What Happened with Items

Thanks for your honest words Chris in this post with insights behind the scene.

Interestingly I have a very different experience than most players replying to this post.

I like the league and the patch 3.19 so far. It harder to get useful items - yes. And it was fine to me.

But now, after the last patch - there is loot everywhere and it feels too much. Maybe hard mode is the thing I'm waiting for. I want to play a challenging ARPG where progress is satisfying. Now the items have much less value because there are too many.

Btw...I'm playing SSF and max 1-2 hours per day.

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I also overstated the impact of the change when communicating about it in this post. I said "we removed a massive historic bonus", and this caused the community to think the impact was larger than it was. The reason why I used the word "massive" was that the numbers sound big when viewed in isolation, but are less impactful when viewed in context. For example, the rarity bonus that was removed from a Red Beast was 750%. This sounds big, but a four-mod Archnemesis rare has a 41000% bonus. Players have been saying we reduced drops by 90% but in reality, that type of difference could only be true in the most extreme situations involving Beyond, Delirium and Incursion stacked with party quantity, rarity, sextants and scarabs and a dedicated MF culler (peak efficiency of every juice mechanism that exists). Every other player is unaffected on average. For example when playing Breach, the reduction in currency items found is around 7% (when comparing 3.19.0d to 3.18.1f). In 100% Delirium maps, the difference hits 17%. In Incursion and regular non-league content, you'll find 25% more.

Buddy there's no need to tell us that the loot drops are almost the same now. The ppl who actually spend time playing this game, know this is total bullshit.

What about deterministic crafting? You think players want to do a 50/50 on destroing the end game item with annulment orbs. Item they farmed a week for, in game that resets every 4 months?
Thats not fun!

League went from highest numbers ever at the start, to a dead league in a week. Mabe your vision of the game is not what players consider fun.

no thanks

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I… didn't actually understand the impact of the change.

And you still very much don't understand it.

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I said "we removed a massive historic bonus", and this caused the community to think the impact was larger than it was. The reason why I used the word "massive" was that the numbers sound big when viewed in isolation, but are less impactful when viewed in context. For example, the rarity bonus that was removed from a Red Beast was 750%. This sounds big, but a four-mod Archnemesis rare has a 41000% bonus.

1. You ignore quantity in this example. Most league mechanics hand rarity AND quantity bonuses.
2. Red Beasts are one of the lowest examples you could find. No one farms beasts for their drops.
3. We fight hundreds of these league-buffed mobs each map.
4. We find that crazy buffed Solaris Touched maybe once every 100 maps.


Juicing is dead - not just the extreme party max juicing. Any kind of juicing, especially for solo players. It does nothing anymore, unless you employ methods to locate these super rare loot goblins 'very efficiently', methods that go against the ToS.

Not even Escape From Tarkov is this stingy about loot, and that game is far more hardcore and unforgiving. When Tarkov feels like it's showering you in crazy loot in comparison to POE, something is seriously wrong.

Chris, you aren't making Dark Souls, you're making an ARPG where the focus is loot and killing monsters. We no longer have monsters to kill aside from rares and loot being a lottery makes Diablo Immortal look superior.

I hope this leads to financial destruction for you, your company, and your game as it's clear you don't play nor understand it. Rest in piss.

A little confused here

So we should use 3rd party programs to target hunt Loot-Goblins to get drops ... like the example in your post? If so you may want to update your ToS .

When did I die and wake up in D3 years ago I thought I was playing PoE ?

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The remaining things that went wrong pertain to post-release communication. It took us several days to hotfix many of the changes in, and while we posted about it each day, this full explanation took almost a week. I wish we could have done it faster, but we have tried to prioritize working on the actual fixes as quickly as we can. As the confusion about our motivations has raised a lot of concern with the community, I should have found a way to priorities writing this post.

"we cannot walk and chew at the same time. No offense - but this excuse does not fly unless your development staff is exceedingly small. Even a vaguely mid-sized team is capable of communicating the entire way through.

You didn't for reasons that have nothing to do with how busy SOME employees were.

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Rewards should be set appropriately for the increased difficulty of these rare monsters.

