Endgame Loot

I've been dabbling in the endgame for a bit now (currently running T10/11 maps), and i gotta say - the loot feels really bad.
I upgrade my waystones, use the tablets (if they drop which they hardly do) & use whatever skillpoints are left in the atlas-tree (because i'm hardly getting enough waystones with all the nodes) to boost my chances, but boy - it's bad.

It really reminds me of the early days of Diablo 3 in which you could play for days without getting any upgrades. You don't get enough materials to craft (getting the right white archetyp of item is in and of itself a task), and there are just way too many rolls on any given item.
People will now tell me to use trading, but i have 2 issues with that:

1) I want to loot the things i use, not sell/buy stuff on some trading page. There is literally no gratification from buying an item. Crafting is borderline, but flat out buying things is not what i am looking for in an ARPG.
2) The trading page is huge a pain in the ass. Unstable, 99% of the persons you PM don't answer etc - not a good experience. Not going to suggest an Auction House because that definitely did not help D3, but it was better than this nevertheless.

I have a few other issues with the endgame so far as well, but not getting any good loot really kills the will to play more.

I agree. POE2 loot drops and crafting are not as good as POE1, which is not what GGG said it would be. Rare drops are bad given most have bad stats and the crafting currency drops needs to be much more frequent given how random the mods are when they are used for crafting (vast majority is crafting currency is wasted on unwanted/bad mods). I don't think GGG planned for exalts to be as valuable as they are which is forcing people to get all of their upgrades via trade, rather than waste exalts trying to get luck crafting something.

+1

I had reached a point in the endgame where I hit a wall and tried my luck at trading. (Admittedly new to POE)
I was completely baffled with how absurdly strong trading is, comparatively to finding drops. I don't even get excited for loot dropping anymore because so far 100% of the time the loot is going to be worse than any gear I get from trade.

Yeah I've stopped playing for now.

multiple level 90 - 96 characters and in all that grinding I never once found a good item from the ground. everything was bought on trade and I hate it.

This is honestly the worst loot/crafting system in any game I've ever played which is sad as I love everything else about PoE2.

The main issue for me is not even the junk affixes, its the fact that high level items can and mostly roll with the lowest of low tiers which just cause you to vendor everything. item level should dictate the minimum tier that can roll on an item, not just the maximum

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OG_Smez#4109 wrote:

Yeah I've stopped playing for now.

multiple level 90 - 96 characters and in all that grinding I never once found a good item from the ground. everything was bought on trade and I hate it.

This is honestly the worst loot/crafting system in any game I've ever played which is sad as I love everything else about PoE2.

The main issue for me is not even the junk affixes, its the fact that high level items can and mostly roll with the lowest of low tiers which just cause you to vendor everything. item level should dictate the minimum tier that can roll on an item, not just the maximum

In a game with free trade, there will always be better items on the trade market than the ones you find yourself.

For example, item mod tiers ranging from T1 to T10. Imagine they boost loot in endgame maps, so you find only T5+ mods, other players collectively find a large number of near-perfect T9–T10 items, flooding the market, while individually you might only find few T9–T10 items, that won't fit your build anyway and a lot of items with mods T7-T9 which are great now, but would be medicore if they boost loot. The reason is that millions of players together are far more likely to stumble upon an upgrade for your build than you are on your own.

The only real solution would be to introduce a mechanic—such as a loot or crafting boost—that applies to items which are then made untradeable.
Or for example mechanic where SSF items have +1 to all mods tiers.