Yes, but for example WoW had dozens of active skill slots, so one slot used by a potion wouldn´t matter (there was no reason to go into inventory for one). In Guild Wars 2 your healing spell had fixed position and no healing potions - again no reason to go to inventory. Here we have 8 positions for abilities- both offensive and defensive ones.
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- All Discussions. What is that 1 spot in the inventory? It's a slot for relics. You can make them through the blacksmith.
- So I was reading the game guide to check how armor worked because I was (and still am) clueless about how it works, and I ended up reading page after page of features and thought it was funny how many little things weren't updated.
- Quests in Grim Dawn provide objectives for the player and allow the story of the game to advance. Main quests are integral to the game's plot, and completion is necessary for the game to progress. Side-quests are usually optional missions that can provide valuable rewards and experience, as well as encouraging exploration of the game world. Completing quests can grant rewards such as.
Content of the article: 'Endless delve made me realize why looting in POE is so bad'
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A precaution: this is a long one about ARPG looting and the problems unique to POE. You can probably skim it and be relatively fine, but just warning you now
Endless delve reinforced a view about POE’s looting I had for a while, and did so severely: The gearing in path of exile might be the worst in any ARPG ever. I'm not going to go over point the good things about endless delve specifically as it’s already a hot topic on this subreddit, but I did want to talk about the looting in POE in general, as I believe I have recently deduced why looting in POE is so poor due to experiencing endless delve and the inability to use the bench or trade. There are 5 reasons (really 8 condensed into 5), and I'm going to go over each of them as best I can:
1: Too many gear types with no generics or class separation, and too many bases that are useless and clog an already full garbage bin
2: Too many forms of arbitrary progression limiting (Level, attributes, chromatics, sockets, links)
Grim Dawn Inventory Slots Free Play
3: Too few mod tiers, and no sliding tier progression.
4: Too much (ground) clutter (filtering and pickup quantity).
5: Inventory management.
So to explain, starting with point 1:
1: There are too many gear types with no generics of class separation.
Item 'Types/Classes'.
Path of exile has 12 different types of regular weapons (Fishing rods not included): 1-H Axes, 1-H Swords, 1-H Maces, 2-H Axes, 2-H Swords, 2-H Maces, Scepters, Staves, Wands, Claws, Daggers, and Bows. There are also 6 regular variants for boots, chestplates, gloves, shields, and helmets (ES, Armor, Evasion, and the 3 hybrids). Not including shields quivers or any jewelry either. If you are using ground slam, you get to use an already limited subset of those. Choose axes and you are stuck with 2/12, two-handers 3/12 (unless you can’t get enough int for staves). Choose axes and two-handed, and you get 1/12. This means 1/12 of all weapon drops are actually going to be the right type of item for you.
Item 'Bases'.
Then, there are the basetypes; what if the item drops with a base from 1-2 acts ago? Well, you probably already have an item from there; it’s not likely to be better because the base stats are just as low as what you are probably trying to improve. At the end-game this is often no better, as only two-handers received the implicit/base rework, and most items just have base-types that are inferior clogging up the pool.
This means you not only have a 1/12 or 1/6 chance to get a weapon type you can actually use, you have an even lower chance to get one that’s actually useful for you. You aren’t going to want to mess with a non-foil on a 1-H crit sword build, or stun thresholds on 2-H maces when increased area damage or AOE exists. A lot of base-types shouldn’t even exist as they are and need reworking (coral amulets, cloth belts, and studded belts are obvious examples). Typically, other ARPGs don’t have this many item/basetypes, or they focus on gear for your class. Grim Dawn for example has generic 1-H and 2-H melee that work for any melee user, and then separately there are the class-specific items, meaning your chance of gearing up is better for your character. Additionally, those games don’t have so many defensive stat combinations to worry about, so getting items with the wrong type is even less likely.
2: Too many forms of arbitrary progression limiting.
Isolated Statistical Progression.
Level is good, attributes work to separate classes… but chromatics, sockets, and links are an issue, one I believe GGG already knows about. You will often get items that are a little better than what you have, and in any other game you would equip them, but in POE you’ll notice that they have one less socket then you have for your main skill, and you’ll notice you have maybe 6 jewelers orbs and 1 link in the stats as of act 5. You then stick in in your stash to maybe equip later, when instead you just get a better item in act 8, 3 acts later.
