What Happened with Items

You should add 2 new bench crafts reforge keep suffix/prefix for 6 divine each

Hello GGG. Casual player and minion enthusiast here, giving you my humble but honest take in hopes that you can see how much - or how little - the recent changes and actions have affected me, and how other players' feelings impact me looking forward.
Working in QA myself, I understand how difficult it can be to view the full scope of all changes and functionalities thrown at us. If they have concerns, I feel like they aren't being taken seriously enough. They should have a bigger voice, and much more involvement in the development process. Given how complex your game is, number tweaks can mean a lot more than just numbers, and devs should also be 100% aware of this. Chris owning up to the mistakes regarding decision analysis and the negative loot impact is a step in the right direction, but if you're moving forward wanting people to feel like progression is slower and harder, your philosophies need to consider one very important balance that I find is quite lacking in these areas:

- Full investment in damage should feel like full investment, something Archnemesis crippled (and I'm not even mentioning the underperforming gems);
- Proper investment in player defenses shouldn't make us fear Archnemesis mods more than proper bosses and endgame content;
- Full investment in defenses for minions, for example, should feel impactful at almost every stage of the game, including buff maintenance and proper player awareness;
- Structural changes in the economy, like the Divine+Exalted switch, needs a lot more preparation and better communication with the playerbase.

I know some of these issues are already being addressed, but they don't feel sensible enough. I think it's safe to say that absolutely nobody likes the idea of gambling maps in order to find that one exploding loot monster. Using it as an example of a healthy economy is dishonest and it downplays the effort of players (like myself) who never found a mirror or farmed enough to have one. Trying to balance out the game around the existence of that monster type is very risky and questionable. I'm not particularly affected by the juicing nerf because I don't play enough hours to feel like investing to that point, but at the same time I heavily disagree with the way it has so many diminishing returns now, because most players that keep playing the game want to feel challenged by it, and feel like they're being rewarded by that challenge.
With that in mind, I have my own set of suggestions (no matter if they're possible to implement or not):

- Discard Archnemesis mods that funnel the global loot numbers into loot piñatas, instead of working around them. The balancing of the other mods seems to be going in the right direction;

- Give the players a better way to react to the most dangerous rare monsters, they're unpredictable and logging out should never be considered a good option;

- As for minions, consider giving more options to buff their HP and defensive interactions, be it via the passive tree, items, support gems or hell, even cluster jewels with slightly better numbers/modifiers. Their problem isn't damage for the vast majority of use cases, it's the fact that we feel like investing in their defenses - especially permanent minions like spectres and the Animate Guardian - just doesn't feel like it matters because they're paper thin. Remember Indomitable Army ? Why not make them unaffected by Corrupted blood, rather than not take bleeding damage while moving ? Or the old Enduring Bond with duration reset for SRS and Phantasms ? Defensive clusters just don't feel good enough in the current state of the game, and I'd like to see discussion over this. Also, Reaper and minion bleed damage in general might not be in a good spot still. If you want items to be more impactful for minions in terms of scaling both HP and Damage, make it so the passive tree doesn't feel boring as we're already socked starved. Also, please use Ghazzy's AG example to verify if monster damage is properly applied to minions;

- Melee keeps getting mentioned as being in a very precarious state when you have to facetank unpredictable content, and a lot of skills are clunky to use. I'm not a proper melee player but, as a general suggestion, I'd like to see more ways to use melee skills, or have them triggered like the counterattacks (which could use a buff btw, or specific ways to build them), make them feel more impactful at close range and leave the projectile skills for greater distances. As it stands, those projectile skills just take over for defensive reasons and just deal a ton of damage anyway;

- Expand upon skillsets with barely any use - Blind was an example you did review, although it's still not sought after often. Link skills, Taunt and debuffs in general, to name a few, aka options that can fill in supportive niches and be offensive and defensive. Equivalents of Corrupting Fever to elemental and/or chaos damage. Hierophant could also use a better Brand node as it doesn't really compare to the Totem nodes, while no other class has something related to Brands;

- Some defensive options just feel worse than others. The Arctic Armor, Flesh and Stone and Tempest Shield come to mind. You know better than anyone that this game does not reward you for standing still, and skills that force you to stay still for longer periods of time should either reflect that, or not have that condition to begin with. Arctic armor still underperforms in that regard and could use a rework. Flesh and Stone doesn't feel offensive enough unless it has Maim attached to it, making the reservation feel like it's too much.

- Finally, I feel like banners are very, very strong by themselves and have little to no support outside of the gem itself. I feel like power could be scaled further with more passives and items options while taking out some of the value from the skill gem. Champion is already a strong ascendancy but it has close to no interaction with banner skills, and could use something that gives it more identity (in similar fashion to Taunt). Maybe allowing two Banners with added reservation efficiency rather than no cost could work. That would make Perfidy work better for other ascendancies I suppose, or just give the unconditional extra banner anyway, carry all of them flags.

