Campaign Currency Feels Too Scarce — Could It Be Improved?

Hello everyone,

What’s your opinion on currency availability during the campaign?

Right now, getting Regals and Exalts feels quite difficult. In the Temple of the Vaal league, we already saw how much better early progression feels when players have access to a bit more currency to upgrade their items during the campaign.

So I was wondering: would it make sense to make Regal Orbs a little easier to obtain early on? For example, instead of requiring 10 Regal Shards, maybe they could be created with 5 or 6.

Another idea could be to let merchants occasionally offer random currency items for sale, with their stock refreshing each level, similar to how their gear changes.

I think this could make item progression during the campaign feel smoother and more rewarding, without making it overpowered.

What do you think?

I've rarely felt I need more currency during the campaign, I feel that any time I need an upgrade, I'm very comfortably able to craft one up, often with a few tries if needed. If anything is low in amount, its Whetstones and Armorer's scraps, as I often need to supplement scrapping for them with buying quality and scrapping those, which is a hastle I'd love to not do at league start.

As to the suggestion, no absoultely don't have venders sell currency per level. Then you'll REALLY feel like you need to pull over every level, go to town, see whats there, then get back to actually playing the game. The more the game just lets you go forward and level, swap gear in the field, and finish the campaign without disruption, the better. Going back to town every level to manage logistics is the opposite of 'smoother' gameplay.

Use the crafting benches in the temple.

this would help improve and they are such low value it shouldn't hurt the economy

I'm always trying to think of ways to get Players to interact w/ Crafting, but currently you get quite a bit of Currency playing the Campaign (maybe not so much Runes). However, I don't know how things will look next League when Vaal Temple isn't the League Mechanic.
I know Regals can feel pretty tight and recycling Rares feels like trash. But there needs to be Designed some sort of Opportunity to Learn or a "Check," and having some limits to your Currency in Campaign makes you think about what's worth slamming and what's maybe not worth the roll. What's worth picking up, and what's maybe not worth your time. Just like Solving for Poison, Bleed, Freeze, etc.
You Decide, but the game has Checks where You need to make a Decision.

tl;dr
I don't think more Regals is what Campaign needs at this time. But I do want some sort of Crafting opportunity for Campaign that introduces more (higher-) tier Crafting techniques than just slamming, even if it ends up mostly reserved for the latter half/quarter of the Campaign.

it should be like this. the game is as it should be. slow, annoying, difficult to craft, painfull to play beside meta build etc etc.

if u want easy mode, pick a meta leveling build, play a meta endgame build, spend + hours to grind daily (or learn how to do anti casual staff and grind +hours for 5x efficeny.

is this real world, i mean.. vision?

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karsey#2995 wrote:

Use the crafting benches in the temple.

We can use it now, but my post is more about future. Next league u won't have a Temple in Campaign.

Currency in campaign was perfectly fine and if anything I feel it needs to be nerfed. Progression in ssf was extremely fast, mainly due to the drops being too good. I just don't agree with this at all and don't feel like more currency would be a good thing. If anything it would make progression feel more meaningless than it already does.

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rrogan17#2926 wrote:

Currency in campaign was perfectly fine and if anything I feel it needs to be nerfed. Progression in ssf was extremely fast, mainly due to the drops being too good. I just don't agree with this at all and don't feel like more currency would be a good thing. If anything it would make progression feel more meaningless than it already does.

Were you playing a reasonably good build?

I think that right now the gap between good leveling skills and bad leveling skills is too large. That means that casuals have a decent chance of grinding to a halt without knowing why. And the reason is because some skills are just trash. In those cases, you need more currency to get your luck on getting a good weapon.

Personally I’ve given up on crafting. For 1 exalt you can get completely OP weapons, and I find 1-2 exalts per act. With the odds of actually getting a good roll, it’s not worth to use those exalts on “crafting”.

However, even with my lack of PoE knowledge, which ends up in me using terrible builds, I can do most of the game just fine. Except Jamanra is usually a bottleneck. Somehow everything up to that point is usually fine, and act 3 is fine. But Jamanra has a high armor or something, because when I do too little damage the fight takes 20 minutes, which is a lot of opportunity of dying.

I don’t mind the long fights, in fact it’s quite fun. But I’ve noticed it’s either a 3-4 minutes fight or a 20 minute fight though, and nothing in between. That just seems weird. So I keep my currency so I can buy something in case I get stuck here.

Personally I think regals could add 2 modifiers. That way the resulting item has a much better chance of being usable. Let’s be honest, how often do you use an item with 3 modifiers?

That’s on top of potentially reworking it slightly so it gives a little bit of agency. Why not roll 3 modifiers and we can pick 1 or 2 of them? Why just 1 completely random modifier, which most of the time is trash?

The drop rates are such that experienced players who know what they're doing will almost always have enough currency drops for smooth progression and players who don't know what they're doing, or who are using currency inefficiently, will almost always not - they will likely need to grind more, for more currency drops, which means they progress slower.

In a game meant to be challenging to most players, the average player will likely feel that currency drops are scarce relative to their progression.

It doesn't necessarily mean that drops should be adjusted, but it's why these threads always skew the same way in responses:

- most players saying they wish they had more currency drops for whatever reasons.
- some players saying they think it's just enough as long as you do xyz.
- one or two players who are very experienced saying they think it's already too much.
- the first and third groups will actually be over-represented on an online forum because online feedback skews negative, and the people who think it's enough won't be here in as large of proportion as the people with something negative to share.

Currency drop-rate is one of the levers involved in ggg setting an optimal carrot-distance for players to chase. An optimal carrot distance from a design standpoint means that most people are chasing it, some people get it, and of those who get it, some will wish for it to be moved farther out because they want a more satisfying chase.

You might complain while chasing it, but you are chasing it.