What Happened with Items

"^ AN is [Removed by Support] remove it. We have said it for 6mo now...stop gripping onto a terrible idea. Let it go, its like Sirius mobs in T14+ maps...it was a bad idea. No one likes 1 shots from un-seen abilities. We dont need niche mechanics on rares....just give blue mobs "X" more hp and resists than white mobs.....and "XX" more for rare mobs and LET THE MOB TYPE DETERMINE the special nature of the attacks...not some pseudo dreamt up modifier.

Literally every mob in delve has AN mods...and every mob is blue or yellow so its unplayable. Also----gimping the elite crafting hurts everyone in the game because the economy is awful right now.

It seems like a few other people have touched on this, but I figured I'd throw in my two cents:

AN is overtuned. I disagree with removing it completely - it brought a much-needed breath of fresh air IMO - but in many cases AN monsters are doing significantly more damage than bosses. My current build has died a couple dozen times in white maps so far, and about half of those were due to Heralding Minions on its own. Only 3-4 deaths were to bosses, and all of those were because my chaos resistance wasn't that high. Even with the defensive nerfs, there's some much needed changes to make AN what most of us would consider "balanced." My suggestion is to bring back how modifiers used to stack together. That is, only allow certain, lower-tier modifiers to appear at first (such as Flameweaver). Then, if a monster rolls modifiers that can combine together (Flameweaver and Hasted, for example), those modifiers get replaced with their combined modifier (Flame Strider in this case). This would keep the monster encounters interesting without allowing for the stacking shenanigans that have plagued the system since its introduction to Core.

Drop rate needs to be looked at. I don't disagree that item drops are in a good spot - the vast majority of items actually make it past my loot filter, and most of those are base types I'm actually somewhat interested in (I run a semi-strict filter, YMMV). However, since in most cases the modifiers those items get aren't tied to how they dropped, the fact is that most items don't roll modifiers I'm actually interested in. Here's the real problem, though: I end up turning those items into alt shards because I don't have enough currency to consider using them as crafting bases, which is kind of the whole point of the armour changes. While certain AN modifiers do convert those items to currency, it seems the vast majority of the time they gave something unhelpful (usually scrap and whetstones from my experience). If you don't want to buff quantity across the board, at least buff quantity for currency drops, because as it is we're having to wait for a 1/200 modifier to get any decent currency drops.

Finally: You claim that most content didn't have a huge cut to drop rate, and certain encounters (Incursion being the big one) actually give better loot. Well, I have news for you, but regardless of what the code should be doing, that isn't the case. In past leagues, just Incursion (that is, no other stacking mechanics) dropped a significant amount of loot - usually an entire ring of stuff. This league, all but one encounter has yielded less than 5 rare items, and very little in the way of currency, with one case yielding precisely 3 Scrolls of Wisdom and nothing else. This, frankly, is unacceptable - it's not just not worth it to juice content, in some cases it's not even worth it top play content, even with the patches. Again, I don't expect to be showered with items and currency after every little thing I do, but as it is I'm essentially wasting my time doing anything other than bosses. IMO, with balancing as it is either league-specific content needs to be increased another 3-4x or baseline content needs to be increased by 2x.

I don't like loot tiles, especially not Rare mobs with loot tiles.

Pls bring back loot on all monsters

"7% only" is probably not a lie, but I bet this calc did not include removing real Beyond

I think the Archnemesis is slightly overdosed at some points but for the most part I think everything is fine. It isn't your player bases fault that they are complete trash at adaptation. Imagine what a champion you are IRL if you cry about a game (extreme) this hard. If GGG listened to the community it would be Path of Pronouns.

What about banning people off platform for rules here? Is your game spyware that listens in on my computer when I've played it? I've made jokes in the past about 1984 but you're spearheading this together with blizzard and their overwatch surveillance program to monitor twitter/youtube to ban people who speak negatively of you. But with banning math from your game because of comments made on twitch is ludacris to me. Massive new zealand overreach. [Removed by Support]

And now you're telling me you're doing the exact same but with people who speak ngatively of a certain person of your company? I havn't only lost my respect for your country let alone stand this company and everyone associated with it. But you've turned me off of everything you're touching in the future too.

Go ahead mods. Alter and remove it. Winston knows. I'll try newspeak later with my thought crime.

ahahaha...ha...
wow.... so,so sooo faaaar away from their own playerbase that i dont even know what to say.
im dropping this league,[Removed by Support]. if next league is not better then i'm afraid i'll have to say goodbye to poe. i dont give shit about this "vision" i care about PLAYING the game and having FUN. if you want a grindfest for twitch nolifers,then bye i have a life that i'm not willing to sacrifice for some pixels.

