Have you considered toning down the loot drop a little bit?

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1

I know I will probably get crucified for even suggesting this.

I’ve seen many complaints of people, who get so much loot, especially at end-game, that they actually struggle to check it out, even with a very specific loot filter in place.

Look, I get it, people need constant dopamine boosts in order to not get bored of the game and quit on the spot.
However, do they really? We as ARPG fans are pretty accustomed to not getting rewards straight away, on every single step.
I’ve never heard someone say “Man, this game drops so little loot that it discourages me from playing it”.
I DO, however, have heard and read many times people saying “This game drops so many uniques and legendaries that they actually lose their meaning” (remember Diablo 3).

Even now, when I am leveling a new character, I see a shiny chest and I am like “Duh, whatever, let’s just open it”.
Does it need to be that way?

I remember, almost 20 years ago, when I was playing Diablo 2 24/7, and I had never seen a unique drops up to a certain point. Then, at a higher difficulty level, first time ever for me a unique dropped - Pelta Lunata buckler. I didn’t even know what that was, with that different color and a unique icon. I was flabbergasted.
Now, compare that to how uniques drop in Last Epoch left and right. You actually get annoyed at some point, when you see yet another unique drop.
Again, does it need to be that way?

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Crucifixion time! haha only joking. I of course dissagree and love the better loot drops and especially the higher favor gain it is so nice.
perhaps people need to use stricter loot filters? as for me its only really more crafting mats that are dropping at mo (other than prophecy drops are higher but i want that)

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Did you actually mean “better”, or “more”? Because I can bet you also don’t want an abundance of literal trash on every single step

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How you seen how much shit drops in PoE without a filter? That is unplayable. Personally I don’t have an issue with “bad” loot dropping as that’s part of the genre and, I’d argue, a necessary part of it.

Have you considered using a loot filter?

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well personally i see them as the same. as more loot means more ‘better’ loot as more dice rolls are happening so better RNG. I personally only see t7 exalts that i am looking for and double exalts etc. like i say perhaps a stronger loot filter is needed?

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I have over 1,100 hours in PoE. I am very much aware.
It is the same situation over there, and I don’t want it here to be the same.
That game is full of trash uniques, which nobody uses. Why do they even exist? Don’t you think they dilute the feeling of seeing a unique drop?

This post is not about loot filter, it is about the uniques and all other drops losing their meaning because they drop in abundance everywhere, all the time.

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Yes :stuck_out_tongue:

Then their filter is not specific enough plainly spoken.

While LE drops a lot of worthless loot… the valuable loot is definitely a ‘man, this game drops so little loot that is discourages me from playing it’.
It’s always surprising just how stingy LE’s system is with actually giving players upgrades after a specific point, which happens surprisingly soon, thanks to the exponential power increase in tiers rather then a inversed curve leading to more plenty but less meaningful upgrades.

The game warrants a massive rework in that area plainly spoken, but we won’t see that for a long long while. Their initial setup worked for the start but is quickly outpaced by their content by now and will likely lead to issues along the line.

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Then you will hear it hear first I guess. Funnily (taken the posts above in consideration) this is one of the many reasons I always end up quitting PoE faster than I’d like.
I’m a CoF player at heart, to me trade feels like cheating. It took me several leagues in PoE to understand that I simply won’t get the build enabling uniques I need to play the builds I imagined. Some I haven’t even gotten ~1k hours later (and no I don’t talk about stuff like Headhunters or Mage Bloods, more along the lines of Doryani’s Prototype).
Is it a no-go for me? Not at all, but it certainly discourages me from playing any league related stuff if I know that I most certainly won’t get to play the build I wanted to play. Are there workarounds? Depending on the build sure, but that can include a lot of suffering while hoping for the single drop to turn it around. I honestly don’t have the time and patience for that anymore.

Now onto LE. I agree with you when talking about Glyphs of Despair. With the event I’m playing MG for the first time and even without any CoF Prophecies the Glyphs dropped so much that I have over a hundred of them now. No effort required. I only have one rune of creation though.
Shards are in a weird place. Playing MG with the ability to simply buy any rare with affix/suffix you need and then rune of removal them they inherently lost all their value to me. I just spent around ~80k and a paltry amount of favor for enough Hybrid Health, Armor and Reduced Crit, Health and Stun Avoidance shards that I won’t ever need to look for them again.
When playing CoF this completely different and I’m always on the lookout for the rare shards.

Now concerning Uniques. Having “bad” uniques is fine if you ask me. As long they are interesting enough. There is this amulet that disables health regen and leech. I always thought it is just bad, but after playing a lot more with Silvershroud that thing could be bis in certain rogue builds (with enough LP).
Then there is stuff that is probably even harder to build around like the fire tornado gloves. Even those existing are fine for people that want the challenge to build around “bad” items. Or simply to have a place holder item with cool effects that will be swapped out down the line for a better one.

