What Happened with Items

Let us for a moment, imagine Joe Average.
Joe's a reasonable mid 20's dude who games less than he'd like and more than his girlfriend or mother would want him to.
He has a job and social responsibilities though so he limits his screen time to 3 hours a day with half of that spent in game.
Joe particularly enjoys ARPG genre where the game Puppies of Erebor has caught his undivided attention.
But something has happened. Puppies of Erebor developers have drastically changed the gameplay and reward loop.
Joe happens to be pretty smart and has a tool that has allowed him to track his in game profits during gameplay accurately and time relevant. He decides to compare the graphs from previous league of Puppies of Erebor to the current one.
What he sees is that in previous league, where a single instance would be cleared every three minutes (Joe's entirely average in his clearspeed), and every second instance features some sort of previous league mechanic, his profits oscillate between 3 and 8 puppy orbs by instance with about one in ten of these instances rewarding him with 40 puppy orbs. This means that every 100 instances Joe has 870 orbs to work with upgrading his build or making a new build.
He compares this graph to the current league where again, he sees an oscillating graph. Except this one has a low point of 1 and high point of 3 puppy orbs (again, one in every two instances offers an older league mechanic only this time greatly nerfed) while every 50 instances he gets 350 puppy orbs from a super rare RNG gated event. This means that Joe technically earns 894 puppy orbs per 100 instances cleared in this league. He's actually getting MORE orbs this league.
And yet, Joe quits Puppies of Erebor. Not because he got more loot but because to clear 100 instances takes him almost 5 days of gaming which means that he grinds for 4 days getting next to nothing for his effort in the hope that on the fifth day he might get that RNG gated event. Which isn't guaranteed. Nor is it guaranteed that he'll be able to clear the event.

Now, to step back from our imagination, what the hell did you think was going to happen when you gated the vast majority of drops behind completely RNG events of finding an Arch Nemesis monster with the mods you yourself announced to be RARE and lucky find?
Who thought that was a good idea?

the entire archnemesis loot gamble feels horrible.
we have to look at every rare, and if we find a whatever-touched we have to log out before it dies and join with our MF-cull character to play optimally. The loot diffirence is staggering. This feels horribly interruptive and i hate it!
i would like the drops to be spread out on all the mobs.
And by the way the AN that gives flasks or quality currencies, they are just absolutely worthless after you've met a few. noone needs that many whetstones or flasks... they just remove whatever good drops you could've had!

also: "we added a dedicated reward for Beyond: Tainted Currency Items." this is bogus, as most of these tainted currencies are just ready to get thrown into the dumpster with the current chances.

but in generel even though you really messed up this leaguestart, i hope you will continue striving for making a better POE.

PS: some minions are not tanky enough in this patch, its so annoying! some builds are just horribly hit by the , as some AN monsters just melt them completely.

*grabs popcorn

Took a couple of days off and played about 5 hrs today. Loot drops are basically fine right now equipment-wise. Important mods like +life seem to be much higher on average which is nice. Currency is much better too. It's just that Sentinel dropped so much completely random stuff that it still feels like a big step down.

The Lake mechanic was poorly designed though imo, too many narrow pathways to follow to effectively kill shit. I understand you didn't want it to be an empty wasteland but there's seriously too much crap in the way. I'm playing a caster now and it feels like I'm just blasting rocks or petrified trees most of the time. The zones should have been a little bigger.

pog

For what it's worth, I agree with the changes in spirit. I'm one of the people who agrees that harder rares, even ones that are more difficult and mechanically complex that the map bosses is an interesting idea - the way rare items can become better than unique items given modifiers.

I feel that these sorts of blowouts are inevitable as things are dialed back in speed for PoE2, a winnowing of the community is inevitable as the people who only play to press buttons and make lights happen fall out and the people who want to "Spend ten minutes fighting a rare" take their place.

Demographics shift over time, and nobody likes being on the way out.

I'd rather have a game made with a personal vision - and the accompanying personal mistakes that come with it - rather than a game made to make fans happy. Fans are idiots. I'm an idiot. Everyone in this thread is an idiot. You shouldn't be trying to make us happy, and some would argue that Archnemesis has been proof positive that you absolutely aren't.

I admire that. I like it. I respect the fortitude it's going to take to see the active players drop and say "The scope is changing and this is a consequence." I hope you don't give up on the vision.

The playerbase will come along, in whatever form the new game demands. I'll be there, so long as I can still taste the vision, and so long as you never try to put my tastes over your own.

