bit of pushback against comments chris made recently regarding the ex/div switch

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Cyzax wrote:

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Echothesis wrote:

Which brings us full circle around: now divines are too expensive to be used by most people, so by your logic it would be a LOT of sense for GGG to make another same change, but for divines this time.

Actually no, because there is one huge hole in your argument... 'Most people' don't use Divines...

Divines are a min-max tool, usable only by the few.
Exalts are a general tool, usable by everyone.

Divines were widely used by everyone previously, relayively available from 6-link vendoring, not so much anymore. Exalts were the stock currency, too valuable to be used in anything else than meta-craftimg, yet availability was decent due to harbingers dropping them.

Now harbingers were made completely pointless and they had to come up with a completelt new currency to bring some value to harbingers. So, they went out of their way to fix something that wasn't broken, created a bunch of broken mechanics and issues along the way that they are now desperately trying to fix. They have sold mtx and merchs with the exalt theme, exalted orb was an icon from its value in the game, a status symbol. Now all that mtx and merch is made pointless, are they refunding the ppl who bought these?

I also play Old school Runescape, where you can exchange 1 million coins for a platinum token, making tier 0 trades easier to do and not put the price cap of 2147m on items (2147m coming from the max value possible in the game code). Should the game developer, Jagex, now switch the currencies, making platinum token the standard trading currency and the regular gold coin worth 1 million platinums? Tell me, in what world that makes any sense?

In every single economy, there is more availability of the less valuable currencies, hence the lower value. Ergo, economy in standard was flipped upside down overnight, making it be a pyramid standing on its head. Small players and rmt'ers (because they are the ones stocking currencies) made billionaires overnight, and billionaires, crafters, farmers made small players overnight. Who does this serve? Small players and rmt'ers. If I was a betting man, someone inside GGG got a sizable boost to their income after this change...

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Mad_Defibrilator wrote:

If I was a betting man, someone inside GGG got a sizable boost to their income after this change...

If you were a betting man, you'd lose money...

If GGG were that corrupt (they aren't), they could just do an SQL add to their characters adding a gazillion mirrors...

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Cyzax wrote:

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Echothesis wrote:

Which brings us full circle around: now divines are too expensive to be used by most people, so by your logic it would be a LOT of sense for GGG to make another same change, but for divines this time.

Actually no, because there is one huge hole in your argument... 'Most people' don't use Divines...

Divines are a min-max tool, usable only by the few.
Exalts are a general tool, usable by everyone.

Divine orb functionality had (and still has) more demand than exalted. Many people who didn't technically "use divines", used Harvest rerolls instead, me inculded, and those rerolls were also wiped.

With very little chance to get something useful from ex slam, they are useful only to dedicated crafters, willing to invest a lot besides the ex themselves in that process. While divining what you are going to wear is universal base necessity for all players.

I can believe that GGG only wanted more people to ex slam because luring people into endless grindloops is what they do for a living, but that could have been achieved without deleting many people's investments (you said yourself they only care about leagues going forward, right?). And that comment by Chris was just adding insult to injury.

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Echothesis wrote:

Divine orb functionality had (and still has) more demand than exalted. Many people who didn't technically "use divines", used Harvest rerolls instead, me inculded, and those rerolls were also wiped.

If I remember right, Chris said said something in the sense that a fortunate byproduct of the whole thing is that well rolled uniques are worth more now. I mostly agree with that, high rolls were kinda the norm before and lows were often vendor trash. Now there's some demand for low rolls by those that can't afford a high one if the unique is on the expensive side, the whole thing matters and that's nice.

The exalt effect being in low demand is a bit of a misconception, I think. They aren't used much but I wouldn't say it's because the community didn't want to, the effect of the orb just wasn't even nearly worth its value. In the end, if they say that the usage of the orb went up significantly that's enough of a proof.

So, if exalts being more affordable has a positive effect and divines being more valuable also has a positive effect, for GGG that's a win-win situation. The big loser is likely the style factor, divine orb just doesn't look as expensive.

No one used exalts to slam a random mod unless there was a specific way to narrow it down - like the + to socketed bow gems with roll no attack mods trick. Divines were used to roll uniques like loreweave or ventor's and legion jewels. For most uniques min-maxing was nice but not overly impactful.

