Good Morning Friends. In the last league, I did not even know that the Challenges system existed, and as a result, I probably left some cosmetics on the table that I could have wrapped up easily. This time around I am trying to farm up the obnoxiously iridescent set of armor, and at least walk away with the first phase of it. At this point, I am close to getting the third reward and am bumming my friends to see if they have any unique boots that I can borrow to equip quickly and get credit. The rest of the stuff is going to take considerably more time and involve specific types of maps. At this very moment, I am at the point of killing Kitava and closing out act 10, but before doing so I want to finish the 3rd trip through the labyrinth. I came close to doing this last night but hit a bit of bad luck and took a death on the final boss… which frustrated me enough to just do something else for the rest of the evening.
While I slept another set of patch notes was released along with a general statement from Chris Wilson on Reddit. I am going to include both and then talk about them.
We will deploy a patch soon that significantly improves item drops throughout Path of Exile. This post broadly describes the major changes. Detailed patch notes will be posted later.
We have massively increased the rarity bonus for items dropped by monsters with multiple Archnemesis mods. This is proportional to difficulty, so there’s a moderate improvement for two mods, a large improvement for three mods, and a huge improvement for four mods.
We have massively increased the rarity of items dropped by Map Bosses. They now act like late Act Bosses, dropping fewer normal and magic items but many more rare and unique items.
We have globally increased the drop rate of unique items by 33%. In addition, with the massive item rarity bonuses added to map bosses and multiple-mod rare monsters, they will drop many more uniques than before.
We have globally increased the base drop rate of currency items by 25%. Because we removed some drops from past league content, we are giving rare/unique items back from rare and unique monsters, but are giving currency back from all content in the game.
We have reduced the cost of many Harvest crafts, with many becoming twice as cheap. We relied too much on players having specialized in Harvest when we were costing these. It’s now balanced around less Harvest investment. We have also reduced the life of all Harvest monsters. These changes will be deployed tomorrow rather than today.
We have significantly improved the amount of rewards from the Lake of Kalandra. Improvements to the rewards from league reflections at the Lake will be deployed tomorrow.
We are aiming to deploy most of these changes today and will post the full patch notes as soon as we can in a separate post. These contain more buffs that aren’t large enough to list here.
We’re still looking into other areas, including the effectiveness of Tainted Currency Items.
This patch includes improvements to item drops, including those from Map bosses and Rare monsters with 2-4 Archnemesis modifiers, reductions to the life of Harvest monsters, and a few bug fixes and improvements. Changes to the Lifeforce cost of Harvest crafts and improvements to rewards from league reflections in the Lake of Kalandra will be deployed tomorrow.
Item Drop Changes
Map Bosses now drop fewer items, but of substantially better rarity, resulting in more unique items being found from Map Bosses.
Globally increased the base drop rate of unique items by 33%.
Globally increased the base drop rate of currency items by 25%.
Archnemesis Changes
Increased the item rarity for monsters with two Archnemesis modifiers, and substantially increased the item rarity for monsters with three and four Archnemesis modifiers. With the item drop conversion system, this results in a lot more powerful drops when hitting certain combinations of modifiers. This also results in a lot more Unique items from monsters with three or four modifiers.
Harvest Changes
Reduced the life of Primal Blisterlord by 23%, Primal Crushclaw by 15%, and Vivid Devourer by 15%, in order to bring them more in line with other Harvest monsters.
Reduced the life of all other Harvest monsters, bringing the Harvest monster life more in line with monsters found in other league content.
These changes do not affect the Spectred versions of these monsters.
Improvements and Bug fixes
Kirac will no longer offer the “Slay the Beyond Boss” mission, due to irreconcilable difficulties encountered with the Beyond revamp.
Fixed an issue where strongboxes could sometimes drop no items. Strongboxes will now always drop at least one item.
Fixed an overflow issue from socketing exceptional support gems in the Vaal Caress Unique Gloves, causing them to behave as they were level 10 gems.
Fixed a bug where unlimited hideout decorations could sometimes not be placed.
