The illusion of Tier 28

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Exalted items 7.9

In patch 7.9 Exalted items were introduced and the excitement for these items was received with much hype. Finally a reason to leave the gambler and to actually item hunt for REAL!

Unfortunately the hype was short lived as it became quite clear quite quickly that finding an exalted item actually worth putting on was so low, it was still better/easier to craft an item and hunt base types from the gambler.

Exalted items 8.0

In patch 8.0 exalted items saw another buff, higher level bases would now drop closer to your level which means that an exalted item drop was much more likely to be “useful” (at least i think this happened in 8.0 i cant find it in the patch notes)

While this feels good and i have now found a few useful exalted items. a tier 28 ultimate chase item is still just an illusion

What i recommend

  • Increase the drop rate of tier 7 on items for level 90+ characters. Have this drop rate increase with both “Increased rarity” on maps and with your level. A level 100 Character farming should have the highest chance of finding the best items.

  • Increase the chance of multiple tier 6 and tier 7’s on an item

While some may see this as a push to “increase power creep” keep in mind Tier 7’s don’t even drop till level 90+ at this point you already have level 20 skills, good gear and are probably bored of your current build. It is at this point your interest should be renewed by the ability to get some of the most powerful items by HUNTING and not the gambler in order to push your build to its very limits.

Anyways, this is what it would take me to step away from the gambler (of course you could just remove the gambler, but i wont forgive that!)

Thoughts? ideas?

6 Likes
2

fully agreed, exalted items need to feel better to find. currently i don’t even bother picking most of them up unless the exalted affix(es) are ones i want shards of. i haven’t spent much time farming for gear on any characters because i tend to get distracted and make new ones to try out different ideas. this is partly because i’m an alt-oholic but also because the item hunt just isn’t very exciting at high levels. finding idols and potentially useful bases loses its appeal pretty quickly. knowing that i might actually find exalted items that i want to use or that could potentially be BiS upgrades would make it far more tempting to stick with a character and grind out those drops.

2 Likes
3

I’m not in favour of higher level characters having better drop chances for items. This adds pressure for people to have max level characters (and will consequently pressure devs to make level 100 “attainable”), instead of 90+ levels being an immaterial epeen side quest - as it should be.

4 Likes
4

Alternatively, drop chances for these items could improve with empowered timelines. This would take away the need to make a high level character but would still be restricted to the highest content.

7 Likes
5

While I understand the logic here and how you feel there’s problems with this that are already in place (IN my opinion)

  1. Level 90-100 Already exist. If you dont want there to be incentive at these levels why even have them? Just lower the level cap otherwise there useless. Why should there be no content for these levels?!

  2. Tier 7 is already locked behind level 90+. Builds are already fleshed out at this point. Increases the drop rate isnt going to make people think they HAVE to be level 90+ to enjoy there build, BUT it will give incentive to people who already push characters this far to have something to do and give a REASON for players who dont to go ahead and do it if the incentive is great enough. Wearing all TIER 7 gear isnt go to make/break builds, just simply min max them.

TLDR - If were not going to have incentive to play levels 90+ might as well just reduce the level cap.

Edit: t7 locked behind level 90+ area content

1 Like
6

This idea could work. Although empowered timelines is achievable much earlier than level 90 making players having access to higher stats at much lower levels would just add to them complaining content is to easy. Im sure a happy medium could be found.

7

Yeah, hopefully empowered becomes a challenge in the future that makes them a worthwhile place to hunt chase items.

8

So yeah… the loot hunt definitely got way better in 0.8, we still can make it even better, but we are already at a much better point.

Especially when comparing Gambler vs. Loot Drops

I just want to say that your expectation of a T28 Item is just an unfair exceptations.
The intend of exalted items was to have a “slightly better than rare” item, with maybe 2x T6 or 1xT7, which probably is already the maximum “realistic” maximum of having a usefull item.

4xT7 Item is theoretically possible, but is not realistic, putting your expectations so high just don’t make any sense and devs communicated this on multiple occasions.

