This patch finally broke me

Deleted my league character and went back to my standard stuff finally. At least if I have terrible farming results there I have some wealth built up and I don't have a laggy purple blob destroying half of my map.

Looking forward to 3.2.8 and the "real changes" then.

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additionally, when there is MORE loot, players tend to make MORE builds, and play MORE.

That's a lie. Harvest was completely broken as a league where everyone could easily make top tier gear. And it wasn't that popular. Nowadays it's mostly forgotten.

It cannot be the target to make players play as long as possible. This does not end well. Look at Bethesdas fall from grace.
Make the 50-150 hours a normal but ambitious player puts in every league worth it. Design aroudn quality time not around total time. There is so much room between the massive grind right now and the design philosophy of a certain other company that wants to include every dad with 2 jobs and only time to play 2 hours on weekend...If streamer xyz gets bored or has to few viewers, well guess what, get a haircut and get a real job...to bad...But right now, at least when it comes to poe 2 the time investment is waaay to big, the baseline droprates are way to bad.

Poe 1 still ok i guess. But don't push it to much, lol

Economy economy economy, can we talk about poe? like. the game that has the economy you speak of.

oh wait we cant, because this is path of stock market not path of exile.

This game absolutely buries you with loot. I play it since 3.14 league so I'm still relatively new to the fandom compared to many veterans, yet I still can see how much more loot drops and map juicing we got now compared to back then.

Because back then loot strategies were pretty complex and if not done right - you would just bleed currency away. Speaking of those Nemesis-3 strats that had to be done in correct atlas region with correct watchstone mods rolled and correct sextants applied (GG alt orb prices back then lol)

THen 3.17 came out and dropped this Atlas Tree. Which made farming understandable even to room temperature IQ players. Spec out this and that, use a corresponding scarab. That's it, you're done, you can farm. Use any map you like, cringe atlas regions with its own small trees are gone.

The concept of MFing in juiced T16 was pretty alien those 3 years ago. MF characters dropped power in favor of quant and rarity. People were farming T3 Tower in Scourge league.

Today we are farming extremely hard T17 maps with max juice and drop so much shit that sometimes we filter out raw Chaos Orb drops. Really, this happens and it's ridiculous.

It's actually hilarious how many people with headhunters complain about loot

To be honest, I feel the same as OP. I've been with PoE1 since it was in closed beta. I feel like an old man yelling at clouds, but this just isn't fun.

Maybe it's a build issue for me, and I don't totally believe it is, because I can cruise through other content. But, KotF just feels too hard for the types of characters I run, who have been to T16 maps before. People say run a different build in trade, but I don't wanna, lol. I like running jank characters in SSF, and I've always enjoyed it, until now.

Someone else also said that the mistake I'm making is that I'm playing a trade game like a SSF game. That's like trying to solo a MMO that's made for party play. Fair enough, maybe? I've uninstalled and I'm playing a few other games. I'm not mad, but I am sad.

I think I'm gonna sit this league out. That's fine. GGG always said that a good cadence is to play 1 league, then skip 2 leagues, then return on the 4th. I've been playing every league for a long time now, so maybe I just need a break.

Lot of pro standard talk going on