My recap of PoE vs D4 and why even still PoE is unmatched

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Baharoth15 wrote:

1) The process is akin to a slot machine. 90% or more of it is spam currency on a base. Be it alts, jewelers, fusings, harvest reforge, essences or fossils. It's incredibly dumb on a fundamental level sitting there for half an hour throwing 1k+ alts at a flask to get the combination you want.

2) Risk vs reward is horribly unbalanced. There is a clear cap on the potential profits, no matter how much currency you've burned in the process, the price you can get for it on the market is capped. The risk meanwhile is infinite. If you are unlucky enough you can waste thousands of fusings/divines whatever on a craft that should only take 10 tries on average.

3) It is pretty much impossible to seriously craft without using trade. You won't find the fractured bases you need yourself, you'll have to buy them. You won't find the dozens and hundreds of divines you need for meta crafts, you'll have to buy them. You won't find the hundreds or thousands of deafening essences you need, you'll need to buy them.

Now try fixing those points without ending up with something that's basically harvest or try to convince me that this design is actually the most fun and engaging form of crafting you've ever encountered in a game to a point where you think it's impossible to improve. Bring it on.

Well, my view will always be that the best items should drop and not be crafted, but I think that ship has sailed long ago. I'll accept that, but I don't have to like it. The balance between crafting, drops and trade is always difficult, and you can't "fix" one without tweaking the others.

Lets start with a question for the sake of discussion here: Should we even be able to craft BiS/perfect/close-to-perfect weapons? Should the potential of crafted gear be higher than the potential of dropped items, in practice, not theory?

If your answer to that questions is "yes", then I think there SHOULD be an immense amount of RNG involved, and there SHOULD be the possibility to fail.

If your answer to that question is "no", then I would make crafting A LOT easier, more deterministic, but at the same time severely limit the potential power of crafted items/obtainable mods on crafted items. Hell, your precious Harvest crafting would be perfectly fine if they would limit crafted mods to T3.

When it comes to your point number 3, my question will always be: In a game that has always been - and will always be centered around an economy, should you have access to everything you feel that you need/want without trading? What is the point of trading if that's the case?

Yes, drops should be the way to get good gear, my full agreement there, but as you said, that ship sank ages ago. Crafting, for me is the second best option. But that ship too sank in 3.14. The only ship that's still intact is trade and imo it's the worst of them all.

Should it be REALLY difficult to make top tier items? Obviously. Is RNG the only/best way to make that happen? Not really. But we aren't even talking about anything close to mirror tier stuff here. Just trying to craft a 3xx onehanded pdps weapon is stupid enough as it is already. Nevermind 4xx and beyond. And 3xx isn't even good, nevermind great in modern POE (30 quality Ahn's Might can have 37x pdps just to give you an idea what level of power we are talking about here)

If there was an even remotely deterministic way to craft 3xx pdps onehanded weapons or 7xx pdps two handed weapons that would be a massive step forward but we don't even have that. If you want to have an remotely endgame viable weapon it's all about trade, again.

As for the last part my answer is unchanged. Trade should be an option for people who want to use it. That was the goal declared in the trade manifesto after all. You should be able to sell your stuff to someone else if you want to. And i am fully in agreement with that.
But it's not the reality of the game anymore. It's not that you "can" sell/buy stuff if you want to. You are forced into it if you want to have any sort of progression past the campaign. Drops are nonexsitant and crafting is, as mentioned, locked behind trade so there is really no point to it anymore as far as i am concerned. Instead of crafting shit i can just buy the crafts of other people if i have to resort to trade anyway. So yes, there absolutely should be alternatives to it. Again, this is supposed to be an ARPG not a fucking economy simulation. I don't even mind if those alternatives are significantly worse than trade as long as it's somewhere within reason, but it's not. Not if your goal is to enjoy all parts of the game and not stop after a fraction of it.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

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Phrazz wrote:

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AdRonZh3Ro wrote:

Oh, ok. You don't really want to discuss the finer points nor find a solution, you just want to keep being vague and evasive. Fine by me.

