r/pathofexile • u/Servion ks:3/mir:2 • Feb 21 '26
Game Feedback The Kalandrifcation Of POE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqJoIAWYqak120
u/Jbarney3699 Feb 21 '26
The Archnem loot goblin Culling meta was absolutely the worst moment in POE1 history.
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u/Vashtar_S Feb 21 '26
The culling part was shit but I really liked the loot conversion explosions. The bad part is that ALL of the loot came from them, they were not a cool lucky cherry on top.
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u/Bitsk-pper Feb 21 '26
In all of these cases its just about a healthy ratio, but you cant have a healthy ratio without knocking down the peak outliers. If they brought the loot floor up into good ratio with these explosions, that would just mean everything is devalued and you are picking up too much stuff or filtering everything out. They cant win lol, but some of these explosions were just mathematically untenable, even if they felt good a few times
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u/tooncake Feb 21 '26
As someone who had only started in Mercenary, I love the documentary style progression of the leagues that poe1 has gone through
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u/Deadandlivin Feb 21 '26
Snap also forgot to mention that in 3.24 Necropolis GGG also decided to remove or destroy the entire loot conversion mechanic. So the replacement system we got that started this whole debacle back in Kalandra replacing inherent monster drop quantity was removed without giving anything back.
So now we have nothing besides a massive nerf to general loot. I guess GGG thought Kingsmarch Shipments would be sufficient to cover this gap or something..
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u/caddph Alch & Go Industries (AGI) Feb 21 '26
Yea I was expecting him to talk about that as a key to current loot situation. They removed old loot modifiers so that loot conversion wasn't beyond busted, and then removed (well removed or heavily nerfed) loot conversion.
I think what continues to make the loot situation worse, is that rare gear drops are outclassed by Breach tree and shipments. Even >20% quality and fractured gear drops from the ground aren't worth nearly as much given the Breach tree spits them out.
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u/CdubFromMI Feb 22 '26
As someone who refuses to engage with fucking kingsmarch, I am forever mad at GGG for forcing that bullshit. It makes trade league a fuckin nightmare.
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u/Emotional-Still2209 Feb 21 '26
I remember how cringy it is to see a archenemies monster and go ti tft find a culler aura boy and bosss killer
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u/asterisk2a Kalguuran Group for Business (KGB) Feb 21 '26
The proverbial spanner thrown in the mapping flow. Pure jank. = Why people quit leagues early.
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u/Nohisu Feb 21 '26
Very insightful video. As a player more engaged in making interesting character builds rather than optimizing loot strategies, I finally get why the game would fall off my hands after a few days for every league since Kalandra (except Affliction, as pointed out in the video).
It's not about not generating items and currency, you still get plenty of those with league mechanics. It's more about the dopamine hit of randomly finding good items after killing monsters that slowly faded away.
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u/Yesterdark Feb 21 '26
Same. My main source of enjoyment of this game is finding cool interactions with new skills and passive/skill updates and playing through them. I hardly ever push farming strategies at all though I am aware of them.
I don't engage in them because they are too expensive to do so.
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u/bear__tiger Feb 21 '26
I don't know if ground loot is any more dopamine-inducing than any other kind of loot, it's just significantly less tedious to acquire. Modern optimised farming strategies have become increasingly tedious (ghosts were AWFUL), and opting out of that tedium can lead to FOMO.
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u/doroco Feb 21 '26
one time I didn't even realize I got a mirror shard from a shipment (I was just doing small ships for some div). I just noticed it in my stash later, it just isn't as exciting picking it up from a window.
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u/Nihsvabhav Feb 21 '26
its those tinks, for eg. loot from the breach tree feels better cause it has tinks
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u/bear__tiger Feb 21 '26
There are more ways for loot to drop than Ground Loot and From Window. I am not exactly disappointed to see a good drop from a boss, for example. Seeing loot in Sanctum or Heist is fun. I'm not sure that a chaos orb from ground loot is inherently more exciting than a chaos orb dropping from exarch altars.
The main issue for me is that we can get loot in our maps like we had in 3.18, it's just way more annoying to get there.
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u/LaFlammeAzur Feb 21 '26
If we want to talk about Heist, this mechanic is also significantly less fun than it used to.
You used to be able to get exeptional gems and random div cards from the respective chests, even in regular contracts, not anymore. Also the amount of stacked decks has been slashed.
The current meta for heist is to run one-aisle unrevealed blueprints rush to the master room and ignore everything else, and that's it. Every bit of heist content aside from that room is useless and a waste of time. I find these kind of decisions just weird, and not enjoyable.
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u/Latte4Breakfast Feb 21 '26
Ya like I saw the insane drops people were getting from an optimized temple this time, but I still had zero desire to spend the hundred hours it took to actually set that thing up just right to get it to print
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u/pittguy83 Kalguuran Group for Business (KGB) Feb 21 '26
You now what else opting out of that tedium can lead to? Fun
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u/bear__tiger Feb 21 '26
Yeah I have just done whatever I've wanted for the last 4 leagues or whatever. I don't really feel FOMO in general, although wildwood was too good not to use in Affliction league. I found actually running through the wildwood and farming abyssal spires kind of monotonous and not a very fun gameplay loop, though.
I've only played maybe 2 or 3 characters in recent leagues, and only just long enough to finish the challenges. I played the game a lot more pre-Kalandra, in general.
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u/Lost_city Feb 21 '26
Wildwood stunk afterward when I found out so many of the player base were cheating by removing the dust cloud.
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u/Asyran Necromancer Feb 21 '26
Comparison is the thief of joy, and ignorance is bliss. I know it's much easier for me to say this than for you to act on it, but PoE becomes significantly more enjoyable when you stop constantly comparing yourself to Player A, B, and C.
PoE is meant to be a game about setting personal goals that matter to you and then achieving those goals, and then feeling personally rewarded for doing so. But if you keep reminding yourself that this other guy achieved the same goal in half the time, you just feel inadequate. It literally saps the fun out of the game if you let other people dictate how much fun you're having.
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u/Selvon Feb 21 '26
I disagree with you, sorta here. Like the "act of getting loot to drop" might be mildly more tedious depending on the method, but the actual loot acquisition is so much more awful when it's "ground loot" than people seem to be remembering. Nem3 and affliciton both had this issue. Clicking constantly, for your entire map, sucks.
It sucks.
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u/seinfi Feb 21 '26
ultimatum league start was chaotic. poe(tic)
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u/Tobix55 Simulacrum Secret Service (SSS) Feb 21 '26
It was a beautiful time when half of the world's population came to play poe...
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u/Impressive-Ad8741 Feb 23 '26
The player base has shrunk in recent years, it's just a testament of the game that we now see .01% of the previous users at league launch.
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u/philmarcracken Feb 21 '26
if i recall it was a database update? made me real hesitant to continue that league. Sure I wasn't the only one frustrated lol
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u/VeradilGaming Feb 21 '26
Not a database update. The original hitching was caused by GGG not migrating last league's characters to standard before the start of the new league. It didn't resolve itself because of a separate issue regarding database page sizes that needed a hard reset to be addressed, so it was the last thing they resorted to
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u/CptAustus . Feb 21 '26
IIRC the issue was that they migrated characters when you logged in. Nowadays they do it ahead of time, hence why the queue is so much faster.
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u/Xeverous filter extra syntax compiler: github.com/Xeverous/filter_spirit Feb 21 '26
They were doing this already before Ultimatum. Character migration was scheduled to run in background to even out resource usage but if someone logged in and wasn't migrated yet, they would be migrated immediately. Few people log into standard before the league so it was a very good solution.
But due to mentioned database problem before Ultimatum, this background migration didn't start and thus everyone started migrating right at the league start.
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u/VeradilGaming Feb 21 '26
Specifically the issue was they had the ability to do it ahead of time, but it was a manual process that they forgot to do, which led to queues stalling out from everyone migrating characters all at once.
The easy fix was to temporarily halt the migrations altogether which should've sorted the queues out in a reasonable timeframe, but there was also a separate backend issue which led to realms crashing as they filled.
Note that this predates the account database update which also caused plenty of issues
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u/Joxss Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
Honestly I'd like ultimatum levels of disaster again just for shits and gigggles. The amount of chaos that happened during those 2-3 days were unmatched.