Not sure about this, since having a all desired multiple exalted affix items is just not the intend for the system i think. As i already mentioend above, exalted items should be just slightly better than rares and are not meant to be a full replacement for every item slot.

I think while we certainly still can improve affixes and endgame itemization, with more interesting and meaningful affixes, the exalted items themselves are in a relatively good place IMO.

I have to agree with @Jerle, that lvl 100 should be a long term luxury goal for very good players and not for the average player. Lvl 90 is a very good milestone in the current implementation already, if we recieve a death penalty in the future (maybe exp loss), everything above lvl 90 will just become a thing for the top players, while not being necessary.

I think having the best loot drop with lvl 90-100 content is fine, since you can easily do lvl 100 content with lvl 80-90 anyway.

While empowered timelines need some other work to “feel good” IMO, this could be a good thing, if they extra chances are reaonable, and not sooooooooo much better, that you feel forced to do them.
We also could use empowered versions of the lvl 90 and 100 timeline (for the lvl 100 timeline the lvl would not change, but maybe just increase the modifiers and scale the mbs even higher)
I already suggested some other stuff here, that is slightly related to make MoF a better system.

1 Like
9

This is a big reason why they aren’t really worth spending the time to farm. I think Boardman’s suggestion is an attempt to counter their underwhelming nature and make them actually worth chasing for.

10

This is exactly what im referencing when I say illusion.

Let me tie an apple to the end of a stick and let you chase it forever knowing at most perhaps a piece it might fall off but you’ll forever go hungry. If tier 28 is unachieveable why even implement it

Might as well just make exalted items be limited to 1 or 2 tier 6/7 affixes.

11

So you want to disincentivize long term luxury players with crap drop rates to disincentitivize them to play instead of upping the drop rates and incentivizing short term players to play longer?

This philosophy falls under one of my listed reason why playerbase drops so steeply after 2 weeks in arpgs.

Why do games need to slow down and become so unfun uninteresting at late game?

Me rant over.

12

I don’t think @Heavy and I are saying that there can’t be better drop rates for exalted items.

What I’m saying is I don’t think it should, nor need, to be tied to levels. Let level 100 be the closet trophy it is. I like @McFluffin suggestion for better rewards through more difficult content (so even if I’m 87 but have god tier gears to tackle the content, I can).

1 Like
13

after reading the other replies i realized that i missed the part in the OP where boardman suggested this boon for level 90+ players… i initially thought he was talking about 90+ zones which makes more sense to me. i have never even gotten a character to level 90 because, as i said above, i get distracted with other builds and don’t find the current loot hunt very rewarding. if i can already do level 100 monos with my level 74 character, i’m not very motivated to grind out better gear.

buffing the difficulty of higher level zones and increasing the rewards for them seems like the right way to go.

1 Like
14

oh shit, probably why ive not found any because I only have 2 characters at 90/91 rest of my characters are 81-87 and a few lower, im trying to find a class to play on release that I will commit only to them so I have approx 17 characters

T7 should drop from level 100 Monos really and thats it, there shouldnt be a level requirement to find them

as far as I can see there isnt even a true end game system in place anyway

‘end game’ appears to be Arena and stacking monoliths as high as possible - Monolith lvl 100 with 45+ clears starts giving mods like ‘287% increased physical damage’ ‘187% glancing blow’ ‘Rares enemies have 450% increased HP’ stack all 3 of them and the difficulty spikes a lot

15

I am not suggesting tier 7 drop at 90+. I am stating that that is currently exactly what is implemented in LE right now.

Edit : Tier 7 affixes drop for level 90+ content.

While i am all for the idea of lowering that level rate and having those affix levels drop in harder content but to lower level players, this will only increase the power of lower level players and reduce anything to look forward to above the level you can now achieve it.