Now aquiring uniques you actually want and need for the build is very easy in LE. In MG you just buy it, in CoF you spam prophecies. For the rarest drop-anywhere stuff like red rings I would say CoF is easier, MG for the good rolls on stuff like Abberoth amulet.

Just aquiring the unqiues is just the start in LE though. With LP things get a lot more rare. I find it still easy to get the first power boost with LP1 stuff. Rarely I play builds where there is not any upgrade in power going from LP0 to LP1 even when the slam fails. It is way, way harder to upgrade to the next power level with LP2+ slams on rare items than to just get your hands on the base unique. For the rare items you can’t reasonably be expecting anything over LP1 for as long as you play.
And I personally like this “easy to get going, hard to upgrade” approach a lot more than having a lot of builds closed off because you simply can’t find the stuff you need for it.

So no, I don’t think there is too much worthless loot even though the “perfect” gear is actually - as Kulze said - extremely hard to aquire.
A LP4 rare unique with all T7 slams is possible in theory but with the current systems it’s not realistic at all to get one item like this in the game for at least a century or something. So nope, not gonna happen. You also don’t need it. There is no content in the game that needs this kind of power yet.

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That’s actually gotten a TON better since at T16 maps now you can get the ‘sightless seer’ which is a NPC which provides a inventory full of uniques where you can choose one, with a heavy heavy weight towards rare uniques.
Makes things like Doryani’s Prototype suddenly… doable. If you play a lot at least, same as with chancing that unique since it’s possible to be done.

That’s a mild way to put it :stuck_out_tongue: But yeah, with CoF and MG EHG went definitely off-kilter with how the shards are supposed to feel, it changed it entirely from before 1.0.

LE uniques definitely are quite fine, there’s several intricate mechanics hidden in them. The only gripe I have are those which don’t have intricate mechanics but are basically just oddly compositioned stat sticks… which goes counter to what I feel unique design should provide. If I take a unique solely for the stats (outside of things like Omnis, which is a different way of handling them well) rather then the mechanics it provides then I think it fails on a design basis.

Which leads me into saying ‘it should’ve been held back to be provided and instead opened up gradually as the game progressed’ to give min-maxing perfectionists a more reasonable goal to achieve, even if the goalpost obviously because of power-creep shifts away over and over.

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Huh, where did you read this? Do you have a link or something, for reference?
Cause I check almost every new thread made in this forum, and I never ever seen someone say anything close to that. Pretty much the opposite. They’re always complaining they don’t get their LP uniques they want.

You know, at some point, 0 and 1 LP common uniques can be treated just the same as white gear, you just ignore them (and even better, just hide them in the loot filter, now that we’re are able to set up rules for LP).

So please, don’t suggest anything like this. If they tone down unique drop chances, then the actual time we’ll spend before getting a 4LP Red Ring is going to be way longer than the age of the Earth, which is how things are currently.

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Yes it’s gotten better. In my ~20h of playtime in the maps he can spawn in, I got him once.
Dunno if bad luck, but that is not something I would consider a viable method for the timeframe of a league.

For legacy absolutely and I’m happy they think of the SSF players.

I think MG more so than CoF. With CoF you are limited through prophecies what shards you can attain. And even then you still are actively playing for it.
This may be just a me-problem with MG but I don’t feel like spending a few thousand gold that can’t get you a single stash tab for not needing to worry about any shard ever is rewarding.

Yep, I feel the same way.

Maybe, for me it’s not a problem and I like having the possibility of this rare, lucky event that makes your eyes go wide in disbelief.
One could argue that there is too much room for that at the best imaginable outcome, but for me personally this is not a problem. I’m already happy when I get a double T6 Exalt :smiley:

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Really? It’s inevitable. If you’re at 90% of possible gear power then only 10% of possible gear drops could be an upgrade.

Not quite sure what this means, would you want a minimum droppable tier at some point, so, say at lvl 40 only t3 affixes could drop, at lvl 50 that increases to t4, etc? That might make drops more interesting but it would significantly reduce the power & use of crafting as you level up (which would be bad) unless glyphs of chaos could be used on t5 affixes.

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You mean like it would become a random t6 affix, then the t6 wouldn’t be craftable anymore? Damn, I would love that!

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No, that it would allow you to change the current t5 into a random t5. T6/7 would still be uncraftable.

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Thats crazy, thats my number 1 complaint I hear.

“This game is too grindy” in loot based games, grind is directly connected to loot rates. PoE is called too grindy, because it takes too long for some peoples tastes to get enough currency/items.

Right now I do agree the game has too much loot. It causes the game to have an extremely messed up curve.

You immediately get decent rares, then all you are left doing is fishing for exalted items/LP uniques for hours on end. I personally like the increased access to idols that came with loot lizards as well as shards. But there is an abundance of rare items to the point items basically dont matter outside of the highest rarity.