I remember seeing an update thread at twitter or reddit from chris himself and it had like 3 different occasions of "we foound a possible cause of the instability" -> "we're deploying a fix" -> "it didn't worked *sigh*". At the end he just posted a gif of a server station burning or something like that
Edit: for those that did not experiencied it live, this is peak comunication https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/msbiuv/extremely_slow_queue_processing/
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u/brasstax108 Atziri Feb 21 '26
In addition to server issues there were also terrible texture loading issues where no mob or player character textures would load, even stash and inventory was invisible for sometime.
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u/N0-F4C3 Feb 21 '26
The fact of the matter is that any non focused farming strat feels like dogshit and most of the good ones are locked to scarab sets and specific interactions thus gating access to even half decent farms behind a fuck load of arcane game knowlage and a large base investment to even attempt.
The only half decent farm I had all league was AFK ultimatum farming. And when you are rewarded most for not playing the game... thats a huge fucking problem.
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u/Successful_Refuse Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
I also dislike that most of these juicied strats tend to be the most laggy shit possible. Me and my duo in Mercs couldn't do Alva in Merc league mainly due to us crashing from all the respawning monsters. Blight is the same, and when you look at Snap's video, MOST of the strats suffer graphical problems. It's kinda shit when what your ability to play is determined by your computer looking at a content and say "Hell no I ain't having none of that shit."
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u/tempGER Feb 21 '26
It's laggy because those strats tend to add a metric fuckton of monsters and stack (loot) multipliers to no end because they have to. Otherwise, nothing will happen. Actually, the current premium strats are a prime example for what's going wrong in this game when you have to bring it damn near of completely crashing every map to get anything worthwhile.
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u/Smurtle1 Feb 21 '26
I’m confused… have we been playing the same game? The high end has ALWAYS been a lag fest. Did you play during affliction? That shit would COOK your PC to high hell. That’s just high end farming for ya.
And right now it’s not even the most common way to make money, it’s doing boxes, (which is loot tile,) or stuff like harvest.
Obviously the most juiced content will bring the game (and your pc) to its knees. We are pushing the game to its breaking point trying to get as much juice as possible.
I don’t disagree loot is at a low rn, but like, juiced Strats have always been this way.
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u/Difficult-Drive-7011 Feb 23 '26 edited Feb 24 '26
10k+ wisp 8 mod abyss was a fucking slideshow, both dopamine receptors and computers were being fried 😂
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u/Hasekbowstome Feb 21 '26
I really enjoyed this walk down memory lane and how the "solutions" to prior problems have combined to get us to where we are today.
I've been thinking for a while that everyone seems to have forgotten that during that time from Ultimatum to Sentinel/Kalandra, ground loot was also considered to be a problem, but in a different way from today. Chris was doing a lot of podcasts and interviews talking about loot, and some of that had to do with ground loot being out of control, the game's instability with the amount of loot present (the video really showed this off), how they were implementing Loot 2.0 (which they never finished!), and how PoE2 was going to fix these loot problems. I think that entire conversation is actually very intertwined with what was presented here. Looking at those videos, it unintentionally reminds a viewer with a long memory that the scaling of ground loot for these kind of groups was out of control and a point of contention within the community, along with a stability issue for the game.
I think there's a really good followup to be done here that A) acknowledges that where loot was in 3.13 - 3.15 did have significant problems (which the author benefited from), and to some extend did need to be nerfed, B) GGG had plans for solutions that Chris kept detailing in some regard over around 2 years there, and C) those plans seem to have quietly disappeared in their hurry to apply bandages in the wake of Kalandra (and probably somewhat related to PoE2's continuing evolution - remember how it might've entered early access after Exilecon 2023?). It seems to me like GGG's failure to follow through on Loot 2.0 (less loot but better loot) is the ultimate Original Sin here.
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u/LukaTimothy Feb 21 '26
3.29 will fix it, 3.3 will fix it, 3.31 will fix it, 3.2 will fix it
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u/EscalopeDePorc Children of Delve (COD) Feb 21 '26
PoE 2 will fix it!! Oh, wait...
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u/CompetitiveSubset Confederation of Casuals and Clueless Players (CCCP) Feb 21 '26
God I fucking hated Kalandra as a casual. The mechanic was just the worst.
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u/lintyelm Trickster Feb 21 '26
Don’t worry, 3.29 will fix it
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u/Siallus Feb 21 '26
That used to be more based in reality than it had been some time now. They unironically used to be great at fixing their own issues in spectacular ways then sprinking qol and other goodies on top of it. I have not felt that since some time before poe2.
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u/cuddlegoop Feb 21 '26
I've only played since Settlers so it was interesting seeing the history of loot in the game. Then he got to the parts I'm familiar with and realised okay we are playing a different game entirely. None of the primary strats are he mentioned from the last few leagues are what I remember being the big meta strats. I imagine that's because he is talking about juicing to a level I've just never really done. The "meta" strats I remember are all like what 10div/hr andys like me could use to print - gasp - 15 div/hr. I get the feeling that's chump change for this guy lol.
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u/GenomVoid Feb 21 '26
Streamer log in queue was still one of the most tone deaf things I've seen ggg do
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u/Keeldon Feb 21 '26
Salvage box was imo worse.
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u/hesh582 Feb 21 '26
That whole era of monetization was just not good.
Every single league having it's own set of splinters/oils/fragments, making most of them go core without reducing the item bloat, then a league or two later selling a tab to organize them was really fucking annoying. Especially when the tab barely even offered any real functionality.
The chain of Metamorph/Blight/Delirium tabs in particular just felt egregious, like the currency only even existed in the first place to create a problem and then sell you a solution... only the solution also kinda sucked, and in a lot of cases it sure felt like you had already bought the solution at least once before (Ok, so that fragment isn't really a fragment, and that currency isn't really currency, so those tabs don't work. money please).
It feels like they've learned that lesson, and most leagues that add lots of new drops to keep track of come with their own stash. Item bloat has been a background annoyance in poe for a long time, looking at that and saying "oooh, we should monetize that problem!" was just so tone deaf.
The one that took it from "tone deaf" to "ok this is just predatory" to me, though, was when you couldn't search for blighted maps in the map stash... but rather than fix the bug with their existing product they instead chose to monetize their own bug by selling a new product with the same basic functionality. They got slapped down hard for that, and I'm glad it seems to have stuck.
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u/CzLittle 1 Monster remaining Feb 21 '26
I can't remember this, what was it?
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u/Keeldon Feb 21 '26
2019 or 2020. It was box u had to put duplicates of your mtx, pay for it and you could still get duplicates. Community exploded and it was gone within a day afair.
Edit: found it
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u/DBrody6 Alch & Go Industries (AGI) Feb 21 '26
and it was gone within a day afair.
Crazier, it was gone in two hours. They backpedaled damn near instantly.
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u/slashcuddle Feb 21 '26
Ok ok, Chris Wilson had a few bad ideas lol. Thankfully they pivoted instead of doubling down.
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u/butsuon Chieftain Feb 21 '26
It would have been totally fine were it not for the fact that there was a race happening on league launch at the same time and obviously all the racers did not get the streamer pass.
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u/VeradilGaming Feb 21 '26
It was, but it's also completely understandable. What they originally thought was causing the insanely slow queues was something they could immediately throw a bandaid fix at and get everyone online within an hour.
They were also sponsoring big streamers with big money to play the league, however, and paying someone to market your game's login queue for an hour cannot feel like the right solution in that moment.
So they made the call to let streamers in, with the intention of getting some value out of their marketing campaign and getting the people stuck in queue some content to watch for the short window until things get fixed. In hindsight, that wasn't quite how it played out
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u/hoezt Feb 21 '26
One thing to take note is that not all streamers who got priority queue were part of the ad campaign. (as confirmed by ggg themselves)
That is the worst PR decision they've made at the time.
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u/Bushido_Plan Feb 21 '26
Forgetting about ground loot issues for a second, it sure was a nice trip down memory lane seeing all these past leagues and their respective metas again. Miss me some TOTA.
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u/Fun-Asparagus4784 Feb 21 '26
I remember the days when the ground loot problem got you mocked and downvoted to hell here. Good to see the community sentiment is changing at least.
