Divine shards because currency exchange exists (with 200IQ explanation)

Go farm a set of fourth vow div cards from alleyways without doing some "put 700 div cards into the boss strategy" While were at it, go try to do that strat on hc. Div cards exist for people to be able to target farm things incrementally. You can't really do that right now. Settlers league (back in the day when I was in my 30s) I farmed 2 house of mirrors from stacked deck farming and I've still yet to see a fourth vow card. With that map being my scry and farming almost nothing but alleyways and my scry map. 2 characters to 100 doing this in settlers. (given some of them were shaper rotas) There is pretty much no reason to try to farm a specific div card without some super stupid strat. Your average player will never get to engage in that content thanks to exploiters.

I'm a little interested in your defense of the veiled orb changes. Before you could stack up veiled orbs early/mid game and craft your boots/gloves/helmet/sometimes weapons pretty reliably. Now, you have to deal with an anull to get a veiled mod. Making it to where you need 3 suffixes + 2 good prefixes (or vise-versa) before you are incentivised to use a veiled orb on them with one of them being a high life roll. At the same time they added life rolls that were significantly higher so now that 70 crafted life on prefix is a lot worse.

Aisling before was a lot better and using tft as an excuse to make harvest and jun more annoying wasn't fun. Harvest when they first launched the changes to appease tft users (which I assume is their vision of it) was terrible. I've never actually met someone that thought the veiled orb/aisling change made the game better than it was before.

I understood why they made it where you cant have 2 veiled mods in 1 aisling but doing this just to cut off tft scammers wasn't good.

Balance the game for the sake of balance, don't balance it around people that cheat and exploit.

Does anyone remember when you could get stacks of div cards from kirac missions? ya. ruined by people that exploit so they can farm apothecary stacks and get rich.

If you couldn't rmt a lot of this stuff would lose its incentive. Especially if you were playing sc. No point in having more than 1 mageblood.

Also when hc players die they should be sent to their own "voided" league instead of standard so people don't get to rmt league specific items. Tired of seeing all the league specific badass stuff being ripped to standard in hctrade. Anyone that has played hctrade knows what I'm talking about. Examples of this are tattoos, hinekoras locks, crucible items like the sst shield or weapons, multi fractured grave/recomb items, etc.

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VoidWhisperer42#5989 wrote:

SSF means doing everything solo, no carries, no shopping, no skipping progression or knowledge with lucky drops. That’s the appeal, but in PoE, it also makes the mode feel limited, since no proper balance was designed for it. It’s like playing Ruthless, still PoE, but with extra weight strapped to your back.

I'm not editorializing the changes....I'm just answering your "how" question. Surely even you can see HOW lowering drop rates astronomically will disproportionately "ruin" SSF player's experiences (as compared to before the changes). Even accounting for the fact that its a self-imposed challenge mode, going to the extremes that GGG is known to go means that SSF gets raked whenever things are "balanced around trade" again.

Again...not editorializing or judging, just explaining. Both things can be true at the same time: GGG rightfully balances around trade, and simultaneously SSF players get disproportionately screwed by said balancing and get angry.

You don't even have to be playing ssf to get annoyed by these things, they are just amplified to that player base.

div cards have absolutely destroyed the value of almost everything in trade. there used to be tons of decent mid tier uniques that were worth 10-50 exalts/divs (pick your era) and now almost none of that exists because div cards have obliterated trade values along with loot explosion mechanics that have been added despite them destroying the trade economy.

6 links are worthless, almost all uniques are worthless, i dont even really turn in div cards ive got 10,000s of them in my tab i dont even bother its pointless, none of it is worth anything. even high lvl ppl in hcssf are saying oh i need a mageblood and literally farming a mageblood, the entire concept of just deciding you want a unique and then being able to go get it is an abomination in an rng trade based game.



and yet there they are, because the game is not balanced around trade league the game is 99.99% balanced for self found. the entire mechanic of div cards existing is an affront to trade values of items and the very need to trade so i dont thi8nk you can point at the fact you cant just get every single one of them reliably is some sign that trade league balance thinking is somehow stamping all over self found balance.

