Thoughts and suggestions from a veteran POE player

I generally don't post to much beyond the occasional bug report but with all the community screaming and changes in 3.19 I felt providing my thoughts on a few things could be helpful.

Archnemesis
Delve Interactions: The removal of heralding from delve is awesome and it was certainly one of two problems with the interaction of delve and Archnemesis. The one I haven't seen discussed is the Permafrost modifier and specifically the vortex ground it creates. In general I think the damage from vortex ground is a bit high through out all content but specifically in delve where you are expected to fight in small arenas it can be a huge problem where the arena basically doesn't have a safe spot.

Conversion Modifiers: I agree that the quality currency and flask drop conversions feel horrible by the time you reach maps. I agree with some of what I have seen from community members with potential fixes to this. For instance adjust it so that the quality currency drops start to favor the rarer currencies more in the later maps to where in red maps you get maybe half the quantity bonus so that your seeing half as many stacks but they consist of far more cartographer's chisels and gemcutters prisms.

With the flask one instead of converting all drops to flasks maybe guarantee at least one flask that has both a top tier prefix and suffix from the available pool so that this would naturally scale through maps. A slight adjustment to the item level requirement for mods so that T1 mods have an item level requirement of 83 on flasks would create a solid curve for improving your flasks while yo progress with T1 mods showing up regularly in T14+ maps.

Kalandra League
Rewards: I generally feel that the Kalandra content is still a bit unrewarding especially for the effort that goes into it. I think Tarke Cat did a great job in his video at communicating how I feel about Lake of Kalandra rewards.

Difficulty: I want to make a specific comment about difficulty. I've been able to regularly build out lakes that have up to a Difficulty 16 tile and past difficulty 12 or 13 it feels almost impossible unless you are at a power level that is trivializing everything in the game. I know this isn't how GGG intends the game to be played so I feel like the difficulty curve needs to be brought down a bit so that the highest difficulty achievable should be in line with about difficulty 12 or maybe 12 right now because above that it unrealistic for 99.9% of the players.

Harvest
Craft Availability: I really think GGG missed the mark on this one with regard to their understanding of how most players interact with Harvest. Outside of less than the top 1% of players people weren't using TFT to buy or sell crafts. Because of this I think the changes have significantly reduced the usefulness of Harvest for everyone which wasn't what I recall the intent being when it was discussed during the reveal event.

In general the types of crafting that GGG seems to believe are to powerful given their perceived tradability in the 3.19 version of harvest would be just as difficult for most players as they were in the old version. I would argue that the players that weren't using TFT before would never have access to them in this league where they could have gotten lucky and seen one in previous versions. Now they aren't available to anyone which means that the massive crafting project to produce twink gear that we start to see by week 3 or 4 of the league doesn't exist anymore. This leaves a giant end game void for a lot of players who play in order to absolutely twink out a build and with those crafting options now gone I expect player numbers after the first month to be exceptionally bad this league.

With this in mind, the last follow-up on feedback contained this line "Harvest's crafting potential without being gated by rarity is just too high."

Add back in the ability to Divine rares through harvest and gate it by rarity because right now this isn't something that is an option at all in trade leagues and would also provide a bit of ease to gearing in SSF leagues. I feel like GGG has constantly been fighting with the idea that they don't want the deterministic crafting the Harvest provided and as a result their decision making around it has been horrible since it was released. Either get on board with what the community wants and get the right people in the room to make sure its in a good place or just get rid of it because it doesn't align with you vision for the game.

The Divine Orb Changes
I like the change because I think the cost to exalt things in a trade league is far more appropriate this league then it has been in the past. With that said the problem is with where Divines and their effect are at. I wonder if GGG has a statistic on the number of divine orbs that have been used in trade league in 3.19 because quite frankly the number should be 0. There is absolutely no reason to ever use a divine for its intended purpose in the current economy unless you are twinking gear and have an unlimited flow of currency.

It used to be that on very good end game items you would consider using an exalt if it had an open affix and could potentially become super valuable or was just your end game item and anything was better than nothing. You used to use divines to reroll uniques because it could be cheaper to buy one that was horribly rolled and hit it with a couple divines and have some great or at least better for a little less. I like the fact that we aren't just divining uniques and that there is significant value in finding one that is well rolled. Its exciting, which seems to be what GGG wants.

Where the divine orb is really missing is on rares. Think about the situation where I'm trying to fit in a new pair of gloves but when I equip them I'm a single point of strength short. In the past I'd look through my gear, see if I had a poorly rolled strength stat somewhere and likely throw a divine at it to solve my problem without too much effort. In this league that isn't an option. The effect is that its much harder for me to use the items I'm actually picking up and rares in general seem more expensive. This means I feel like I'm progressing slower because I have to play longer to acquire useful upgrades.

