[0.2.0g] An analisis in why loot/crafting feels bad. Problems and ideas to solve them.

I believe that many of the complaints about loot stem from the item system itself. I've said in several posts already that this system has been carried over from the D2 era, persisted in PoE1, and now continues in PoE2. People say they want the loot and crafting from PoE1, but in reality, PoE1 started just like PoE2 (I was there!). PoE1 has slowly addressed the loot/mod issue over a decade of development, with things like the crafting bench and advanced metacrafting—but I still believe it’s ultimately a flawed system.

Why shouldn’t PoE2 follow PoE1's model? Because the way items currently work does nothing to incentivize looting—it's basically a low-odds lottery.

Problems with the current loot/item system:

1) Mod quality and usefulness are all over the place.
Some mods are essential (increased defenses, increased physical damage, resistances, increased move speed), some are strong but build-dependent (increased mana/life, crit chance, attack speed, increased str/dex/int...), some are niche or weak (increased elemental damage vs increased phys, accuracy rating), and others are outright useless (increased light radius, reduced shock duration, flat life regeneration...).

Solution: Rework all mods—remove some, combine others. For example, Increased Physical Damage could be removed entirely, or even Increased Movement Speed (a radical change), giving more value to Added Flat Damage (both elemental and physical). Or combine things like Reduced Shock Duration into Reduced Ailment Duration to make it useful against all ailments. Some mods need a full redesign—like turning Flat Life Regen into a small % regen instead.

2) High-tier mods don’t show up enough.
Often you find a high-ilvl item with two good mods, and then a Regal Orb gives you +14 maximum life or +14 stun threshold.

Solution: Remove low-tier mods from high-ilvl items. That way, the “feels bad” moments when improving or looting high-level items would be drastically reduced. If there are many mods, the combination should determine how good an item is—not just the tier of each mod.

3) Orbs don’t allow any decision-making in item improvement, which makes Problem 2 worse.
Essences try to fix this, but they’re basically Transmute/Regal orbs with “variations”. They’re also rare, and I’ve rarely been rewarded for using them (e.g., using an Essence of Body to get Increased Life and ending up with just Life Regeneration...).

Solution: No easy short-term fix, but if Problems 1 and 2 are addressed, this issue would largely resolve itself.

4) There are too many independent stats, making it hard to find “clean” useful items.
That’s exactly why mods like Increased Physical Damage + Added Physical Damage are so powerful—they combo perfectly on the same item.

Solution: As with Problem 1, combine and rebalance stats. For example, remove synergistic pairs from appearing together on the same item (like Added Flat Damage + Increased % Damage, or Added Flat Armour/Evasion/ES + Increased % Armour/Evasion/ES). Of course this means to adress player power correctly: less powerful top end items, so the game should be balanced around that.

5) Base item types don’t scale with item level.
As a result, many high-level drops are low-base items that are completely useless for endgame characters.

Solution: Tie item base types more tightly to item level—or better yet, have base types scale with ilvl (like staves, wands, or scepters do). This would allow interesting implicits to remain viable across all stages of a build. For instance, the one-handed mace Smithing Hammer has half physical and half fire damage—it’d be great to find that at ilvl 80 with endgame-scaled stats.

I know these suggestions would mean radical changes, but if we don’t propose and discuss them now—while we’re still in Early Access—then when?

the fact that a weapon is useless unless it drops with high +%pys dam and +flat psy

is a huge problem in itself. they balanced the game based on this combo, without it you dont do enough damage. even the story is balanced on having a weapon with these affixes.

they really should just remove +%phs and scale the weapons properly into endgame.

I feel like the game is a trade simulator rather than an arpg where you can find your upgrades. Then to make it worse the trade site is a pain in the a$$.

"

the fact that a weapon is useless unless it drops with high +%pys dam and +flat psy

is a huge problem in itself. they balanced the game based on this combo, without it you dont do enough damage. even the story is balanced on having a weapon with these affixes.

they really should just remove +%phs and scale the weapons properly into endgame.

Absolutely yes. There are so, so many ways for an item to be bad and so few for it to be good.

+% phys dmg. Okay!
and +% crit. Nice!
and +% attack speed. Yes!
but +0 flat phys. Nevermind, maybe this will sell for a couple exalts.

It just feels bad going down a checklist with every item like "This is probably trash, but...yeah it's trash."

I'd love it if affixes were tuned so the weapon base did more heavy lifting, and good affixes were the difference between an item being mediocre and an item being good, as opposed to an item being useless and an item being mediocre, with a vanishingly small chance to be good.
(I say this as someone playing arpgs since 90s D1 and who very much does not want screen-clearing speed. I love old school but I also want to find upgrades at some point, ever)

We need crafting period...Real crafting, not this joke roulette we have now.

Last Epoch has the best crafting in the game history, D4 is a damn russian roullete and PoE2 is worse, it has no crafting.

Well it has some but you get my drift, if you do not fracture correctly and waste currency you get no were...And to be honest anuls have never dropped for me this league...Found 7 divs so far, 2 perfect jewelers and 2 level 20 gems and no anulment.

What's the point of fracturing if you cannot anul stuff to craft.

At this point it's easier to just pay 3 divs for whoever sells you a good rolled item that your build needs than craft anything. Making lower currency useless and higher currency inflated.

Why would I even try to anul a good fracture to just get 15 life and anul again into 10 life regeneration is beyond my understanding...And considering we can probably get 170 life and then hitting 5 fire rez into anuling the life before rez is just crazy to even think about lol :{ .

Nothing of this will fix anything at all... game just simply LACK OF AFIXES. All better gear is just simply +5 more to stats,dmg,crit dmg or crit chance. It's most null itemisation ever arpg'S see. While it was ok for old poe 1 for poe 2 they should

make class/skill specific afixes and make it meaningfull like active gameplay so hammers should have it's own afixes like area of effect, +aoe and +to level of a certain skill and make loot more NRG while increasing afixes..

adding craft to this game will delete all fun of getting loot for now, orbs are best for it.. due to 0 interesting afixes, also.. item bases are null and boring

it's have more boring loot than titan quest that is... even older than poe 1
game is fully focused on RMT and trading with bots on outside site..


if you cold compare arpgs even D4 have more afixes and more interesting itemisation with it's powers that change skills and temper crafting system that change a looot in skills.

I'm agreed with you. A lot of the affixes are old as d2 and carried within the game. I would love to see some cherrypicked mods like the ones that you are suggesting that synergises with the weapon/skill, like "increased armour break", or something in those lines.

I think i'll write another post suggesting this.

They really could use a redesign of itemization. If they're trying to promote a different style of gameplay with PoE2, doing that with the item mods designed for PoE1 gameplay isn't going to work.

Instead of movement speed being the only important stat on boots, why not have something like:

X% increased movement speed after performing a dodge roll.

X% increased movement speed after blocking.

X% increased movement speed while holding a melee weapon.

X% increased movement speed after using a projectile.

Dodge roll distance increased by X%.

X% damage reduction while stationary.

Or on other items:

Your next spell after making a melee attack does X% more damage. (3 second internal cooldown)

Projectile attacks increase the damage of your next melee attack by X%, stacking up to 5 times.

X% increased damage against maimed enemies.

Projectile damage increased by X%, based on distance from your target.

Things that could actually change up the way people play and design builds, instead of being strictly number go up.