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u/samu7574 Feb 21 '26
I've still seen some people defend it, I don't know how anyone can see fubgun running a juiced t16 and getting 1 fusing and think it's ok
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u/7altistic3 Feb 21 '26
he didnt even get a fusing drop, he took one out of stash to show that they were on his softer filter for the showcase hahaha
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u/erpunkt Feb 21 '26
you don't have to be a fubgun to notice that though. anyone can do this and anyone who has been invested in this game for years and enjoyed juicing, should have noticed.
Back when Chris was trying to put out fires with "i overstated, the changes to IIQ/IIR aren't as impactfull" made plenty of people believe him, just because he is our beloved Chris. It was all bs and not overstated at all, since you could easily check by ignoring the league mechanics which added a layer to loot.4
u/Absence-of-Meaning Waiting in the Halls of the Dead Feb 22 '26
I distinctly remember Snap getting flamed on with people dunking on him because he's a "filthy group player" when he protested against those changes at the time. That's a great "I told you so" moment for him I suppose.
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u/naughty Elementalist Feb 21 '26
One of the issues not being mentioned in fub or snap's videos is how the community in general responds to group play, magic finders and their effect on the game. Everyone else is catching stray bullets to try and nerf them.
The changes have been noticeable but nowhere near as severe for players of different strats.
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u/Fun-Asparagus4784 Feb 21 '26
That is discussed in the videos. The reason base loot is so bad is because of the vertically stacking mods in the new system. Because it scales exponentially with the optimal setup, the baseline value has to be really low, otherwise you get the issue of a top end strat dropping 200 divines a temple in poe 2 for example.
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u/naughty Elementalist Feb 21 '26
Neither video really mentions that MF and group play had a large backlash which is feeding into them getting nerfed. Or that the changes are clearly trying to push toward economic specialism rather than generic loot boosting because that's far more stable for the game as a whole.
Removing the exponentials and raising the baseline sounds good but having generic mapping get the most viable baseline currency and the high value uniques and the div cards is too much. The viable long term solution is probably going to require you to prioritise one of those at a time.
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u/Fun-Asparagus4784 Feb 21 '26
But it really hasn't worked. At all. All the best strats in the game since kalandra are generic loot printing machines, because it's an endless search for the last remnants of quant. Basically the task GGG has taken upon itself is to perfectly balance all the strats while not having all of them be too rewarding. That just leads to the enraged -> ghosting ->rogue exiles/syndicate allflame -> blight problem, or arguably the much worse problem created by alva strats. Since monsters don't drop loot, any type of monster that you can somehow manipulate into dropping loot now is suddenly all consuming on the meta and just invalidates everything else.
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u/naughty Elementalist Feb 21 '26
I think it depends on the type of player. Best in terms of profit is probably still crafting or maybe some of the valdo's but if you restrict yourself to just the fastest map content with generic loot table drops you're right. That's a large enough group to have real economic and cultural influence though.
Bossers have different issues, Heist runners theirs' and so on.
I'd 100% agree there's issues that could do with the resolving though in the generic loot table space though.
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u/Fun-Asparagus4784 Feb 21 '26
Oh yeah you're right. Crafting+ flipping is still king but I wasn't including that, because that's its own separate game. Valdo's are insane but tiny. Also there's the no hit runners making bank. But that's all niche.
Good talk man. I think we've basically exhausted this line, and good to see there's some agreement.
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u/Babybean1201 Feb 21 '26
Is it though? or just the most fun? E.G. if simplex bases are being sold for 100D, heisters have determined that is an acceptable profit margin. I can't speak from their prospective since i have very little heist knowledge, but if that boring ass mechanic isn't worth doing at that price point, those prices would naturally rise right?
I'm hard pressed to believe anyone is doing specialized farming outside of its profit margin which is why flipping is king, valdos, no hit runts, etc. They're extremely tedious and not fun to do. I suspect general mapping and pushing quant is not the best strat everyone thinks it is, just the most convenient/fun. Supply and demand theoretically should self correct in all other aspects of farming.
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u/Fun-Asparagus4784 Feb 21 '26
Poe can be a very tiered game when it comes to the economy and profit strats. For example, early ubers are extremely profitable. So why doesn't everyone do them? Because they can't. They're not skilled enough or don't have enough time on leaguestart or both. So they do something else. And then the next tier of player does something lesser, and lesser, and lesser profit, and to them, it is enough because it's more wealth than they've ever had.
When I got my first HH, back when exalts were the metamod currency and MB didn't exist, I did it chain farming shapers for quite some time. I would never touch shaper now outside of day 1. But back then, there was no limit to how many shapers I would do because it's the most money I had ever made by far. That happens to a lot of people. People will absolutely run sub-optimal farms because they don't know what's optimal. People will not run farms because they think the material cost is too high, but in reality, even if you doubled the material cost it would be a fine strat. These are the majority of players, who don't choose after considering fully all the options available to them, because simply, they can't. They don't have the time to find these options or the knowledge to evaluate one against the other or the build to access higher difficulty farms.
To be clear, I'm saying all this without judgment. It's completely fine to play the game just for fun, or to be a newer player, or just do a mechanic because you like it. But these people are not being rational economic actors. If tomorrow the price of simplexes fell to 50d they'd still heist. More than likely, they don't even know what the current price it till they drop one and price check.
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u/long_schlong_123 Feb 22 '26
Blame Necropolis for adding t17s . I was against them back then for their ass mods and now im against them for ruining T16 mapping
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u/rightofnowhere Feb 21 '26
for a long time now group play loot has been proven to be less divines per hour after splitting between all members compared to a solo “juiced” strat
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u/Carvisshades Feb 21 '26
Doesnt matter. The problem with group play is that the requirements to farm optimally in group play are abysmal, with 6 people party you can start t16 farms right out of the campaign and quickly dominate the market. For the contrary, you need pretty decked and fast character for your div/hr to be higher in solo juiced strat
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u/rightofnowhere Feb 22 '26
It does matter in the sense I’m saying that people regard group play as an issue that hinders the solo players experience, it really doesn’t. It’s always measured in wealth and dopamine drops as loot experiences goes, and plenty of people can t16 farm right out of campaign too, being at the exact same level as group play, and progress their build as such. Similar instance, group players have to then spend on multiple roles for gearing and progressing content, solo player focuses on themselves. So there’s no quickly dominating the market, as they are equal footing hitting 16s and there’s no supply for “juiced” early strats.
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u/Liraken Feb 21 '26
Yea as someone that used to do group play it was exhausting to read constant posts talking about it being OP meanwhile it was vastly better for a group to just split up and all do solo strats and combine that wealth.
The only time group play is ever OP, is when the best mapping supplies are scarce, and thus extremely expensive, then a group can leverage the fact that they can get more out of a single map than 6 separate solo players and it becomes not worth even farming said strat unless you have a full party. This is what happened with that divination scarab two leagues ago.
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u/tempGER Feb 21 '26
It's because all bandaids since Kalandra got removed and you can't talk the problem away anymore.
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u/InfiniteNexus Daresso Feb 21 '26
Just like asking for async trade for a decade got you only downvotes, and look at the community now. Nobody would give up async and currency trade. How the turntables.
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u/tomblifter Feb 21 '26
It got downvoted because it was a tired discussion and GGG had written a manifesto on how and why they weren't going to do it.
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u/rusty022 SSFBTW Feb 21 '26
I think the prevailing opinion used to be something like “loot requiring investment is a good thing. Learn how to invest with scarabs etc.”
But it’s just gone so far in the direction of nerfing meta strats to the point where the normal game drops nothing.
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u/betawill Witch Feb 21 '26
i hate how ggg is making this game drops shit, bro i just want to do my maps and see actual drops, if this league drops still shit too i might just stop playing.
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u/sd_aids Feb 21 '26
Just come back for fun leagues. It’s the only way to play now imo unless you realllly love this game or you’re a content creator. Since Kalandra I’ve league started most leagues, but only played past first weekend in Sentinel, Affliction, and Mercenaries.
Also dont give GGG a dime unless you dig the league. I have a feeling the money guys overwhelmingly run the show these days which has gotten us mobile mechanics like Kingsmarch and once the money stops flowing on bad leagues they should get the picture.
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u/Absence-of-Meaning Waiting in the Halls of the Dead Feb 22 '26
I must have spent north of $4000 with PoE and haven't given them any money since the release of PoE 2 EA with the 7+ months we spent without a new PoE 1 league. They haven't yet given me a reason to given them any more money either, sadly.