All for a progression system that is entirely arbitrary and unique to POE — it exists because it can, just to provide progression on a statistical curve (socket/link/color chances) and that’s it, but it probably shouldn’t exist as it currently is, as it just means you swap items even less (this is bad early game, but still bad late game for swapping body armor and two-handed weapons).
Grim Dawn Inventory Slots
Even if you are trying to identify everything on the ground or roll correctly socketed items with your limited supply of alchemy orbs, the chance you will get decent mods with even 10 alchemy orbs is very low. POE2 was already teased removing links, and making all items have standard socket numbers & colors. Whether or not new problems will arise (chromatic/socket vendor recipes and gem crafting?) is unclear, but at the least it’s being addressed.
3: Too few mod tiers, and no sliding tier progression.
Hundreds of hours; Under 15 tiers of mod
POE has 13 tiers of health mod on body armor; it also has 10 campaign acts and 16 tiers of end-game mapping. 13 tiers is not enough. You can get all but the top 3 tiers of health roll before mapping even starts at ilvl 64.
Most ARPG games I’ve played seem to slide progression as you go further; minimum rolls get higher, and so do maximum rolls. POE allows you to get a +1 energy shield roll at mapping. This shouldn’t happen at all.
Simply put, there aren’t enough tiers of mod in POE, and they don’t filter themselves appropriately as you go through the game, giving far too wide a breadth of possible stat rolls. There should be more like 30 tiers of health roll separated by act split (acts 1-3,3-6 7-10) and by mapping tiers with overlap between the next and former (white maps drop tiers from late acts, white maps, and yellow maps for example), not 13 tiers for the entire game.
4: Too much (ground) clutter.
What a better loot filter doesn't quite fix.
POE drops a lot of things — too many things. Sometimes I forget until I hold ALT to disable my loot filter. This is in part because of the problems caused by having so many worthless base types, but also in part because the game doesn’t filter it in any other way. Remember when I was talking about generics and class specific items in other ARPG? They are already typically filtering items so that they are only usable by your character. POE has a complicated problem though; characters can use items far out of their regular stat set if built for them. This is a great thing, but the drop related side-effect is not, stealing what would otherwise be appropriate drops away from a bow user to drop some scepters and shields they can’t use.
Edit: Add on top the piles of useless regular gems single-purpose oils, low-tier essence, and all of the other items that lose use either immediately or very early on after getting them
Coins, Fragments, Splinters…
One more often talked about are the scattered drops, in which piles of the same relative type of item, or items that are always worth picking up, take too many clicks. As is unfortunately typical, other games already solved this problem, by not having it in the first place. Items in POE don’t have weight. In games like Resident evil 4 for example, there are many items you need to pickup yourself — carrying the weight the developers at GGG were likely looking for.
The issue is, is that there are far fewer useful items in those games to pick up, and they actively encourage you to pick up everything you can, turning that moment of action into a moment of slight satisfaction, combined with a typically punchy sound effect and animation to reinforce that. POE cannot have these things; there are too many items here, and you need too many of them to properly facilitate progression in many areas of the game.
Either you pick them up, or someone else that you traded with had to, creating an uncomfortable realistic economic problem involving the “economically inefficient” (the poor) performing necessary jobs for others. This is terrible design in a game that wants to discourage trading. But this isn’t a topic about POEs economy, it’s about looting. So how do other games solve it?
What has been done elsewhere?
Grim Dawn, Diablo 3, and pretty much all of the others solved this by allowing automatic currency pickup in a radius near the player. Simply walk near the item, and it automatically picks it up. In POE this would be easy through pickup type toggles and inventory space tweaks.
