Fixing This Game's Horrid Loot Situation

Just like in PoE1, it feels like end game becomes a complete slog of just bashing your head against a wall over and over until it finally crumbles. There's little left to gain by leveling as you start hitting 90+, so a lot of progression becomes reliant on gear, but almost none of it actually resembles an upgrade. The problem is that there are far too many mods and mod tiers that can roll on gear once you're in end game, making the not only already rare occurrence of getting every desirable mod on a piece of gear even worse when you also have to deal with the even rarer occurrence that the mod tiers are good enough to resemble an upgrade. This also adds to the frustration players feel about getting crap loot over and over and over and why any sense of progression in end game feels like it just stops. And this doesn't even include the still very real lack of loot in the campaign, making it hard to upgrade gear even then. Thus, I propose the following changes:

1. Start scaling item quantity to T1 maps as early as Act 3, and Rarity of T1 maps as early as Act 5. This should especially include Exalted orbs and other such currencies because players should feel like it is safe to use them during campaign, especially in a fresh league. Consider further bringing quantity and rarity levels of T15 to as low as T6 before effectively flatlining outside of map mods and atlas passives.

2. Starting in Act 4, drop ranges of mods should start cutting off the lowest ilvl ranges. For example, starting at Act 4, you can't roll Tier 1 health anymore. Other more limited mod tiers should continue for some time, and some (namely +level to skills) might never drop off, meaning even their Tier 1 will still drop at high ilvls. Act 4 should drop most Tier 1 "ilvl 0" mods. Act 5 should drop mods below ilvl 12, and act 6 (reaching end game) should drop most below ilvl 24.

3. Every allocated Atlas Passive point then increases the ilvl cutoff for mod rolls by an additional ilvl per point. This brings us to ilvl 54 as the cut off for allocating all 30 Atlas Passives. This is critical in reducing bad gear drops and should greatly increase the rate of at least modest upgrades, thus maintaining a sense of progression. Weighting of top tier mods can remain low (or even be lowered at this point), ensuring they remain a constant source of chase, but this way you aren't getting a highly coveted +6 to skill level on a martial weapon and also rolling, say, +2-5 phys, +10%phys/12acc hybrid, +24 flat acc, and +12 to a stat or something.

4. For mechanic specific passives, you further improve ilvl cutoffs for drops from that content only. So, adding 2 points to the Map Boss tree improves the ilvl cutoff by 2 just for boss drops.

5. Existing Tiered gear drops then become far more exciting a drop as they can weight better towards the highest possible mod tiers. This cutoff mechanic also then ensures slamming a good find does not, like the above example, give you something like a pathetic +15 accuracy on a weapon with 140% increased physical, +4 skill levels, and 24% inc attack speed.

Doing this makes completing the map tier "quest chain" that much more rewarding and worth doing and ties a player's sense of progression each league much closer to their own efforts and time spent. Gear progresses at a far more consistent and modest rate, with a bit more chance of significant upgrades. Gambling, though, should be less impacted by this if impacted at all. Since that's basically free drops, I'm comfortable with Gambling not gaining much from such a change, maybe limited only to the ilvl 24 cutoff (since loot drops in maps are directly tied to the Atlas passives). It would be nice if gambling could improve over time, though, in a similar fashion. Maybe enough gambling (spend X*n amount of gold each "level") helps give Alva the resources she needs to find better equipment to gamble? I like that, makes gold worth gathering and adds one more source of progression for players to work towards each league to catch gambling up to the ilvl cutoff of the atlas maps (reaching ilvl 54 cutoff would likely represent billions of gold, but this would feel very natural).

In before the forum trolls arrive to say that it's good that there's a paucity of loot and then to call you a bad player.

I completely agree. It makes absolutely no sense that high tier items can roll low tier mods.
They could then also reduce equipment drops by a lot because there's a much higher chance that anything good drops so you don't need all the trash loot.

I would also suggest to add essence types that work like augments or exalts. Currently we have transmutation and alch type essences (the latter being way too effing rare), but most of the time, augment and exalt type essences that add an affix to a magic/rare item would be way more useful.

in the past 6 weeks i havent found an upgrade L91.5 meanwhile....

I wasted many Exalts and Chaos Orbs for nothing but pure TRASH rolls...

So i had to use TRADE and buy all my gear there.....

SUCKS SO BAD!!!!

im expecting an expert item had a minimum of xtier of rng stats. in the end still getting stack of undesire stats + t1`t2.

You're just a bad player. I'm assuming you want better loot so that you can just clear the game faster, but if you're good enough you can just play without any loot. Git gud scrub. It's clear GGG doesn't want players like you here, they want superior high skilled players like myself. You don't even have the minimum of 10 Forum badges that would show you're a true PoE player, so your opinion is wrong. Go away troll. Leave our game alone. GGG doesn't want more players if all they're going to do is complain and ask to change everything, this game is literally perfection, I cannot put it down, I have 57,700 hours in PoE 1 and I'm hoping to spend another 25,000 in PoE 2 before I eventually succumb to deep vein thrombosis giving me a heart attack.

Also, XP loss on death is what sets the Men apart from boys like u. I can clearly play this game for hundreds of hours without blinking or moving anything but my fingers. That's real strength.


/s

makes you wonder how even the gear you want exists rest assure thousands will appear on trade

Loot and crafting are in a horrible state in POE2. It's pure RNG/Gambling with incredibly low odds of success for loot drops or success in crafting. I have far better luck gambling in a Las Vegas casino - seriously.

I completely agree, crafting right now is no different than finding trash loot on the ground. Too much RNG. You should not be able to roll t1 mods on a ilvl82 weapon. I stopped throwing currency on crafting all together and found better success in trading.

I agree that the loot/crafting are garbage, but what makes anyone think that Tencent wants us to have decent loot. It's a main part of the hook.