I'm looking forward on the fixing of archnemesis monsters, especially the magic monsters (the blue ones). Please make a test map with only magic monsters and test it, they are hard to kill, very threatening and very unrewarding. Players with extreme dps doesn't care about them, they kill them like white mobs and zoom thru.

I'm not a big fan for rare mobs for a long time, mainly due to the reason the power in strength given to them is too huge, I'll prefer a more balanced in strength, example
a) tanky but greatly reduce in dmg
b) dangerous dmg, but can be killed easily (this is still bad for HC players)
c) plz remove all form of HP/ES recovery of mobs just increase its Max HP/ES, the killing speed of a high/low dps build won't change, fast will still be fast, slow will still be slow, but regen causes a minimum dps to kill effect which is very bad.
d) do not increases both accuracy and dmg, this is too deadly against evasion build. Evasion build getting any thing hit once is already scary enough.
e) do not increases any crit chance/dmg for spell casting mobs. This is really powerful. Spell don't miss. Getting crit dmg reduction from hits passive is highly ineffective for most build and making it compulsory is even worse.
f) never buff physical dmg spells, to encourage more CI build.

A evasion build was good before, now any archnemesis mob can kill it easily.

If feels like all the years of hard work fixing the game goes down to drain.

I understand there is a need to encourage MF build, and preventing drop abuse from a 5-6 Mods stacking rare. But this should be done surgically, you should only target the problematic Mods, not just lazy do a global change, its irresponsible.

And Archnemesis mods over every content is a global change too, very irresponsible. Advise to do thing in a smaller scale next time.

Last piece of advice, POE is well known game now, every new league, 90% of the players will be old players who has a lot of knowledge in the game.

not cool

your "fixes" are not fixes either

There is just one problem with all of this. This game is a H&S MMORPG, in these kind of games only one thing matters, LOOOOOOOOOT.
Reducing LOOOOOT droprate is the worst warcrime you can do in the game that is centered around LOOOT.

Also one thing that might be new to the devs, most ppl play this game to have fun. If they have fun they play, if they don't they won't.
I play for challenges and if I have 36-38 I stop playing IF the league is meh, if I like it, I play it after that as well, try new/fun/meme builds and have even more fun.
IF the league is boring and the nerfs are becoming a hinderence, I reduce the challenges to a rate I even don't care and stop playing.

One last thing, Chris can play the huffy one, but ppl are angry on the game because they REALLY LIKE THE GAME AND CARE. I have over 6k hours played since open beta, some leagues I loved some I didnt, but never ever EVER had the urge to stop playing, even in nerf league.
I personally felt the inability to sustain alch&go on maps, I had lucky drops early on so I cant say a thing, on day2 I got my brass dome that I 6linked in 2 fusings.)

Ninja nerfs are the distrust towards the playerbase and it's always enraging.
don't do that.

It was initially a bad idea to change the drop rate. Return the drop chances as it was in the last league, I beg you GGG. You will be shocked by how many of your problems are solved instantly. Thank you

Loot is not fine.

6 man party, fully juiced map... no way should it be acceptable for the game to have a single loot pinata kill drop a stack of 50 divine orbs.


For us solo players most all special league mechanics in maps are completely unrewarding.

The last Blight I successfully completed in a map:
- 2 of 6 chests dropped nothing at all (I assume your loot cull was at work here). - 2 of 6 chests dropped complete crap that was hidden by the map filter, barring one rare item, which I deemed crap and ignored.
- 2 of 6 chests were oil chests, which dropped 1 clear oil each.
Really?

Barring 3.19, never in my entire time playing POE have I ever gotten multiple oil chests with such little return. The oil chests used to be explosions of several oils each. And when bad RNG, while the explosions would all be low tier oils, at least they were explosions, and not a single clear oil.

And my last Blight outcome wasn't a one off. It's the status quo of the league. I have done every map Blight I have encountered this league. I have yet to fail a map blight this league. All told I have a whopping 5 clear and 3 sepia oils. That's astoundingly bad, and completely useless.

Breaches are bad. Deliriums are bad, hell, I had one that didn't drop a darn thing at the end, barring me pressing my hotkey to see what the filter hid, which in effect means dropped nothing at the end.

Your pushing of item drops to the Archnemesis rares is sorely ffffing up the drops in the rest of the game, not mention that random rares should not be more dangerous and harder to kill than the boss of the map.

It's ludicrous to be in the midst of battle with a couple of Archnemesis rares, hear the sound effects of map a boss you didn't even realize was there, and continue the fight as if the boss wasn't even there.