Why i think rarity feels bad (as a player with 8k hours in PoE1 and 450 hours in PoE2)

First of all, I understand the devs view point of MF being another vector for character power and it could feel better if it were implemented better but it has some flaws in PoE2.

The problem is that it pushes players down into a spiral of unescapeble halt of progression by being the both the problem and the reward at the same time. You need better gear so you can have rarity but also you need rarity to be able to get good gear. It also multiplies the power of better builds while making the worse builds worse. But the problems caused by it are mostly felt in the earlier parts of the endgame progression, because you need it really bad at this point in the game.

When you start mapping you need to solve many problems with your character like resistances, mana etc.. And you really don't get enough currency or item drops to solve most of those and keep slamming your head against the wall until you get "lucky" and it can be very frustrating unless you are playing one of the better builds. And i think this is the only big problem with it. For example, if you are playing a life build, you need life and resistanes on most of your gear but if you are playing an ES build you don't need to get life on rings so you can just get a bunch of rarity on rings without sacrificing anything. So the better builds get to be able to clear content a lot faster and get more rewards from it while worse builds are both inherently slower at clearing and they also get less from the same content. So, it is also a balance issue and amplified by the huge power gap between the stronger and weaker builds.

It can be fixed in multiple ways and don't need to be completely removed from the game. In my opinion, the best way to fix is to increase the availibility of rewards from other sources besides the loot on the ground. Mechanics like expedition, ritual, essences and strongboxes should be a lot more rewarding than they are now, so that whenever you play without rarity you can still get decent payoff for the time you've put in. Maybe then we would not feel the need to invest so much into rarity on items. Whenever the ground loot is this much stronger than every other reward structure in the game best way to get more loot is to just boost it as much as you can. It also amplifies the gap between the breach and the other mechanics.

Another way to approach the problem could be increasing the availibility of mandatory stats like resistances, attributes and life on the passive tree or jewels so that we could bandaid the gaps in our builds to also fit rarity without paying multiple divines on trade or be forced to play with an objectively worse version of our builds just to be able to farm currency to buy or craft better gear.

It is a multi-faceted problem and it is a lot more complex than just "REMOVE RARITY Madge!!!". I hope GGG finds a smart way to solve this problem. Or, maybe it will just fix itself as they add more mechanics and buff the existing ones.

I think that making a rarity rune and removing rarity as an affix would solve alot of issues.


Since we can swap them out now, early game you would be incentivized to run full rarity runes to find more gear and crafting drops and then as you map you can get your rarity from waystones instead (with steep diminishing returns above 100%) so you can more reliably use runes for power instead.

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fouquet#0993 wrote:

I think that making a rarity rune and removing rarity as an affix would solve alot of issues.


Since we can swap them out now, early game you would be incentivized to run full rarity runes to find more gear and crafting drops and then as you map you can get your rarity from waystones instead (with steep diminishing returns above 100%) so you can more reliably use runes for power instead.

We already have a rarity rune as a soul core but it is not easy to find as SSF or very expensive on trade for someone who would need it starting their early map progression.