Loot: My Synopsis and Thoughts

Jonathan has mentioned wanting to know what is wrong with loot, so I have taken some time to think on that and come up with a way to explain it to the best of my ability. So here I sit on a Friday after work and write my issues with loot as it pertains to currency and some item drops with some ideas on how to resolve this.

Currency

This is probably the greatest issue overall for the current league (0.2.0). That is around a few items of loot overall, these items not only cause issues for all players but make currency drops important

Regals

I am talking about both Orbs and Shards in this section.

Lets begin with Shards. Shards are required to make one Orb as we know, this is required as one of the three ways to turn an item from a Magic to a Rare, the others being Alchemy Orbs and Greater Essence, both of which we all know to be less common.

Regal Shards are gained by killing monsters, chests, strongboxes, and/or disenchanting Rare items. The issue we come to though, is that these are not dropping often at all. I see less Regal Shards per map than I do Exalts and those are even fairly rare.

I do, however, get a good amount of rare loot, vast majority being DE worthy. The issue here is that when I break down an item, I get 1 or 2 shards, that means I need to break down 5, at the minimal, items to get 1 orb. It is more like 6-8 though as I have many items that break down in to 1 shard.

This formula needs to be adjusted, we should see 1 shard (or 2 depending on the item) for a 3 stat Rare, 2 for a 4, 3 for a 5, and 4 for a 6. If the Rare is tiered, you could increase that if you so wished, this would solve issues though with getting regal orbs from shards very quickly. To demonstrate on this point, look at armor quality shards, an item at 20% yields around 4 or 5 shards, that I feel is acceptable, the drops rate is also much higher on these for some reason so while you are not swimming in those items, you are also not hurting for them.

The next part is Orbs themselves. These should be a higher drop rate, they should be a more "common" currency item as you obviously want all players to have access to them to raise their levels. Going from Magic to Rare with a gamble craft should always feel like you have the currency, the more deterministic with essence should feel less common itself.

When running 50 maps, juiced to an extent, with rarity gear that is not great but average for an average player, I would get about 3 or 4 total in all 50 maps. This feels too low. They feel closer to Exalt levels of hard to get which is an issue as these need to be more common. I find myself exchanging exalts for regals more than I should.

Exalts and Divines

These may as well be together, it is impossible to seperate them. Both of these items should be more uncommon, and rare in the case of Divines, but the issue is that they are both hard to get.

Divines became the trade currency almost instantly this patch, and due to that many players felt stuck. Even some of the streamers who can play this game for hours on end don't see them drop as much as you would expect for people who play the game for around 10+ hours per day.

Exalts, while they should be more rare than Regal, have a natural sink. We do not have a way to make gear how we want with certainty in this game, so exalts have a natural sink in them when you are crafting out Blue and White items into Yellow. This should add to them being more common than they are now.

Divines however, are less of a sink because they are used until you get the stat you want, then they are just sitting. While I agree these should be more rare, it feels like you are not getting them at any point.

Gear

Gear is dropping, at least for me, but it is heavily useless. My take here is that by iLvL 81 items, you shouldn't see or be able to have, less than a T5 on an item. Anything lower is just trash for it, though 5 is low as well. If we up the floor for these, like was done on the Runes recently, this will give many of us, myself included, the ability to get gear that is an actual upgrade. I know people who ran Level 5 wraps to T10 maps because they just didn't get an upgrade. Sure this should be possible if you get an epic roll, however, the chances of this should drop as time goes on.

So this is my post on this. I don't know if it will help or not, I just want to see POE2 succeed.