Increasing the quantity will indeed not fix it, as it rather is a question of quality.
In D3/4/Destiny, the stats are tied to the item level whereas in LE they are independent of it.
Say in Diablo, a Lvl 50 Item can roll 3.5-5% crit, a Lvl 55 Item 4.5-6 and a Lvl 60 5.5-7%.
If you find a good rolled lvl 50 you may not immediately replace it as you level, but it’s inevitably that you WILL get an upgrade as you progress.
In LE, your lvl 10 yellow item can have the exact same stats as your lvl 80 item (of the same base). So going higher in lvl/corruption doesn’t give you any better items, just more of them.
IMO, this system is fundamentally flawed and doesn’t fit into a (potentially) infinite progression scaling.
Another aspect that makes it feel so unrewarding is the poor target farming.
Whether you want an upgrade to an existing slot or want to farm gear for a build that you want to do, farming something specific is either straight up impossible or nowhere near an acceptable effort:reward ratio.
Some things that, while not really fix the issues, would improve the situation a bit:
remove low level bases from Monolith loot tables
remove base/affix combinations nobody wants, melee mods on spell dmg wands for example
I’ve been doing Game Design for ten years and some change, and in my experience, the best solutions are the ones that require the least amount of work and have the fewest side effects. By my reckoning, there are three options available:
More drops. Whether it’s replacing low-quality drops with high-quality ones in high-difficulty content or just boosting the purple drop rate alone, the resulting name of the game is more purple. The backswing is that there are more useless purple drops, but that’s really not that big of a deal given that the Loot Filter exists.
Smart Loot. Drops are now tailored for the class you’re playing. The upside is that it’d be great for players who only use one character. Downsides are that it’s terrible for players with multiple characters that like to pick up stuff for their alts. For it to not be horrible garbage that ruins the game, it would also require a significant amount of planning, development, testing, and carve-outs for fringe builds like Dexterity Sentinel or Melee Casters.
Filter Boosting. Drop rates and Affix applications are now influenced by your Loot Filter settings. On one hand, players would be able to adjust their drop rates to their heart’s content. On the other hand, this would make the Loot Filter mandatory rather than optional, require a ton of very careful work to keep it from being exploitable, and runs the very real risk of being an absolute mess of bugs and spaghetti code that nobody is sure even functions properly because Drop rates are an invisible force.
I don’t know how much work the developers want to put into solving this problem, but simply giving us more Exalted drops comes with the least amount of baggage.
While it’s true that it would be nice if stat ranges were tied to item level, that would not solve the base problem that not enough viable drops are appearing. In D3, most items are just stat sticks - outside of using a specific legendary, the vast majority of skills will work with any weapon. Meanwhile in LE, there’s no shortage of weapon-specific passives and skill nodes.
Wands cannot roll melee affixes. Unless you mean Scepters, in which case I am using those and would appreciate you leaving them alone.
There’s a few weapon specific skills and nodes, but weapons (& items in general) are just stat sticks, there’s no way to do damage outside of using a skill (ignoring minions & to a lesser extent ailment builds) & skills all get their damage from your weapon (plus passives and 1 unique boot).
Welcome to any problem solving that involves “smart” loot.
“ah you are a caster, you clearly dont need attack speed”
I think the system works fine as it is outside of there being to many filler stats that are extremely niche but still useful. For example, lots of stun chance exalteds will show up, and stun is skipped by almost everyone. But the DoT damage from stun chance forge strike build might be a bit miffed if we just delete stun chance.
There is a weird problem where there is somehow too much loot already, but not enough drop rate for the “chase” items. its fairly easy to end up with characters with exalted in every slot on decent enough bases. But its very hard to get exalteds on the perfect base with perfect other stats. So you hit 70% of your peak power right away, and can do pretty much everything already, and getting that last 30% takes 500+ hours.
TBF, casters don’t need attack speed, casters need cast speed. Hybrids may need attack &/or cast speed & if that’s the case Sceptres are for them since they can get both attack & cast speed & all the usual melee affixes.
I don’t completely disagree with some of your solutions. The problem is really in the specifics. This could get very complicated because there are an insane number of bonuses that can drop and lots of them don’t go together. (Some of them are arguably not even useful.) But the number of possible builds and specs means the player needs a variety of bonuses to show up so they can choose what they want to play rather than the loot informing that. (Which is a huge problem that comes into play with Unique and Set items, but that’s a separate issue.) Moreover, some of the philosophy of LE is to have items drop on one character that could be used on another. You don’t want to get stuck grinding an extra 50-100 hours to get items to drop for a specific character to then have to get stuck doing that all over again on the next one. To a certain extent, a variety of loot dropping allows you to avoid that hassle.
I think over-all if you were just to streamline what bonuses can show up together and on what items, it would go a long way towards fixing Exalted drops.
The problem isn’t the amount, it’s the ‘blind dick, thrusting in the darkness’ way they are put together – where you need 20 chaos rolls to try and make something useful from one, but usually just end up with a shatter. Maybe a fix for exalted items is that they drop with ONLY the exalted affix. Everything else must be crafted.
That’s somewhat my point as well. This partially stems from the number of nearly-useless affixes that can show up on items, as well as the exponentially larger set of useless combinations. One of the major downfalls of totally random loot, and barely being able to craft any of it.
The solution is simple… make Alts, and level them. Lots of Alts.
I am currently sitting on 20 Alts (which is the limit), most of which are in empowered monos. So when I am farming, I am farming for 20 characters. Makes most drops that get past my loot filter relevant.
Remember only the affix that is t6 or t7 is fixed, you can change all the other affixes before fusing, so it’s quite easy to turn an exalted into something that might combine nicely in future, as long as the purple affix is of interest to you.
The problem is that you can only change them a little bit and there are a boat load of affixes that are pretty much useless and are objectively useless based on which build you’re running. The amount of time you can get all 4 affixes to be something you want, let alone seal one and then max out the others, is extraordinarily rare. In my 640 hours of playtime, I’ve done that a total of 5 times, or thereabouts.
I understand that people have been trained by PoE and mobile games to spend literal thousands of hours trying to get an item or reward that they like, but some of us have jobs and lives and other things to do. If we were valuing our time properly, we wouldn’t want to get something less fun or interesting out of 40 hours of play time than we would get from reading, practicing a skill or hobby or doing something else similarly more productive for that same amount of time. We’re already resigning ourselves to the idea that we do this for enjoyment or to relax from other things. To then have to play the game compulsively for hundreds of hours to get any additional entertainment value out of it that it doesn’t immediately offer is like having a second job. If ever you recognize that this is what you’re doing, you should probably stop right then and do something else. (Or at least consider it.)
That’s why I only level characters and don’t focus on Exalted items further than filtering for the ones I’d actually use and banking them for later. If I were to actually grind for one specifically, I’d be stuck playing LE for way longer than it would be worth my time to.
