while its true its a ton of content here's the issue with POE2, until the fix this, its fundamentally a fucked game.
You do not hunt for loot in POE2, you hunt for currencies, to buy exactly the peice of gear you need from other players, its Bitcoin mining to buy your weapon, you farm the coins out of enemies, any attempt at making top tier loot is mathamatically against you in a huge degree.
if they fix crafting with this patch, I'll absolutely play, likewise if loot from enemies becomes statistically more likely to be even in the fucking ballpark, the fucking zipcode, the god damn Galaxy of being close to usable.
I'm not betting on the latter, but the former, crafting is possible, which even when they fix crafting, that just means POE2 is a "currency and crafter" game, the "Loot" is almost all worthless except for the shit your target farming from Super bosses.
While I understand where you're coming and have some degree of agreement to it, I think you are still looking at it wrongly in some ways.
I mean, what do you mean by "loot" over here? If you think it's like d4, then sure it's definitely not the same. Fixed loot would be unique items here, and uniques in poe games always have a puzzle element to it, it gives some unique effect, and you have to solve all the inefficiency with it. Meanwhile d4 just straight up give you a unique that is a straight upgrade or bis item with no downsides.
Crafting while it's still too convoluted for my liking, has never been more deterministic in poe game. You can "deterministically" craft a good tier 3 items essences and omens, yes, deterministic, it's doable since last patch. And that tier 3 items is sufficient to do all content including pinnacles, outside maxed juiced content.
Yes, you hunt for currencies, because currencies are materials for crafting. And no, you don't really "have" to buy, you can craft, the problem is nobody ever bothers to learn how to craft, so some people people earn currencies by crafting desirable items for people to buy, otherwise how do you think those items happen to be on marketplace?
Can you do it with more fixed items like uniques and simple crafts? Also yes, but also unfortunately, people don't bother to make their own builds too. They watch streamers, who try to build meta, which uses bis items, and complain builds doesn't work without those items.
In poe1 there's tons of builds that can reach Uber under 10divs in value, but most people won't learn why those builds work, so crafters/opportunist watch those vids, immediately craft those items, mark up the price 8-10x, now the build costs 40divines, and people complain again.
I'm not disagreeing in the sense that I believe the knowledge barrier can be lowered(and it already is in poe2) more, but I think poe games just need a certain amount of investment to understand the game better than other arpgs. And no, I'm not an expert in either too.
Im the end, loot drops/currencies can drop more, but it still won't matter because people will then increase the price of items, so at the end of the day, learning the craft will always be the way to affordable gears.
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