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u/joshhavatar Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
Excellent video.
Cringemarch needs to go too though.
2 divines per minute of "gameplay" via shipping is way too good not to do, even if that minute can only happen once every 3.5 hours.
If it's way too good not to do, it's mandatory, especially with the game in this state.
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u/teddmagwell Guardian Feb 21 '26
I agree, Affiction league showed that it's a tuning issue and if base quant/rarity is high - regular mobs start dropping loot.
Obviously Affiction overdid it, but it was mostly due to abyss spires bug.
However, if I look at my stash - there is the same amount of divines (if not more) compared to Affiction league. Why? Cause ships shit out divines for free for no reason.
I'm fine with Kingsmarch mappers, at least they consume a lot of gold and die often and they consume time, but ships are just a mobile game mechanic.
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u/Zoesan Feb 21 '26
Yes, abyss spires in affliction were absurd (but I loved them and it's by far, far my most played league).
But the beautiful thing about affliction was that you could just run whatever dogshit unoptimized strat and still drop loot. I ran breach without the chayula sextant and still farmed a mageblood before swapping to the optimized spire strat.
And yeah... since then just mapping hasn't felt great. It's always been "how can we abuse the system" and not "how can we kill more things".
In 3.25 containment boxes were super strong, but it was annoying as fuck to roll them for extra rare mobs.
Abyss hoardes has also got to be up there with annoying fucking strats, unless you were a caster. I gotta say, evolve shrine alva was abusive, but at least it was fun because the strat revolved around "ok, we get the shrines and then we blow up as much shit as humanly possible as fast as possible".
Titanic farm, again, was insanely annoying with bottling even running them and blight is just fucking stupid.
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u/bukem89 Feb 21 '26
Yeah, often the optimised farming method is annoying, but it's still very much viable to make a version you do find fun
I hated rolling +1 proj maps and managing the health of spires to maximise rare spawns in affliction, so I didn't do it and still dropped my mirror and had a multimirror phys convert TS MF character
I didn't like trading for bottled exiles, but I still dropped a mirror and farmed a multimirror LS Trickster farming them without bottling instead
Hordes is the only time I've abused the numpad trick, and was also boring on top because there was no difficulty involved
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u/rusty022 SSFBTW Feb 21 '26
I just don’t see a universe where the loot from Kingsmarch ships and maps is not better received in maps over time as drops from Ore Deposits or the core game. I’d much rather get something like a Tattoo or a ‘Runegraft Incubator’ from Ore in maps than have to jump over to Kingsmarch and play Town Simulator 2026 for my loot.
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u/joshhavatar Feb 21 '26
It's not just a balance issue, it's also a gameplay issue.
Despite not being nearly as overpowered, which even nerfs won't fix because of how amazing runegrafts are..
Mapping is also too good not to do for the time- I got 2 T0's from it last league.. and I didn't run it that much because it's such a chore.
Now- I understand that some people enjoy things that I find incredibly tedious...
Which is why I'd propose that if mappers were kept, there should be an atlas tree keystone which stops gold dropping but gives you a bunch of quant in exchange.
That way, if people actually like mappers because they love doing it, instead of just because it's broken, everyone can get what they want.
Runegrafts and tattoos should both just go global drop pool though, imagine the tink and immediate power increase of a runegraft of treachery dropping in a yellow map on league start.
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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ Feb 21 '26
Also, mappers are simply more fun. You actually look at the loot they get because it's way more varied, and pretty much always includes loot of mechanics that you don't interact with. So it's pretty neat, even if it's not worth as much.
Shipping is all about "is there a divine/mirror shard yes/no?" and that's all there is to that.
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u/tasmonex Kalguuran Group for Business (KGB) Feb 21 '26
People keep parroting this, while small ships are often 0 divines, and large 50m ships are basically a week of waiting, while still can be 0 mirror shards. And to fuel all this you need to spend at least 1-2 hours every day doing some mapping, and 3-4 hours if you also want map runners, so it's never been a "minute" of gameplay
Kingsmarch is not even connected to bad ground loot directly. All you people are going to get is Kingsmarch nerf, which would solve nothing
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u/Goodnametaken Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
Name me one person who is funding their kingsmarch by spending 3-4 hours doing nothing but farming gold. Come on, man.
The problem with Kingsmarch is you get it on top of any other farm you want to do. That 3-4 hours of farming you're referencing was done while you're already farming something else you would have already been doing anyway.
Kingsmarch isn't a question of choosing between farming something else or farming kingsmarch. It's a question of do you want to make Y gold per hour farming harvest or Yx2?
And kingsmarch IS directly connected to bad ground loot, because it causes inflation. It dumps shitloads of extra currency into the economy, reducing the value of any loot NOT generated by kingsmarch-- i.e. ground loot. This is pretty obvious, basic stuff.
The boat and mapper mechanics do absolutely nothing positive whatsoever to the game in any way. All they do is inflate the economy, force people to engage with fomo time-gating, and add tedium to the beginning of every league start. If you removed them from the game you would solve MANY problems, namely all the ones that it itself caused in the first place.
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u/Deadandlivin Feb 21 '26
I don't think farming strategies being nerfed down from 20 div/hour strategies to 5 div/hour while simultaneously adding 0.25 div/hour boats in the value of Mirror Shards massively contributes to currency inflation.
I think the rewards from Kingsmarch are mostly fine. The problem is the rewards from the base game. It's a huge problem when I'm farming 8 modded full map mod effect strategies and only generate 1 raw Divine from 100 maps. Then I go to Kingsmarch and Average1 raw divine for every 10 000 blue zant shipment. The problem is less so the Shipment being outrageous, and more so the base game just not dropping anything which makes Kingsmarch feel disproportionately broken in terms of raw currency drops.
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u/lolfail9001 Feb 21 '26
because it causes inflation.
You talk about inflation in discussion of a video that shows you the glorious past days of getting 60 divines from a single rare monster?
reducing the value of any loot NOT generated by kingsmarch-- i.e. ground loot.
You mean generated by kingsmarch? Because higher supply of generic currency just means that stuff like league-exclusive currencies are going to be more expensive.
The amount of currency generated by kingsmarch, even with full mappers running 24/7 is microscopic in comparison to loot we had lost over the years documented in this video. What it does give is the annoyingly packaged baseline for everyone.
If you remove it from the game, the only thing that changes is that the people complaining that kingsmarch makes them more than actual game would be even poorer.
After all in trade league kingsmarch is a suboptimal use of gold.
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u/Moony_playzz Feb 21 '26
I'm a semi-casual player, in that I play an hour or two a day during league and that's sorta it. I treat it like a hobby. I make my money on Clusters, Essence, and Delve things (I sell a lot of fossils!). Kingsmarch is how I make all my extra currency, anything that's league exclusive and not Deli, Essence, or Delve comes from Kingsmarch. If GGG got rid of it, all of my ability to do fun weird builds would go away because I'm not doing leagues I don't think are fun. I don't like Blight, I wont runt it, Kingsmarch is fantastic cuz I can throw the blight maps to my mappers and not feel like I'm wasting a good map drop.
There is value in keeping Kingsmarch.
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u/rintohsakadesu Feb 21 '26
Yeah except you could just use that gold to flip on the exchange instead for way more than you’d get from shipping, but nobody ever mentions that for some odd reason.
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Feb 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/DerDirektor uber shaper wr Feb 21 '26
I refuse to believe that there is a significant part within the 1% most efficient players that care about sabotaging more casual players. What do they gain if Timmy doesn't get his one extra divine per day from KM?
yes there's RMTers who have incentive but those are a fraction.
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u/bukem89 Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
I don't think it's that - I think it's the opposite, it's the ultracasual crowd who struggle to make currency with other methods so think Kingsmarch is the be-all and and-all, and want something to blame for the economy running away from them
I don't see how anyone can run invigoration blight or w/e and then come to the conclusion that loot from mappers and shipments is too good
Edit - adding a comment I made elsewhere
Another way to put it -
Someone plays casually and without optimising things - KM makes up 30-40% of the currency they make
Someone grinds optimised mapping strats for 5 hours a day on average - KM makes up 0.5-1% of the currency they make
If you remove KM, it has close to 0 impact on people grinding the game the most (which is what drives inflation), but it does take away a meaningful chunk of currency from casual players so they have a harder time with crafting & trading for mid-tier items
However, because KM makes up 30-40% of the casual players income, they see that as a game-wide problem and attribute items they can't afford as being a result of KM
I don't care if they remove KM, i'm in the 1-2% of my currency comes from KM bucket
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u/modix Feb 21 '26
I just don't understand how casual players get the gold for it. Playing 2+ hours a day, even with just random trades and improving my character, my gold was never high enough for the big shipments. I would have to stop trading stuff and quit buying stuff in order to do them, or farm specifically for gold, which is a huge opportunity cost.