I could keep going, but I'd like to see you show that you listen first. And if any extra testing is required, if you want the community more invested in giving you reliable feedback, we'd be more than happy to playtest if that were ever to become a thing :D
I hope this will be read eventually. If not, I hope other people see it and resonate at least slightly with the wish of a better game.

Casual player out

Remove Archnemesis ASAP or TFT will become the meta game. Feels sad.

Why punish someone who dedicated their time and experience to make a 6-man party + trader(s) to get something good out of the game? If they're playing by the rules, they dont exploit anything, and their works, their times, their efforts are shafted and treat as an "solo player in a 6 man party", I dont think it's fun, game is meant to be fun.

If coop play is not rewarding why not just ... remove the coop aspect of the game instead of it being punishing for everyone involved?

And even if you say but there are SSF mode, your changes not only affect the dedicated party players that play softcore, but also affect the SSF community too, picking up scraps hoping to gear up alone is no fun.

So yea, keep up with your vision, and the results will show itself soon (or has shown? idk)

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For players who are juicing their content to extreme levels with six-person parties, dedicated MF cullers and stacked league mechanics, they no longer have Beyond to push things over the edge. But they still find ridiculous amounts of stuff. I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster.

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. They should have been like this at release, and I am deeply sorry that they were not.

Dude.... That's inflation and that's gonna fuck everyone except the bank parties.

LEWT explosions are fine, not raw cash.

Good lord just put gold in the game at this point.

Plus all the shit wrong is still wrong. I either play JUST SO or I die. There is no build freedom. 9,999,999 wrong ways to every right one.

Also kirac pass, loot crates, FOMO. Gah. Just fuck it all.

Honestly, I think the two most important things they need to do is revert drops back to 3.18. Revert Archnemesis back to 3.18 or remove it altogether. Then they need to wipe and restart the league. Why? The economy is scuffed. I don't think anyone should really have a problem with this considering we all start over again and again in new leagues anyways.

why do you think, that loot from one of rare monsters with one of super-rare Archnemesis mods is a great idea? JUST MAKE A STABLE DROPRATE LIKE BEFORE

Hi Chris, I'm sorry to see how much negativity this community has brought you recently. Thank you and your team for being so passionate and hardworking. You will always be my favorite developer no matter what.

Just typical GG strat where they just pull a change from thin air and haphazardly implement it with literally zero testing done. Dude literally admitted it in this post. They never test it and it always happens this way. Some stupid change gets made, then they spend half the league band-aiding it when they could have just tested it and ACTUALLY listened to the community.

They only care now because so many people quit, nerfing loot drops into the ground, destroying crafting, and turning the game into diablo "loot goblin" 3, while also simultaneously making the Iconic exalted orb literally worthless and garbage while making the divine orb basically the only worthwhile currency item, while ALSO keeping the accessibility of the now worthless exalted orb the EXACT SAME. So now there is this moderately rare drop that is basically bloat and feels bad because it could have been a divine.

It's just heaps of changes meant to make the player feel bad, to up the difficulty of gearing for no reason, you say you don't have hard mode implemented, but the results and gameplay say the exact opposite.

Just Short sited changes without any ACTUAL thought behind them. There is a reason over half the content creators for this game are angry/quitting, there is a reason Path of Math personally attacked you specifically. It's because they are all upset that you just frankly seem allergic to players having fun and making progress without grinding their face on a belt sander for 12 hours a day.

You can take accountability all day long, but nobody cares if you don't actually do anything about it.

This patch you just rolled out is guaranteed not enough either, regardless of you saying otherwise.

I'm a pessimist. So, this game profits with mtx, right? If I think everything is about money and I wanted to make more money out of the game...

I would need to retain more players each league and extend their gametime each day, because with that, there's more time to expose the player to lootboxes and other mtx ads, and bigger chances the player would buy them.

I would try to make and release quality content every 3 months, to see if I could retain more players each league or atleast profit with each league start when interest is at its highest, like those "live service" games.

I would then want or be pressured by stock holders to be just like those "live service" boys and make more money, and I would need to do some data analysis and market research, or something like that I guess.

I would question myself: "How much can I lower loot drop rates while increasing playtime across the board, without going overboard and loose players' interest in the game? Should I get a smaller carrot? Should I get a bigger stick?"

Because then I would need to figure out how much I can artificially stretch that player retention and game session time with the same amount of product/content created before, because otherwise there wouldn't be so much profit.

I would finally go too far and f it up. Because I'm just one f'ing guy and I'm known to make bad decisions in life and struggle with basic metaphors.

Thank God GGG isn't just one guy and would never make mistakes like mine! Oof.