I can absolutely discuss the finer points and find solutions. Bring it on, what are we fixing?

My personal problems with "crafting" in current POE

1) The process is akin to a slot machine. 90% or more of it is spam currency on a base. Be it alts, jewelers, fusings, harvest reforge, essences or fossils. It's incredibly dumb on a fundamental level sitting there for half an hour throwing 1k+ alts at a flask to get the combination you want.

2) Risk vs reward is horribly unbalanced. There is a clear cap on the potential profits, no matter how much currency you've burned in the process, the price you can get for it on the market is capped. The risk meanwhile is infinite. If you are unlucky enough you can waste thousands of fusings/divines whatever on a craft that should only take 10 tries on average.

3) It is pretty much impossible to seriously craft without using trade. You won't find the fractured bases you need yourself, you'll have to buy them. You won't find the dozens and hundreds of divines you need for meta crafts, you'll have to buy them. You won't find the hundreds or thousands of deafening essences you need, you'll need to buy them.

Now try fixing those points without ending up with something that's basically harvest or try to convince me that this design is actually the most fun and engaging form of crafting you've ever encountered in a game to a point where you think it's impossible to improve. Bring it on.

1. If you are spending half and hour and 1k alts to get perfect flasks, i think you are doing it wrong. You should be aiming for good and maybe even great flasks, not excellent or perfect.

2. This is the problem with trade, if you have it then the economy must only have a certain amount of everything , otherwise the economy collapses and nothing is worth anything.

3. You are aiming for perfect items again.

The game is better suited with characters that are good and great. Anything over 5-10 million dps is overkill and makes you ignore the mechanics of bosses and everything. That isnt good.

I mean it is why Mathil, Fast AF and Quin are very popular. Their builds are good and great but not excellent or perfect.

1) I am not aiming for excellent or perfect, i don't give a fuck about tiers. Just getting the right combination of prefix and suffix can take this much effort if the suffix you look for isn't one of the few craftable ones.

3) No i am not. See my other post. Even sub par gear is ridiculously hard to make in many cases i.e any case that doesn't have deterministic methods using meta crafting.

Go and do any of the ubers or wave 30 simus with 5 mio DPS. This isn't 3.09 POE anymore where 5 mio dps was suitable to do just about anything. The powercreep is real and not just on the player side. Even Mathil skips out large parts of endgame content on many of his builds because it's simply not feasible. And that's a streamer we are talking about. He is playing this game as a job, by no means is he suitable to be a benchmark for pretty much anything.

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Phrazz wrote:

Well, my view will always be that the best items should drop and not be crafted, but I think that ship has sailed long ago. I'll accept that, but I don't have to like it. The balance between crafting, drops and trade is always difficult, and you can't "fix" one without tweaking the others.

Lets start with a question for the sake of discussion here: Should we even be able to craft BiS/perfect/close-to-perfect weapons? Should the potential of crafted gear be higher than the potential of dropped items, in practice, not theory?

Yes crafted gear should always lead to better results than drops could.

If drops would generate better gear than crafting, then why even have crafting in the game? It would be obsolete at that point.
It wouldnt just be crafting, it would also be content unlocking crafting options or currencies.

Why have Delve or Essences or anything like that in the game, if drops were the best way to progress?
And even if you were in favor of drops being the best option - how much gear generally speaking needs to drop to meet the very specific requirements of any given build in any given slot?

You´d be drowning in drops to make that happen, even more so than its already happening.
Most of that gear would still be useless for your specific build, even if the rolls were really really good.
Im not quite sure why this sounds appealing to players. I think it would be terrible for the game.

Peak Harvest did show quite clearly that one singular way to play the game isnt healthy for the game overall. It doesnt matter if its Harvest or plain drops. It would kill off other parts of the game as it did back when Harvest was THE way to play the game, not a way to play the game.