Alternatively, borderlands also solved this back in borderlands 2 in a different way. You can hold a button to pick up all nearby “simple” items (ammo and money), and in path of exile’s case, this just means picking up all items of the same type. Picking up items by contact or in bulk are commonly used in a lot of games, and path of exile needs to do something about it. This can be paired with additional sounds just like in other games, but no animations is preferred. Otherwise, the complaints about wrist & hand injuries will continue. Combine this with an increased pickup radius so that items textboxes aren’t constantly moving around, and you’ll have a good basis for a fix. When you have about as many interactions per second as a high-level Starcraft player just to pick up some sticks, you’ve done something wrong.
5: Inventory management.
A decades old problem already solved elsewhere.
The inventory in POE is outdated It's small and limited in functionality. Grim dawn allows for a bigger inventory by giving more bags. Torchlight has pets that can hold and sell items you give them. Diablo 3 just shrunk every item. All other games usually do a combination of the first two, but whatever the case, one thing is clear; POE is the only ARPG not to improve inventory management over the years, and it’s not for the better, as it just means you want to pick up less items.
Want to take that helmet that might be better? Pick it up. Two 6-socket items? Take them. Some maps, some currency, and there are two two-handers for your setup right over there. Except your inventory is already full. No, this isn't inventory tetris; you can't rotate the pieces. Ready for some loading screens so you can shift-click into a box?
This is not good for the gameplay loop, and it’s not satisfying. All it means is that the ARPG part about looting is being largely skipped because it’s faster not to pick anything up, otherwise you won’t have space for the rest without having to awkwardly juggle things.
Picking up scraps to roll the dice.
This is especially bad with the currency system. Want to roll using alterations? Hope you sold a couple thousand items over the course of the game, otherwise go trade with some poor sap that did (or a bot, which is unfortunately common due to this). The lack of value scaling of items by size worsens, this, and in order to get trade currency (chaos orbs), the only method is either random drops, or by doing an incredibly clunky full set trade. Frankly, chaos still needs to be obtained by selling items — otherwise it’s use as a “re-roll” currency will get increasingly less applied as more leagues as added, and it will become like affix adding is for exalts — but this isn’t the way to do it. There are many possibilities; perhaps removing transmutation shards from rare items and shifting alteration, alchemy, and chaos chards into a mix will help, but it still won’t solve the inventory size or management issues.
Overall
TL;DR
Looting in POE is terrible.
Too many item types/classes you can't use with varied bases types you would never want will drop. Of those of the correct type with a decent/good base, too many of them will be unusable due to socket/linking/coloring issues. Of those, too many will have bad stats due to a lack of total mod tiers or game progression tier filtering, making them worthless anyway. To further this, looting is clumsy and unsatisfying in most cases, the inventory is too small, and vendoring/storage is too clumsy, problems already tackled by the rest of the genre in some way. There’s more I didn’t mention like garbage stats (like light radius or small flat regen), or the lack of certain amounts of mods in some mod-group categories (more of a harvest crafting issue that allows easy rolling of otherwise extraordinary mods), but I think I’ve covered enough, and I just hope I’ve done well enough in doing so for others to understand.
Path of exile has 12 different types of regular weapons (Fishing rods not included): 1-H Axes, 1-H Swords, 1-H Maces, 2-H Axes, 2-H Swords, 2-H Maces, Scepters, Staves, Wands, Claws, Daggers, and Bows. There are also 6 regular variants for boots, chestplates, gloves, shields, and helmets (ES, Armor, Evasion, and the 3 hybrids). Not including shields quivers or any jewelry either. If you are using ground slam, you get to use an already limited subset of those. Choose axes and you are stuck with 2/12, two-handers 3/12 (unless you can’t get enough int for staves). Choose axes and two-handed, and you get 1/12. This means 1/12 of all weapon drops are actually going to be the right type of item for you.
Item 'Bases'.
Then, there are the basetypes; what if the item drops with a base from 1-2 acts ago? Well, you probably already have an item from there; it’s not likely to be better because the base stats are just as low as what you are probably trying to improve. At the end-game this is often no better, as only two-handers received the implicit/base rework, and most items just have base-types that are inferior clogging up the pool.