The first problem with the ex to div switch came with crafting - because of harbs, div cards and base drop chance exalts being plentiful made bench crafting much more affordable. Purely as a trade currency, there was no problem as the market would adjust. The second problem was the slap given to standard players who owned a significant amount of exalts. To them this change made their time and effort worthless, on top the callousness of GGG on the matter is insulting. No apology, no recompense, pushing responsibility to the players. For the sake of GGG, I do hope standard players are a negligeable minority.

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Echothesis wrote:

With very little chance to get something useful from ex slam, they are useful only to dedicated crafters, willing to invest a lot besides the ex themselves in that process.

Incorrect... Apart from a number of niche builds where the wrong added affix would impact it negatively, all outcomes of Exalts leaves you with a better item. It may not be much better, but it is better. Divines may give you a worse item.

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Echothesis wrote:

While divining what you are going to wear is universal base necessity for all players.

And yet, I've never done it since I started in 2014... Even before Divines became the trading currency, it was still far better to trade them (for Exalt) to the few players who wanted to massively min-max, and then spend those Exalts on better gear.

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Cyzax wrote:

Divines are a min-max tool, usable only by the few.
Exalts are a general tool, usable by everyone.

There is one class of item in this game for quite a while now that negates this statement: legion jewels. These were pretty easily obtainable by the vast majority of players and were HUGE divine sinks. I would argue that the existence of legion jewels alone would be enough to defend NOT changing the exalt. Exalt slamming has been non-existent not because exalts were rare or because they were used as currency, but simply because ANY other way to craft an item was always better than a yolo slam. BUT divining a legion jewel ALWAYS produced totally new results. And it requires A LOT of them to get something good. Then you also have items like ventor's gamble, loreweave, forbidden shako, etc. that were not terribly rare but very popular and required divine orbs up the whazoo to make useful.

I completely disagree with saying that an exalt slam will ALWAYS make your item better. In fact, in 99% of situations, it will make your item WORSE because it takes up a suffix/prefix that could otherwise be used for the crafting bench. Even if you have a 4-mod item, having the freedom to SWITCH your craft at any time is invaluable: using an exalt to fill that item bricks it from ever being changed. The ONLY situation where an exalt ONLY makes an item better is if you have a 4 mod item with 3p or 3s. ACTUALLY, even less than that because suffixes can be used to beastcraft aspects so only in the situation where an item has 3s already and 4 mods would it make sense to exalt it. PLUS now that fracturing items is a thing, it is STILL better to have a 5 good mod item than a 6 mod item with 1 crappy roll.

The only item in the game that will ALWAYS be better with an exalt slam is jewels. But just like you said about divines, that was only important for min-maxing. It was the DIVINE that was regularly used, not for min-maxing, but to get damn near guaranteed improvement. The average player wouldn't be using the divine in the first place unless the rolls of the gear you were divining were low. Whereas, if the average player was using exalts to slam items they were shooting themselves in the foot.

To be perfectly honest, based on unique designs and other things that have cropped up through the years: GGG had specially designed items and mechanics to encourage massive use of divines, yet they have only EVER discouraged the use of exalts by introducing mechanic after mechanic that made them totally obsolete as a usable item. Making exalts cheaper does NOT repair the damage they have wrought on their intended use. It is still almost always the worse choice to use the exalt rather than trade it

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jsuslak313 wrote:

I completely disagree with saying that an exalt slam will ALWAYS make your item better. In fact, in 99% of situations, it will make your item WORSE because it takes up a suffix/prefix that could otherwise be used for the crafting bench. Even if you have a 4-mod item, having the freedom to SWITCH your craft at any time is invaluable: using an exalt to fill that item bricks it from ever being changed.

I think so too, exalts may be used more often after the swap, but only where result doesn't really matter. Like "picked up this meh item from the floor, might as well wear it for the next few levels, so let's slam it". Aside from specific cases where modifier pool is limited, slamming really valuable item is foolish.

I would not be surprised if they wipe Standard completely when POE2 launches. "A fresh start for all" would be the excuse. A big FU to standard lovers.

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Cyzax wrote:

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Echothesis wrote:

While divining what you are going to wear is universal base necessity for all players.

And yet, I've never done it since I started in 2014... Even before Divines became the trading currency, it was still far better to trade them (for Exalt) to the few players who wanted to massively min-max, and then spend those Exalts on better gear.

Depends on build I guess. I wasn't there in 2014, but heard there were times when multiple builds could clear all content with trash gear. If you try to make attack build now, not divining at least your weapon is irrational.