Waystone Sustain

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redbane#4077 wrote:

My last 6 (all I had) T15 maps, half yellow and full -- I tried 3 of them with no rarity, and 3 of them with 100 rarity. Zero of them dropped a T15 waystone. Seems broken to me.

One T14, One T13, the rest way lower.

Mark Roberts was on some hopium in that interview for sure. Or it's completely random / bugged for some people and he is cruising.

I have gone through periods where a ton will drop, but that isn't now. Interested to see the changes.

Don't think rarity affects waystonedropchance.

I did some nonrepresentative testing a few days ago because my buddy was buying waystones and I am swimming in them. My filter shows only t13 and above. My atlas giving me 20÷ chance on upgrading tiers. On average it seems to drop something between 1 and 1,5 waystones in that range per 100÷ quant being almost equally distributed. The sweet spot for sustain seems to be around 200-250÷. That is propably too high while grinding your way up. However in endgame you can easily achieve numbers of 900÷+ with 6mod corrupted, atlas and towers.

With breach the numbers are even more absurd. I always roll a 144 stash tab and remove a lot of maps that I don't play because of mods (multidmg mod especially with extra chaos, monster accuracy, burning ground, sometimes combos with monster life like extra proj or shocked ground wih no rarity or quantity) leaving me to 50-60 that I actually play. From that alone I get a return of 3-4 stash tabs in t15.

Skill / game knowledge issue. I am new to the franchise and just using what's in the game, I could come up with build and strategy to easily sustain waystones, I have way too many of them, I can easily make choices which T15s I want to run and I vendor those that I don't like because they are bad for my build.

Actually, I am happy with their answer, that they "don't see" this problem themselves. Maybe it's dying issue. If you die a lot, not only you need more waystones but you also lose map bonuses, so you lose the juicy waystones and ways to drop more of them (mostly bosses).

I didn't die almost at all until hitting lvl 90+ and running fully exalted T15s.

Also, it got fairly easy after getting like 4 boss atlas points, before it was a bit more difficult but I never was in a situation where I needed to run lower tier maps because I just didn't have maps that I wanted.

Also, you can reforge them up, so if you are not good at sustaining, collect T12-T14s and reforge them.

As a newer player i had this issue a couple of times around T8-T9 Waystones Quest.

* T1 maps i found easy to clear, so i crafted T2 and T3 maps.
* T4 maps were also craftable very easy
* The more maps i did the more T1-T5 maps i had lying around.
But at some point, i did not find enough Waystones of the same or higher tier. At this point i was also not able to buy new waystones on the same tier as i was mapping.
This caused frustration, as i had to do lower tier maps in order to have a "chance" to find a higher tier waystone to start running higher maps again.
To add insult to injury, if i died then i had to start over :D. Especially early on i added modifiers to the waystones to increase waystone drop rate, which in turn also gave me punishing maps sometimes... as a result i died more often and lost waystones as well.

Solution / Proposal:
I would propose a simple change: Allow to purchase clean waystones equal to character progression quest from Vendor. We have proven, that we clear previous map tiers... no?

Currently the vendor offers unlimited T1 waystones ( which to "craft" to T8 is just horrible ), and purchasing of T2-T5 waystones one at a time also not "great".

I don't understand why T5+ is "gated" behind "selffound". After you buy the T2-T5 waystones, it will take like a day until they are back in stock... so... you can wait... or go for T1 maps.. nice! :(

Additional sidenode:
I don't get why there is a whole mechanic around the economy of obtaining and sustaining waystones. Good/Bad waystones are already behind a "slot machine".

Imho, the progression between each tier does not feel "meaningful" and "rewarding" enough to warrent 15 Tiers of waystones ( and the painful quest to do 6-10 maps of each tier ) .

Also, everyone gets a different atlas layout, so it is entirely possible for some layouts to be better than others. Don't make it a "skill" issue when some people simply benefit from better RNG

There is a waystone sustain problem that goes away if you know exactly how to game the waystone drops. I think sometimes there aren't enough fresh eyes and "can get to T15 in 30 maps" ignores the gearing required to do that - if you have the gear to juice your waystones from T5+ you absolutely can do that. But there are humps - T10 being a big one, where the early map gear no longer keeps people alive and reducing juice isn't an option because the waystones are no longer dropping

Extra bosses should help here, as they are a reliable source of at-level waystones regardless of juice

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Arkansaw#6164 wrote:

Also, everyone gets a different atlas layout, so it is entirely possible for some layouts to be better than others. Don't make it a "skill" issue when some people simply benefit from better RNG

Pretending favorable RNG is skill is kind of the POE way since the beginning of the first game.

Just one more trolling mechanic. Almost like they don't want you to play this game or god forbid, actually have fun.

515% increased waystones found for t8 corrupted map: full clear
1x t2, 1x t3, 1x t7

437% increased waystones found for t11 corrupted map: full clear
1x t4, 1x t5

Math is like D4 math.

After further thinking, I think the issue is bossing vs. normal maps. Bossing with eventual points in boss tree will sustain well. Without it, and without doing bosses it has a large chance to not sustain itself.

I hope a dev reads this and it helps. The boss map increase will probably solve the issue, but I think a lot of more casual players avoid bossing and just do safe maps.

A universal solution would be to always drop 1 map that is equal to the level you are currently running.

That should be a staple IMO

I'm not even juicing and I have billions of T15 maps in my stash

if you're running out of maps you're doing something really wrong

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auspexa#1404 wrote:

I'm not even juicing and I have billions of T15 maps in my stash

if you're running out of maps you're doing something really wrong

My hunch is that you are doing a ton of boss maps where I think the current design is dropping the most even Tier maps.

There are 8 pages of reasons why you cant blanket statement claim "it's fine, you're bad"

-- Obviously there is some random variances in the least :)