Ground loot is awful no one wanted ruthless 2.0

Every piece of gear my character had on from act 5 onwards was bought on poe.trade. When rare drops would have mattered (campaign) they never happened, and now that they drop like candy in maps the only ones worth picking up are tiered, which requires 100-150% IIR to even show up often.

I've made about 10 div so far, 80% Of this was from raw currency drops, and deterministic items like uniques, very little came from rares or "crafting" etc, and its made loot completely boring at all stages in the game. I feel like unless you want the challenge of playing SSF, interacting with the trade site is virtually mandatory otherwise you are just playing the game 2-3x harder than it needs to be.

The game does not give you the tools to make good gear via crafting, which in turn makes normal ground loot just depressing and a gigantic waste of time to interact with. I remember I always picked up rares in PoE1, we couldn't auto ID them, we had to do it by hand, and we didn't have tiered rares, yet I still picked them up because even if it wasn't good off the bat it might of had potential to be via crafting. In POE2 you find an item, and 99 times out of 100 its unsalvageable garbage that just turns into gold and its not even a week into the league and I'm praying they add filters for tiered rares so I can just hide everything else.

I played in SSF last league to 96 (on a warrior that never once found a good mace to switch from totemcuck build), I have thousands of hours in poe1, ssf/ssfhc you can check my 90+ cheevos if you dont believe me, I even played ruthless SSF the league it came out in PoE1 and I don't ever remember gear being this depressing ever. It really does feel like ruthless, except im not playing in a challenge league with a bunch of other degenerates ladder racing to see who can stand the CBT the most, this is what is being presented to new players and dad gamers.

Please for the love of god just unfuck the loot, you wont have to keep buffing skills and nerfing monster HP, if players actually have decent gear in a normal campaign leveling experience without being hooked into the trade site everytime they find some currency to upgrade the dogshit they have found playing through acts.

But they introduced the recombinantor to make look feel good and then they made impossible to combine even 2 mods

Sadly this wasn't really addressed yet

For real. People already didn't like the direction of 0.1, but at least player power scaled well in the late game. And instead of adding content and making the game more fun, they just made the game worse and moved even more towards ruthless.

100% agreed.

The lack of functional loot drops is very, VERY detrimental to the game. FORCING players to leave the game just to find gear to advance their builds is absolutely brainless.

As more and more players find themselves unable to advance they'll look for other games... the upcoming Last Epoch update is going to see PoE2 turn into a virtual ghost town in less than 1 hour.

And I haven't played Last Epoch in 2 years...

They need to massively increase the drop rate, *AND* do away with the idiotic setting that always drops items that are 180% directly opposed to the build being used.

BUT - they also need to drastically reduce the drops for zoom zoom map blasters who are the ones that cause them to 'adjust' the game against their over-the-top exploitative builds. Let them zoom and blast, just reduce the rewards.