An Early-Game "Orb Farming" Zone (D2 Countess-Inspired)

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Warlyx#1083 wrote:

SSF is not popular on PoE2 for a reason , lack of drops, u can go entire acts w/o upgrading anything.

once u are into maps its even worse since its a loop of farming and left empty handed .

sure, makes sense. though we can't expect them to balance the loot around SSF players, which would require an extreme buff to drop rates. I certainly don't want that. I do believe a reliable way to target-farm orbs in the campaign would be a big plus for SSF/HC though, without affecting Trade-Enjoyers at all since they will be getting orbs much faster in maps.

Freythorn could be such an early game farming zone. Go in, do the rituals, defeat The King in the Mist, get his drops, then perhaps much better options from the ritual itself.

Has anyone tested farming this zone early on for upgrades?

I would imagine that it would be hard to balance it so that it doesn't become too good though.

I play mostly SSF until I reach the inevitable brick wall somewhere in maps.

The only thing that keeps me from crafting is a lack of exalted orbs. Usually throughout the campaign I manage to cover my character in decent 5-6 mod rares so I generally need something with 5-6 mods to replace those unless I've wildly out-leveled those pieces. This means I need up to 3 exalts just to roll one piece.

Nobody is running out of Transmutes and Augments and I never run out of Regals because I disenchant every rare until Act3-4 when gold values ramp up. I never have many exalts to craft with so I usually don't even bother. I usually get to endgame with 15-20 Regals.

I like the idea of a boss farm for absolutely last resort, but that sounds very boring. I think if the game wants players to be able to craft throughout the campaign, it needs to facilitate that somewhat reliably without making the player repeat content ad nauseam.

A few days ago I proposed a more reliable and steady way of obtaining exalts via shards that can be disenchanted from magics or rares. Nobody needs transmute shards and it's likely nobody is disenchanting magics for them. I DE magics in acts 1-2 because they sell for pocket lint. The downside to DEing for exalts is now you're porting to and from town every 5 minutes. Definitely not fun either.

The other solution is tighten the curve of exalt drop rate and increase the minimum rate. However, I highly doubt drop rates will ever be increased enough to give players consistently enough exalts. Also, I have no idea how drop rates work in PoE and everything seems to be weird somehow in this game so maybe increasing the drop rate at lower levels isn't simple.

Just felt like dropping input because you mentioned leaving the boss at about a 1/20 rate for exalts and therefore making that boss nearly worthless to farm in acts for someone like me. If I farm a boss for an hour and I only get 5 exalts, I'm never farming that boss again.

The rarity of exalts does not reflect their value and practically necessary function imo but then again, neither do Divines from what I can tell. But exalts are far far far more valuable in their functionality to me. I usually don't get to do much crafting until I'm already waist deep in endgame which is ridiculous.

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Googous#1585 wrote:

Just felt like dropping input because you mentioned leaving the boss at about a 1/20 rate for exalts and therefore making that boss nearly worthless to farm in acts for someone like me. If I farm a boss for an hour and I only get 5 exalts, I'm never farming that boss again.

thank you for the input!

I'm actually shocked to hear that. around 1/20 drop chance and I am thinking the boss should require about 3 minutes per trip, so 20 trips per hour would get about 1 exalt per hour. I suppose that's not very generous but I'm in Act 5 on HcSSF and it's been really shit, I do not find 1 exalt per hour right now. I play for 8 hours and maybe find 4 exalts with 70% rarity. of course that's not 8 hours of pure grinding because many town visits and some breaks.

but if your experience says that 5 per hour is considerably low, then maybe the rate should be closer to 1/5, so with 20 trips one could expect about 4 exalts.

again, to reiterate the purpose here, this is not for endgame orb-targeting, this is for league start, campaign, ssf, hc.. currently, any way to get 4 exalts per hour when you're level ~20-60 would be substantial

+1 to target farm in general. I play SSF btw.

I second this

+1

+1

This is a great idea and would be a great fix, as a matter of fact it has already existed here in poe2. There was a bug where you could farm The 9th Treasure of Keth miniboss by Unearthing the boss' corpse and then unequipping unearth and respawning at waypoint. This is what you're exampling, right? A loot pinata to farm orbs? Well the miniboss did that, but here's the thing, they made their opinion on this when they removed the ability to unearth or shatter the corpse, breaking the farm and "fixing" the bug. They want the grind to be slow and boring, that's why the game is. They want you to waste your time, that's why death = map-wide enemy reset. You can react to this with a clown emote, go ahead but everyone knows this. That's why I have my hostility, because they have theirs.

+1
great idea!


Currently new players will have a difficult time since:

Starter builds that are off-meta just hit a brick wall to progression when entering maps still

(though the wall might be smaller now after some patches - it's still no fun).