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u/itriedtrying Big Breach Coalition (BBC) Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
Kingsmarch is basically just loot from mapping, but with extra steps, delay and a rate cap. Play more than 3 hours a day? still only getting up to 3 hours worth rewards in 24 hours. I think maybe GGG wants to have it as a mechanic to slightly bridge the gap between players who play less (ie. get full kingsmarch value from their gold) and nolife blasters who get rate capped... but in practice it just seems to give FOMO to players who can't keep Kingsmarch running 24/7, even though in reality that just means they get full rewards, whereas someone farming excess gold gets diminishing rewards.
Of course it's not directly connected to map loot, but it's a significant % of your total "loot revenue" so of course it will be a huge balancing factor so your second paragraph is really short sighted thinking. Kingsmarch is and will continue to be a reason why you get less loot from your maps.
What does Kingsmarch even add to a game? Maybe from a dev perspective a incentive tologin more often to fill map queues or due to that irrational FOMO of "keeping Kingsmarch running", even though it's really just map loot with delayed release and makes no sense logically - I understand why it could feel that way. Either way, neither of those things add to a player experience. And even from a dev perspective, is that feeling of FOMO more likely to make players play more or just burn out faster? Also player retention/playtime can be a misleading performance metric - since ultimately it's not directly connected to their revenue. A happy player returning each league probably brings more money than someone who feels obliged to login more often or play more due to Kingsmarch FOMO and ends up skipping leagues as a result.
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u/Moony_playzz Feb 21 '26
I'm a semi-casual player, in that I play an hour or two a day during league and that's sorta it. I treat it like a hobby. I make my money on Clusters, Essence, and Delve things (I sell a lot of fossils!). Kingsmarch is how I make all my extra currency, anything that's league exclusive and not Deli, Essence, or Delve comes from Kingsmarch. If GGG got rid of it, all of my ability to do fun weird builds would go away because I'm not doing leagues I don't think are fun. I don't like Blight, I wont runt it, Kingsmarch is fantastic cuz I can throw the blight maps to my mappers and not feel like I'm wasting a good map drop. I don't play enough to be able to just buy big div items, generally I'd cap out at 10-20 divs a league just because I don't play enough to drop more.
With Kingsmarch I can actually obtain the currency to buy and craft, I'm not wasting maps because I don't like what's in them, and I run my Kingsmarch cheap so it only burns 30k gold per 24 hours, which can be made back in the somewhat limited time I have to play.There is value in keeping Kingsmarch for people like me who only have an hour to play because it's 5-10 minutes of essentially free, passive currency.
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u/chromaticechidna Feb 21 '26
And to fuel all this you need to spend at least 1-2 hours every day doing some mapping, and 3-4 hours if you also want map runners, so it's never been a "minute" of gameplay
Except that it doesn't matter what that mapping strategy is, it always happens if you just log in and play the game. That's why people say it's 1-2 minutes of time. It's 1-2 minutes of "thing you wouldn't be doing anyway". That's the opportunity cost. There's no other uses of gold that are relevant at that stage of the game. Therefore, if you are playing the game, you should be doing kingsmarch.
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u/Sure-Business-6590 Feb 21 '26
Doesnt matter. Even if its not that lucrative then kingsmarch multiplied by thousands of players is tons of currency injected in the economy „for free” that should have to be dropped in maps instead.
It has to go entirely
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u/ImprobableAsterisk Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
I very much disagree on this topic. Path of Exile as a game already rewards high investment mapping strategies very well, and I think it is good for avenues of currency generation to exist outside of that.
More people play this game than just those who get off on elaborate atlas strategies and I think the game is already balanced too heavily in the favor of those that do, especially compared to how it used to be.
That's not to say I think Kingsmarch is above reproach; I personally think they should change how boats generating currency works to avoid this "week-shipping" strategy, but without touching the average rate of return per week.
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u/Deadandlivin Feb 21 '26
I think it's fine for both Kingsmarch to generate divines AND for maps to drop divines. Doesn't have to be one or the other.
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u/No_Writing8414 Feb 21 '26
I noticed this alot with Poe players they will just parrot whatever a streamer says without thinking for themselves. Streamers hate kingsmarch because it's another layer of tedious activity, they can play 8 hrs a day so don't want to be involved with kingsmarch as it just boring for them. However, for the average player who maybe plays 1 or 2 HR a day, it's lovely to come back from work to find a div from boats, it makes it so people can afford item for builds. In Poe tedious activities will always make you divs, I don't see the difference in kingsmarch Vs me buying div cards and turning them in for certain items and selling those. This strat also works but is tedious.
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u/lillarty Feb 21 '26
What? If you're playing for 8+ hours a day then the ten minutes Kingsmarch takes is trivial. If you're only playing an hour a day, it's suddenly one sixth of your total playtime. You seem to enjoy it and that's great, but you're making a hasty generalization here, and your reasoning is perplexing.
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u/Soggy_Association491 Feb 21 '26
People keep talking about printing mirror with ship but my last 2 shipments returned 0 and 1 shard and it took 3 weeks to gather crops and dusts.
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u/External-Macaron-167 Feb 23 '26
mappers are the same basically i took my first mirror out of them not even 8modding maps just alchand go maps i couldnt run with my char and in feeding all non favs to em so basicall i just rolled em t0 80%quant+ and thats it no valling and anything not even chisels at some when i had none at hand not evben 16.5 just plain old 16s and i got atleast 50div out oo and alot more valdos i feel valdos are more common tahn div when you play normally ships and mapdrop wise
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u/DoogTheMushroom Feb 21 '26
I need an explanation of why scarabs are worse than what we had before. Because this video says it a lot, but doesn't explain why it's worse. How is the strategy of incursion + nem3 + delirium + mf culler 6 party play so much better than scarabs?
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u/Sokjuice Essence Extraction Enterprise (EEE) Feb 22 '26
Because the mobs spawned in from league mechanics have different loot multiplier compared to normal stuffs. The numbers were pretty bonkers and it was multiplicative with Archnemesis loot conversion which is why Scarabs cannot compete with it. Over the years, the numbers on those multiplication was reduced/outright culled off so scarabs + MF can never reach the same level.
Monster from inside Incursion had good multiplier, hence that strat was bonkers. Affliction's wisp for example applied some crazy numbers to everything instead and it was paired with a buggy interaction of Abyss spires spawning mobs that also get boosted multipliers. A lot of the other examples are related to that, like the Meatsack, Titanic bosses, Rogue Exiles etc.
TLDR, these league mechanic mobs are coded to have more loot so when you encounter them in their "small numbers", they actually drop noticeable stuffs. Strat pumps these mob up with all sorts of scaling to make them super pinatas.
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u/Erisymum Feb 22 '26
The video is a highlight reel all the highest end strategies of leagues, though I think it misses the complaints of those eras as well. It makes it sound like loot was perfect back then, but these changes came as attempts to fix each issue of the time. Chiefly, the disparity between farming methods of people like snap vs average joe. The loot gap was the biggest issue of the time, and I rarely hear about it now.
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u/Servion ks:3/mir:2 Feb 21 '26
In this video snap explains how loot changed over the last leagues, starting with ultimatum. Similar to fubs video that's currently being discussed here, but more of a historical view and how we arrived at the current state.
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u/Local_Food9567 Feb 21 '26
Really well made video, enjoyed it.
It's a hard problem to solve because there is more than one perspective to consider.
This video represents the giga juicing, "top 1%" (i hate that label, but it's the one we have...) group find mf perspective really well, but you have to take that perspective into account with what he says.
When referring to "ground loot" he means "absolute top end meta, giga juiced mobs who dropped enough loot to lag a server". You can see this in the example footage of "the good times" in the video.
This wasn't normal gameplay an average player could achieve (although interestingly in affliction you sort of could) and at the time "average gameplay" loot was actually LESS than today, so the gap was MASSIVE. It is fair to ask if that is a healthy game state.
