**The Only Hope of Casual Players Is...**

Hot take, but if the game and drops were balanced around solo play INSTEAD of the constant focus on balancing for the trade economy it would be more fun and have better player retention for a wider audience.

It would allow experimentation with builds and content for a much wider % of the playerbase. instead of the current state of constant resource scarcity if you arent actively trading.
Even the content itself it locked behind trading. Bosses of any difficulty 0-4 are all expensive. In most cases its more difficult to afford an entry ticket to a boss than it is to defeat the boss.

Im not saying eliminate trade, but the scarcity of desirable items and currencies in a solo play environment is unacceptable considering 90% of items need to be traded through a website instead of IN GAME systems.

As long as the trade website is mandatory outside of the game client, the game should not be balanced around trading.

I'm a casual. My Monk hasn't been able to get past Jamanra's final form in campaign yet (my Witch obliterated him, but unfortunately she got bricked hard and I have no gold to respec), so I've been grinding to get better gear and more levels so I can kill him on Monk, since for some reason even though my Monk has better gear than my Witch (his evasion is over 50% and his gear is on average better), he somehow has lower HP and more Mana issues (I don't understand how a Melee class uses more Mana than a Mage type class, but aight).

Now that I have the time to attempt Jamanra again (and got higher Eva + HP + Mana than before), I try to clear the map to get to him and get wrecked by a bunch of busted elites, when prior I got there pretty fine, with some elites in the way, but nothing as bad as this. What changed exactly? I don't get it, am I missing something? Do I really need to watch a guide to play a game? This game is frustrating.

To add to the casual player frustrations, the camera zoom is so trash, that a no ES build (I'm trying pure Evasion out, you know, for fun) just gets offscreen one shot. My Witch doesn't care about offscreen much, she has ES for days, but Evasion Monk is a pain and Evasion doesn't even seem to be doing much of anything even though I'm building it as high as I possibly can for the moment. I'm thinking or re-gearing to ES/Eva gear, since clearly ES is what is superior at this point, but that might take days upon days of grinding mats (I tried grinding already and gave up 2 weeks ago when I spent 5 hours grinding the same map on repeat only to find 1 single Exalt... Didn't even get any other good drops. That felt like a total waste of my life force). Not sure I have the will or time to even bother doing it again.

In the end, the bulk of my frustrations are with the crafting system being so terrible. I really don't want to trade just to progress at such a low level. It ruins my sense of accomplishment within the game. I'm in the trade league, but I chose it in the advent that I MIGHT need trade out of desperation at higher levels (which is typical in most games, that at higher levels, rarity of gear drop becomes higher). I didn't expect that I'd be forced into trading so soon or that the game would push it on me so hard... It just feels bad, especially with no AH set up.

TL;DR The crafting system sucks and ES seems to be the only way to go, which limits the fun/diversity and sense of discovery to be had in game, at least for me as a casual player.

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KaosuRyoko#1633 wrote:

So if I'm reading correctly...

OP is basically saying he's not good enough to complete all the games content without a completely decked out stat stacker? I'm a game that... doesn't really require skill? Epic self burn.

because the highest resistance of a player is only about 76% and it can't be improved much. If you don't want to be killed by the BOSS, you should find a way to kill the BOSS instantly, because you can't withstand the BOSS's attack.

Games like Monster Hunter and Elden Ring can stack resistance to increase fault tolerance, and learn the BOSS's moves in this way to interact with the BOSS, but unfortunately it can't be done in POE2. High-resistance equipment means high price. If you have equipment that can withstand the BOSS's attack, its value is enough for you to kill the BOSS instantly.

You already have equipment that is powerful enough to kill a boss instantly, so why do you need to stack resistance to interact with the boss?

There is nothing worth doing in the end game anyway.

So much could be resolved with a proper dedicated SSF with decent drop rates. It could also be solved by a homogenized and emergent magic find system instead of putting 95% of it on gear, only further creating disparities between the top 1% and the bottom 99. I flat out shouldn't need 200+ hours on one character to feel like I can approach pinnacle bosses. I'd bet real money most people in trade leagues don't trade more than a small handful of times, especially a month+ in when inflation strikes, outside of finding a 0.1% rare they can sell to a flipper, bot, or Path of Trading player and maybe get one modest upgrade for the currency they get out of it.

The really weird thing about GGG's approach to this game's loot balancing is that they clearly think it's too much, hence coming out with a Ruthless league before coming out with a dedicated SSF. It's stupendously frustrating and was a huge reason for me to give up on PoE1. At least PoE2's gameplay feels good enough to keep at it, but the burnout will come all the same when this game--just as its predecessor--fails to respect my god damned time.

I, and many others, would spend money on this game more often (or at all, EA aside) if there was a dedicated SSF.

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ki784340143#8116 wrote:

"

KaosuRyoko#1633 wrote:

So if I'm reading correctly...

OP is basically saying he's not good enough to complete all the games content without a completely decked out stat stacker? I'm a game that... doesn't really require skill? Epic self burn.

because the highest resistance of a player is only about 76% and it can't be improved much. If you don't want to be killed by the BOSS, you should find a way to kill the BOSS instantly, because you can't withstand the BOSS's attack.

Games like Monster Hunter and Elden Ring can stack resistance to increase fault tolerance, and learn the BOSS's moves in this way to interact with the BOSS, but unfortunately it can't be done in POE2. High-resistance equipment means high price. If you have equipment that can withstand the BOSS's attack, its value is enough for you to kill the BOSS instantly.

You already have equipment that is powerful enough to kill a boss instantly, so why do you need to stack resistance to interact with the boss?

The foundational damage and defense scaling in this game is such a damn mess compared to so many other titles. The resistance scaling especially irks me...
I have a whole post about resistances alone needing a re-work if anyone is interested:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3629096

They stated not doing anything with the economy until the first league. I still do not see that as a solution.

Where I absolut agree are

- Not respecting player time
Where you need gambling luck all over and then need to invest hours up on hours just to get for example the 3 keys to the Arbiter. For most normal player this alone is 2-3 weeks for each attamp if you can play just 2-3 hours every second day.
You need either gambling luck to find the citadels which is better now but still. Just to get there you need to invest a substential amount of time to run all the maps.
Or you have gambling luck to have some divies drobed ... which you do NOT want to wast for Citadel keys but to buy better gear 99% of the time!

- GGG should MUCH harder fight all the trade-BOTs
Not just once every now and then. Every damn day!
PoE 1 and PoE 2 have just one trade server. There should be one job-position for "Senior BOT-DELETER". A person whos job is to do nothing else but check market for 24/7 hideout only chars and DELETE anything they have + the chars on that account.

IF we then would hit a point where trading would become imposible for any reason GGG should set up their own CLEARLY MARKED bot where GGG controls the prices. And only GGG should be allowed to do this.
For example: "[GGG]Market Stabilizer BOT" which can trade only tiny amounts of currency at once.

But seeing all this 24/7 BOTs with thousends of divines makes me sick!

I just stopped playing the game completely.
And this is coming from a NEET (I don't work or study).
I can't even imagine someone who works, studies and has to take care of a family, being able to progress in the endgame of this game. It's simply unbearable how long it takes to reach citadels, do any endgame boss and lose all the progress from all of that, because everything is just one attempt.

AND OF COURSE, the loot is a huge piece of crap. Either you're a Streamer who has a thousand fans donating perfect equipment, or you're a Chinese guy with 100 bots farming trade. There's no way for an ordinary person to make any progress in the endgame of this game.
And both Trials are SIMPLY HORRIBLE to farm their exclusive items. Whether it's on artificial difficulty, or how long they take.

I need ggg to drop the templar.