This means you not only have a 1/12 or 1/6 chance to get a weapon type you can actually use, you have an even lower chance to get one that’s actually useful for you. You aren’t going to want to mess with a non-foil on a 1-H crit sword build, or stun thresholds on 2-H maces when increased area damage or AOE exists. A lot of base-types shouldn’t even exist as they are and need reworking (coral amulets, cloth belts, and studded belts are obvious examples). Typically, other ARPGs don’t have this many item/basetypes, or they focus on gear for your class. Grim Dawn for example has generic 1-H and 2-H melee that work for any melee user, and then separately there are the class-specific items, meaning your chance of gearing up is better for your character. Additionally, those games don’t have so many defensive stat combinations to worry about, so getting items with the wrong type is even less likely.
2: Too many forms of arbitrary progression limiting.
Isolated Statistical Progression.
Level is good, attributes work to separate classes… but chromatics, sockets, and links are an issue, one I believe GGG already knows about. You will often get items that are a little better than what you have, and in any other game you would equip them, but in POE you’ll notice that they have one less socket then you have for your main skill, and you’ll notice you have maybe 6 jewelers orbs and 1 link in the stats as of act 5. You then stick in in your stash to maybe equip later, when instead you just get a better item in act 8, 3 acts later.
All for a progression system that is entirely arbitrary and unique to POE — it exists because it can, just to provide progression on a statistical curve (socket/link/color chances) and that’s it, but it probably shouldn’t exist as it currently is, as it just means you swap items even less (this is bad early game, but still bad late game for swapping body armor and two-handed weapons).
Grim Dawn Inventory Slots
Even if you are trying to identify everything on the ground or roll correctly socketed items with your limited supply of alchemy orbs, the chance you will get decent mods with even 10 alchemy orbs is very low. POE2 was already teased removing links, and making all items have standard socket numbers & colors. Whether or not new problems will arise (chromatic/socket vendor recipes and gem crafting?) is unclear, but at the least it’s being addressed.
3: Too few mod tiers, and no sliding tier progression.
Hundreds of hours; Under 15 tiers of mod
POE has 13 tiers of health mod on body armor; it also has 10 campaign acts and 16 tiers of end-game mapping. 13 tiers is not enough. You can get all but the top 3 tiers of health roll before mapping even starts at ilvl 64.
Most ARPG games I’ve played seem to slide progression as you go further; minimum rolls get higher, and so do maximum rolls. POE allows you to get a +1 energy shield roll at mapping. This shouldn’t happen at all.
Simply put, there aren’t enough tiers of mod in POE, and they don’t filter themselves appropriately as you go through the game, giving far too wide a breadth of possible stat rolls. There should be more like 30 tiers of health roll separated by act split (acts 1-3,3-6 7-10) and by mapping tiers with overlap between the next and former (white maps drop tiers from late acts, white maps, and yellow maps for example), not 13 tiers for the entire game.
4: Too much (ground) clutter.
What a better loot filter doesn't quite fix.
POE drops a lot of things — too many things. Sometimes I forget until I hold ALT to disable my loot filter. This is in part because of the problems caused by having so many worthless base types, but also in part because the game doesn’t filter it in any other way. Remember when I was talking about generics and class specific items in other ARPG? They are already typically filtering items so that they are only usable by your character. POE has a complicated problem though; characters can use items far out of their regular stat set if built for them. This is a great thing, but the drop related side-effect is not, stealing what would otherwise be appropriate drops away from a bow user to drop some scepters and shields they can’t use.
Edit: Add on top the piles of useless regular gems single-purpose oils, low-tier essence, and all of the other items that lose use either immediately or very early on after getting them
Coins, Fragments, Splinters…
One more often talked about are the scattered drops, in which piles of the same relative type of item, or items that are always worth picking up, take too many clicks. As is unfortunately typical, other games already solved this problem, by not having it in the first place. Items in POE don’t have weight. In games like Resident evil 4 for example, there are many items you need to pickup yourself — carrying the weight the developers at GGG were likely looking for.
The issue is, is that there are far fewer useful items in those games to pick up, and they actively encourage you to pick up everything you can, turning that moment of action into a moment of slight satisfaction, combined with a typically punchy sound effect and animation to reinforce that. POE cannot have these things; there are too many items here, and you need too many of them to properly facilitate progression in many areas of the game.