Fixed a bug where Cartographer’s Strongboxes in the Lake of Kalandra would mostly drop Tier 1 Maps.
Fixed a bug where monsters could sometimes get stuck in terrain in the Lake of Kalandra.
Fixed a bug where the Iridescent Weapon Effect did not propagate to your off-hand.
Fixed a client crash that could occur with the Bony Arachnomorph Pet microtransaction.
This patch has been deployed without restarting the servers, however you will need to restart your client to patch the client fixes.
Anchoring
In negotiations, there is a concept called “Anchoring” where effectively the first person who sets the terms of the discussion will ultimately control the end results of the discussion. You can see this when an item is reported to have a retail price of $1000 but you can get it on “sale” for only $100. That item was never designed to cost $1000 and likely has maybe $20 of parts and labor into creating it, with the rest of that $100 margin made up of profit split between the distribution, retail, and manufacturing network. The same is true when you walk into salary negotiations when you throw out a high number fully expecting to negotiate downwards to something you are comfortable with. I feel like this back-and-forth that we are currently experiencing with Path of Exile is another prime example of this.
Essentially there are a few sticking points that I can see from the community. The first is the dogged continued reliance on the ArchNemesis system which is largely hated. The second has been a great lowering in the total quantity of drops, or at least the types of drops that the economy of the Path of Exile trade league operates on. Thirdly and also extremely important is the decimation of the Harvest crafting patterns so that there are fewer ways to create guaranteed good crafted items by removing much of the meta crafting system. We know that Path of Exile leagues are effectively a test bed for concepts that are going to be core to Path of Exile 2, and Chris Wilson has said as much during interviews. Let’s break down each of these points and talk about my theory surrounding them.
ArchNemesis
I believe that ArchNemesis is an experiment in generational efficiency. It is much easier to generate a random enemy when all you have to do is take its base stats, then tack on a handful of predefined bonuses in order to arrive at a specific fixed end point in difficulty. The community hates this system because it creates speedbumps to the efficiency of running content. ARPGs generally speaking are about taking the most efficient path to the most rewards, and the players will always optimize this process. The fact that Grinding Gear Games refuses to walk away from this system that is so seemingly universally loathed by the community… tells me that this is a key part of their strategy for Path of Exile 2. Each league is effectively beta-testing this system so that hopefully by the time we reach POE2 that it will be something better.
I also believe that ArchNemesis is intentionally designed to be a speed bump that slows down the most efficient runs. What I think Grinding Gear Games is losing sight of however is that having to chew through a single boss for five to ten minutes isn’t fun. If this system is ever going to succeed the “fun” equation will have to balance so that the risk versus the reward of these encounters is more skewed towards the player. There seems to be a focus on increasing the difficulty of the game, but in truth… most of the players don’t seem to want this as evidenced by the massive number of players who never reach endgame levels.
Trade Currency
I think on some level Path of Exile is going through an identity crisis. I think the team at Grinding Gear Games woke up one morning and realized that the game that they designed, is not being played in the manner that they had originally intended it to be played. Based on what I am seeing with the way the changes are being shaped, it seems as though there is a clear indication that Path of Exile is intended to be played by relying on dropped gear. Instead, the most optimal way of playing the game is to grind out a certain amount of fungible trade currency, and then buy the specific items that you need for your build from those who have dedicated their gameplay experience to being player run stores. It is generally accepted that almost everything you get as drops is going to be crap, so your best bet is to grind out something that can be sold… and then use the earnings from that to purchase your way to success.
The negative side effect of this system however is that it is deeply counterintuitive to anyone who has come from any other ARPG. The whole trade economy is a giant mess, and short of the introduction of an official auction house system, I am not sure how to make it more approachable to most players. I think the grand design of the game was to largely play as “SSF” or “Solo Self Found” for those who have not heard the term. The trade options were there in order to facilitate fair trades, and fix the core problem with some of the issues surrounding Diablo 2 and players getting fleeced. However, this instead turned into a game of its own much like the gold farmers and auction house PVPers from MMORPGs. I think with Path of Exile 2, the attempt is being made to change this.