Putting that at the end of Philosophy 2 doesn't really make any sense - less more difficult rares should drop more and better because they are harder, but also because, you know, there a less - because most tweaking that ignores their numbers and only cares about their difficulties is going to be inadequate or missing the mark in some other way (like many rares dropping crap but a scant few dropping a stupid amount of stuff, like dozens of ex or div, just for example).

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I'm the Game Director for Path of Exile 1

Interesting phrasing - who is the director of PoE2? KEK


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Anyway - some of what you typed elsewhere flies in the face of what many players have experienced as of the latest patch, even the kind of players that don't over juice things or play high end or in super-efficient groups.

You see the reaction to the last patch - and that's from the experiences in the game, not assumptions from bad wording or whatever victim blaming you are coyly attempting.


Also - this is quite the f-up - and your post really doesn't explain anything. But hey, you CAN fool some of the people some of the time.

As I'm more calm now I decided to give my proper feedback. English is not my first language but i'll try my best.

Lets go in order.

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Philosophy One: Reward mechanisms should scale properly with Item Quantity and Rarity bonuses

For the last few years, we have been using what we internally call item templates to control what drops from league content. This is where a monster (often with a reward symbol over its head) drops a specific type of item when it is killed.

But Path of Exile is a game about opting-in to more difficulty in exchange for more rewards. You can roll your maps to be harder or add sextants to them. You can play with additional party members. You can trigger additional stacking league content like Delirium. All of these things make the game harder in exchange for more and better rewards. The way we achieve more and better is through item quantity and item rarity bonuses. Item quantity means you directly find more stuff, and item rarity means that it has a higher chance of upgrading to magic, rare or unique. Item templates ignored quantity and rarity bonuses. A template of "drop four rare jewels" just did exactly that, regardless of how much extra difficulty you had stacked.

From the 3.19 expansion onwards, we are trying to make sure that reward systems scale with player item quantity and rarity bonuses. That's why the reward conversion system that higher-tier Archnemesis monsters have is so powerful. Any bonuses you have from additional difficulty will affect the rewards that the rare monster drops. Additional item quantity causes them to drop more items that are converted, and additional item rarity causes those items to upgrade, which also affects the converted one. For example if you upgrade a rare item to a unique item and it's then converted to a currency item, it'll drop as a Divine Orb, Exalted Orb or Orb of Annulment.

Going forward, we are trying to make sure that as much as possible, reward systems scale with the reward bonuses you get for playing difficult content.

I do agree with the first two paragraphs. This is what drives me to comeback every 3 months and start from the beggining again and again. The following two paragraphs looks really good on paper but in reality its a massive failure. I'm gonna explain why i think that later on.

Also "templates" is keeping the econmy afloat this league. If heist and expedition was in this new system I would be farming blood aqueducts to this day.

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Philosophy Two: Players should fight fewer Rare Monsters at once, but they should be more challenging and rewarding

In fights with a lot of Rare monsters on screen, you can't follow what modifiers they have, what skills they're using, and sometimes not even what type of monster they are. There's too much to pay attention to, with too much noise and screen pollution. You cannot use appropriate combat tactics, and instead have to just stutter step or be so powerful that it's inconsequential.

Fewer, more difficult rare monsters help you pay attention to what is happening, assess it, and act accordingly. It gives you an opportunity to employ counterplay and for your playskill to actually matter (rather than relying on pure character power). It is also a lot cleaner and far better for performance.

Rewards should be set appropriately for the increased difficulty of these rare monsters.

Here is when I'm starting to have problems with. You decided that AN mods was the way to reduce rare monsters and provide more meaningful fights. Yeah, the idea of reducing rares is good but AN mods are the worst thing that you could have done to achieve the goal. Why? Well, AN mods dont solve any of the problems that the old system have except rare count (wich could have been done simply by reducing the rare count duuhh).

Mods like hasted, soul eater, empowering minions, assassin, overcharged, frenzied among others when combined with each other and with fast mobs results in a disgusting fight experience that last less than half a second. There are tons of clips like this since 3.17 when AN mods werent even core yet. And when you have a bunch of defensive mods that affects your build you'ill be there for a long time.In the cases that the defensive mods dont affect your build at all, rare mobs are as much trivial as they were before.