I hate writing a negative post but... After you have quadrupled down on your... THIS IS THE WAY IT IS AND GET USED TO IT... I have to say your going to kill your player base. 3.15 was bad... 3.19 is Diablo 3 with darker graphics. (I hope that hit's your heart a little because it does mine.)

Your rare monsters explode 35 flasks and 500 armor scraps. This isn't rewarding. Loot goblins are not exciting (at least I hope this isn't your "vision.") Don't turn into Diablo 3.

Getting beyond on the map, and instantly spawning the boss after 5 monsters are killed isn't a mechanic... after the boss spawns there are no more mobs... The boss only drops 1 tainted fusing... Beyond used to be the best mechanic in the game for juicing. Now its the worst mechanic in the game, period.

I have been playing this game for 7-8 years. This is the only time I have considered never playing this game again. Continuing to neglect the community and turning the game into a "archnem" finder, is one of the worst ideas you and your dev team have come up with. I understand you want to change the way loot is distributed, and the community has been haggling you for months to change it, but this isn't the way.

I love your game. I love your PAST content. The former way of loot was more rewarding (in my opinion) because it was a steady stream of loot. I have played like 30-40 hours this league because I had the time, and it isn't nearly as fun or rewarding as you're making it out to be. Spending 3 minutes in the map IDing 30 fractured rare/magic items to find out they're junk, I mean COMON, how is this "fun." I could have opened another map and found a divine, or dropped 250 simulacrum shards. Please continue to work things out. LOOT IS NOT FIXED. PLEASE DO NOT THINK THAT IT IS!

problem is ggg thinks fun in grinding for weeks,but no. fun is when u feel u improving ur gear with crafts/buying them,finding good loot,no one wants to grind maps for weeks.most player quit after 1-2 week. they thought reducing loot =more player play for weeks.. no if u reduce the loot theres no enjoyment u killing the game.. even after the buffs the loot is dogshit.. harvest is literally killed with this change.. u should get like 10 times more lifeforce..

This league invokes nostalgia all the way back to beta, where everything was such a grind and farming docks made me scared. It makes me kind of understand how 'more grindy, slower gameplay' has always been part of 'the vision'.

I don't think that nostalgia necessarily equates to 'better game' overall though. Admittedly, it's hard to balance designing a game you want for your vision vs the perception of what is a good game to your playerbase.

I am generally afraid to say the next few things, please don't permaban me.

From beta to now, it feels like the term 'communication' has slowly become faux pas--it seems communication only goes one way these days.

I remember back in beta people having a lengthy discussion with GGG staff about wanting duplicate character names. Chris always seemed available in those days. People were annoyed this wasn't a feature, but Chris took the time to explain that this 'feature' just wasn't worth the dev time, and had minimal impact on enjoyment of the game. Cool.

People clamored for player-bound loot. Another back and forth ensued. Chris pushed back: "You lot never wanted this for Diablo2, and you all loved that game!". People got angry, incredulous even -- not so different from some certain behaviors today. Some people took Chris' comments personally, and they responded in a personal way. "We're just not going to play the game, because this sucks! Good luck with that!" "Obviously no one wants this, why be so stubborn?!" In the end, loot allocation became a thing. "We are in this together, GGG is a company that is just built differently (in a good way), come play Poe" was the sentiment expressed...on Diablo3 forums. Wow.

Somewhere along the road, things changed. From Chris' side, I remember an important post: "I really need to come out here and put a stop to this, all this negativity is really negatively effecting the mental health of our devs!" "Reddit is always full of a few, but very vocal people!".

I don't know what happened, but it seems these days all the good grace is slowly being eroded away. For example, in another thread, I did not appreciate how a player on forums was making fun of another player for not buying points and being a supporter (f2p shaming), so I posted a reply stating that f2p shaming was wrong, and there is freedom to buy or not buy supporter packs. Yet my post was taken down for 'antagonizing another player'. In addition, I was to be suspended for an entire week, before carefully explaining the incident through a support ticket got me re-instated after a day. This is rather shady behavior I think. Now just today I am learning that sponsorships can go straight from being sponsored to permabanned...can't you just pull the sponsorship? Akin to legally firing an employee for insubordination? Taking away a person's livelihood seems...over the top a bit... (I donno...). Fast forward, and what was once a rather mild-mannered player now has some resent...towards a video-game, LOL!

I'm also pretty sure I had MTX for toxic rain that has somehow magically disappeared (unless there was once an MTX exchange program that I'm forgetting...) from my inventory, so that certainly doesn't help the situation...

So I don't know what happened, but I still hope somehow someway someday we can be a bit kinder to each other, and revert to communicating both ways. It was once not like this after all.