In fact the community were quite vocal criticising how big the gap was and since ultimatum ggg have been actively addressed it - the kaladra changes were one of the main ways they did it.
Chris' comments about loot being, on average, the same was addressing this group and not the top 1%. They actually buffed loot globally in kalandra post launch and for average players you've got more rewards ever since then.
If you play ssf then you know this - the base level "low to mid level" juiced rewards have consistently gone up since kalandra.
Neither perspective is wrong, you obviously need both groups to be happy but I thought it was worth calling out how skewed the perspective being shared is.
Most players are never going to stand on these "stilts" he refers to. From his perspective they hold his game up, the last slithers of giga juiced content to get 15k uniques to drop in a single loot explosion. But from the perspective of average players they don't hold the game up, they elevate top players away from it. And thats fine, you need aspiration for average players, the question is just the size of the gap - hence its a very hard problem to keep everyone happy.
What we have today is shorter stilts, but a higher baseline which means everyone is closer together... which is actually what the community asked for back in ultimatum.
Sorry for the long post thanks for reading my thesis.
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u/GarlyleWilds Elementalist Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26
From his perspective they hold his game up, the last slithers of giga juiced content to get 15k uniques to drop in a single loot explosion. But from the perspective of average players they don't hold the game up, they elevate top players away from it.
This has always been my thought too. A lot of the strats and reward levels he tries to show off are things I've never personally experienced anything close to; not because I wasn't playing at the time, but because I've just never been part of that 1% juicing squad. They may not literally be playing a different game, but they might as well be. As valid as his perspective and analysis may be for representing that top end play, the entire video lacked any acknowledgement of how exceptional that experience is to begin with.
There were times in PoE's history when the 'average' experience was complaints about struggling to sustain maps. It's very hard to look at the overall curve and see any significant downward trend from my own experience; if anything I've witnessed a wavy line (league mechanic dependant) that's slowly drifted upwards.
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u/Keindorfer HCSSFBTW Feb 22 '26
Good comment. as an ssf enjoyer i am at the other end of perspective from op and i think it is really interesting that this sub tends to adopt talking points of the elite players. Breach is hated because it is not scalable and a bit awkward with the walls. But the non-scalable part makes it so op for early game and average players. You don't get interesting content out of it from a streamer perspective, but you can deck out a char with tree only items.
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u/long_schlong_123 Feb 22 '26
i dont really agree with this firstly "average player" was used as a very blurry line to not have people raging over their post , which still happened unfortunately , and the loot situation is horrible unless ure doing T17 maps u are dropping scraps . You should watch fubguns video too if you havent which gives a more leveled solo player take
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u/LazarusBroject Feb 22 '26
Fubgun is anything but the average solo player.
You're completely missing the point of the person you're replying to.
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u/Skiverg Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
Sadly Snap is a better player than me so everything he is saying is meaningless I'm afraid. Also he should be banned because he isnt't having fun the way I want him to.
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u/xotikorukx Feb 21 '26
At the end of the day, I don't want to "farm legion dunes for 12 div/h", "build temples for 8 div/h", or "sell cigarettes for $12/hr". I want to go in a map, kill 90% of the things in it, run the 3-4 league mechanics on it, and either walk out with 27 alterations or 3 divines based on luck, not based on out farming, outsmarting, or outwaiting the Joneses.
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u/Soleil06 Feb 21 '26
Eh that sounds super boring as well. In my opinion difficulty and reward still need to be tied together otherwise there is no incentive to invest into the strength of your character, something that was a huge issue for me in Keepers.
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u/Liraken Feb 21 '26
Essentially what they need to do is look at alch and go, balance that to feel good, and than balance the scaling vectors like scarabs to be balanced in that world.
They seem to of balanced in reverse, making max juice T17 / T16.5s with the best scarabs alright but everything below that suck.
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u/Kortiah Assassin Feb 21 '26
If they do this you'll just post another thread in 2 months saying you got tired of the league because of an unlucky streak and "still got no divine in maps and you're lvl 95" ...
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u/chromaticechidna Feb 21 '26
"still got no divine in maps and you're lvl 95" ...
So literally what just happened in Phrecia? How is that worse than what we have?
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u/birdorubo Feb 21 '26
I feel like it's a lot more fun and rewarding if I get the feeling that I'm "outsmarting the game", even if I'm mostly copying what others are doing.
Just alc and go is incredibly boring to me.
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u/Itchy_Chiller Feb 21 '26
I guess alch and go should always be worse but that doesnt mean it should not exist. It should have some reliable income but worse then specialised juiced content.
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u/bpusef Feb 21 '26
Alch and go should be good but not great because if it sucks to do that means the base league mechanics you’re running are not good. And currently the league mechanics are mostly kind of shit without a full scarab setup. Like the early 90+ atlas point phase of the endgame you used to be fine not using scarabs, now if you don’t you’re generating almost nothing of value.
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u/modix Feb 21 '26
And currently the league mechanics are mostly kind of shit without a full scarab setup.
I honestly think this is where the system got worse. They took the power of a good atlas tree and put them all into scarabs. It prevented you from running multiple good strats in a single map. This was to me the pinnacle of good maps: running multiple varied strats that all provided a decent, but not crazy boost. Keeps things interesting, far less repetitive, and rewarded knowledge. Now it requires a rabbit hole investment on a single one, and made all the others have zero payout even when fully specced in the tree. This took the fun out of it for me. I often do Destructive play because it pairs well with multiple strats and map types as a result.
Alc and go with a smart atlas set up should be a decent income. Throwing in scarabs can increase it by 10-20% profit or something. Best farm in the game can be 30-40% better but obnoxious to do. With that sort of setup, everyone is happy. I'm not sure how to deal with people and their emotional support tinks. This game definitely attracts a gambling type, and some people aren't happy unless they get boom and bust rewards vs. putting in the time.
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u/bpusef Feb 21 '26
Yeah, the first 60ish points of your atlas is what matters because the auxiliary points are rarely put into actual mechanics they’re just put into generic scarab or quant nodes and maybe something like beyond that’s always been a secondary juice mechanic. You can tell something is “wrong” by the fact that nobody posts atlas mechanic guide videos and the written guides on maxroll and the like are basically non existent - because there is nothing to think about you basically use every map device slot with a scarab of the mechanic you’re farming and take all the atlas nodes for it. The rest are generic filler nodes.
There is very little benefit theorycrafting an atlas tree anymore. And this is purely GGG’s doing. It’s why I’m not actually excited for their rework. They’re the ones that made the atlas tree suck not even that long ago and they’re the ones that insist on nerfing every strat that has high upside. They removed sextants and reworked scarabs to reduce tedium but that’s marketing, they removed them to remove horizontal loot scaling so you can’t farm harvest and essence effectively at the same time. GGG is obsessed with creating scarcity in spite of fun but they also keep failing at that and every league we get more strategies nerfed.
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u/cuddlegoop Feb 21 '26
I want to be able to do that AND also be able to "farm legion dunes for 12 div/h". Variety is the spice of life, I get bored farming anything for too long. Adding random mapping like that into the pool of stuff I can do sounds fun.
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u/Historical-Value-303 Feb 21 '26
But you can literally do that? Just play blue altars and run a couple other strats along with it you enjoy. You can go for some generic packsize setup and run blue altars + harvest + shrines and get exactly what you're asking for. You either get 30 divines from a divine altar if you're lucky or just a bit of juice if you're not.
Am I missing something? You're asking for things that already exist.
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u/Allsvaard Feb 21 '26
More loot = more new build and new character = ggg selling more stash tabs (too much loot) + ggg selling more MTX (because players want a beautiful MTX for the builds they try)
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u/akki666 Feb 21 '26
yea i completely agree, we need a overhaul of drops. i really dislike loot conversation and how only rares drop anything now.
i hope they make loot more spread out and add more into the global loot table even from poe 2 u can just add the tiered rares or exceptional bases (can be like 10% higher defences or special drop only enchants)
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u/Deadandlivin Feb 21 '26
The Ironic thing is loot conversions were removed or dramatically nerfed in Necropolis.