So with AN mods you eithe die fast, take ages to kill a single monster or you dont even know that there was a rare in the pack. Even if I was getting more loot (wich i'm not) from AN monsters its just not fun for me beacuse of the fight itself. Its either frustating, boring or trivial.

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Philosophy Three: There shouldn't be a large gap between the difficulty and rewards of league content and base game content

Monsters added in leagues are more difficult to kill and drop better items than regular ones encountered in the base game. When those leagues become core, these properties carry across, creating two tiers of content, with one far more rewarding than the other.

We feel it's good for league content to be harder than the base game, and therefore more rewarding. But the difference should be approximately twice as rewarding. If the gap were any larger, then it would be less efficient to kill regular monsters and a player should spend all of their time focusing on repeating a small subset of content.

This goes in the opposite way and phylosophy one, and that how you trained every player to think this way. Ever since I started to play juicing league content, current or past, was the way to farm currency and items. You choose to design the game this way.

Who goes into a map and ignore every single league mechanic to just farm non league monsters? No one does that. Philosophy Three shoudnt even be a thing at this point of the game. If you want to shorten the gap how about raise the bar of non league monsters?

And why twice more rewarding? Because there's already tiers of content in the game so your reasoning doesnt make sense to me.

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Lake of Kalandra Balance Change: Rare Monster Normalisation

This one I wont even quote enterely, just this single sentence

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...general player concerns about being overwhelmed by too many hard Archnemesis monsters in some encounters...

So, instead of balance one thing you choose to dig around evey single league just to fit this mess called Archnemesis mods. This doesnt make sense. Cant you see that the problem are the AN mods and not the rares? Think about it for a second.

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Lake of Kalandra Balance Change: Monster Item Rarity and Quantity Normalisation

AS above, to fit AN in the game you decided to change everything and balance around it. Hey Chris, remember in tha last Q&A when ZiggyD asked about Headhunter being neferd again and you answer was that you couldnt balance tha game around it? Thats exactly what you are doing with AN mods.

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What went wrong

I know exactly what went wrong when i read this

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Had I understood the consequences, we likely would have still gone ahead with the change

This is what went wrong with the update. I have the most fun in POE when I can farm more currency to make the next build and so on. This is peak POE for me. And i'm a filthy casual that makes less than 100ex per league.

No one is complaining about the culling of items.

And no, i'm not exacerbating the drop reduction because I didnt even played Sentinel due to AN mods being core.

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Improvements to testing and communication in the future

All I can say about this is that I hope this goes somewhere and prevent things like 3.19 happening again.

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The direction from here

Now this proves how much disconection there is. The "multiple mirrors per day" and "50 divines from a single mob" party are being accused of cheating. I dont know if thats the case or not but lets say they arent cheating. You are saying that in order to farm currency now, I need to spam maps in order to find a rare monster with the correct mod in the correct order? For real?


And the next line is even worse

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For regular players who are just alching their maps and adding difficulty where they feel they can handle it, we think that drops are in a pretty good place after this week's changes.

Drops are not ok. Not even close. You balance the game thinking that everyone is optmizing every single aspect of farming but the reality is the opposite. This is the minoity. Your divine/exalted change? Only restrict casual players out of metamods. Harvest crafts removal? Again, limit casual players in a lower level. Stop this GGG, POE is not a PVP game where everything needs to be carefuly balanced. Its okay for things to be OP, you can always nerf it after the league end. Let us have our fun. If we are having fun it means more money for you.

After reading this post yesterday i unninstaled the game and even now after i'm more calm and can think straight, I have no desire to play the game. Thats really sad but I wont be playing anymoe with the direction that the game is going.

Isekai me too truck-chan, letss guooo! ^^

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BigBadWolf1776 wrote:

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DreadLordAvatar wrote:

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fai430love wrote:

[Removed by Support]

you might get banned for this comment. good luck

i dont think he cares anymore lol

Lol, OMG DONT GET BANNED FROM PIXEL LAND BRO!!! WHAT WILL YOU EVER DO W/O PIXEL LAND BRO!?!?!?!

Imagine caring you got banned from a GAME.