James GordanToday’s discussion will be pretty disturbing if you follow Path of Exile 3.20 Balance Manifesto. It has to do with the monster mods, and that pretty much ties into how to loot. If you haven’t played Poe recently, GGG did a huge loot overhaul with a nerfed bonus of rarity and quantity for many of the old League mechanic monsters. In addition, GGG replaced the old loot system with a conversion system, in which you’re forced to interact with loot goblins to get a lot of loot.
On the other hand, Archnemesis was the biggest problem in Path of Exile for casual players, and GGG has addressed it. They got rid of Archnemesis, back to the old expansion scenario. Archnemesis was bad for casual players, most of them could have had better builds, and if you were playing a single element type, you would often encounter a rare, nearly unkillable. So with the biggest problem out of the way and pretty much, in my eyes, more or less completely solved, we have moved on to the bigger problems playing the game today. That is crafting gears and loot.
Today, we will discuss loot and POE Currency, how they affect you, and why the new rare mod system currently needs to be determined and tested is not a good sign.
As the league is scheduled to be announced or launched on December 9th leaving, there is probably less than a month to fully test out the system. Currently, GGG has a system where they are putting out FAQ after the balance Manifesto, which answers all the burning questions that people may have. There are some answers in this monster mod FAQ that raises your eyebrow. We sure that this system is going to work well. They almost addressed how monster mods or rare mods will work regarding loot difficulty and other factors. So the number one problem right now that people have realized is that a Pandora’s Box has opened, and that is the Magic Find conundrum.
Most people don’t really think about Magic Find that much, and that’s because there are alternate ways to get loot if you just killed a lot of mobs. You could have done Archnemesis III in the past and got a lot of loot, but if you wanted to clear maps without magic button, you would be losing money over and over again. So, Magic Find has always been extremely overpowered. It is very important not to understat how overpowered magic find was.
There’s a reason why GGG didn’t remove Quantity Support Gem, and there’s a reason why item quantity doesn’t exist on any rare gear besides Legacy gear as well. So the presence of Loot goblins in the absence of mobs dropping loot has exacerbated the issue. At this point, if you look at players’ community like Reddit, a lot of people have figured out that magic find is very toxic for the game because they feel forced to opt for it. Now they didn’t really feel as forced is because there were other ways to obtain loot and buy POE Currency. The reason why magic find feels bad is it limits build diversity. Because every build wants a baseline of rarity and quantity, making a certain item is mandatory.
When GGG writes this FAQ, they even mention how magic find has a diminishing return. Diminishing return is not a good thing in this case because you want to have a higher baseline of quantity and rarity so that your character has as much opportunity to find as much loot as possible. While sacrificing as little of your character’s power as possible, there will be a huge homogenization of every single item that people use, and we can already see this in the current league. People were using two Ventor’s Gambles a lot of times or two Pariahs. Still, mostly Ventor’s Gambles for the rarity, meanwhile, everyone is going to be running a gold flask with the Rarity suffix on it, so it pretty much makes all these certain items mandatory.
Obviously, it takes away all of this build choice and stuff that makes Path of Exile fun to play. You’re not building a more powerful character when you try to match your character. You’re building a more powerful magic finder. For many people, that kind of ruins the fantasy where you’re trying to make your character as strong as possible, and you should do the hardest content, and POE Currency buy a lot to get rich rewards. That’s how Path of Exile has always kind of been weird.
If you look at how Maps work, the harder your maps roll, the more loot you’ll be rewarded with. Now another problem is that the GGG has introduced this conversion loot mechanic thing, which allows you to exponentially scale magic finds, what this means is that in the past, if you wanted to find more POE Currency, only increased quantity would help. But now, the way that you find POE 3.20 Currency, dropped items are converted to a currency based on rarity, which means your freak is also helping.
Players get this multiplicative effect, where you have quantity and rarity affecting the amount of POE currency you’re fighting. So before, it was only quantity, but now Path of Exile has this conversion loop mechanic thing, where your quantity and rarity all help because you will drop more unique items, which will all get converted to various currency items, just like Divine Orb, Exalted Orb and Chaos Orb.
Thus the problem is it is highly possible that the variety of builds in Path of Exile 3.20 will not face a bright future. Archnemesis is gone but still left something behind from my perspective, which could be a potentially negative aspect in Path of Exile 3.20.
James Gordan