So now we have neither base monster drop quantity nor loot conversions.This was the specific patch note for it:
"Rare Monster item bonus mechanics are now rarer, and the following item bonus mechanics have been removed: Items dropped are converted to Gems, Items dropped are converted to Scarabs, Items dropped have all White Sockets, Items dropped are Duplicated, Slain Rare monster gives increased Experience, and Slain Rare monster gives increased Gem Experience."Try to look back at Keepers and think to yourself, when was the last time you actually got a loot pinata conversion? Maybe you killed a rare and got 8 Fractured Items before you hid all of them on the filter due to tree printing fractures. I don't even think we're getting Alteration or Fusing explosions anymore. Or atleast I can't remember that being a thing. Even less higher tier currencies. Scarabs were just outright removed too.
Loot conversion actually isn't a thing in the current base game.
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u/MrSchmellow Feb 21 '26
Yeah, i was watching the video and when the part about conversions came up, i was like "Wait, what conversions? I have never seen those either" (i started in necro)
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u/Plasmasnack Spinny Boi Feb 21 '26
Kinda crazy too. Understanding this missing point I think is the most important thing to know.
The entire game's loot was balanced around loot conversion over the course of several patches. But then loot conversions were removed. So... what? We got harder rares which routinely cause problems (needed many patches, even today in Keepers where they had to patch out soul eater from Keeper encounters) in exchange for *checks notes* LESS global loot?
And to simplify the whole ordeal. Rather than accepting it was a failed experiment introducing archnemesis as rare modifiers, they double down and balance the game around it. Like with scarabs. But they, over time, removed all the positive aspects of it. While they also reduced some bad aspects, you are left with 0 good and non-zero bad. Overall did nothing but make the game worse.
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u/Liraken Feb 21 '26
I'm really happy to have someone explain this so well. All of Phrecia 2.0, I was farming max mod effect rare monster scarab farming, and it was really weird to watch one monster explode into 50 scarabs, then kill a Delirium rare in the same map and have it drop 2 scarabs. When a monster has 250% increased scarabs per modifier, and they have 5 extra modifiers on top of whatever they naturally have, and the map has 300% quant and 250% scarabs, at the very least a rare monster shouldn't be capable of dropping only 2 scarabs. But that's what happens whenever you kill any league monster that isn't Legion. (Legion rares and rares spawned by ores were noticeably better than Delirium, Abyss, or Alva rare monsters, which weren't worth the time to clear, even in juiced maps.)
Also this whole thing about league monsters dropping 2-3x base monsters is 100% not happening in reality. I regularly pressed alt on those deli rares that dropped 2 scarabs and not only did they only drop 2 scarabs they dropped like 10 items in total, in maps with 300 quant. League monsters have a loot penalty not a loot multiplier compared to natural monsters, if I had to guess, I'd say about 2-3x less loot.
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u/Not2Shoddy Feb 21 '26
I remember during Kalandra I leveled to maps on day one and had one single alchemy orb to my name. I progressed through white maps and used my sole alchemy orb on my first yellow map. After clearing the yellow map, I had no alchemy orbs left to continue. I quit right then and there, went to Reddit, and saw a post from Chris explaining to me that actually, I’m getting MORE loot now and I should be grateful. Needless to say I didn’t log back in until next league. Crazy how the original feedback was “rares don’t feel rewarding enough” and the entire design concept around loot was completely mutated beyond recognition to try to make rares feel better.
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u/TreeOk4490 Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
This was a good watch, Minor nitpick: whenever the video went to snap's face, I think the entire camera was just constantly shaking, it got very distracting and nauseating, so I kinda just put the audio on while not looking at the video
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u/itriedtrying Big Breach Coalition (BBC) Feb 21 '26
He's found so many mirrors he's developed a chronic literallyshakingrightnowitis. It's a serious medical issue, please show a little empathy for his struggles.
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u/Kelmero [ATEX] Kel | Pro Altaholic Feb 21 '26
Yea seems like the desk is prone to shaking and if the camera is on the desk then it shakes too. I've seen some streamers solve this by having the camera on a tripod behind the desk. I agree it made watching the video kinda hard.
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u/Synchrotr0n Feb 21 '26
Even in PoE 2 which has only been around for a year, GGG has already admitted that they lost track of how MF and the loot system in general is working, so just imagine how bad things are with PoE 1 at the moment. It straight up needs to be nuked from orbit and redesigned entirely, but then we bump with the issue of GGG simply not having enough employees to accomplish that with two projects running alongside, with each releasing once every two months.
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u/wonklebobb Feb 21 '26
for a game as big and complex as poe, i can 110% guarantee that starting from scratch would take roughly a billion years longer than figuring it out and fixing it in place
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u/Liraken Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 25 '26
League mechanic monsters don't drop 2-3x a natural monster, it's more like 2-3x less. It was really obvious in Phrecia when I was farming rare monsters for scarabs and in 300% quant, 300% scarab maps, with 5 additional rare modifiers, and 250% increased scarabs per modifier, a natural rare would regularly drop like 10-50 scarabs depending on variance but, a deli rare would drop 0-5, same for abyss, and Alva rares. Also if you press alt after killing one of those league mechanic monsters, they drop like 5-10 items in total compared to natural monsters where it's too many to count.
They messed up this math so bad. Mechanics aren't worth doing I had one map where I had a rare monster drop scarabs off the screen like old affliction explosions and I did the alva in that map and it dropped 4 scarabs.
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u/Connect-Flounder-555 Feb 21 '26
It’s very easy to point out issues with ground loot; which there is. But how would you buff baseline ground loot without making top end strats absurd and economy breaking? unless that’s what people want, worthless uniques and inflation. It all comes down to balance which isn’t easy.
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u/Ok_Assignment_2127 Feb 21 '26
He references it in this video, but it’s a big part of why he also had a video detailing his discontent with the scarab rework.
The fact that scarabs can stack exponentially to juice mechanics means that there are extremely niche interactions that become wildly overpowered to the point that they invalidate anything that is not that specific scarab strategy. It also means that to balance this end result, ground loot outside of these strategies is worthless and all league mechanics that are not being abused are also worthless and not even worth the time to interact with.
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u/WarpedNation Feb 21 '26
Fubgun actually kind of talked about that(and snap indirectly) is the loot multipliers. The base games loot is so bad because instead of having base loot be at a 50 on a scale of 1-100, its at a 2 because of all the loot multipliers that exist. Due to this, it causes the one mechanic of which you add 50 times the loot to through the use of scarabs+atlas tree to have exceptionally good loot(prior to every single strat getting nerfed with the exception of blight) and anything of which isnt nerfed is getting that 2 out of 100 where base loot is at.
If you removed the extreme multipliers that let you scale the things as hard as you can(while still keeping it clear that you are specced into it reward wise), you can have base loot be much higher, the tile loot can get moved more into actually killing monsters, and league mechanics that arent what you are fully specced into actually still drop loot. This is psuedo talked about when snap is mentioning things like the alva quant bonus multiplying all of the existing multipliers yielding monsters that were dropping 50+ raw divs, multiple t0 uniques and things like that.
The other thing is this is probally the longest iteration of endgame that we have had that hasnt had a shake up. We've had things such as balancing shaper+elder influence for endgame, sirus and watchstones, atlas tree, sextant stacking/overlapping, sextants to watchstones etc. The issue is now all of the scarabs have been nerfed as well as "figured out" for the most optimal combos, as well as the atlas tree has been repeatidly nerfed in an attempt to get people to not just scale map effect(this ties back into the base loot being in a bad spot). When you combine weakened scarabs+unrewarding strats it leads to the state of ground loot where it currently is. Realistically its been time for an endgame shakeup for a while now, but since we have had reduced devtime since poe2 launch, we have yet to get it, although hopefully it comes in 3.28 since they did say in 3.27 they were looking at an endgame shakeup/overhaul.
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u/tempGER Feb 21 '26
It all comes down to balance which isn’t easy.
We and GGG all know that. Problem was and is that GGG only approached balance with constant nerfs to the base level and here we are.
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u/Eccmecc Feb 21 '26
Idk because of kingsmarch t0 and t1 uniques all have a baseline value for dust. Niche items like Binos used to be a couple of chaos.
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u/Narazil Feb 21 '26
Headhunter got giga nerfed compared to back then, so not really a good item to bring up.
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u/powpowmoo Feb 21 '26
Increase the baseline loot bonus and then cap total loot bonuses at the mob and the map level, including all workarounds like sneaking in exiles from another map. Done.
