Path of Exile is in a bad spot where there are no more iconic items... again... at least until PoE 2

For years I have played the leagues in a manner that I either get a chase item + a mirror or 3 mirrors as my league goal. This league I achieved it in 1 week and had pretty much nothing to do anymore, but achieving that wasn't even that special anymore.

Every League I've had to do some serious grinding or find clever ways to earn big money to get the items that truly feel like an achievement, every time.

This time it was just easy, not special; and the feeling is going to stay like that until new items are introduced because the perception of Mirrors and Magebloods is that it's something that every player used to have with a day's worth of grinding.

It already happened with the Headhunter - it's not an iconic item anymore - it's just the "cheaper than the best" belt.

The Mirror of Kalandra is not anymore the "You get it once every 5,000 hours played item - super rare!" item, but rather "Yeah it's a decent item, I've had it drop 7x in the Affliction League."

The Mageblood and the Mirror ( currently the most iconic items of the game ) do not make it into any discussion or homage like the Headhunter and Mirror used to, because if an average-skilled late game player can stack them in dozens, it's not special anymore.

this is far more about how you choose to play the game (or rather the meta-game) than the game itself.

The game has some of the most interesting and iconic itemization of any game ever and IMHO second only to D&D itself for that.

If you play the game as a wage earning simulator in such a way that you filter/ignore 98% of the content maybe don't be surprised when 98% of the cool shit also gets ignored or culled by your filter.

Meanwhile I'm in SSF standard making a build with The Cauterizer and potentially 2-4 other cool as fuck items that no longer exist and where never (or almost never) meta when they did.



Play how you want, but maybe give actually playing the game as its gameplay loop was intended a try, instead of the popular way to mitigate and ignore the intended gameplay loop by instead turning it into an hourly wage and shopping game. But don't blame the game for metagaming choices that forshorten and trivialize it by unimaginably large degrees. The metagame you choose to play isn't even 2% of the real game IMO. Its so vastly easier and faster to accomplish goals that were never even meant to be goals its hard to overstate just how distorted and unrecognizable it makes the game.

Whenever you start to feel this way give hcssf a whirl. You will be surprised at the amount of adrenaline the game has to offer when you're on your own and 1 mistake can rip you.

you re not wrong. a solution would be to tag all magebloods and mirror with the name of the league. that way you have collector magebloods and mirrors :) depending on the league

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SerialF wrote:

you re not wrong. a solution would be to tag all magebloods and mirror with the name of the league. that way you have collector magebloods and mirrors :) depending on the league

Hmmmm I don't even agree that there's a problem here worth fixing but I kinda like the idea of giving items meta-data...Just from a cool collecting mini game standpoint. Thing is I think most items already have some and its hidden from us. For example if you divine certain items they will actually update ranges to new values but wont actually remove some things that are no longer on that item even when those things were deleted from current versions. A divine will only delete mods that were directly replaced by a new mod.

For this reason I have a Marhi Erqui (spelling w/e) that still has level 15 Pulverize 7L built in but has the new huge Damage range. So the game KNOWS its not a new version.

Thing is I don't think most people give enough of a shit about standard items for this to solve the theoretical problem the OP has.

Now if GGG was to actually do some Game design work on STANDARD for once and maybe help make it more of a thing...

Is Path of Exile in a bad spot, or have you just played it a lot?

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alhazred70 wrote:

this is far more about how you choose to play the game (or rather the meta-game) than the game itself.

Getting powerful and wealthy through clever map, skill & market building is how I like playing the game.

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Lonnie455Rich wrote:

Whenever you start to feel this way give hcssf a whirl. You will be surprised at the amount of adrenaline the game has to offer when you're on your own and 1 mistake can rip you.

Nah, I've tried plenty, it's a completely different game and not my thing.

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SerialF wrote:

you re not wrong. a solution would be to tag all magebloods and mirror with the name of the league. that way you have collector magebloods and mirrors :) depending on the league

Well, but everyone would have these, wouldn't make a difference then. Even foil Magebloods aren't anything fancy anymore.

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GusTheCrocodile wrote:

Is Path of Exile in a bad spot, or have you just played it a lot?

Around 10-14 days of in-game time over the past 15 months is not a lot.

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GusTheCrocodile wrote:

Is Path of Exile in a bad spot, or have you just played it a lot?

Or the game could just be in a bad spot, which it is.

Don't even get me started on all these years of reduced development power due to the competing development of PoE2 which was supposed to benefit PoE1 as well.

As a primarily Raise Spectre player i see them just breaking all the rules since crucible and things are not ok just reviewing the last couple patches on that one metric alone.

Now lets get to the "iconic" unique items many of which can not even compete with a half-baked rare in current times but it could have and still can if they add the apropriate systems i detailed during crucible where item-power has global limits and systems like what crucible was could add to any item including uniques pushing their stats to those global limits making many uniques competitive in the endgame versus rares.

but whatever that would make too much sense.

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SilentSymphony wrote:

Or the game could just be in a bad spot, which it is.

I think the game itself is pretty good, it's just that for the most dedicated, the current league probably did big damage that people don't realize yet because they've put so much value on these items in the past.

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Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

Around 10-14 days of in-game time over the past 15 months is not a lot.

Is it interesting to you that you reached for that qualifier, when the question wasn’t limited to the last 15 months? It’s interesting to me.

Anyway, good luck!

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SilentSymphony wrote:

Don't even get me started…

If asking questions of other people does that, I can make no promises :)