Currency drop increase from PoE 1 didn't go far enough

The biggest issue PoE 1 always had is that crafting was an inefficient means of progression for the average player. Unless you were extremely wealthy in game, trying to craft your own items was simply a waste of time. You could spend hundreds of orbs trying to craft a single decent piece of gear or you could simply buy a decent piece of gear for a pittance.

This made crafting feel really bad for most people, because if your crafting didn't hit (and let's face it, it rarely does), then you felt like you wasted extremely valuable currency.

When GGG announced that they were increasing currency drops in PoE 2 to make crafting more accessible and realistic, I was really excited to hear that. However, the drop rates in EA have fallen well short of the mark.

You can easily pick up very good endgame gear for 20-30 exalts. That same 20-30 exalts is basically a fart in the wind if you try to craft. There's a 99% chance you'll end up with multiple garbage items that can't even be scoured / altered. You just vendor them and move on. When compared to the 100% chance that you can just go to the trade site and spend your exalts on a bona fide upgrade, crafting suddenly becomes a very distant second when it comes to progression.

Currency drops should be SIGNIFICANTLY boosted to the point that players can craft items on a regular basis without feeling like they're just throwing away a fortune. If regals and exalts were common enough and the average price of items on the trade site was very high, then crafting would be a far more realistic option and a meaningful use of our time. This would also make SSF feel a lot better.

As is, crafting will always take a back seat to trading and it won't even be close.