"Garbage Loot" Lets talk about it.

Many complain that loot in this game is garbage.

Let's define garbage loot: "drops that are not worth picking up, not worth using and not worth trading."

If loot drops are reduced by 99%, then what does drop would be far more likely to be a desired upgrade for you or another player.

The answer to the garbage problem comes from multiple angles:

1) links need to be separate from gear to make using gear you find easier (PoE 2 fixes this)

2) Far less loot needs to drop. Maybe Ruthless will fix this?

Ruthless wouldn't help this predicament except tangentially because the system is built around 99.9999% of player power coming from gear and gear alone. So, it would take a drastic reduction of monster power for wearing garbage loot to be the norm for players or for it to feel good.

Let ruthless be for sadist no lifers which is who the target audience is for that sort of thing.

people wearing garbage gear doesnt mean it isnt garbage gear

it just means their character is gimped and cant progress until they grind X amount of time to upgrade into 'not garbage' gear.

ruthless is just going to show the absolute insane disparity between OP spells and attacks.

pick a spell that has good gem level scaling. use the 40% quality gems + weapon -> +1 spell level weapon vendor recipe. regal, craft more damage on it, wear to endgame. hell, wear 2 because you're a spellcaster and are already safer than anyone trying to melee.

take some resist nodes and some extra defensive nodes on the passive tree because +2 gem levels and a 5 link is enough to actually kill things with spells, and get used to everyone running grace+determ+banner AGAIN.


people have done it all ssf, ruthless is not going to be compelling or even interesting after the first 2 weeks.

You're definitely right that GGG needs to balance archetypes. No argument there.

If all you have available to wear is raggedy threadbare cloth, then raggedy threadbare cloth with a few less holes in it is worth picking up, and worth trading for. But that doesn't mean it's not garbage.

Gear should be judged by how well it helps you stay alive and kill mobs. If it doesn't do that, it's garbage, even if it's marginally better than the garbage you're currently wearing.

The problem with loot drops in PoE is too much of the loot that drops is useless. Just turning down the drop rate so that fewer things drop doesn't suddenly make the garbage that does drop kill mobs better.

It's all relative. Imagine that GGG made items drop with 2000 life, 2000 mana, and +1000% more damage and made them as common as wisdom scrolls. All of sudden, all the mirror-tier loot currently in the game becomes garbage.

This is why my original definition for garbage makes sense and yours doesn't.

Gear either helps you stay alive and kill mobs, or it doesn't. Most loot that drops in this game, the vast majority of loot that drops, doesn't help. That's why it's garbage.

Just because suddenly a lot less loot drops doesn't make the garbage that does drop help you stay alive and kill mobs. It's still garbage. Just because you end up trading garbage gear because that's all there is doesn't mean it's not garbage.

That's why your definition of garbage doesn't make sense.

OP, Point two won't fix anything, at all. If it takes 2000 items to drop to get one piece of good loot now, and it evens out to 2k items drop a map, you get one good item a map.

If you reduce that number, then all you do is make the player run more maps to get that one good item. So if in Ruthless, 100 items drop a map, then it will take 20 maps to get one good piece of loot to drop. Your idea doesn't make good items drop more often, it makes the one good item drop less often since less loot is being generated.

Whether loot is garbage is not defined by it's trade value. Tradevalue is a useless metric because it mostly stems from supply. No matter how great an item is, if it's common it won't be worth anything. Whether loot is garbage depends on how good/useful the item is and here is where the issues are.

Most uniques have mediocre/bad stats sometimes even accompanied with major downsides that aren't even remotely worth dealing with when looking at the upsides. GGG completely forgets an important aspect when designing uniques. Its that picking a unique for a slot already comes at the cost of losing a bunch of stats that a rare would give you. That alone would send many uniques to the never used category even if they didn't have a downside because their upside isn't worth it. But they even slap a downside on it as well for good measure.

Then there is rares which have 2 issues. The first is that the best items literally can't drop. Be it dual conq influence items or items with dual tier 6 eldritch influence, none of them can drop. They need to be gambled for using currency. The second issue is how extremely unlikely it is for a rare with decent stats to drop. There are 6 affixes per item and the pool they choose from is filled to the brim with useless filler stuff that's literally just there to reduce the chances of good stuff dropping like reflect. So getting 6 useful affixes on an item is already on the probability level of winning the lottery. But it doesn't end there. Even if you get 6 useful affixes, they also have to have decent tiers. Pretty much everything below tier 5 is useless if you are looking for endgame items and the chances for even one affix rolling tier 2 or 1 is laughably low, not to mention that you'd need that to happen 6 times.

So no, reducing the amount of loot will do nothing about it's usefullness. As long as the core issues mentioned above aren't addressed the loot in this game will mainly currency and fragments. Items will remain a waste of time no matter how many of them drop. If anything, reducing the number dropping will reduce the chances for the noobs who don't know anything about all of this and pick them up nonetheless.

They need to completely redesign 90% of the uniques, get rid of most of the downsides they have and either boost their signiture trait or change/improve their other stats so the cost from not using a rare isn't that big. So many uniques not having any resists or life is alredy a no go as far as usage is concerned.
As for rares, the only solution that comes to mind would be tying the tiers to item level to some extent. Ilevel 86 items shouldn't be able to end up with a 5 life mod on them. They should have significantly higher chances of getting good rolls. There will still be the hurdle of the best loot being drop disabled and the issue with getting 6 proper affixes but if the chances of getting 3 or 4 reasonable high rolls aren't essentially zero anymore then it might be worth picking up rares dropped from endgame bosses, maybe not for hardcore grinders for the rest of us. If good items become cheaper because of it, then i'd consider that an upside. This games difference between rich and poor is already ridiculously high where the rich do hundreds of millions of dps while most normal players don't even break the 10 million mark. Reducing that gap a bit would actually be healthy for overall balance.

/edit There is also the issue of complete lack of QoL in regards to loot which just increases the opportunity cost to picking it up. In the time it takes to pick up 10 rares, id them and then sell them to the vendor you could just run another map. Bigger inventory, items dropping identified and loot filters filtering by specific stats would go a long way on it's own.

Generally, if you want to know how loot and crafting is done right, look at last epoch. Perfectly done Qol, average items can easily be crafted and top tier items can only drop but the drops are rare and there is still rng gates there so it's not like anyone has top tier items after setting foot in maps.

Naw loot is garbage because the loot pool is too big and contains too many things for too many different characters. It's that way because it's designed around trading first and foremost. It's that simple.

Now getting rid of sockets is a huge step forward. The next huge step is fixing resistances to not be percentage based and balancing the game around having them maxed.

Ruthless could only fix a problem if you honestly and truly believed that gear existed in a vacuum and not in the context of allowing people to do content. Most gear is garbage because it doesn't forward to goal of doing higher level content. Gear is not some magical thing divorced from gameplay like Chris and other people think it is, it's a content access token, it's just like a map in a sense. Garbage loot happens not because it's not better than your current gear, it happens because it's not better than what you need to kill monsters. The only thing Ruthless can solve is teaching people that the definition of gear being good isn't relative to other gear, it's relative to playable content.

Harvest was of course the perfect solution to this, but the people who were post endgame and had done all the content were making powerful gear, and somehow they necessitate balance changes. They do not, and thinking about those people as anything but a curiosity as gotten PoE into this mess.