Lets take a look at content in LE

Level 1-34 (first 33% of game) 2 hours on average?
  1. You gain access to 4 specialization skill slots and your first skill is around level 12-13
  2. You have 4 idol squares to work with
  3. Your roughly around chapter 6 of the campaign
  4. Your likely wearing all rare items
  5. T5 affixes can already drop to you (start dropping at level 32)

At this point in the game you have tasted every mechanic in the game. From this point forward there is no exciting new game mechanics to unlock or learn other than finishing the story and getting exalted items and meeting new bosses in Mono.

Level 34-66 (Middle 33% of game) 4-6 hours average?
  1. You have all 5 skills specialized and all level 18-19
  2. You have all idol slots
  3. Exalted tier 6 items can drop
  4. Campaign over and likely unlock between 4-7 timelines
  5. Still wearing rare items but likely found some higher tiers or crafted better
  6. You received most passives points as campaign quest are over no longer gain any by reward.

It is at this point players choose to leave this character as there is not much left to do and play an alt or quit until next patch

Level 67+ (Last 33% of game) 20+ hours
  1. Final 1-2 points for skills with huge time gap between them
  2. Exalted items fall but are rarely usable
  3. No New content
  4. No New mechanics

Yes in the future there will be more end game systems and mechanics which will likely drive up players ambitions to stick around during these levels but atm a greater part of the player base just dips out until new content.

The point of this that im trying to state is why is everyone so against there being content level 90+

If level 90+ had new mechanics new systems more content that was just as fast as the first 33% of game people would want to play and continue playing and come back to. Right now there such a long time investment for anything positive to happen at this point in the last 33% of game its easier to leave and just play a different game.

TLDR - First 2 hours you have a taste for everything in game. Its my opinion some things should be locked behind high level endgame to keep people interested long term.

Im really bad with words

4 Likes
16

Im not against it at all. infact there needs to be content throughout the whole game but this is a solution usually with a long running game - Path of Exile has a ton you can do - maybe too much now but in the early days and even 2.5-3 years ago there was nothing but maps with no real purpose

Theres definitely a huge hole for LE and its mainly in pure character development - the problem with LE is you reach the top of your skill tree extremely fast with barely anything more to gain but slight increases - PoE the nodes are all available from the beginning based on your pathing but you may not be able to get ‘x’ until you are level 95/97 etc but theres other ways to gain major power usually at massive cost or mega grinds - one example is Jewel sockets and corrupted items

I have level’d roughly 15-16 characters to 100 in PoE - some took over 500 hours, some took me only approx 80 hours but they were all extremely engaging in character development - aka spending vast amounts of time re-specing/testing, finding best setups etc

I actually dont think the content or gear availability in LE is the issue AT ALL, infact its too easy for some items - you unlock the best bases for some at level 60 - what I think would be nice is you get maybe a one time bonus to your class at say level 70/80/90/100 - 1 time passive blessing unique to that class so theres a reason to want to keep leveling

Grim Dawn was easy to get 100, the only carrot after that was item grinds for things that never showed up, infact in Grim Dawn you can have a maxed character with utter shit gear and even beat the whole game with said gear - you have to really push to keep playing the game at that point - almost everyone on the GD forums thought I was mental to want to have a much longer XP grind and the developers said XP to them was nothing ‘everyone should be able to get max level easy’ which I did not agree on

1 Like
17

Is that true? I always had the impression that T7 drop from level90 monolith. And not that I need to be level90 for them to drop.

18

According to patch notes 7.9
Tier 5 affixes drop at level 32
Tier 6 affixes drop at level 55
Tier 7 affixes drop at level 90

Could be worded funny but it says level 90 not level 90 content.

19

I saw those as area levels. Not player levels. I don’t think a level90 character running a level55 monolith gets T7 affixes? Hmm. I might ask the devs if you’re also not sure.

20

Yeah copy and paste wording is

  • Tier 5 affixes now start dropping on items at level 32, instead of at level 81. Tier 6 affixes start dropping at level 55, while Tier 7 affixes start dropping at level 90.

Guess we need confirmation one way or another

Considering before tier 6 and 7 you needed level 81 char to gamble tier 5 I assume this refers to character level