Either you pick them up, or someone else that you traded with had to, creating an uncomfortable realistic economic problem involving the “economically inefficient” (the poor) performing necessary jobs for others. This is terrible design in a game that wants to discourage trading. But this isn’t a topic about POEs economy, it’s about looting. So how do other games solve it?
What has been done elsewhere?
Grim Dawn, Diablo 3, and pretty much all of the others solved this by allowing automatic currency pickup in a radius near the player. Simply walk near the item, and it automatically picks it up. In POE this would be easy through pickup type toggles and inventory space tweaks.
Alternatively, borderlands also solved this back in borderlands 2 in a different way. You can hold a button to pick up all nearby “simple” items (ammo and money), and in path of exile’s case, this just means picking up all items of the same type. Picking up items by contact or in bulk are commonly used in a lot of games, and path of exile needs to do something about it. This can be paired with additional sounds just like in other games, but no animations is preferred. Otherwise, the complaints about wrist & hand injuries will continue. Combine this with an increased pickup radius so that items textboxes aren’t constantly moving around, and you’ll have a good basis for a fix. When you have about as many interactions per second as a high-level Starcraft player just to pick up some sticks, you’ve done something wrong.
5: Inventory management.
A decades old problem already solved elsewhere.
The inventory in POE is outdated It's small and limited in functionality. Grim dawn allows for a bigger inventory by giving more bags. Torchlight has pets that can hold and sell items you give them. Diablo 3 just shrunk every item. All other games usually do a combination of the first two, but whatever the case, one thing is clear; POE is the only ARPG not to improve inventory management over the years, and it’s not for the better, as it just means you want to pick up less items.
Want to take that helmet that might be better? Pick it up. Two 6-socket items? Take them. Some maps, some currency, and there are two two-handers for your setup right over there. Except your inventory is already full. No, this isn't inventory tetris; you can't rotate the pieces. Ready for some loading screens so you can shift-click into a box?
This is not good for the gameplay loop, and it’s not satisfying. All it means is that the ARPG part about looting is being largely skipped because it’s faster not to pick anything up, otherwise you won’t have space for the rest without having to awkwardly juggle things.
Picking up scraps to roll the dice.
This is especially bad with the currency system. Want to roll using alterations? Hope you sold a couple thousand items over the course of the game, otherwise go trade with some poor sap that did (or a bot, which is unfortunately common due to this). The lack of value scaling of items by size worsens, this, and in order to get trade currency (chaos orbs), the only method is either random drops, or by doing an incredibly clunky full set trade. Frankly, chaos still needs to be obtained by selling items — otherwise it’s use as a “re-roll” currency will get increasingly less applied as more leagues as added, and it will become like affix adding is for exalts — but this isn’t the way to do it. There are many possibilities; perhaps removing transmutation shards from rare items and shifting alteration, alchemy, and chaos chards into a mix will help, but it still won’t solve the inventory size or management issues.
Overall
TL;DR
Looting in POE is terrible.
Too many item types/classes you can't use with varied bases types you would never want will drop. Of those of the correct type with a decent/good base, too many of them will be unusable due to socket/linking/coloring issues. Of those, too many will have bad stats due to a lack of total mod tiers or game progression tier filtering, making them worthless anyway. To further this, looting is clumsy and unsatisfying in most cases, the inventory is too small, and vendoring/storage is too clumsy, problems already tackled by the rest of the genre in some way. There’s more I didn’t mention like garbage stats (like light radius or small flat regen), or the lack of certain amounts of mods in some mod-group categories (more of a harvest crafting issue that allows easy rolling of otherwise extraordinary mods), but I think I’ve covered enough, and I just hope I’ve done well enough in doing so for others to understand.
Closing note.
There is a reason the mod bench and trading is so important, and why people who played long enough felt the way about Harvest that they did; POE just doesn’t do looting well. Hopefully at the least, perhaps the developers can take this information and do something with it. Harvest’s reintroduction in January won’t solve these things; it’s just a bandage on-top, and while it will help players like me, those who would just rather loot like any other ARPG are at best still stuck with the POE auction house and its main currency; gold (orbs).
Source: reddit.com
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