Path of Exile Should Reconsider Bringing Quant Gear Back

Hey everyone,

I wanted to weigh in on the recent decision by Grinding Gear Games (GGG) to remove quantity (quant) gear from Path of Exile. While I understand there were concerns, I believe it’s worth discussing why bringing quant gear back could be beneficial for the game and its community.

Reasons to Bring Quant Gear Back:

Loot Incentives and Reward Systems: Quant gear has historically provided a tangible reward for players who invest in optimizing their loot acquisition. It creates a clear incentive for players to work towards enhancing their gear and builds. Removing quant gear might dilute these incentives, making the pursuit of better loot feel less rewarding.

Build Diversity and Player Choice: Quant gear offered players a unique way to specialize their builds around loot acquisition. This not only added to build diversity but also allowed for different playstyles. Bringing back quant gear would reintroduce these options, allowing players to choose between focusing on loot quantity or other attributes, leading to a richer and more varied gameplay experience.

Economic Balance: While it’s true that quant gear could contribute to inflation, it also played a role in balancing the in-game economy by making it easier for players to accumulate and trade items. Instead of removing it entirely, perhaps a rebalancing of quant mechanics could address inflation concerns while still preserving the benefits of loot quantity.

Challenge and Progression: For many players, the challenge of optimizing gear for maximum quant was a rewarding part of the endgame. It provided a sense of progression and accomplishment. Reintroducing quant gear, with adjustments to ensure balance, could enhance the sense of achievement and progression in the game.

Performance Improvements: If technical issues were a concern, it might be possible to address these through targeted improvements rather than a complete removal. Advances in game technology and optimization could mitigate performance issues related to high loot quantities.

What This Means for Us

Rebalancing Rather than Removal: Instead of completely removing quant gear, GGG could explore rebalancing it to address concerns while retaining its benefits. This could involve tweaking the mechanics to prevent extreme inflation and performance issues.

Community Feedback: It’s important for GGG to consider community feedback on this issue. Many players enjoyed and benefited from quant gear, and their input could be valuable in finding a balanced solution.

I believe there’s room for a compromise that can retain the positive aspects of quant gear while addressing the issues that led to its removal. What do you all think? Should GGG look into reintroducing quant gear with adjustments, or do you feel the current approach is the right one?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and discussing potential solutions!

Agree with you, I think IIQ never caused unbalanced economy. (Even 20IIQ legacy bonus). There are many ways to earn good money, one of them was MFing for sure, but never been the only one. I remember good old times when we all were running harvest crafted and fractured maps, mirroring them with fractured fossils (before the tag Mirrored or split). I used to farm the mine for fractured fossils and profit was insane (and ofc was 100% no IIQ and solo).
What i'm saying is that the solution (for me) isn't to remove Mfing, but maybe to boost some other activities PoE offers. They introduced the reworked heist bases which is good because you can make money farming heists. Sanctum is always a good way to farm money. This is only my opinion, but the point is to make more rewarding other activities, rather than nerf existing ones.

(For example, this league we got back recombinators but we cannot move fractured mods with them from an item to another, what's the point on farming mine and get mine fractured bonuses on bad bases and Ilvl <=83?)

Absolutely not. IIq was never about the economy, IIq was problem because it was so powerful that you were a moron to not use it, which mean't builds that could use it were objectively the optimal builds to run which hurts build diversity

Its the same kind of toxic that head hunter was back in leagues like Legion where it was so much better than every thing else that you were basically wasting your life if you did not run one.

That is simply not healthy

Build diversity: There was none. You picked one of the maybe three builds that can realisticly equip all the quant items and you're done unless you're in standard. If your build required certain modifiers or uniques you were immediately locked out of it by default.

Progression: The quantity uniques were always dirt cheap unless you went for a maxed ventors, multimirror +quant corruptions, legacy race rewards or the ultimatum helmet. There was rarely any crafting involved at all for these items. The progression was extremely limited for quantity slots.

Economy: There are many uncorrupted global drops in the 10-200c range even two weeks into a league. That seems a lot healthier for the player base.
Also there are many scarabs now that fill a similar role that everyone can use.

I'm actually surprised such a bad mechanic stayed for as long as it did when the item quantity support gem was drop disabled 10 years ago.

I hope it stays dead.

There should technically be no difference.

Build Diversity is a neutral change at best. Instead of meta gearing for loot. Players 'should' be able to build for actual gameplay instead with similar results. At the same time players who don't build this way 'should' get better overall loot.

GGG used to claim something about gaps in drops not feeling good however when they made the change to Alteration Orbs and similar to drop in stacks I'd wager everyone liked it.

The funny thing is this only removed the individuals chance to Magic find, people abusing supports and one full glass canon farmer running 6 mans is still juiced to all hell cause it scales the quant per person while not scaling the investment per person. This strat is still the defacto for all high tier players early league cause of how insanely op and cheap specializing a character in only one aspect of damage, defensives, speed etc is.

The whole reason it was insane was the crazy multiplier you could get going with it. If it had just been changed to be additive with one of the other quant sources instead of standalone multiplicative, it could have easily been left in and toned way down. This would have allowed SSF and other single-player folks to have another source of quantity while severely toning down the benefit of individual item quant for party players.

The way it is now, it just removed it for solo players, and party players still have the party multipliers. It's not as juicy for them, but it did little to make things better for those that already didn't abuse the quant system.

IMO, add IIQ back, as well as IIQ support gems, make it additive with monster quant, and scale back party quant. You'll end up with a much more fair system that still allows folks to individually MF if they want to. By making it far less lucrative (and therefore mandatory) to run, it also solves the build diversity problem.

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Saltychipmunk wrote:

Absolutely not. IIq was never about the economy, IIq was problem because it was so powerful that you were a moron to not use it, which mean't builds that could use it were objectively the optimal builds to run which hurts build diversity

Its the same kind of toxic that head hunter was back in leagues like Legion where it was so much better than every thing else that you were basically wasting your life if you did not run one.

That is simply not healthy

+1

Removal of IIQ on gear is a step in the right direction.

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jeppejack wrote:

The funny thing is this only removed the individuals chance to Magic find, people abusing supports and one full glass canon farmer running 6 mans is still juiced to all hell cause it scales the quant per person while not scaling the investment per person. This strat is still the defacto for all high tier players early league cause of how insanely op and cheap specializing a character in only one aspect of damage, defensives, speed etc is.

Each additional player provides +50% MF to a map, which now has to be spread between 2-6 players. Individually, group players are at a disadvantage.

it should be brought back just to upset the fomo and instant gratification players who would get mad about others getting more for min-maxing hoho