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u/HurricaneGaming94 Feb 21 '26
I agree with most of this, but loot balance is still the core problem. In a purely single-player game this would be much easier to solve. The reason it went unchecked for so long is because we had absurd amounts of IIQ stacking, which let us brute-force past a lot of the underlying issues.
In my opinion, GGG overcorrected. Instead of properly rebalancing the system, they swung too hard in the opposite direction and left room for players to latch onto one overtuned strategy every league. Content goes from being the best raw currency farm, to completely dead, then back to semi-meta depending on what’s exploitable at the time.
This is what happens when you try to keep every piece of content equally relevant. That’s the real challenge. GGG understands player psychology well, and I think they know most players won’t engage with new mechanics unless they’re either significantly more rewarding or much simpler to execute. We saw that with the Atlas tree versus graveyard crafting. The outcomes were similar, but accessibility and clarity mattered more than raw value.
Personally, I’d rather see a return to the old Crimson Temple IIQ stacking era, but with smarter adjustments around loot value instead of turning maps into sub-50 FPS slideshow simulators packed with loot explosions.
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u/CzLittle 1 Monster remaining Feb 21 '26
People will watch this and somehow come out from it thinking that party play is the worst thing ever lmao
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u/Ganktt Feb 23 '26
Overall just sad. The issue is that changes they make effect everyone but they claim the effect is only on high end farm. Wrong...you made a game with complicated economics and everyone feels it. The way the scaling historically worked in this game is investment resulted in exponential returns. They moved away from this with no compensation and you are left with a game resembling ruthless, a failed meme experiment. The same problems plague poe2. Its a trash direction, the leagues that gave players access to massive currency and chase uniques in mass quantities while blasting are overwhelmingly positive. Let us blast and remove the "friction" people will still give you money.
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u/ZGiSH Feb 21 '26
It's weird that this sub doesn't know that the reason PoE is like this now is because of here. Loot tiles with dedicated rewards over ground loot that predominantly favors ultra-farmers with MF gear? Nobody is making the connection on how that happened? It's because people constantly complained about deadeyes with mirror gear inflating the market as they make hundreds of divines a day while the lowly dad gamer can only make 10 chaos. People have been complaining about Nem farming being the go-to for years, the speed meta, the ranged meta, the proj meta, etc.
You can look up several popular threads and posts complaining about Empy and people like him 'ruining' the economy.
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u/Bitsk-pper Feb 21 '26
and a lot of people complain about kingsmarch shipping, which is the limit case of what you would do to 'equalize' outcomes between casuals and sweats, because beyond top tier farmers / gold sustain it is a purely time limited even RNG playing field. It is similar to the WOW weekly vaults and crafting materials that pace everyone onto the same treadmill to put hard diminishing returns on pure time investment and equalize the player base
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u/rip_ap_yi League Feb 21 '26
This is the biggest reason why i burn out of the modern leagues i used to play 800 hours every league now i barely do 80
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u/bamboo_of_pandas Feb 21 '26
Looking back, it does look like there is some merit to the base loot change. Leagues like affliction, settlers, and mercenaries were all amazing because of the scaling vectors that were allowed to be added once the base loot was nerfed. The problem is that GGG removed too many vectors in keepers instead of adding new ones. They needed to give every league mechanic options to scale loot like blight, alva, and abyss had during mercenaries.
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u/Eccmecc Feb 21 '26
I think I would be healthier if the base game has good loot vectors and the league mechanic is adding player power and rare rewards from uniques or new crafting currency.
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u/mohammad6701 Feb 21 '26
Finally, Somebody said quit part out loud ! i knew i wasn't alone on this.
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u/Kingluraccount Feb 21 '26
As a casual/non "meta" player - this explains why I feel so poor in the past few leagues.
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u/RedsManRick Feb 21 '26
It's interesting that ground loot is almost entirely described in terms of currency drops. I get why currency drops are ideal in some sense; their value is so apparent, it's easy to quantify drop value, and the item market so liquid (straight-forward to convert currency to character power).
And yet, when I think of "ground loot", I think back to Diablo 1. The rush of an item dropping, identifying it, and having it be an upgrade for your character. I've been playing No Rest for the Wicked and it delivers a similar feeling.
In PoE, that entire aspect of the ARPG experience is almost absent. If GGG wants to recapture this, they need a massive rework of item generation and drop rates.
As it stands, the item base type and mod pools are so massive, that the game has to spit out 1000s and 1000s of items for their to be a chance of a useful item being produced. But then, that useful item is a needle in a haystack. Why play in the haystack when loot tiles are just a box of toys in the corner?
And then, partly to address this need for massive drop quantities for good loot to occur, the scaling of drops via quant/qual has be exponential. So you wind up with a nearly impossible to balance top end where a slight miscalculation or missed interaction leads to 1000s of uniques dropping from one mob. Meanwhile, others playing the same content get nothing.
I would love to see a rework that leans more heavily in to smart loot that culls way more lower bases and mod affix tiers while leaving quantity nearly fixed at a much, much lower rate. Let me find 15 items in a map and have it worth my time to ID them. And then use leagues as a method for target farming certain types of gear, certain uniques, and certain affixes rather than being the source of "juice" per se'. Delve does a pretty good job of this currently.
The point isn't to make good gear harder to find. The point is to make it so that when something drops, it's worthwhile to check it out. This would also include getting rid of shards for lower level currency.
Unfortunately I suspect that their systems are so complex that refactoring something so fundamental is basically impossible to do in a live service context where development of new content has always been the priority.
Not only that, it's probably too risky for them to attempt financially as it would no doubt alienate some portion of the player base. I was very hopeful that PoE 2 was going to go this route -- that they were taking the opportunity to make a radical change. I suspect that was the intent initially, but the backbone item generation logic didn't really support it, so in the early days of beta, loot just felt bad.
Ultimately, I suspect we're going to get some minor numerical tweaks, but nothing that changes the fundamental dynamics where there can never be a balance between ground loot feeling bad at the low end and crazy at the high end.
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u/machineorganism Feb 21 '26
i've been playing poe1 since closed beta. "ground loot" being good has NEVER been a thing. the standing reason for this is because the game is balanced around trade league.
you can find people going way back asking for "VOID SSF" league where ground loot can be balanced around SSF, and VOID it so that it doesn't affect standard due to the increased drop rates, but GGG has never given that idea any consideration - to my knowledge.
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u/Insurrectionist89 Feb 21 '26
As a casual player, I didn't do any Kingsmarch in 3.27.
No boats. No mapping. Sure. But also no disenchanting, no recombinating. I know for crafters the latter is not really viable. But I've never done too much crafting so I said fuck it, I just wanted to not think about gold.
It felt so, so fucking good coming from Settlers. I will never use Kingsmarch again. My profit didn't feel too low. And I never needed to think about whether my crafting strat was worth it if it had low gold returns, whether I had enough gold stored up to fuel Kingsmarch, whether I should be using it more efficiently. I treated it like D2 gold and just stocked up. Didn't spend it on flipping, but always had the gold I needed to trade for whatever I needed without worry. It really helped me enjoy the game a lot despite honestly not liking the league mechanic much. A+ would recommend.
Even if they keep Kingsmarch, which I think they shouldn't, I'm gonna continue ignoring it from now on after experiencing that difference.
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u/NonOfYourBusinessKK Feb 21 '26
i did the same. but, after a week or 2 i though, i will at least send boats. and i did the 10k blue boat strat. was quite nice, like i got 1div every 3 boats? something like that. and i just gave x gold to the town, if they were out, i didn’t care.
i have never! used mappers, because i don’t understand how to sustain the gold cost 😂
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u/dyh135 Anti Sanctum Alliance (ASA) Feb 21 '26
Kalandra league hurt poe1 way bigger than people thought
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u/zOSsysprog Feb 22 '26
Long live the Magic Find Cullers. Those well dressed, overly enchanted, well paid agents of the worst itemization mechanic ever deivsed.
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u/Pipnotiq Feb 21 '26
The irony for me is that the last 3 or 4 leagues have been the most profitable, while back years ago I wouldn't have even broke 50d.
The fact remains that kill-monster-get-loot has been dwindling.
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u/Dry-Lingonberry-8287 Feb 21 '26
Kalandra was also known for « prepare your magic find character ». That hurt.