Lack of gear upgrades in endgame is my core problem

For my core feedback, the one thing that slowly makes me stop playing is that at some point near endgame its almost impossible to progress in power.

I reached lvl 94 as ritualist fire mage in SSF, most gear have 2-3 decent high tier traits, clearly I have a lot of room for better gear.

But there is no crafting, there's no guaranteed way in the endgame for me to get a high tier item with 4 desired traits, as time goes by and you cannot get lucky to find decent gear the desire to continue playing gets reduced to the point I stop playing.

I absolutely enjoy the game's other aspects but this is the core problem I have with 0.2

We need reliable ways to progress in power, and reliable means not relying on RNG

without crafting the game is completely hollow, I have no goals or needs/desires. I just get good enough gear and then explode, no need to get better gear.

This league was so bad I couldn't even stomach the campaign again. The campaign is so disgusting it's almost insurmountable.

It isn't much better in trade league. You buy one significant upgrade from anything that you can find/craft yourself and then the next upgrade is out of reach unless you no life the game playing like an Eve:Online station trader yourself to get rich.

Finding upgrades is also made super hard by how tightly the stats are fitted. There isn't much wiggle room to lets say fit in a better ring but that lacks a res that your old ring has. You get in situations where you have to replace a whole bunch of gear to get res capped again. Or you have to buy something with extra sockets that is 5 times more expensive and even more out of reach.

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Rakie1337#5746 wrote:

The campaign is so disgusting it's almost insurmountable.

I often enjoy the experience until i start reaching deep into endgame and suddenly no more gear improvements drop because the chance to get a drop that has 4 desired high tier traits is astronomically low

Lack of upgrades, no crafting, no self found items is everyones problem, it destroys the game.
My fear is that say next league they might make a minor attempt to address this problem but it won't nearly be enough. Any improvement is welcome, and I'll get baited back next league but I bet the game will remain terrible in this respect all year with only a tiny promise that it's better but it wont be. Like how they added more T2, T3, T4 items laying all over the ground, that did absolutely nothing.

Here it is:
Tier 2 Rare items now drop 4x more often. Tiers 3 to 5 now drop 30% more often. The modifiers of Tiered Rares have also been improved by cutting out more low level modifiers making them better on average than before.
Tier 2 and higher Magic items now drop around 5x more often. The low level modifier culling of Tiered Magics has been significantly improved with Tier 2 now culling 50% of the modifier range, and improving from there. Tier 5 magic items will usually only roll the highest modifier available for a given type. This means that Tiered Magic items should be a much better starting point for crafting or Recombination.

Total joke. I actually thought this was going to help

Just chill people, the game is not even released yet. You know they will add more stuff. They will keep slowly adding new content while fixing and stabilizing the core game. POE1 had nothing at the start. Last epoch took years of beta testing to get where it's at. D4 still has nothing. Just be patient and if you are done with the league or you can't progress, just come back later.

This where I am at, gear is limiting my progression. Neither trading or crafting are affordable with the amount of divines that are needed. Item drops are wacked because it takes several divines to improve the modifier amount, a lot of the items have the mods but the amounts are too low.

But when you have people making a good living off of playing these games its difficult to manage reward rates. SSF should have a better/separate rate to offset not trading.

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Alexandra_Momo#4012 wrote:

Just chill people, the game is not even released yet. You know they will add more stuff.

You do realize by adding more stuff the chances of us getting loot with 4 good affixes at high tier becomes even more astronomically small?

This issue will only keep getting worse as more loot is added, if its bad now when we are missing so many weapons, its gonna be so much worse by launch if it isnt seriously attended.

The main idea behind SSF is increasing difficulty by delaying gear progression. To complain about gear progression while playing that game mode makes no sense to me.

That said, you can get 3-4 mods gear with recombinator. Obviously it will be a problem if you are looking for some rare mods, like +3 gem lvl on amulets or +3% max chaos resist on shields. Odds for those mods are really low. But if it is about regular mods, you can do it if some strategy.

For example, if you want a ring with life + STR + 2 resists, you can use recombinator to get those 3 suffixes (STR + 2 resists) with a fair odd. Then you have 3 chances for exalted slam. As life is not a rare modify, it is not hard to get a high tier of that.

On the other hand, if you want a item with 2 prefixes and 2 suffixes, that strategy doesn't work that well, so it could be better to combine all 4 mods in recombinator than trying exalted slam. I've noticed that trying to do it with 2 items with 2 mods each usually presents a lower odd. It seems better to make a 3 mod items, then try to add the last one mode to that item. Odds will be a lot better in this case and you can use almost any magic item with 1 useful mod for that. It might demand a larger amount of expedition currency, but since that patch which buffed their drop rate, it hasn't been a problem to me at least.

A) Pretending SSF should be a broken experience because people in trade league just RMT into the most broken gear is not an excuse. SSF poe2 is a video game, and the experience needs to be better so people dont just stop playing after some point at endgame cuz it stops being rewards

B) The reconmbinator in its current form is utterly useless, you will be getting something like 2.5% when trying to combine ONLY 2 HIGH TIER AFFIXES, so no at endgame you dont get 3-4 affix gear from recombinator, you only need high tier affixes, not some garbage t2

If recombinator gave us 75% chance to combine two t11 affixes I would agree, maybe 30% to combine 4 t10 affixes

But at that point at the endgame nobody cares about t2 or t4 affixes, they are garbo