maybe deciding you want a thing and just being able to go and get it reliably as a concept is completely out of step with the fundamental principals of an rng looter game regardless of which league you play it in when it comes to highly desirable items?



veiled orbs, this or that particular div card. so what were saying is that 0.01% of items in the game have had their drop rates balanced with trade league being factored into the thinking. meanwhile the other 99.99% of items have 0 value in trade because they drop so much even most of the ssf crowd have given up even seeing them through their filters.




maybe when we cant get exactly the item we want its not because the devs have balanced the game around us needing to trade for it, but its because its an rng loot game and the entire premise of these games is that you dont just have everything, you cant just have whatever you want whenever you want it? the lottery isnt balanced around everyone winning the jackpot, its not designed so that everyone wins it. the design is that most people who play never win it, that is intentional.

^you do realize that the ONLY reason drop rates are what they are for every single item is because trade exists, right?

You do know that...don't you?

It doesn't matter that things have little to no value, or that div cards exist. They are STILL balanced around trade existing.



Rare items, or even COMMON items, don't need a drop rate of 1 in a million EXCEPT for the fact that trade exists. Weights for rolling mods and other things don't need to be NEARLY as steep if it wasn't for thousands of people all playing within the same pool.



Just because things, such as div cards, DO overall help the SSF experience doesn't at all translate to "the game is balanced around SSF". It ONLY means that the release of div cards made finding items easier across the ENTIRE game. But the rates are entirely derived from trade.

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cowmoo275#3095 wrote:

Just because things, such as div cards, DO overall help the SSF experience doesn't at all translate to "the game is balanced around SSF". It ONLY means that the release of div cards made finding items easier across the ENTIRE game. But the rates are entirely derived from trade.

Hell I'd go as far as say not even div cards are designed to help SSF players. I mean, sure they are very helpful in allowing you to target farm, but have you actually sat down and tried farming The Doctor cards on your own? It's going to take you absolutely forever plus more, grinding the same map over and over again unless you take scarabs to increase their drop rates.

Maintaining a stable supply of maps and scarabs to farm The Doctor is infinitely easier when you have access to trade. Now if you take that supply chain to SSF, you will suffer for it, because there's no way to reliably farm and self-sustain both one map and the scarab. Sooner or later you will run out of one or the other and you'll be forced to do something else until you get more.

All this to say that, yeah no, the game is absolutely not balanced around SSF. Trade has been the forefront of GGG's priority when it comes to game balance, and SSF exists purely as a challenge mode.

And before anyone comes in and says you're not supposed to be farming for those rare items in SSF: Hey buddy? Admitting you have to settle for less and making your build work with whatever you scrounge up only proves it's a challenge mode and is absolutely not helping your case.

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Pizzarugi#6258 wrote:

Hell I'd go as far as say not even div cards are designed to help SSF players. I mean, sure they are very helpful in allowing you to target farm,

I mean......it is exactly their entire purpose to help SSF. Each individual card, no matter how long it takes to farm, is LESS rare than the item itself. In every scenario. This ultimately HELPS SSF.

Even that sentence you wrote "sure they are very helpful in allowing you to target farm"... without that capability, SSF doesn't even have the OPTION to farm lol. Cards make the difference between completely at the mercy of randomness, or having some semblance of control.

But yes, because the drop rates are astronomically low (thanks to trade), it doesn't help a heck of a lot. But it 100% irrefutably DOES help.


Easy proof? How many raw headhunters dropped while farming a stack of Doctor cards SSF? I can pretty much guarantee you there isn't a single player, trade or otherwise, who would say they got the HH raw before completing their div card stack.

Div card farming is terrible with the scarab and card drop changes. That was caused by trade league players like fubgun and the people that play like him.

Veiled orb and harvest changes came because of tft/trade players.

The only thing good that came from harvest changes was getting to see PoM meltdown and get permabanned.

you could argue that they wanted the game to be more random. I have to say though one of the things about poe i personally love is that i have agency over what i farm and the ability to target things. If the game was completely random like trying to farm a zod rune in d2 lod. I probably wouldn't play it.

kinda funny how offtopick this got

We have divine shards it's called chaos and exslted orbs and div cards which award divines