Too much of our progression is gated behind RNG and forced trading

Currently it feels like too much of my progression, or frankly my ability to keep a gameplay session going (map sustain) is gated behind RNG.

For example:

Ascendancy trials have multiple layers of RNG:

- Did a Djinn Barya or Inscribed Ultimatum drop? (rare-ish)
- During Trial of the Sekhema, did you get reasonable rolls on afflictions/boons/room types?
- Did enough reasonable relics drop in your attempts to help your chances on the next runs?
- During Ultimatum, did you get reasonable choices that allow you to get through it?
- Did boss behavior in either type of trial act consistently enough that you could use what you've learned fighting it so far to beat it?


Mapping has multiple layers of RNG:

- Waystone sustain seems exceptionally terrible
- If a Waystone drops, there's a good chance it will not be the tier you need to keep progressing the questline for atlas passive points
- There's a way-too-high chance you'll get tier 1 stones which don't meaningfully contribute to reforging upwards once you're high enough tier
- Alch-and-go is more or less dead - I've found maybe 6 orbs of alchemy in my entire time playing this character so far.
- Transmute and Aug seems to have way too high of a chance to add mods that don't affect waystone drop chance


And of course, you need to improve your gear throughout this in order to grow in power in order to beat higher tear content etc, and slamming random mods onto an item repeatedly is frankly not crafting.


To be honest, this post was mainly inspired by yet another map I've run where literally no current-tier waystones dropped, and only one "tier below what I'm on" waystone dropped, which doesn't help regorge up to current tier just now. I don't know what the refresh rules for Doryani's inventory are but it doesn't seem like level-up or opening a new map are it. At least with Kirac I could open a map to refresh his inventory and buy a map from him if I got stuck.


I'm a "mostly SSF but I trade when I need to" type of player, and needing to trade for waystones just to literally keep playing the game is frankly a log-off moment for me (of which this game has had a lot so far).

This is also not to mention how generally unrewarding the loot from each map has been. I would really just like to keep playing, but there's enough friction in each session due to RNG that it's really not fun.

Yeah, I basically put PoE2 on hold so far till devs fix the ridiculous itemization RNG.