Item Crafting
In this grand plan of trying to make gear matter again, Harvest stood in the way as an obstacle because it essentially invalidate the reliance of players on item drops. Through a truly obtuse system of crafting, you could control very specific attributes on an item and ultimately create something that was perfected for one of the currently in meta builds. The crafting currency it seems was originally designed to be used as a gamble, rather than allowing players to have a deterministic way of getting the specific items that they wanted. Essentially with patience, following a specific procedure, and pouring through a ton of currency… you could get the exact item that you wanted. Again this removed the focus of player attention from grinding for the perfect item drop to acquiring the currency needed to make the perfect item.
Again I seriously think at some point Grinding Gear Games realized that they had optimized their game to be played in a manner different from the original goal. Path of Exile 2 and the design sessions leading up to it, likely was a lens through which the original goals were refocused. Now we are seeing a series of changes that have shaken the foundation of the trade economy, and a series of changes anchored by something extreme… and then slowly walking some of that back but still with the goal of shifting the way players interact with content. As an outsider, I would rather be able to play a game where I could rely on drops than one where I have to craft my own gear or rely heavily on a trade economy to function. While these changes are legitimately decimating entire ways of playing the game… I can’t necessarily disagree if the intent is to make item drops matter more.
Identity Crisis
I keep referring to this as an identity crisis, in part because I have seen this play out in a similar fashion in another game that I enjoy. Magic the Gathering was never intended to be built around constructed play, or at least not the variation of constructed play that we have today. I’ve read before that the original intent from Richard Garfield, the designer of Magic the Gathering was that players would effectively open a starter deck and a few booster packs and then play with whatever they happened to draw. The cards had wildly different levels of power on purpose because the original intent was for each of these powerful cards to be diluted by a large number of less powerful cards through sheer chance. He honestly continues to follow this core concept of making the best with what you have been given in his more modern games like Keyforge and even his digital card game SolForge.
What instead happened is that it became far more efficient to buy the singles you needed to craft the deck that you wanted to play, and as such the focus moved away from “cracking packs” as the core means of card acquisition. This did a few things… it caused an arms race in deck potency as players distilled deck design into only using the most powerful cards in specific combinations to create turn-one win scenarios. Wizards of the Coast employed a number of strategies over the years to try and solve this disconnect between the original design of the game and how the players actually played the game, but these generally have backfired. Now you see an environment where “Draft” gameplay is largely insignificant and the most popular format is “Commander” which also has some of the most relaxed restrictions.
Then you have the MTG Finance community, which has a completely separate set of priorities independent of those who are just trying to play the game. I have to admit the first time I tried to dive into any of the discussions surrounding trade league, I got massive flashbacks to all of the MTG content I have consumed around card values, buyout attempts, and the sanctity of the reserved list. Again I don’t feel like Richard Garfield ever intended for certain cards to be more valuable than other cards, but that happened through low print runs, and the need to remove cards from the game… making them by nature more scarce as a result. So now Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro as a result… is having to design products that fit not only the casual player but also the competitive constructed player and the finance community.
Maybe I am reading too much into this series of patches, but I feel like Grinding Gear Games is having its own moment of trying to figure out how to bring back the original design goals of the game. As a largely “SSF” player, I support the notion of making drops matter more. I really do not like the random difficulty spikes encountered by the ArchNemesis system, but I think that each league serves as a test bed for ways to tweak that content to make it feel more enjoyable. Path of Exile is one of the most obtuse games that I have ever played, and something needs to change with it if they ever hope to open it to new players. Making gear matter is absolutely one of those things that could help. We already know that the player-build system is greatly simplified and less reliant on specific item sockets in Path of Exile 2, which is another step in the right direction. For me personally, the thing that brings me the most pause is still how “out of band” the ArchNemesis system seems to be with the “fun” of running around and decimating mobs. Everything else seems like there is a method to the madness.
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