What Happened with Items

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But Path of Exile is a game about opting-in to more difficulty in exchange for more rewards.

Meanwhile archnemesis is forced fed on us, oozing in every aspect of the game. You can't opt in archnemesis, it's everywhere.

Please slap those archnemesis behing atlas tree points.

The loot system was "changed" due to archnemesis as you sayed in :

- https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3296718

Revert the loot changes & slap archnemesis behind atlas points.
Revert Exalts / Divine changes.

Why did you destroy minion builds? Was that an accident also?

Your initial explanations that gear would make up for the nerfs is untrue. Maybe you missed a memo or something. Please address.

saddly from the start of AN league till now player numbers drop a lot more significantly than previous leagues... i wonder why

Dunno, design there you need to grind 100500 maps to find one solaris-touched monster and pray that he does not have drought bringer modifier to convert currency to flasks - this sounds really awful for me... I think I encounter those 4 mod rares like once per 2-3 hours of active play - and MAXIMUM what i got was 6 chaos orbs... It's still way better to rely on heist/expedition, anything that has currency in chests...

Nothing about harvest - at current state anything outside fracture>essence/fossil spam > eldritch currency is literally dead. We can't craft decent influenced items anymore!

Not a single word about minions - they are garbage, rip my favourite archetype...

P.S. I just realised, that if play can't kill 4 mod archnemsis monster - he has almost 0 chances for good loot, am i correct?

I can't upgrade my character, it's full of holes and I bandages like mummy now. I appreciated the Daresso's Courage change which helped me bandage my character(tankiness in mapping is through the roof). But the problem is I don't know where to go from here, crafting is basically impossible and I can only play on "safe" map mods.

The Archnem "offensive" is far too great to the point that my tanky character died within a second.

The "defensive" are too much. When they could regen + consecrated ground = hp never gone down.

Please tell me that my dps is not that bad and your balance is off.

For community, I think QA team is just there to guaranteed everything is "functional" and they're not there to understand the "feeling" of the game.

Maybe make alpha client as "Public test realm" would be better? By giving away lootboxes to those whom provided feedback for each change within the "beta patches" would be a good reason for players to join, and you need real player's feedbacks.

My guy Chris tryna use flextape to fix this sinking boat, gl mate.

I'm a returning player after a 2 year break. While I'm having a lot of fun, this is mostly due to all the new content of having missed 8-10 leagues and catching up with the slew of changes that have happened in the meantime. I would say I'm a casual player, meaning I usually play 1 character extensively for 100 hours or more over a longer period of time, see how much of the content I am able to do if not all and quit until next league.

For players like me, even after a 2 year break the loot changes were felt drastically, I'm not racing towards endgame and I'm doing the older league mechanics because I actually enjoy the leveling process, getting micro-upgrades in gear and constantly think about what's next, in or out of game. This is the core of what makes the game fun for me, sense of progression and accomplishment. However now I find myself getting ghosted rares, y/r beasts, special encounters in general that don't drop anything remotely worth the time investment. The majority of drops are armourers scraps and whetstones. I've full cleared incursion rooms and gotten a portal scroll and a random item or 2 out of it. This makes you simply not want to engage with any mechanics at all because there is no reward for your time investment. A 'casual' player with limited time won't engage with anything anymore because ultimately it halts your progress and if you aim to see the endgame, you only do selective older league mechanics for loot.

I've cleared the campaign by now, and my currency tab is just plain dry. I'm sitting on less than 20 alchs, 3 vaal orbs, 5 gemcutter prisms and I haven't used any of those currencies yet. All my other currency is also substancially lower than what I had 2 years ago. Keep in mind I haven't skipped anything during the campaign. I only have a bit of chaos because I had 1 good sale for 50c. The returns on maps will be severely diminished too I feel. I'm worried that the already substantial time investment for casual players have gotten demoralising now, whereas I would have to quit my job or give up on other things in life to see most content because we progress a lot slower. I have seen clips of groups getting stacks of 10 divines as well, but those are not likely to ever happen to me, I'm worried that by trying to tackle those, it has been underestimated how much you would impact the little man. I was happy to get by with selling some decent drops and getting the occassional exalt that would get me enough to get a scuffed min-max build. Right now I don't see that happenening.

All of that being said, I highly appreciate the transparancy of your communication as always and this gives a lot of perspective about the intent of the changes, I'm just not quite convinced it is for the better as it stands. Loot balance is without a doubt one of the most dangerous things to tamper with because it's a massive part of the enjoyment and the way this snuck in without mention is quite upsetting. I'll have to see how mapping feels

There is nothing you guys can do with this approach of GGGs, the only way out is to uninstall the game and leave. Maybe it just dying.

What, you love the game like it was? I bet you love old grandpa too, but guess what...

You are just disconnected from community. Yes, I understand, you see POE from CEO point of view, you see it on the paper and as a numbers ... but WE - players, community, consuments of your game have a different point of view.

Look at the Twitch, there are tons of "pro POE players" which are specialised to every segment of the game - from best SSF HC players to Omega juicers or crafters. Why you didn't invite them to the dev server and didn't say "Eyo guys, we are planning to implement these changes to the new Kalandra league, can you play it for 7-14 days and tell us, what do you think about it?". Then you will have valid feedback and you can start to finding compromises between your point of view and community point of view. Like gamers for gamers you know? Not like "Hi I am Chris and I made this, deal with it"...

Just ... please wake up, don't destroy this game :-(

Congrats Chris thats what a leader and MAN really do, being responsible for those mistakes, ty for the effort, I'm giving a try again for the game