Suggestion: Balancing Exalted Orbs availability

Context:
I am currently facing the final boss of the second act on "Cruel" difficulty, and up until this point, I have barely engaged with crafting—only using it sparingly for magical (blue) items. There appears to be a significant imbalance in the availability of crafting resources, particularly "Exalted Orbs," compared to lower-tier orbs such as Augmentation or Transmutation Orbs, of which I have around 80 each. By contrast, I’ve gathered only about 10 Exalted Orbs throughout the campaign so far, and I’m nearly at the end of it.

Issue:
Enhancing items often requires 3 Exalted Orbs, meaning these orbs are far scarcer and more valuable than other crafting materials. However, their application is entirely random, with no way to influence the outcome. As a result, it’s common to end up with an unusable item, effectively wasting precious Exalted Orbs. This creates a frustrating experience, especially during the campaign where these orbs are incredibly rare. For newer players, this randomness and scarcity may discourage experimentation with crafting altogether, potentially leading to frustration and early abandonment of the game.

Proposed Solutions:
To address this issue, I suggest one of the following approaches:

1. Increase the Drop Rate for Exalted Orbs (and possibly Regal Orbs):
Adjusting the drop rate would ensure players have more opportunities to engage with crafting during the campaign without making it feel overly punishing or inaccessible.

2. Introduce Crafting Resource Rewards Through Campaign Quests:
Adding quest rewards that provide Exalted Orbs would enable players to experience the crafting system more organically during the campaign. For example:

- In Act 1, a suitable candidate for this could be Leitis. Her character already has a compelling narrative reason to offer everything she has to help us avenge Eamon, her loved one, whose head was cut off. This quest could involve summoning her via a portal just before the boss fight. She could provide, say, 6 Exalted Orbs as a reward, allowing players to upgrade their gear or save the orbs for later use. This would give new players an early taste of crafting rare items and make the first major boss fight more approachable, potentially reducing "rage quits."

- Similar quests could be introduced in subsequent acts to balance resource distribution throughout the campaign without needing to adjust the drop rates for endgame content.

3. Better Disenchanting
Let's say that disenchanting is interesting only when starting in Act 1. After that point the money you get from selling the item is more interesting than the disenchanting material you can get. Make items give more and maybe even combination of different shards with higher item level and rarity of the item that is being disenchanted.

4. Combination of these Approaches:
A hybrid solution that slightly increases the drop rate while also introducing crafting-related quest and disenchanting rewards could strike a balance, maintaining the intended rarity of Exalted Orbs in endgame while making them more accessible and impactful during the campaign.

Conclusion:
These changes would create a more engaging and rewarding crafting experience, particularly for newer players, and reduce frustration stemming from resource scarcity and randomness. By providing additional opportunities to experiment with crafting during the campaign, players are more likely to remain invested in the game, ultimately enhancing the overall player retention and satisfaction.

Let me save you some time : GGG wants players to detect problems, not to design solutions.

Overall I agree with the concept. It's disheartening to many that a good early item costs less than the currency it would have taken to craft it. If they could buff the currency drops enough for the current 1Ex items to be like 10Ex I think that would feel better for many. Not my biggest complaint personally but I can see it.

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Kaozium#2036 wrote:

Let me save you some time : GGG wants players to detect problems, not to design solutions.

In fact, this is one of the problems. I like the game very much and I'm giving part of my free time to suggest what could work of course. It's fully up to them of course whether they take the helping hand.

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KaosuRyoko#1633 wrote:

Overall I agree with the concept. It's disheartening to many that a good early item costs less than the currency it would have taken to craft it. If they could buff the currency drops enough for the current 1Ex items to be like 10Ex I think that would feel better for many. Not my biggest complaint personally but I can see it.

I'm maybe not a newbie myself. Maybe a "profesional casual" :D, but not a newbie. I play a lot, I just not have so much free time for that to go as deep as I would like to. I had no "rage quit" moment, but I can imagine that many players, that are not that much experienced and didn't play POE1 can have big problems and they deserve somewhat fair approach from the game without sudden spikes in difficulty or having bad time due to bad luck on drops. Endgame is different part of the game, but campaign (at least a non-cruel part of it) should be relatively easier on the newbies but at the same time it should be optional whether you want to make it "easier" by upgrading your gear or you feel confident and are experienced enough to fight the boss with what you just have.