Right now, drops and some basic crafting will allow you to enjoy about 90-95% of the total content available. How comes that having to delve deeper into crafting or trading to unlock the remaining 5-10% all the sudden equates the game overall being in a terrible or undesitable state?

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Orbaal wrote:

Peak Harvest did show quite clearly that one singular way to play the game isnt healthy for the game overall. It doesnt matter if its Harvest or plain drops. It would kill off other parts of the game as it did back when Harvest was THE way to play the game, not a way to play the game.

Right now trade is the only way to play the game. Where exactly is the big difference? Even with 3.13 harvest getting decent gear was way more time consuming than it is right now using trade. Everyone is freaking out because harvest was so powerful but fact is we have an even more powerful tool available right now and somehow the game is still working.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Right now trade is the only way to play the game.

I rarely buy stuff and still get to do everything I want to do.

If your benchmark still is Uber Bosses, wave30 simus plus the really hard Maven invitations such as Feared & co I think your benchmark is off.


I consider this type of stuff little more than irrelevant bonus content.
And yes, you will have to trade and/or roll the dice on crafting to get there. Ill give you that but I still dont see why this would be wrong and needs to be changed.

For the rest of the game you neither need to trade nor craft a lot to get there.
Pretty basic gear will get you there.

It's not about how many purchases you need (the sells are the painful and crucial part anyway), i made like 4 purchases in sanctum and that was more than enough to everything i wanted. Twice that and i could probably go for ubers.

My question is what's the big problem of giving us a more or less equal alternative in terms of power? Not something better, just something else even if it's just half as good. Where is the big problem in that? Aside from "GGG doesn't want it cuz reasons".

Also depending on your build even pinnacle content or even red maps will require trade or vastly more time investment on the scale of several hundred times what it would take with trade.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

My question is what's the big problem of giving us a more or less equal alternative in terms of power?

In one word? Hierarchy.
There has to be an order how to acquire gear for some features to exist.

Drops has to be the worst option, otherwise crafting and trading might as well not exist.
Crafting cant be easy or deterministic for trade to exist.

Its simple as that. I dont think there is more to it.


For the most part trading is in a pretty good spot, with some exceptions.
Overall tho, trading allows players to skip a lot more tedious alternatives and get them exactly what they want, with the added downside or opportunity cost of having to use a non-streamlined process.

If trade was streamlined and thus the opportunity cost being removed, then trade would reign supremely above all else and I dont think that would be good for the game.

Now Im not a massive fan of the trade system but I can see why GGG does it this way. It makes sense from their prespective and I can get behind it to some degree.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

1) I am not aiming for excellent or perfect, i don't give a fuck about tiers. Just getting the right combination of prefix and suffix can take this much effort if the suffix you look for isn't one of the few craftable ones.

3) No i am not. See my other post. Even sub par gear is ridiculously hard to make in many cases i.e any case that doesn't have deterministic methods using meta crafting.

Go and do any of the ubers or wave 30 simus with 5 mio DPS. This isn't 3.09 POE anymore where 5 mio dps was suitable to do just about anything. The powercreep is real and not just on the player side. Even Mathil skips out large parts of endgame content on many of his builds because it's simply not feasible. And that's a streamer we are talking about. He is playing this game as a job, by no means is he suitable to be a benchmark for pretty much anything.

1. Then it should realistically take 5 mins per flask.

3. As i said it is a function of trade existing. Great items drops for people randomly and people trade them for currency. IF crafting was much easier, trade would collapse.

I havent done wave 3o simulacrums yet and i havent done ubers yet except eater. To do that content you have to make a build that voids the other content, there are plenty of low budget(10 divine or less) builds that can do ubers. There is no point when you have 30 million dps or more to do maps than just to get currency. That is the problem this game has.

That said they have done ubers on hardcore ruthless mode albeit with the exploding totem build.