PoE doesn't scale items very well

Merciless and even Cruel difficulties require grinding by design for gear, currency, and xp. Especially in Merciless difficulty, you're not going to get far without trading for better gear or using some alterations to craft better gear.

It sounds to me like you're not really used to how this game scales over the difficulties. If you're in merciless and aren't using one or more 4-link items then you're definitely doing something wrong. That's not the game's fault either. 4-link items start dropping regularly all the way back in Normal difficulty. It's almost guaranteed that you could go to the vendor right now and find one or two.

Really it just sounds to me like you don't know how to play the game. Not trying to be mean. It generally takes leveling several characters to about level 70 before you really learn the ropes. The game gets really difficult in Merciless and if you don't know what you're doing then you're going to have a hard time. If your passives, gems, and gear are suboptimal than Merciless is just going to punish you.

You also seem to think that you should be fully equipped with your first character before even finishing the game once. Good luck with that.

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griD wrote:

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DestroTheGod wrote:

Loot drops are fine.

If you want to intentionally gimp yourself playing self found, that's your right. But don't complain about drops when you are playing from a disadvantage in this multiplayer game balanced around parties, trading with players, and not being solo. If you want good loot you're going to need to start playing with a mfer (or become one); probably when you get to maps. That's just how the game is designed to be played if you want to actually get any reasonable loot.

Sorry, but the explicit intention of GGG is to strike a balance between solo and party play. OP gives feedback about his experiences with solo / selffound play and what better time for that than in beta?
Agree about the MFer part, though this might be a different topic.

The game is balanced around trading. This is why: If you get a 20% split arrow as a discharger and a split arrow user gets a 20% discharge gem, the natural thing to do is for both of you to trade gems with each other because you both get an upgrade. Devs have said it in the past but I'm too lazy to find quotes, zzz.

If this game were NOT balanced around trading, then almost all the gear you get would be tailored to your character build in some way. For example, you picked witch? The majority of your gear would be es gear and blue gems. There would need to be a lot of changes to satisfy this, but the game 'could' be designed in such a way where trading is something you very rarely and barely needed to ever do. Look at the way Torchlight 2 handles loot, it's a very good example of a game that is designed such that you need to do very little trading.

In regards to self-found, it's a self imposed restriction. Just like playing in "Only equip unique items" mode is a self imposed restriction. The game isn't balanced around either mode of play thankfully and shouldn't be. Complaining that [x] feature of the game needs changed when it is directly improved if you remove your self imposed restriction is bad.

I'll even throw in another example. What the OP complains is like saying: "Hey this game is too hard, I am trying to play where I can only use white items and everything is too hard, mobs need to be nerfed." If you choose to play in a self-imposed restriction where you only wear white items, when the game is not balanced around this, don't ask for the game to be changed for the sake of balance around this self-imposed restriction. It should really not be hard to see why the OP's complaint is kind of silly now, right?

Sure, there can be improvements made for different types of self imposed restrictions. I won't disagree with this. But what the Op complains about is directly fixed by removing his self imposed restriction. Want more 6s drops? Play in parties and do harder maps with more quantity. Or, like I said, just play mf and you get mad drops. If you choose to not do these things, then you are playing with a self imposed restriction that makes things more difficult. And if you choose to have these self imposed restrictions that cause you to get bad loot, then don't complain about loot being bad because once you remove the self imposed restrictions, loot is fine.

It's all part of their tradeoff system. Often times, at higher difficulties, you find "better" lower level items (more sockets, better links, and even more stats) then the higher level equivs. This is by design to add a choice to the game. Another tradeoff, so to speak.

If you want cutting edge items, then you have to spend the currency to trade or craft.

I don't honestly see what the problem is. It makes lower level items worth something even later in the game. Sure they may not have the armor of a higher level equiv, but the stats or sockets might be far more desirable.

I play self-found too, and I've honestly never had a problem getting decent items.

50% rarity and 25% quantity can make a world of difference.

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DestroTheGod wrote:

Loot drops are fine.

If you want to intentionally gimp yourself playing self found, that's your right. But don't complain about drops when you are playing from a disadvantage in this multiplayer game balanced around parties, trading with players, and not being solo. If you want good loot you're going to need to start playing with a mfer (or become one); probably when you get to maps. That's just how the game is designed to be played if you want to actually get any reasonable loot.

ya but the lag when you play in parties?!? Jeeeeeeussss fucking christ it's bad.

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zSavage wrote:

If you want more jewelers and fusings, farm and pick up all the blues as well as rares, id them for alt shards, and build up a large supply of alts. Then, use either a NPC dealer (2:1 alts -> jewelers, 4:1 jewelers -> fusings) or a player in trade chat to accumulate these orbs. A player should be more or less forced to give you better ratios than the dealer, but it may be more time consuming to find a player willing to buy a lot of alts.

This. Well over 75% of the Jewelers and Fusings that have entered my stash are via Vendor.

If you are playing 'Self Found and no Vendor' - the game is simply not meant to be played that way.

I do save up my currency and use the vendors to buy Fusings and Jewellers. To play Self-Found for me doesn't exclude using the vendors. That would make no sense. Until GGG has an official formal web based trading system I'm abstaining from any trading. Right now beta PoE is not safe and almost daily I read about someone getting scammed. I got seriously bummed out last year with the D3 auction houses. Having bots farm 24/7 and then dumping the valuable items on the auction houses just caused serious inflation and ruined prices for the normal players. Fortunately I haven't heard of PoE botting, just multi-boxing, but if there are botters they are probably keeping very quiet so GGG doesn't ban their accounts.

I guess that's the only way GGG can stretch out PoE to have a 5 to 10 year run. Make us do brain numbing farming run after farming run to get low currency that eventually adds up to Fusings and Jewellers or other higher level currency. Some of the PoE currency is so rare that once you get one you can't use it for the original purpose to enhance an item as it's too valuable to waste that way and we use it to buy better gear.

The rarity of some of the currency takes crafting off the PoE table. It's really a shame that GGG touts PoE as better than any other arpg by having the ability to take a white item and with the right crafting currency forge it into a very powerful item. This is true but then GGG makes these crafting currencies so rare that when you do get one it's best to use it to buy a better piece of gear then try to craft it yourself. It's strange to promote a game feature and at the same time prevent it from being used in any significant way. GGG needs to rethink this.

"I want the best items in the game after playing for 5 hours. You can list a hundred reasons why this is terrible design, but I'm going to completely ignore it and try to tell ggg how to do their job. Also, I purposely make the game ten times harder for myself by not interacting with other players in a game that was designed from the ground up to interact with other players. I heard this one guy got scammed once, so I'm afraid to trade anything even though it's 100% impossible to get scammed when trading within the same league."

Just a little tldr for everyone.

OP doesnt open trade with vendors. 4L are so common in vendors. just use alc and u dnt break your self found self righteousness.


whine more about a self-imposed limitation and swim in ridicule. fact of life sorry.

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Arrowneous wrote:

In all the time I've played to get to level 68 I have only found a couple of 5 socket chest armor and no 6 socket armor yet (also makes the 6s vendor recipe 100% worthless).

I've found 3 6S on the vendor alone that I bought and flipped for 7 jewelers, and my toon is only 67. I have an entire tab of 4L at various levels that I picked up along the way. Your currency is supposed to be used to either craft new gear or trade for new gear. Take a 4L you found and alch/chaos it; or take a rare and jeweler/fuse it.

Also, make your 4L in a weaker slot than chest. That way you aren't losing out on as much defensive stats by having it be underleveled.