I get uniques/rares that I need in a few hours. which is good for some, bad for others.

I dont think obtaining uniques fast is bad persay, but really that LP as a system has driven the game into a design corner where every high end build is just 2-3LP in every slot. A 3LP toungue of the abberant seer, is a 3affix ring, that also happens to come with 3 all stat. a 4lp version is basically a 5affix ring but its lowkey easier to get then a good exalted+ t4 seal etc.

I dont think they can currently tune down the loot unless the reconsider the LP system as a whole, right now people want 2-3lp items, and so to get them they need to pull the lever alot, which means lots of uniques need to drop. and because they need to slam an exalted onto it, they need lots of those too. And if those are dropping like candy, is dropping lots of rares even a problem? likely not.

The game has just experienced a metric crap ton of power creep since 1.0 to the point some people need the current loot rates to even play their underpowered not yet buffed to modern standards builds, and others view the loot as a nuisance cause their torment warlock is 1 shotting 600c with white items on.

I mean hell its a common trend of people complainin that LP is too rare still, and too easy to mess up. if they give in eventually you will just get 3lp in 2 days of playing and be able to recraft it if you mess up.

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I wonder whether this is something they’d be interested in changing too. It seems to me in large part like an issue that stems from the salvage/shattering mechanic which ends up assigning almost every stat its own particular forging material or shard. If they were to condense those into an all-purpose forging fuel it should help reduce drops but maybe their vision for the game is partial instead to the use of filters. Maybe it’s something on their to-do list though who knows

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That’s because the ‘base unique’ has no value at all since you’re swamped with uniques commonly… outside of the most of the most rare ones.

There’s a huge difference though between ‘I get a miniscule upgrade somewhere every 10 hours for the next 250 hours’ or ‘I’ll get a substantial upgrade somewhere in the next 250 hours’.

LE offers the second.

I’m far more fervently leaning towards ‘small gradual and regular upgrades’ rather then ‘sudden massive but rare upgrades’.
The came definitely can have the second part as well… but should overall lean towards the former.

It means that as you progress at the start upgrades are a bit spaced out but meaningful while the inverse curve then allowes the game to ramp up rarity multiplicatively by a far higher measurement to ensure the exponential curve stays in line with the increase in power.

Instead of ‘we get vastly less numerical upgrades in a specific timeframe but each provides a vast increase in power’ it turns into ‘we get less numerical upgrades and each provides a slight increase in power’.
The time-value between viable drops lowers but the power level achieved per drop lowers too.
This gives smaller but nonetheless meaningful dopamine boost… but in a more regular manner, gradually rising rather then exponentially so.

That would be a good start to handle the inherent downsides of the system, I like this a lot. Limits the ‘dead affixes’ a bit.

Exactly that. Early progression rate is extremely fast before it suddenly… vanishes completely.
4 T5 is laughably easy and everything starting from 1 T6 3T5 on a great base begins to showcase substantial reductions for obvious reasons. Exponentially so.
20 hours to get your base 4 T5 done and suddenly… nothing, every 5-10 hours a upgrade from then on for a little bit before it very swiftly turns into 50+ or even 200+ per item.

18

Man this reminds me of my hunt for the Madstone in D3. I spent almost 120k bloodshards (plus the runs to farm the bloodshards) at Kadala pulling for Spirit Stones only. By the community generated “average”, I should have seen 3 or 4 Madstones by this point. My friend gets his Monk to 70, walks over to Kadala, spends the whatever cost for the Spirit Stones. First pull was a Madstone. I literally hit Alt+F4 and told him I was done playing for the day.

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19

In my opinion, it doesn’t drop too few unique items, but there is no point in doing so with the 20th version of the same item. Please also remember that there is currently an event with a 50% larger drop. Perhaps it would be worth managing them better.
Getting a good t6/t7 base is difficult, and yet this will be accompanied by a craft that may fail. There is no balance here.
As mentioned above, the game should reward in smaller steps and more often than large progress after many hours, which would give a better impression and a surge of willingness to play (dopamine).
There are practically no BiS items in the game (I don’t count lp3, lp4 with their chances). It’s hard to say whether it’s supposed to look like this or whether it’s a gateway to future changes.

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That’s exactly the problem.
Uniques are the best exemple, they have been made so common, there is no emotion whatsoever anymore in seeing one of them drop.
It is (used to be?) a game based on drops. If drops become so common and enormous people don’t even look at them anymore, the game risks losing a lot of its appeal.
And the loot-inflation has been going on for a while, and getting worse with each patch.

I hear this argument a lot, but I find it hard to believe.
You could just as easily keep uniques rare, but increase their chance of LP when they drop. You would end up with exactly the same chance of dropping a 2-3 LP item, without turning uniques into overflowing bin fodder.
But I do believe the reasoning you present is the reason why the drops are designed the way they are.

Overall a great post DiceDragon, I agree with everything you said.