With regard to play time and progression the abundance of methods for acquiring exalts through div cards, shards, etc...meant that I could generally see my cash on hand growing every hour played. With divines I don't have this so while I still get the occasional divine drop I never have the smaller moments of excitement when I get two exalt shards or a 'The Hoarder' div card. I think the less frequent gear upgrades even though they tend to be more impactful combined with the rarity of Divines in general compared to Exalts is a big reason players feel so bad about loot this league.

Loot
Let me start by saying that I haven't felt as bad about loot this league as the community at large seems to have but I do have some thoughts.

Drop Quantity: Loot explosions as the community tends to call them can be exciting but they can also be demoralizing. This is evident by the feedback that explosions of low tier quality currency and flasks feels bad. I actually don't have a problem with those other than the space they take up on my screen. But that leads me to my next problem with the quantity of rares dropping with high level bases this league. At first glance it seems like that is a good thing but after a little playing with it I can't stand it.

The quantity of rare drops post changes this league means I've been regularly toggling the visibility of loot on and off during fights because I'll kill something and suddenly can't see half my screen. On top of that the toggling regularly bugs out so that I can't toggle off the loot until I leave the map and because rares are dropping on higher tier bases its really hard to setup a general filter that can effectively mitigate the issue.

Drop Quality: I think this is where GGG would really like to make improvements but has missed the mark on doing so because they haven't properly realized where the issue lies. My impression from all of Chris Wilson interviews and other media presentations is that in general GGG wants players to feel like the items they are picking up and identifying are useful. I understand how improving the tier of the base items that are dropping might be seen a way to improve this but it doesn't help anything when you still identifying item level 86 rares with a 4% resistance modifier on them.

Possible Solution: Here is my thought on how to fix loot drops in a way that would allow GGG to back down the quantity of drops while also improving the quality of drops in such a way that I believe would make the system feel much better for everyone.

Make item level more impactful by not only enabling higher tier modifiers but by having it block lower tier modifiers. Right now there is zero impact that I'm aware of to having an item level over 86. Lets change that and make it so that as the item level gets so much above the required level of a tier it no longer rolls that tier.

Lets use an example of Life on Body Armour; there are 13 tiers of this modifier on body armour ranging from a required item level of 1 to 86. so lets ay that up to 83 there is no change. But lets say at item level 84-86 the lowest tier modifier is disabled. From 87-90 the lowest 2 tiers are disabled. Extrapolate this out to a level 100 item (only available from specific div cards an as event rewards) and you have the lowest 6 tiers removed. You still have 7 tiers of modifiers that could roll for life on that item but now your getting a minimum of at least 60 life.

What does this mean for the game? Well to start with lets talk about where the change would actually apply. Item level 100 items are the product of divination cards so that can be pretty easily controlled but would actually add significant value to getting a top tier base but would also mean that it would be a targetable option for getting a good crafting base for SSF. Item level 84-86 items are pretty common in late red maps but losing only one base would have minimal impact on the quality of rares but at least you'd no longer see a 3 life roll on a 86 item.

Item level 87-89 is coming out of uber pinnacle bosses, strongboxes with the correct item level and item level affix, or from abysses with the proper atlas notables. These aren't going super rare and will be affordable for most players if they want to craft their own item. Item level 90-99 I believe is restricted at this time to a very specific situation with Olmec's Sanctum so these would probably be rarer than item level 100 bases if there were no changes to divination card drop rates.

This change would have almost no impact prior to red maps if implemented with a scope in line with what I presented above but one you reach red maps and specifically farming T14+ maps. The impact for players farming T14+ maps would likely be noticeable but not game breaking. The higher item level dropping in T16 maps primarily would have less than a 10 percent change in their map pool with item level 100 bases from div cards seeing maybe as much as a 30% reduction depending on the details of implementation.

The impact on end game crafting would be more profound, especially in an environment where there is almost no access to deterministic methods. Removing just 30% of the mods (item level 100 base not considering influence modifiers) would make spamming chaos or the effectiveness of tainted/elder currency crafting methods much more reasonable without having to make fundamental changes to how they work.

This is a wall of text and I didn't think I'd have this much to say so thank you for taking the time to read about my thoughts and ideas.

Follow-up thought on the item level solution: Archnemesis modifiers could be backed off of providing so much quant and rarity in exchange for increasing the item level of drops to allow a 4 mod rare to potentially drop item level 90-100 items that aren't currently easily accessed in the game.