconic and exciting as they rightfully are, along with their many Divination Cards.

There are other solutions to this, too—I'm not saying my idea is perfect—but the goal is to keep the excitement and value of Exalted Orbs, and so keeping the value of their divination cards, et cetera, by keeping the actual valuable part of Exalts (meta-mod currency), while allowing for augmenting rares and doing "slams" and such via a cheaper, alternate method. That's really my only frustration with the new league changes: losing the value of something as exciting and iconic as Exalted Orb drops and replacing it with something incredibly rare that you can only target farm by running Villa over and over again, for the one sole Divination Card for Divine Orbs.

Here's the problem: 99% of divines comes from Div cards, that only work with the recipe. Ex are as rare as Divines and it doesn't have shards and Divines are used substantially more as is. Economy will be completely shit xd