Feedback: Loot, Crafting & Death

Loot & Crafting

Right now, loot is… plentiful. You either spend hours sifting through mountains of stuff (great if you want to sell and waste your sanity and time), or you ignore everything that’s not clearly marked as "Tiered".
Which is a shame, because there's potential. But the current system makes most of that loot feel meaningless.

The intended solution? Crafting.
The actual experience? Time sink with close to 0% chance of success and rare resources wasted.

Now, I’m no min-maxing, 24/7 streamer with maxed out meta builds — just a semi-casual player with ~300 hours of gameplay. But when I see that it takes 100 shards for one crafting attempt at 0,5% Chance of success… yeah, that's not a hill I want to climb. That’s a mountain. In the rain. With an avalanche coming at you.

Suggestions:
Reduce the crafting cost from 100 shards to ~25 per attempt
Add a minimum success chance of ~50% to crafting outcomes

That way, loot suddenly becomes exciting again: Players would actively look for their wanted base items with high tier mods, not just filter out everything.

Even then, for one final build, you’d still need to:
find the right base type
get base items with the right, high tier modifiers you want
burn through multiple attempts at your “50.5%” gamble for each combine

It would become something to work toward, not something that only hardcore grinders with insane luck can achieve.


Death Penalty
First of all, the experience has improved a lot in the last couple of months(less dying, may be i finally get slight skill improvments?). But once you hit level 85+, one death still hurts..
Especially when that death is due to clipping a wall or getting stuck on terrain. (Yes, I maxed that skill. No, it’s not fun.)

The real pain:
You lose your probably crafted map
You lose 2+ hours of grinding
You lose all the tower modifiers
And, of course, you lose everything you didn’t pick up yet

Suggestions:
Reset the node, but keep the modifiers, so all isn’t lost
Optionally apply a reduced loot multiplier on second attempts (to prevent farming abuse)
Reduce the EXP penalty — even to 25% of its current value, it would still hurt, but not rage-quit hurt

This is at lvl 90, that is probably getting worse the higher you get

One more thing: ground effects really need better visual clarity.
Right now, they’re often completely hidden beneath piles of corpses, dense vegetation, or terrain clutter. The result? A two-second charge-up indicator casually sitting there for no one to see — and boom: I’m dead, around the corner, wondering what just hit me.
(For context: I’m playing a Poison Cloud build without the explosion part. Yeah, I know, not meta — but I’m having fun. Even if I don’t insta-kill the entire map in 1 second)

Better contrast, clearer outlines, or even simple layer prioritization would go a long way here.


Tames Beast:

Right now, they are a really cool gimmick and help a little bit as a non-dedicated user.
The system offers a lot of potential and could be implemented in a similar crafting system as for items. Hunt for the mods you want, then stitch them together through a lengthy process.
You probably have something planned for that already anyway - the possibilities are just too great to ignore.

The Rhoa mount sounds like a really cool idea — and in theory, it is.
In practice, though, it’s… just not.
Getting knocked off usually just means you die fast and painful.
In most situations, I find myself better off just rolling around than riding.
Would love to see it become a more reliable option, not just a style choice with a built-in death sentence. May be even in combination with the craft-your-pet idea above.

If you got to this, thanks for reading – i still love the core of the game(didnt play poe1 so even if i wanted to, i could't compare them), but these adjustments could help make the endgame a lot more engaging for not-so-hardcore players - and the hardcore players may be able to sell some stuff again with prices going down to an affordable range.