Crafting vs Trading and XP Penalty

Hello,


I have 100h+ in PoE2 and just reached endgame with my warrior (lvl 71). If you ask why it took me so long, it's because I spent a lot of time with alts :)

Two points of feedback from my side

1. Crafting vs. Trading
Until endgame I used to craft a lot. As GGG said, crafting is an important part of the game. So, I went from Blue > Yellow > spending a lot of Ex to add new affixes

I pretty much ignored trading until lvl 69. Then I realized what I am a dumb ass basically. All the Ex Orbs spent basically for nothing could buy me BiS. With 1-3 Ex Orbs I can get everything I want from Trading.

Trading is good. I am happy it exists, and it's done very well. I want it to stay the same. My only question is... what is the point of crafting? I think GGG should do something about it.

2. XP Penalty
This comes from the point of view of a melee char. It is incredible difficult to keep playing maps when dying once bricks the map and in the same time I lose 10% XP :). Honestly I don't see the point of XP penalty, as we get some many other penalties :)

My 2 cents. Let me know if others think the same. And if they (you) do let's hope GGG does something about. I really love this game!

All the best!

L

I have to agree that there is a big disconnect between the value an Exalted Orb has in terms of progressing your character by means of crafting and the value an Exalted Orb has when it comes to shopping for items.

There is an even bigger gap when it comes to Divine Orbs. They have 70 times the purchasing power of an Exalted Orb, but in terms of crafting they are but a minor adjustment.


Trying to gear your character by farming, you will also quickly notice items costing either an Exalt, or a Divine, with very few items being priced in between. You want a Ring with +30 on two different resistances? Sure, one Exalt. You want a third resistance or health on top, then the price immedeately jupms up to one Divine, which is a factor of 70.


In all the time I played PoE, I always perceived it as a trickle down economy. Playing 2h a day means, there are a lot of people playing the game way more than me and their loot will trickly down. I do not need to craft. I do not need pick up loot other than currency. I go to the official trading post website, I search for a corrupted item with 20% quality. I can be relatively sure such items were either worn by their previous user or they considered wearing them, if the corruption was just right. Which still makes the item good enough for me, correct corruption or not.

PoE crafting can be comnplicated to the n-th degree (including Discord servers trading season mechanics). PoE shopping is easier than most other games, because it has always been very formulaic. Three elements require 120 points to cap your resistances, which is 12 elemental resistance rolls at +30 each you need to sprinkle across your gear. 10, if you use the new runes for that. The more you try to compress this into fewer and fewer items towards the endgame, the more you either pay the price, or wait for the trickle down effect to crash prices. This is also the main difference how PoE treats legendary items compared to the competition. Whereas other games offer legendary effects on top of very good stats, PoE offers legendary items which excert pressure onto your other items to pick up the slack (in most cases missing resistance and health rolls on those legendaries).

This always meant, I either have the time to grind (which I do not), or the patience to stick around long enough for prices to come down while I run into a barrier of having bad gear on high maps.

Personally, I do not mind PoE2 basically being PoE1 with minor changes and the PC finally catching up to a decades old direct input scheme seen on consoles long ago. I hope the devs find something to break the cycle of seasons past though.

Agreed with everything you said apart from the trading. I would like to see an incredible game auction house where sales are instant without having to whisper and potentially spend hours trying to buy the item you want.

It is hard to imagine PoE with an ingame auction house, because player trade and player to player economy was such a central tennant during PoE's initial creation.

By all means though, progress is progress. At the moment, PoE is a seller's economy in the sense that the sellers determine the price. In real life sellers have to pay the bills like the rest, hence there is a pressure to make sales and this is the pressure of the buyers to lowe prices. Too high a price will kill the seller's business. That is not the case in the PoE economy and for that reason it is a 100% seller's economy and prices only go down when the illusion of making a lot of currency with an item is crushed by abundant availability.

Having an ingame auction house would not change PoE fundamentally being a seller's market, since items aren't really auctioned in these places, they are sold for fixed prices. Such an ingame trading post interface would be more convenient to trade, but the trade would be the same in nature, i.e. the seller fixes the price.

To really change it, PoE would need to become buyer's market. E.g., I want to buy a ring with minimum +30 fire and lightning res and minimum 50 life for 10 Exo . I then create a fulfillment order, the Exos leave my inventory and whoever has such a ring can make the trade. We see PoE2 moving into that direction with the Currency Exchange Vendor.

This could counteract what we are seeing often right now, which is items at one exo being sniped and flipped for one divine, instead of a broader price range establishing itself. I sure do know, that nothing improves your character faster than playing the trading post game of flipping items, instead of actually playing the game with your character. Seller's market 101.